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How the Workers World Changed

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hawk
Post Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:37 pm

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
SharynS, I am so proud of you. You catch on quick. Of course Detroit's problems were more than just the riots, it included high wages, high business taxes and high real estate prices.

Fortunately, Detroit's leaders are fixing all of that.

The Chinese are also learning from Detroit.
Quote:
“Chongqing is not going to be Detroit”
Zhou Shulin, the vice-director for the Chongqing Logistics Co-ordination Office

Mr. Zhou he explained in stark terms what is driving the Chongqing government’s fervent push for economic development in the region. When Chongqing felt that their industrial infrastructure was not up to snuff, they never stopped spending public money improving it so new industries are moving in and the city is growing.
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hawk
Post Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:30 pm

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Grand Plan for Detroit Part 5—Signs of hope
Quote:
We selected Detroit for a number of reasons. I think it’s the most affordable city in America [given] the cost of real estate and the number of individuals who are unemployed or underemployed and interested in working in IT. We’d been talking about finding an alternative to going offshore, inside the U.S. The cost structure in Detroit is within 5% to 10% of the cost of outsourcing to a place like Brazil.
Tim Bryan
Chief executive, GalaxE Solutions

So the cheap prices of Detroit real estate and high numbers of unemployed and underemployed is starting to attract business vultures to the city. A sure sign that Detroit leaders know what they are doing.
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hawk
Post Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2011 6:00 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Quote:
Michele Bachmann Advocates Abolishing Minimum Wage
Thursday 30 June 2011
by: Travis Waldron, ThinkProgress

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) formally kicked off her presidential campaign yesterday, painting herself as a Tea Party candidate who is ready to lead the country back to prosperity.

[Tuesday], in classic Tea Party form, Bachmann reiterated her long-held belief that a federally mandated minimum wage is a job-killing federal regulation that may need to be abolished.

In 2005, Bachmann told the Minnesota state Senate that abolishing the minimum wage could “wipe out unemployment completely.”


This is the type of deep-thinking presidential candidate that America needs; a woman who has a bold plan that, at one stroke, will wipe out unemployment.
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SharynS
Post Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2011 4:00 pm

Joined: 28 Jan 2006
Posts: 2939
Location: the 'puter 		Just when you think the repubs and "teabaggers" have outdone themselves they come up with a fucktard who out-dumbs Sarah Palin. America deserves the best - Michele Bachmann for President! Mr. Green

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hawk
Post Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 3:35 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Michele Bachmann is special. God talks to her; personally. I am not making this up; it is part of her appeal. The really crazy religious nuts are not in the Muslim world; they are as American as hamburgers and apple pie.

Presidential candidate; probably not but a run for the vice-presidency is a possibility as is a promise of a cabinet post.

Our political world has entered a time machine so it is being transported back a hundred years. The ideas of William Jennings Bryan now have new voices.
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SharynS
Post Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 3:54 am

Joined: 28 Jan 2006
Posts: 2939
Location: the 'puter 		I'm watching it unfold in front of my eyes hawk and I still don't believe what I'm seeing. I seriously have my fingers crossed Bachmann takes top Repub, lordy knows she has all the makings. Elected to the whitehouse, vice or otherwise, would be pure gold IMO.

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SharynS
Post Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 9:25 pm

Joined: 28 Jan 2006
Posts: 2939
Location: the 'puter
Quote:
So the cheap prices of Detroit real estate and high numbers of unemployed and underemployed is starting to attract business vultures to the city.
Private enterprise is and has been, sucking up public resources at breakneck speed - water, oil, airwaves, food seed, even words. Influencing and controlling city infrastructures, city by city, would be one long term cat's jammies in the public private partnership drive no?

With that "they" could easily retire those expensive, time consuming lobby machines and simply funnel public monies to themselves by themselves pretty much at will. Is that what this is about? Is Bing as stupid as to think any of this was/is his plan, that it came from his head.

Pocket politicians - check! Manipulate law-makers - check! Big labour de-balled, gutted, buried - check! The yellow brick road is paved with sausages like Bing.

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unionnow
Post Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2011 10:17 pm

Joined: 05 Feb 2006
Posts: 695
Location: Gettin the Hell out of retail 		Empires come and go, systems come and go, lifestyles, cultures, music, thought, political structures and so on come and go.

We are seeing massive change. Its all part of the evolutionary process. The old order is being swept away. A new order is coming. No one will stop what is coming.

Unfortunately, we are stuck remmembering the past, experiencing the present, and fearing the future. No one will stop it, they are it, we are it.

This new order will run its course someday and fall but its only the beginning for them and the end of an older and arguably better order (and still it was as corrupt as the new order). Its the start of a new order that cheapens life to a large degree.

I have lived and watched families get cheapened, the media become more violent, music putrifying even more than it was, plants becoming seedless, and I could go on and on an ond but whats the point?

The truth is not in front of you, it hidden. The main actors a mere footmen to the true contollers.

They feed you your information and make decsions for you far beyond what you could imagine. They tell youm whom you can trust and demonize those they percieve as a threat. They control your mind and thought processes

Its hidden in plan sight. Their plans are written about in white papers from one end of the planet to the other.

