[Cappy]

Originally Posted by Thor

Said they are part, there is a lot more to the story. I agree some unions became bloated, abusive and harmful to business and the people they purported to represent.

But the stagnation of the middle class for decades now has gone with the largest transfer of wealth from the rest of us to very very few.

I just hate when people blow out of proportion the influence of what few unions are left vs the immensity of corporate influence on politics and legislation. My conservative friends are losing their collective minds over the Ontario teachers union, while conveniently not at all bothered by the corruption brought on our society by special interest.

But I will agree private unions vs public have a much better track record. I also now live in the one extreme in Iceland where most people in Iceland are a part of a union, and I also worked in the summers as a student Molsons brewery in Calgary which closed for one reason, the union was a bunch of idiots who thought they could refuse an offer that would have kept them open and would have close the Edmonton brewery instead.

But having no unions and relying on business to keep up wages with cost of living is a pipe dream, tying ourselves to a world wide casino in the wall street stockholder world means labor suffers wage cuts as an easy way of improving profit margins, while globalization sees more and more jobs move away from the west.

I agree with your assessment, Thor, but we can't underestimate the massive global integration the world has experienced over the past 40 years as well. We now live in a world where products can be manufactured anywhere in the world using assembly line techniques most unskilled workers can learn.

this reveals the loss of many jobs in the auto industry to many in the third world who offer cheaper labour costs. Supply and demand.

Now, with the rise of large skilled workforces in the PIIGS and China, even those in skilled positions are competing with those from poorer nations. I'm sure there are a lot of people on this forum with great jobs and great credentials who could conceivably lose their position to someone in another country for less cost to the corporation.

We can view this as wrong and that corporations are evil, but another way to view this is that globalization is the ultimate equalizer. Touted so often by liberals and conservatives alike in the early process, globalization provides a leg up for the third world to reduce their poverty. We are now learning that this is a somewhat zero sum game. Many middle class jobs must now compete with cheaper sources.

I think this is a bigger reason for the stagnation of wages. We couldn't have always thought western society could live the way we did at the expense of the rest of the world forever?