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The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions. The decline of the unions had much more to do with 1) competition from the A

The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions. The decline of the unions had much more to do with 1) competition from the American south, Mexico, and Asia, and 2) the rise of an American tribute empire, where America's primary export is debt that then gets inflated away. This enriched those connected to the debt creation ( Wall St, government workers at all levels, licensed occupations, people in real estate) but devastated manufacturing.

mattmaroon 18y ago
You should read more Krugman. It started with Reagan.
- redrobot5050 18y ago
  Nonsense. Unions have been targeted ever since the civil rights movement; the labor movement gave rise to organized communities of (African-American) workers eager to get rights outside of the shop floor. Its one of the very reasons the labor movement in this country stays dead. People in power aren't interested in upheaval.
- bokonist 18y ago
  I've read plenty of both Krugman and others like him that make the same point. I find it entirely very unconvincing. For instance, take the city of New Haven, where I went to college. In the 1950's the city had a thriving industrial base and tens of thousands of high paying union jobs. Over the next few decades many of these businesses collapsed due to competition from lower priced manufacturing in the South and West. Manufacturing jobs went from 43% of New Haven employment to 20% by 1973. The famous Winchester factory went from an employment of 10,000 to around 700 by 1979. In that year there was a massive strike. The strike caused the factory to hemorrhage money and corporate actually ended up selling it for peanuts to the employees. But even as an employee owned enterprise, it failed to make money, and eventually it closed completely. Today Winchester rifles are manufactured on a multinational basis, with some parts being made in Utah and others in Portugal. This same story was repeated across the rust belt, from Detroit to Philadelphia. None of this fits Krugman's story. The unions were strong, they were just asking for more money than the market would pay them (although the market was rigged, as I note below). If your interested in reading more, I highly recommend Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and its End. Here is an except from Google books that talks about the decline of manufacturing in New Haven: http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&id=Ve0MPmi2LgoC&dq=city+douglas+rae&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&sig=ACfU3U1vA2iQgGfgwl8_0h0lFC9r4_bjJw&q=winchester#PPA363,M1 http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&... A lot of the worst downsizing did indeed happen during the Reagan presidency. But that had a lot more to do with Volcker's strong dollar policies, high interest rates, and the resulting rise in the trade deficit, than it had anything to do with Reagan's policies. For the past thirty years, foreign governments and investors have been selling the U.S. cheap manufactured goods and then buying our financial securities. This has decimated our manufacturing sector as domestic producers have been unable to compete with manufactures in countries with an artificially weak currency. But its been a windfall to everyone in the U.S. who borrows money - from leveraged buyout firms to the government itself.
  - dangoldin 18y ago
    Just curious - have you read Supercapitalism by Robert Reich? He tries to explain the reasons for the various changes in American capitalism over the past 50 years.
    - bokonist 18y ago
      I have not. I used to read the American Prospect to which Reich regularly contributed, but I haven't read that book.
      - dangoldin 18y ago
        I think you should take a look. I found it pretty interesting. The general idea is that we sacrificed our citizenship for consumerism and the world adapted to people having this new role. It's well written and an entertaining read, even if you disagree with the points.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    There seems to be much more to it than just that though. From Krugman: "Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize." You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?
    - bokonist 18y ago

mattmaroon 18y ago

You should read more Krugman. It started with Reagan.

redrobot5050 18y ago
Nonsense. Unions have been targeted ever since the civil rights movement; the labor movement gave rise to organized communities of (African-American) workers eager to get rights outside of the shop floor. Its one of the very reasons the labor movement in this country stays dead. People in power aren't interested in upheaval.
bokonist 18y ago
I've read plenty of both Krugman and others like him that make the same point. I find it entirely very unconvincing. For instance, take the city of New Haven, where I went to college. In the 1950's the city had a thriving industrial base and tens of thousands of high paying union jobs. Over the next few decades many of these businesses collapsed due to competition from lower priced manufacturing in the South and West. Manufacturing jobs went from 43% of New Haven employment to 20% by 1973. The famous Winchester factory went from an employment of 10,000 to around 700 by 1979. In that year there was a massive strike. The strike caused the factory to hemorrhage money and corporate actually ended up selling it for peanuts to the employees. But even as an employee owned enterprise, it failed to make money, and eventually it closed completely. Today Winchester rifles are manufactured on a multinational basis, with some parts being made in Utah and others in Portugal. This same story was repeated across the rust belt, from Detroit to Philadelphia. None of this fits Krugman's story. The unions were strong, they were just asking for more money than the market would pay them (although the market was rigged, as I note below). If your interested in reading more, I highly recommend Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and its End. Here is an except from Google books that talks about the decline of manufacturing in New Haven: http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&id=Ve0MPmi2LgoC&dq=city+douglas+rae&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&sig=ACfU3U1vA2iQgGfgwl8_0h0lFC9r4_bjJw&q=winchester#PPA363,M1 http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&... A lot of the worst downsizing did indeed happen during the Reagan presidency. But that had a lot more to do with Volcker's strong dollar policies, high interest rates, and the resulting rise in the trade deficit, than it had anything to do with Reagan's policies. For the past thirty years, foreign governments and investors have been selling the U.S. cheap manufactured goods and then buying our financial securities. This has decimated our manufacturing sector as domestic producers have been unable to compete with manufactures in countries with an artificially weak currency. But its been a windfall to everyone in the U.S. who borrows money - from leveraged buyout firms to the government itself.
- dangoldin 18y ago
  Just curious - have you read Supercapitalism by Robert Reich? He tries to explain the reasons for the various changes in American capitalism over the past 50 years.
  - bokonist 18y ago
    I have not. I used to read the American Prospect to which Reich regularly contributed, but I haven't read that book.
    - dangoldin 18y ago
      I think you should take a look. I found it pretty interesting. The general idea is that we sacrificed our citizenship for consumerism and the world adapted to people having this new role. It's well written and an entertaining read, even if you disagree with the points.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  There seems to be much more to it than just that though. From Krugman: "Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize." You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?
  - bokonist 18y ago