Who Killed American Jobs? The Corporations That Killed the Unions

Good jobs - plentiful, high-paying, high-benefit, defined-benefit-pension jobs - exist not because of low taxes for rich people, not because of non-existent taxes for corporations, not because of the complete absence of regulations.

Good jobs exist because of Unions.

When high-paying, high-benefit jobs were plentiful in this nation, unions were strong. Or rather, when unions were strong, high-paying, high-benefit jobs were plentiful.

That's because strong unions stop corporations from shipping jobs overseas, from cutting pay and benefits, from destroying the middle class.

Corporations know this, which is why they have waged extremely successful war against unions for 40 years. Actually, they've waged war against unions for 130 years, but only in the last 40 have they been successful.

Ian Welsh:

Solidarity is the first rule of unions. If you sell anyone down the river, you weaken yourself fatally.

On a larger scale, the destruction of unions remains job #1 of the oligarchy, especially that part of the oligarchy which prefers Republicans to Democrats. Why?

* Because union members vote Democratic, even if they are part of a demographic which normally vote Republican.

* Because the oligarchy's overall goal is to crush wages and benefits, both to pay for their bailouts and as a permanent, long-running goal. They do not really believe that domestic consumer demand is necessary to their own prosperity, and prefer workers who are in permanent debt-slavery. For a generation and a half now they have made most of their money through leveraged financial games, asset bubbles and by offshoring and outsourcing jobs. American workers are nothing to them, less than nothing.

Somehow corporations have forgotten that workers and consumers are the same people.

More than 100 years ago, Henry Ford - the quintessential capitalist - paid the workers on his Model T assembly lines the unheard-of-wage of $5 per day. The reason, he explained, was that unless his workers could afford to buy the cars they built, his business would fail.

Half a century later, the great labor leader Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, was given a demonstration of the earliest robots on the General Motors Assembly line. A GM executive said to Reuther, "Let's see you get that to join a union."

Reuther replied: "Let's see you sell it a car."

A nation of walmart wage slaves can't support an economy of anything but walmarts.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....