So Detroit is now Bankrupt...

[timmah]

Mr Khan said:

Marks said:

the2real4mafol said:

 

Oh so whenever a industry fails, always gotta blame someone like the unions have you? You don't realise how useful trade unions are do you? Without them, we would still be working 16 hours a day for a few dollars a day. The work would be deadly due to a a lack of safety regulations. There would be child labour. The workplace would be filthy. The factories would be far more polluting. You could just go to a Chinese or Indian factory and you would see what your work would be like without the imput of trade unions all because the companies are just greedy. I'm sure they could get there products made in a developed country and still make money.

Without trade unions, i'm sure companies would go back to their exploitative ways. Without no one pushing for the worker to get the best deal, wages would remain flat despite inflation. They would get away without allowing people to have holidays off every now and then or have sick pay. The way i see it why should the lazy executive get millions and yet the hard working people who make the products, the workers get barely enough to live on? 

And another thing, if American car companies want to be popular again, they need to make fuel efficient cars now. 

Really, you think if unions disappeared today that all of a sudden people would be forced to work 16 hours a day with no overtime pay, no safety equipment, and in filthy environments? 

No, the free market (which includes the employee/labour market) would force companies to improve conditions or else have their workers quit and work for the competition. If the factory across the street has high tech safety equipment and offers better pay, you can either match it or see your staff flock out like bats out of hell. The free market works as well, if not better, than goverment in all instances. 

Workers quit and go where? Labor is a buyer's market, inherently, and all companies would push wages down as low as they felt they could for the job to still be "worth it" (and not in terms of what the job is fairly worth, but that you can hit a point where the pay is so low that people would just rather go on welfare)

If that were actually true, then why are only 6% of employees paid minimum wage? Oh, because labor competition is what actually sets wages.

Some interesting stats on this...

• Only about 6% of the workforce actually makes at or below minimum wage at any given time
• The vast majority of these are young people and/or people with very little education or in part time positions
• The industry with the highest number of people making these low hourly wages is the foodservice industry, where tips make up the difference, leading to actual incomes generally above minimum wage. If you take these out (since they make more than minimum wage when you include tips), the above figure would drop much lower.
• Almost nobody STAYS at minimum wage, unless in a tip-based position, but they make more than the statistic suggests anyway

The fact is, as long as you get a halfway decent education, there's absolutely no way you should be stuck in a minimum wage position. Hell, I worked at a fast food restaurant while in high school and was only at minimum wage for 3 months there! If companies could really 'push down' wages without a minimum wage as you (wrongly) suggest, they should be able to 'push down' wages to the minimum wage with one in place, but that's not the case. Why do the vast, overwhelming majority of workers (in both union and non-union positions) make above the minimum wage? There's no law stating they have to pay their employees what they do.. It's because the market has set reasonable value on those jobs, not a government regulation.

That's a fact, Jack!

EDIT: If employers really had the power to just go as low as they wanted, why is the average hourly earnings in the US about $24? http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.us.htm . The current minimum wage has almost zero impact on real hourly rates.