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9th 18th October 2011
Laborers’ Local 483 Municipal Employees:
Letter to Occupy Portland.
Dear Protestors of Occupy Portland,
We are the 900 member public employee union who build and maintain the infrastructure of your City of Portland, including the roads upon which you march today, the wastewater treatment facilities for the public toilets you use, and the parks that you occupy. We support your efforts through our daily labor. More than that, the Executive Board of Laborers’ Local 483 stands in solidarity with the Occupy Together movement to confront the injustice of economic inequality, the scapegoating of working class people, the vilification of labor unions, the exploitation of the unemployed and underemployed, and the corporate takeover of the Americas and the world.
We know you are committed to this fight. We have watched what is unfolding on Wall Street in admiration of the protesters’ courage and in dismay of the apathetic and sometimes brutal response of those in power. We support your “re”-occupation but ask you not to greatly endanger your health and welfare. We need you to stand with us over the coming years. After your occupation is over, it is our deepest wish that you settle in a comfortable place — hopefully a warm, dry home with your friends or family. Your sacrifices won’t be so visible then but your work will be far from over. We ask you to stand up for democracy every single day at your workplaces. Organize with your rank-and-file co-workers no matter what their political beliefs or background. Form or join a union. If you don’t have a job, join us to demand a public works program with living wages and benefits for education, rebuilding of infrastructure, and public transit improvements. When Occupy Portland is over, we will still be standing with you.
Laborers’ Local 483 unites with Occupy Portland. You are the hope for the future.
In solidarity,
The Laborers’ Local 483 Executive Board.
Join the Forum discussion on this post
Labor unions are part of 99% of the problems in this country. Even Steve Jobs seemed to agree. In yesterday’s Huffington Post: “Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/steve-jobs-biography-obama_n_1022786.html
It’s interesting to me that those who seem the most “Greedy” are many at the Occupy events and the unions. Many of you Occupiers say you want someone else to pay your college loans though you’ve done nothing to add value in return, same thing with overall debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. The unions keep pushing for higher and higher wages, more time off, more restrictions on terminating poor performers, etc. yet the workers are often trending down in their productivity and quality compared to non-union workers and foreign plant workers. In someways this is greedier than the highly compensated CEOs of some large companies – at least the CEOs’ companies produce valuable products and services. We are in a global economy now, whether you like it or not, unions. Either your employees need to add more value with reasonable pay and benefits, or employees in China, India, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, etc. will simply replace you and their standard of living will go up over time, as your standard of living declines until there is global parity. You may not like that, but that’s the reality of the world we live in today, and there’s no turning back.
@ ERIC There is always an opportunity to turn back. If we were to recognize that our values are not being expressed through our actions, we can always stop what we’re doing and do actions that are in line with our values.
Yes – the beauty of living in a free capitalist country is that you can do virtually ANYTHING you want as long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. . . that is at least theoretically. However, from a practical standpoint you are wrong if you don’t want a nation in poverty with continued high unemployment. Central control and regulating higher wages and protectionism simply doesn’t work – particularly in a global market. Let’s take the automobile industry for example. You could pass laws that say that we can no longer import foreign cars and that wages will be even higher than the exorbitant union wages that are already in place. Many simple-minded people think that this would solve the problem – Americans would have to buy US-made cars, and they’d have to pay the higher price for the vehicle required by the higher labor cost. Yet, that’s not necessarily true. While most people may still buy autos at the higher price, there would be a small part of the population that simply wouldn’t buy them anymore, and still others would prefer to buy used cars. The protectionism of the US would likely lead to other countries either not accepting US autos in their markets or charging high tariffs. Even if they didn’t, the higher price of the US cars wouldn’t likely be competitive with other car prices that weren’t subject to the higher labor rates, and thus most foreign buyers would not rationally choose US autos. That is, of course, unless they were significantly better quality. Yet, what would be the incentive for creating better autos in a more limited competitive market – in markets with less competition, quality almost always declines. Large companies have far lower profit margins than many people commonly believe. With a few adjustments like this, the companies would likely fail and/or consistently put out inferior products. Look at some of the former communist countries’ autos: the East German Trabant was a classic example – nearly no innovation had been done to the car for 30-40 years, they were poor quality while across the border in West Germany some of the finest cars in the world were produced, and a used Trabant actually cost more than a new Trabant because if you wanted a new Trabant you had to wait many months to get one, whereas you could buy a used one immediately. Socialism and socialist-capitalism hybrids sound appealing on paper, but the reality is that they have proven over and over to not work. While a capitalist free market system is not perfect and has its share of abuses, it has consistently produced the greatest good for the largest number of people vs. other forms of economic organization. When things go wrong in a capitalist system, it is often because the government is inappropriately involved in the economy (i.e. redistribution of wealth; making investments, loans, and grants to companies; funding and controlling education at ever higher dollar amounts despite consistently declining results; setting a minimum wage; etc.). For example, there is ample evidence that the US government CAUSED the housing bubble, through it pressuring Fannie and Freddie (quasi-government agencies who issue Mortgage Backed Securities) to loosen the underwriting standards on loans they were willing to buy with the goal of significantly increasing homeownership. Guess what? It worked. Homeownership did increase significantly as a result, and Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed over 72% residential mortgage loans in 2007, turning them into Mortgage Backed Securities. Yes, banks then further carved up the MBS into further derivatives, and that may not have been a good idea, but if congress had not exerted the pressure on Fannie and Freddie to loosen underwriting standards we wouldn’t have likely had the housing bubble. The problem with Fannie and Freddie is that there were privatized profits but socialized risk. If Occupy members and union members think they add so much value and feel like they are exploited by the man, then why don’t they start their own businesses? There’s never been an easier time to start a business: there is plenty of cheap real estate, bargains on equipment, cheap highly skilled labor, and technology tools. You don’t need someone to “give” you a job – find a want or need and fulfill it, and create your own opportunity.