Name one recent American invention

That has benefited AMERICAN as opposed to East Asian workers in terms of employment and wages.

 

Apple pays its US workers a lot more then they pay their Asians. Why wouldn't that count? We invent all sorts of medical devices that are being made here now, but with the new Democrat tax on medical devices they are moving overseas. This show features all sorts of inventors and they make a lot of it in America:

http://www.hulu.com/shark-tank

What workers should benefit from an invention?

 

Who says I'm a socialist? I'm a NATIONALIST. Money going into the pockets of the ordinary Joes is money going into the American economy. Transferring technology to East Asia has only one long term consequence - cheap copies, improvements, and finally market dominance, cf Smamsung/apple.

 

Blame unions for huge wage and benefit demands for running US manuf out business.

 

Hog wash. If it were not for the unions, we would be working for the same wages as those Asians and native entrepreneurs would starve. When we were at our peak as an exporter of manufactured goods, a far larger percentage of the labor force was unionized and CEOs only made about 30 times what the janitor made. Now the unions are dying, the janitor is starving and the CEO makes about the same as four or five of his colleagues made during the golden age as a percentage of corporate income. Our industrial infrastructure is in the toilet because of greedy investors, not workers.

Where the investor class gets the dumb-ass idea that they "create wealth" is beyond me.

 

You likely hung out and had a BBQ Saturday or Sunday, didn't go to work, didn't call in either because you had the weekend off. You know why? Unions.

 

Cheapers goods means Americans have more to spend on other things we can develop at a better comparative advantage. Every dollar the Chinese get is spent here eventually.

I agree we need to better protect our IP though, and stop Chinese currency manipulation.

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Not true at all. The work week was the current length it is before any major union presence. That is just an old unionists tale to distract people for all the scab busting and oppression against minorities they were engaged in. They control the schools now, and taught you that and other pro union propaganda.

 

If the jobs are being sent overseas, what exactly are we earning money with job-wise in order to buy these things? You can sell a TV for sale for 1 dollar, but that's too expensive for someone who's homeless and in debt. Keeping jobs here keeps the money itself here with the spenders.

Your statement isn't true. The average work week was around 61 hours before overtime was instituted at the federal level with FLSA of 1938 which was pushed through and heavily supported and pretty much written by Union leaders fighting for personal time. It gave a middle ground to employee and employer to be able to get a decent amount of hours from the employee at normal pay and pay them extra for taking away family time beyond the 40 hour work week. It structured into five 8-hour days for most companies, though some that I've worked for would do four 10-hour days or in some cases, three 12-hour days, 2 days off, two 12-hour days, 3 days off, shift-work stylee.

In other words, your statement isn't backed up by documented history. Even the government historical records cite labor unions as the major force which got FLSA signed into law.

 

They only get those wages because they make other Americans pay artificially higher costs. That is why they are only in protected, local, and government industries.

 

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Despite all the claims the US is still the largest manufacturer in the world in the value of goods produced. US manufacturing is also the most efficient in terms of value added per dollar of wages. This is because US manufacturers have spent the last hundred years investing in automation and efficiency rather than chasing low wages to maintain their competitive edge. The loss of manufacturing jobs is not because the jobs moved overseas it is because US manufacturers need an order of magnitude fewer workers to produce ten times the goods of a few decades ago.

The entire history of manufacturing since the industrial revolution is about low margin producers moving to lower wages and being replaced by higher margin manufacturing that pays higher wages as the standard of living rose. This has gone on continuously in the US since 1848 when the first textile manufacturer moved from New England to the south to get away from rising wages. The entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the skilled work force and the engineering talent turned to making better machines that make the textiles instead, and then to making the machinery that makes everything else, these days the machinery that makes computer chips among other things. Now the great great grandchildren of the textile workers in New England are building and programming the robots that work in the Amazon warehouses and your Roomba, and Segway and new robots for the Army.

That is just how economic development has worked all over the world for the last century and a half. Manufacturing economies need to move up the value chain as the standard of living increases. The someone or something chasing all the jobs away is simple economics.

Of course, there are always those who will put the blame for all this on someone or something other than simple economics but they would be wrong.

 

The only thing unions have engaged in in their entire history is extortion and racketeering with sporadic forays into political corruption.

Hsieken all that wouldhave hapened without the unions and pretty much did.

Without investors their are no jobs.

 

Let's see...we specialize in book keeping and accounting. We are good at outsourcing jobs,and making huge profits from other people's work. We rock at making crappy, overpriced, basically unwarrantied cars. We're great at expanding Walmarts, so that's gotta be a plus. We pay our CEO's more than anybody in the world to chop jobs. We're great at selling prescription drugs (we have one for literally everything). We're especially good at bailing out the 'too big to fails'. We're experts at printing worthless paper called currency, endlessly, and then 'giving' it to the richest of the rich every month. We're getting better at spying on citizens, drones snooping, and other secret operations. Our Congress is excellent at doing absolutely nothing. We're probably the best at hypocrisy. We treat our corporate elites extremely well. We're getting much better at making people homeless, and we're especially good at pointing the finger at someone else for all of it.
What we ACTUALLY do well and for the collective good of all though? I can't really think of anything.

 

Tomahawk missiles.

 

We make awesome Ales and Beers

 

And you think US companies are going to ignore large populations of people outside the US who don't have the benefits American workers have? Some patriotic duty is going to stop people from leaving here and making money off those people? No, it's not. When we made rules here to prevent worker exploitation, corporations simply went overseas.

 

Freedom Fries.

 

As far as organized labor goes, some unions here might seem problematic, but that's largely because American labor culture is rather primitive compared to much of Europe.

In Germany, for example, most companies are run democratically, where labor committees have a say in what direction the company goes.

There is no need for an outside union with its bureaucracy when the company itself takes the initiative to empower its labor internally.

This is the direction Americans need to move toward to truly increase their quality of life over time.

In the meantime, we'll continue to see the recklessness of shortsighted shareholders and increasingly top-down management here.

 

I did all of that, enjoyed the football games, played with the dogs and kids, had some folks over. Detailed my truck, and the wife's car. Oh, and I had friday off as well, come to think of it, I have every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. And trust me, Unions had nothing to do with it.

 

And without labor the investors have no bloody capital to invest in the first place. All wealth, ultimately, derives from labor. The capitalist is only useful to society when he redistributes wealth created by labor. It is time that our capitalists realized this and stopped sniveling about their income taxes and workers who expect a day's decent provisions for a day's work.

 

No it does not. If that were true we all still be hunter gatherers.

 

THIS. This very idea, though, makes 'free market' people (i.e. rigged market people) cringe, though. They don't owe ANYTHING to the people that work for them. The people themselves are the business owner's capital to do with as they please in free-markets.

 

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That's as silly as when people say "without capitalists, there would be no jobs!" It's just as extreme, ideological, and senseless.

 

^_-

poppycock. your misunderstanding of free market principles doesn't discredit the actual free market principles. I won't derail this thread with any kind of back and forth on it, but if you're actually interested in that topic start a thread, or pm me expressing your interest and I will start a thread.

 

Markets:
Places where prices are discovered.
Free markets:
Places where price discovery is not impeded.
Capitalism:
The idea that resources can be combined to gain advantage in markets.

If you notice, there is nothing about capitalism that disallows the combination of labour into unions to gain market advantage.

If you pay even closer attention you might notice that capitalism does not align perfectly with the idea of free markets.