Dont cry about it, you cant change it. Like an illness let it run its course. Without the ability to focus on the foundations of our problems and who is pulling the strings in reality it will never change.

Here is a four year old video (precrash)--very interesting...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

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hawk
Post Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2011 6:06 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Big Society
David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain has rolled out Big Society, his plan to bring direct democracy and people power to England.

This is a nation-wide program where all citizens are encouraged to perform unpaid volunteer work for society.

Big Society (BS) basically comes down to the national and local governments laying off thousands of public employees and replacing them with unpaid volunteers.

How well is BS taking hold? Too early to tell if it will catch on. Libraries are one of the early launch pads. Volunteers are replacing paid librarians. Asking volunteers to clean litter on the sidewalks and in the parks is also popular with local governments.

Thousands of volunteers will be unpaid staff at the 2012 London Olympics.

Private and charter schools replacing regular schools is on the list. Eliminating public playgrounds and football fields is another way local governments save money.

Will BS got much further? The layoffs will continue, little doubt of that but just how many volunteer hours and money will be offered to replace paid workers is much harder to judge.

There is a sneaky side to BS. If a village or a neighbourhood has dirty parks, closed libraries, few recreation facilities and unfulfilled social services the Conservatives can say there is nothing they can do if your neighbours and you are far too selfish and lack community spirit.
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Laboryes
Post Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2011 6:01 pm

Joined: 29 Jan 2006
Posts: 1967
hawk wrote:

This is a nation-wide program where all citizens are encouraged to perform unpaid volunteer work for society.

Big Society (BS) basically comes down to the national and local governments laying off thousands of public employees and replacing them with unpaid volunteers.



Oh! You mean slaves?

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hawk
Post Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2011 7:30 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Definitely not slavery
Oh no, Laboryes, not slavery. England's BS is leading us back in time as was described by Charles Dickens before the government was tasked with caring for its citizens.

Churches, mosques, temples and charities will run soup kitchens, homeless shelters and dispense social services far more than they do now.

Business will build and operate hospitals for profit and will rely on unpaid volunteers to do everything that can be dumped on them. This may not be new to you Americans but it is to the British and Canadians.

It is one thing to volunteer to help Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto as the people in our community feels it belongs to all of us and a whole different thing to be an unpaid volunteer at a private business hospital owned by GE Capital.

At Sick Kids, we cheer when a complicated surgery saves a life. Are the volunteers at the private hospitals suppose to cheer when GE Capital releases its profit results?

It is hard to tell how far Big Society will go but personally, I am sure it will be a bust.


Last edited by hawk on Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:24 am; edited 1 time in total
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hawk
Post Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 7:50 pm

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
Quote:
This year, Volkswagen opened a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in which the entire workforce makes $14.50 per hour. This has brought Volkswagen's per-hour labor costs in the US down to an average of $30, the lowest of any of the auto makers.
wsws.org

We gott'a be proud of the UAW for leading the way in driving down worker's wages and benefits to a point where it almost makes more sense to work at Wal-Mart than in a union shop.

The workers in the auto plants make a bit more money and have benefits but the work causes a lot of back and repetitive strain injuries while this is far less likely in an air-conditioned store.

Makes it hard for the college grads to decide which dead-end jobs they should start their careers with.
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hawk
Post Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:20 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
The Toronto District School Board operates the Next-Steps Employment Centre — a job search program funded by the Ontario and federal governments.

The centre’s 10-page pamphlet, “Labour Market,” honestly describes the change in the Canada's employment market for the 20th century "old model" to the 21st century free-market model that we are entering.

The old world, it says, was marked by full-time jobs, stable work environments and long-term employment.
Quote:
just-in time work
Labour Market

The new world, however, has short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.”

You will probably have to hold two or three jobs simultaneously for your entire working life.

You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days. You will be constantly looking for work. “The permanent job, for the most part, is a thing of the past.”

I did not think I would ever see such a bleak document we distributed by Toronto's largest school broad.

How accurate a picture of future employment is this pamphlet? Hard to say.

For high school dropouts and even high school graduates it seems very probably this is the future many of them will face. A percentage of community college graduates may be able to escape this gloomy outlook as well as many university graduates.

However, for sure guaranteed entitlements for almost everyone is gone and they will not come back. The companies will give you a fixed amount of money each year for you to invest for your old age and that will be the limit to their contributions.

The public sector is quickly following suit.

So if our present political parties have signed up for this change and the labour unions is going along for the ride, what can the common worker do to try to change this largely unstudied drive create a low-wage insecure Asian-style workforce in North America?

See the full column in The Toronto Star:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1032369--walkom-we-ve-progressed-back-to-sweatshops-but-with-twitter#article
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hawk
Post Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2011 5:57 am

Joined: 07 Mar 2010
Posts: 271
What does the future hold?

Well now, that is easy to see. In the British Guardian online newspaper you can read a series of articles on how bad the Greek crisis has hurt the normal people in that country. Read that here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/greece-in-crisis

Think the Chinese worker has it good? Then read about working for Foxcomm which has 500,000 workers in one location in southwest China.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/08/foxconn

Suicides? Netting under windows to stop jumpers? Are we talking about the 18th century British navy? Yes. But it is also happening today at one of the world's most successful high tech companies.
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