re: #41 Vicious Babushka

And yet a lot of people will still mindlessly blame the unions for the failure of the company.

I really don’t get where this bizarre belief in the munificence and generosity of corporations comes from in the right-wing. Over and over, they promogulate the belief that when companies are richer, they pass that money down to their workers or keep costs low or whatever. None of this is remotely true. Companies will pay their workers what the market will bear and sell product and services at what the market will bear.

If the corporation can make fifty thousand dollars a year off of you while paying you five thousand, they’ll do that. If they can sell you a product that costs them $0.05 to make at $100, they’ll do that.

The only ways to get corporations to pay workers better and to treat them better are regulation and labor unions. The latter is actually more capitalistic than the former; it transforms laborers into corporations on their own, negotiating with the company.

And yet somehow people see this as unfair. I just don’t get it. I can’t see how people can look at US labor history and not see how vital unions are to our prosperity.