"America Without Unions" by Jeff Faux

[applegrove]

America Without Unions

Jeff Faux at the Economics Policy Institute

http://www.epi.org/blog/america-unions/

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A non-union America will be of course a low-wage America. Most people will work harder for less. Employer contributions to pensions and health care will be a thing of the past. No longer even remotely threatened with organized resistance, employers will make “on-call” contingent work the norm. People will spend their working lives patching together a marginal income with constantly changing temporary and part time jobs- with the predictable increase in personal and family stress. Few workers will have vacations and paid sick-days, and even fewer a forty-hour week. Unions, after all, are the people that brought us the weekend.

Employer-employee relations will increasingly resemble what they were before the New Deal. Laws against discrimination and employee protection may remain on the books, but without pressure from unions they will be harder to enforce. The humiliations of working life under raw capitalism will reappear: abusive supervisors, dirty and unsafe workplaces, being ordered about like a child, daily assaults on one’s dignity, impossible demands, speed-ups, wage theft by employers.

More people will get their jobs through employment contractors, making it even harder to identify who is responsible for abuse of employees. Was it the company at whose office you worked? The agency that had the contract to supply labor? Or the subcontractor who actually sent you there?

These conditions will rise up the ladder of skills and education. The entry wage of college graduates, which have been declining for over a decade, will drop faster. Desperate young people will keep borrowing for education, piling up enormous debts that cannot be paid off with the salaries that are available. Indebted but still hopeful 20-somethings will turn into embittered 30 and 40 year olds. - See more at: http://www.epi.org/blog/america-unions/#sthash.na0Xtu1c.dpuf



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