Facts About Labor

ALL THIS DATA HAS BEEN TRANSERED TO ECONOMIC STATS

Labor Facts, various sources

The reason for the decline in the percentage of labor that is unionized from over 35% to under 12 percent in the last 60 years comes primarily from the anti-union slant of the media, the failure of government to enforce laws protecting unions and workers rights to unionize, and changes is such legislation.

Harvard Law Professor Paul Weiler estimates that one in 20 union supporters -- an average of approximately 10,000 workers a year -- are fired by their employers during union organizing campaigns.

Similarly, in a study of 400 elections on union representation conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University found that 50 percent of the employers threatened to close the office or plant and 32 percent fired workers who actively supported the union.

These actions are in violation of the NLRA's provisions prohibiting employers from firing, harassing, or threatening employees who seek to organize unions.

All this is a far cry from the original vision of the National Labor Relations Act, which saw unions as indispensable institutions in an industrialized democracy. Introduced by Senator Robert F. Wagner (thus, the NLRA is frequently called "The Wagner Act"), a liberal Democrat from New York, and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the NLRA reflected the era's egalitarian economic philosophy. The Depression had been caused by corporate excesses, the New Dealers believed, and by the lack of consumer demand resulting from low wages. Moreover, ordinary citizens were powerless to right these wrongs unless they joined together. Thus, unions were desirable because they offered workers a way to resist corporate abuses, raise their wages, and restore their rightful role in the nation's economic, social, and political life.

Thus, the law begins by blaming hostile employers for labor unrest, declaring: "The denial by some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by some employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife."

The law goes on contend that individual workers don't have the power to improve their conditions and to present collective action as a cure for the lack of mass purchasing power that produced the Depression: "The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association ... tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions by suppressing wage rates."

The current lack of labor unrest, media production of ideas, and congressional pro-business legislation, these all lead to a prediction that the current downward trends in unionization, wages, and benefits will continue for decades.

To find out what economics is called the dismal science.

THE SHIFT OF THE TAX BURDEN AWAY FROM CORPORATIONS

• Average corporate tax rates in industrialized countries have fallen from 45 per cent to 30 per cent in two decades due to influence peddling through political donations by business.

• if corporate taxation keeps receding at the current rate, corporate tax rates will hit 0 per cent by the middle of the century,

• out of the 275 largest corporations in the US, 82 paid no tax in or received a tax refund in at least one of the years between 2001 and 2003,

• the number of Export Processing Zones has risen from 850 in 1998 to more than 5,000 in 2004, despite their generally bad track record on labour rights,

• in 2001, the amount of income estimated to be lost in the US due to the abuse of transfer pricing alone was US$53.1 billion,

• as a share of total taxation, corporate taxes have dropped by 15 per cent in the UK and by 22 per cent in Italy since the 1980s, by 41 per cent in Germany and by 43 per cent in Japan since the 1970s and by 53 per cent in the US since the late 1960s.

Companies as large as Boeing, Halliburton , Morgan Stanley, Pepsi, Citigroup and Xerox are either incorporated in tax havens or have a large number of subsidiaries there. This allows them to under-report their profits for the purposes of paying tax whilst at the same time benefiting from taxpayer money through government contracts.

There is a fundamental corruption of oversight when the Shepard is in the pay of the wolves. It; is a crime for a judge to receive gifts from those whom he sits and judges. I have always assumed that the elected officials were supposed to promote the well being of the people. Donations influence performance. As of 2004, 6 states have passed funding reform (see http://skeptically.org/parwho/id5.html).

Report by Public Citizen shows that America’s dirtiest power plants were the biggest contributors to the Bush 2004 presidential campaign at http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/documents/dirtiest_plants2.pdf

Military, health, and interest on the debt consume two-thirds of every income tax dollar.

The median income family in the U.S. paid $4,171 in federal income taxes in 2005.

Military $1,190

Health $843

Interest on military debt $368

Interest on non-military debt $411

Income security $277

Veteran’s benefits $154

Nutrition $113

Housing $85

Natural resources $59

Job training $14

Others $486

A government that served the public wheal would have 4 fundamental changes in expenditures. The military would be about 1/4^th of present, interest on the debt ($779 billion) would be zero, and both education and health would be at least doubled.