netmouse | wow. hyperbole much?

Just got an email from the democratic party about the primary election. At the bottom they have this to say:

BEWARE OF "RIGHT TO WORK" PETITION
At your polling site you may be asked to sign a petition to put Right to Work legislation on the november ballot.
Right to Work means Right to Work for Less. This legislation would:
Reduce wages and benefits
Weaken labor unions
Destroy the middle class
Please do not sign these petitions. This is an attempt by Corporations and out-of-state millionaires to further weaken Michigan's economy.

(emphasis mine)

this article reports that, "According to the U.S. government, poverty rates are 16 percent higher in right-to-work states. Due to poverty rates, these states have the worst infant mortality rates in the nation. Personal bankruptcies are also higher in right-to-work states."

That's not destroying the middle class, that's hurting the lower classes. at best the lower middle class...

Anyway, I'm not supporting or opposing the "Right to work" movement (here's another article against it) but I'm tired of people trying to play with my fear. I'm not afraid, people. Not more than is reasonable anyway.

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Patrrick makes a good point, Right to Work sends any union manufacturing workers that are left in the middle class down to the lower class.

I believe there are some left in MI and ON.

There are some left, but, in my opinion, nobody should be counting on many manufacturing jobs being around in a couple decades. Perhaps in a few protected industries, such as Defense, but not anywhere else. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; 150 years ago, most people in the U.S. were farmers. 50 years ago, most people in the U.S. were factory workers. 50 years from now, most people will probably be in some combination of the service, technology, and health fields.

In my opinion, the unions are fighting the wrong battle; they're trying to resist these changes because their power base is built around the manufacturing economy. However, often the best thing for their members would be to get retrained in an up-and-coming field, so that they have more employment options. This creates a conflict of interest for the unions, since over the long run, this will tend to shrink their membership rolls.

IMHO, the right battle to fight is not to try to hold back the changes, but to get people the education and training they need to learn and change along with the job market. That will give them better security than the unions could negotiate for them.

well, in my mind, the rapidity with which we are exporting manufacturing away from this country is an issue. Just like the country gets overly dependent on foreign powers when it imports a resource like oil, once we aren't manufacturing anything and our younger generations start growing up without knowing how physical things work and are built (this is already happening), we put our entire nation into the sort of fragile state of dependency many upper classes find themselves in.

In my view, it's actually a good thing for countries to become more interdependent, as it provides a really strong disincentive for a country to start a half-cocked war that the rest of the world thinks is unjustified.

well, one would think. yet that has not worked so far... in fact it has worked rather the opposite way, where a certain country has felt the need to impose its power on countries it is dependent upon. Of course, that probably wouldn't work with China, but we'll have to see, won't we?

I guess I'm just can't stand watching our country become populated with a majority of spoiled brats who can't apply logic and don't know how to make things, only how to consume them.

I think it's working with China, but yes, we'll have to wait and see on that front. The U.S. has been able to get away with a belligerent foreign policy because of its unilateral economic clout, but I think that that will eventually change as the rest of the world develops, as long as the U.S. doesn't shut down trade and try to make itself an island. Islands are dangerous, because they don't have to care what anyone else thinks of them.

As for the people who don't know how to make things, I think that even if they're not making physical widgets, people in other sectors of the economy (say, nurses) are still 'making' something valuable, even if it's intangible.

You assume that a manufacturing worker can be reprogrammed to do something in the knowledge economy.

This means going back to school for most of them at a time they may be sending their kids to school or planning for their retirement.

I do assume that people can learn a new profession, if given the right resources. Defining "the right resources" is a really long debate, of course.

This is really the classic 'buggy-whip manufacturer' problem: When technological or societal changes make it so that some jobs are just no longer necessary, what do you do with the people who had those jobs?

You can try to block the change and force the old jobs to stick around, but then you're causing two kinds of harm. First, you've got a person spending their life doing work that doesn't really need to be done anymore. At least for most people, I think that would be profoundly demoralizing and disempowering. Second, the money spent paying for busy work is effectively wasted when it could have been used for more productive purposes.

Instead of blocking change and wasting the rest of a life's worth of labor in the process, I think it's better to focus resources on helping the person change along with the world. Doing something genuinely useful is not only better for their employer, but is far better for their own self-worth too.

I think that adaptability is a fundamental human trait, and that most (though not all) cases of people who "can't" learn new skills have their roots in either stubbornness or the fear of change, which could be overcome with sufficient effort and some combination of carrots and sticks. In the rare cases where someone absolutely can't learn an employable skill even given every chance to do so, you'd probably have to handle them just as you would someone who was unemployable due to a severe disability.

And who is to pay for this training?

I have found many of the retraining programs to be of the quick and dirty type they fulfill the minimum requirements but do not help the trainee esp. in the long run.

That's the really long debate I mentioned, which probably isn't worth getting into here. The point I was making was that for everyone involved, retraining is generally better than keeping obsolete jobs around.

Better for everyone except the unions, I should have said.

wow. hyperbole much?

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