So what will non-union and unorganized employees ever be able to do altogether about the massive outsourcing and off-shoring of former US jobs by business over the past 30+ years and still counting? Obviously our bought and paid for representatives in DC have not done much if anything to address this ever-growing national problem, and instead have created and passed legislation that indirectly rewards the practice. Free trade really only exists here in the US, and we need DC to create and pass fair trade legislation. Otherwise it may not matter whether or not unions still exist, b/c almost every job that is not nailed down here in the US by physical necessity already is or will be vulnerable for export. Unions have pressured Congress to act on this ongoing travesty, and w/o them who will? The individual voters?
Corporate capitalists have long exploited the peasant labor of socialist nations, just as they had with US labor in the early 20th century, they just have recreated that era elsewhere. Fewer US job results in less taxable income, growing unemployment, lower wages, less benefits, millions and millions more living on the government dole, and ever-higher federal debt. This quite likely won't end "well". I just hope that I am deceased when the "USS Titanic" finally hits its foreign creditor icebergs and sinks below the waves of its multi-trillion $$$ bloody-red ocean of debt.
Its not just the unions that are considered dinosaurs by many who feel that they need to become extinct, but to many if not most companies, the US work force itself is as well, since they are merely expensive and often reduceable "overhead" when compared to the much lower "global" wage and benefit scale. A corporate CEO's wet dream would be to employ as few US workers as possible, while selling and/or leasing their cheap imported products and outsourced services to the ever-shrinking amount of mostly middle-class consumers who can still afford them.
"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."
--Martin Niem?ller
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
--George Santayana
