Consider a profitable business. Its workers need X dollars to survive, and the company can sell goods for Y, where Y > X. If there are a lot of workers and th

Consider a profitable business. Its workers need X dollars to survive, and the company can sell goods for Y, where Y > X. If there are a lot of workers and they all negotiate individually with the company, standard competitive market theory says that they will end up charging about X for their services, as any worker will eventually be displaced by someone who is willing to accept a tiny bit less pay. If the workers form a cartel, their rational policy is to charge about Y -- they cannot charge more than that without driving the company out of business. Labor unions are basically such a cartel. When they were ascendant in the mid-20th-century, the American middle class was vibrant, there were lots of low-skill jobs which provided good income. With globalization, the business can now simply move its operations to a country where workers are poorer, regulations on environmental and workplace conditions are laxer, and organization is illegal. This has two effects: X gets smaller, and wages become close to X. Globalization has some good effects -- increasing the world's total wealth by letting countries specialize in what they're good at, and reducing the probability of conflict by making countries more interdependent. But the part few people in our corporate-owned governments want to talk about is that the price of these good things is, in effect, redistributing much of the wealth generated by companies from workers to owners.