Strike-plagued Lever factory declares bankruptcy

Well folks someone here stated that no one here has worked at Lever so they didn't know what was going on at the plant, so as an ex-Lever worker let me tell you a few things about the plant in London.(I realise it's not the same plant but bear with me)

I worked the night shift 11-7 with approximately 100 other workers of which maybe 10-15% were union employees, the rest were temps. The union employees made fairly good money and the temps made about 8.00/hr. The company hired so many temps because to employ all union employees at their wage would have been a loss to the company. The hardest workers were the temps who were fighting to keep these jobs while the union workers took extended breaks and generally worked at half the pace of the temps. Whenever a new temp was hired it took almost an entire 5 minutes to teach him every aspect of whatever station he was working. I honestly don't know if that plant is even operating still, but I can only imagine if it is, it is due to temp workers and not the over-paid, lazy slobs that proudly wear the union patch.

Unions, moving more jobs out of country than any other organization.

ok, lets break this argument down a little because there are really 2 things going on here

1) The assertion that some jobs like manufacturing are now part of the "old economy" and we should be eliminating these jobs. Therefore, the people who work those jobs are not valued and need to start doing something else or accept dramatically less pay compensation.

I would argue first that this economic model is a mistake: "real" economies make "real" products. The "new" economy draws much of its wealth from financial products and activities. The difference between the two can be understood just by examining the massive financial meltdown we just experienced. Much of the "wealth" that was supposedly created existed on paper only. Just because somebody owes you a million dollars doesn't make you a millionaire, but much of our GDP and wealth was based on this illusion: too many people (banks, investors, speculators) gambling and investing with money that didn't really exist and even worse, borrowed money that didn't exist. Financial markets are increasingly speculative, where investments are astronomically overvalued one week for no other reason than people are "speculating" that others will also overvalue it, and become completely worthless the next once everyone accepts the reality. At least an automaker who can't sell its cars still has an inventory of product of some value. An investor who can't sell his stock has absolutely nothing except worthless scraps of paper. When a huge section of our economic activity is based on these scraps of paper, everything heads to the shitter. This is why we live in this bubble economy now, where we constantly fluctuate in a volatile market from bubble to recession back to bubble with hardly any time in the happy middle. Compare that with the Keynesian era that existed before Reaganomics where we had the longest period of sustained growth in modern human history.

But secondly and more to the point of this thread, I would assert that what you are saying is "university is the new high school," in otherwords what is needed for there to be general prosperity among working Candians is a higher standard of minimum education, such as university. The argument here does not believe that devaluing "unskilled" labour diminishes the middle class because the affected workforce will eventually develop new skills and move into other parts of the economy which pay better. However, its questionable how much of the current and future population really has the personal potential to become "skilled" or "educated" and to what extent people would be prevented from developing these skills due to realities of life(ie unplanned kids, illnesses, etc) would interfere with those who did have the ability. I'm willing to concede that a much larger segment of society COULD upgrade their skills and get better jobs, but unless its a substantial number, there would be a problem of overall decline in national prosperity since there would be a mismatch between a population's economic needs and supply. It also raises the question of whether the system makes these skills acessible enough, with rising tuition fees, etc. which bassically discourage people from seeking those upgrades.

I used to believe the "middle class is not shrinking" theory, but in the big picture, it's become increasingly apparent that the level of education and skills (or lack of it) is not what drives down a worker's wages and income in this economic model and ideology: it is the availablity of education and skills among the labour force regardless of what level it is. The income profile of the workforce is now designed purposely to be a pyramid, with the bulk of the population at the bottom instead of the Keyneisan diamond where the bulk is in the middle. If there are too many people with that same level, even if it is a university education, those workers will be the new autoworker or garbage man. If every single high school student went to university and got a bachelor degree and an MBA then MBA's would be in great abundance and having an MBA would be a mediocre-paying job. Employers do not pay you based on the 'value' of the work you do, they pay you based on how easy it would be for them to replace you with someone else who posesses similar skills.

2)Tying into that last point, the second argument to be made is not about jobs that we want to eliminate, but jobs we want to keep but pay less for, like garbagemen and water quality technicians and teachers. If we had robots that could do these jobs and we wanted to phase the workforce out of them, the argument might have more merit and would be more applicable to the first point. But since we want to keep these jobs around and simply cut those workers out of the middle class, this results in an economic loss to society since we're just growing the army of the working poor. Its also unfair to say these people "haven't invested or sacrificed anything," these are the workers who often put themselves at physical risk on the job, suffering repetitive stress injuries, immediate and long-term health and safety hazards, long hours of mind-numbing physical exertion, late shifts, changing schedules, etc. Ironically it was unions that brought us the 8-hour day and 5-day workweek, but unionized workers are the least likely to enjoy these as they have traded off the "luxuries" we take for granted in exchange for hourly pay that is still less than our salaries. Sure, maybe they get St. Jean Batiste day off or some other "ridiculous" sounding perk, but at the end of the day, they spend more of their life serving somebody else doing shit jobs than the rest of us.