hello. my name is mike ambs.

- a facebook conversation between Justin Johnson in response to my comments on The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day. My reply: 

Blaming Unions for pushing Corporations into a corner, into a situation where they were helpless but to flee the Country is a joke.

Especially at a time when the wealthy in this country see 2 of every 3 dollars that exchange hands in the US. I should repeat that - cause it’s almost hard to wrap your head around, at least it is for me, the top 1% of wealthy people in the US took in 2 out of every 3 dollars, and the bottom 80% split the last 1 remaining dollar amongst themselves; and I’m supposed to get up in arms about Unions making off like bandits? 

Unions don’t lobby for less-strict emission standards. Unions don’t practice the blanket purchasing of fuel-efficient tech’ and sit on those patents for years and years on end. Unions don’t write tax codes that quite literally reward generously the closing of US factories. Unions don’t fight for CEO pay to spin so dramatically out of balance that side-by-side the Robber Barrons look like bleeding-heart philanthropists. Unions don’t make decisions on what cars and trucks will hit the assembly lines; they don’t set the product quality standards either, that’s a top-down decision. 

Not to mention - Unions have gone down, like I said before, from around the mid 20s to just shy of 10 percent - the comparison to overseas carmakers sound suggestive that there is at least a smaller percentage of Unionized workers, which is very wrong - the EU for example has about a 30 percent Unionized workforce in the Auto industry alone - yet, unlike the United States, which rewards laying off employees and closing the doors, the EU literally pays it’s Auto industry to remain open, retain it’s workforce, and compensates for demand in times of depression.

Strange then… the way one model of business seems to work so well, and one seems to fuck an entire Country’s worth of middle-class. 

If people find Unions to be the root of a failed system - then those people aren’t looking very hard; or they are happy to repeat Union-bashing ideas that are the equivalent of… well, it’s late, and I’m having trouble coming up with a snappy example: but the mentality is a self-sabotaging one, similar to voting against your own interests, or cutting off your nose to spite your face. 

Unions are responsible for everything from safe workplaces, workers comp’, min’ wage, weekends, time off, holiday pay, fire escapes, on and on and on and on… it’s so incompressible that they should be blamed for shipping jobs out of the Country… you look at what the banks were wrapped up in gambling with the auto industry’s pension plans and 401ks, and when the game fell apart, you have auto companies scrambling to cover their asses and weasel out of their end of a contract inked, in some cases, 40 years earlier - just so they can avoid having to pay for the consequences of their gambling. 

All the while, there’s a chunk of this Country that still points the finger at Unions - the people who were screwed the hardest. Did you know the income disparity in this Country is wider now than it was in Egypt before the recent overthrow? And yet, Unions, people who are just holding onto what little is left of a living wage and a retirement plan are the root of all our problems?

That’s a rhetorical question :P 

(via mikeambs)

- a facebook conversation between Justin Johnson in response to my comments on The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day. My reply to the above: 

Well, perhaps this is just my arguing semantics here, but reimbursement seems the wrong word when talking about Unemployment Insurance, the main reason I bring this up is: you mentioned our being “forced” to participate in the program… * a strange choice of wording for an insurance program; the reason being is insurance works best when the pool is larger; the smaller the pool: the higher the pay-in and lower the pay-out. Unemployment isn’t a forced savings-account, which, I know your’e aware of, but the distinction between “reimbursed” and eligibility is worth mentioning. The program couldn’t function with a smaller number of people paying in - the same way a city couldn’t upkeep or build new roads if only people who were likely to use those roads opted to pay those related taxes. 

* Also, we are only “forced”, or, more appropriately, eligible through certain employers - the number of contract work I’ve done over the last 7 years hasn’t provided me with many opportunities to pay into Unemployment - and, believe me, when the crash happened two years ago, and I lost my job, I wished like mad I had the option of collecting Unemployment - it would helped me keep my head above water without skipping so many meals. 

As for abuse of the Unemployment - okay, let’s look at some numbers of abuse: Ohio has a pretty high percentage of fraudulent payouts when compared to the rest of the country, in the neighborhood of $42 million fraudulent payouts over five years - now take the average of that number per year, 8 million, and, just to put things in perspective here, compare it to the $5 billion that the state paid out in legitimate cases of Unemployment. That breaks down to 0.16 percent. Not even a quarter of one percent of claims are fraudulent, at least in the state of Ohio - if you can find a state that comes anywhere near even 5%, I’d be impressed. Those numbers aren’t terribly shocking. 

And again, if only because this point is terribly, terribly important to keep in mind, for every $1 paid out in Unemployment, that multiplies to an average of $1.60 - the idea that someone would look at a state like Ohio, who has been hit so hard, and think it would kick-start the availability of jobs to suddenly have a vacuum of $5 billion… is full-on craziness.