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Adam

It’s sad to see the anemic state of organized labor in this country today. Worse, it kills me to admit that, to a large degree, the erosion of the labor movement is the fault of the unions themselves. Their refusal or inability to change with the times, to keep the movement relevant in the face of globalization and the digital conversion — the so-called new economy — has been disastrous.

Disastrous, I might add, for union members and nonunion workers alike.

Just as the Democratic Party has largely ceded the battlefield to Republican stridency in recent years, so, too, has organized labor wilted before an economy where the unrestrained market rules all. The result is unsurprising: The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people “right-sizing”?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year.

You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They’ll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they’re the first to scream, “You’re stifling innovation!” at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/theluddite/0,70858-0.html?tw=rss.index

Got this from Dollars and Sense…
A dark night, a mysterious dame and a gumshoe looking for clues in the case of the vanishing wages
Ha! In addition to being on the mark, this column by Jared Bernstein is funny, too!

She had a neckline as low as the Nasdaq in ‘01, curves like sine waves and a dress tighter than the global oil supply. She had my attention even before she pulled out two reports I’d seen that very morning.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” she said in a voice that gave my calculator a power surge. “I didn’t know where else to turn.”

“You came to the right place, doll,” I said. “I see you’ve got the first-quarter GDP report, along with the new compensation results.” I’d been puzzling over these numbers all day, but what, I wondered, could this tall glass of ice water want with them?

“That’s right,” she purred. “I need to know why GDP is up 4.8%, the strongest quarter since 2003, yet real wages are falling.” Yeah, I thought, you and everybody else who works for a living.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-bernstein7may07,0,4131549.story