Union Yes

Some, in arguing against unions, maintain that increasing union wages can only increase cost in the end because the companies paying higher wages will just pass on the cost. This opinion completely disregards the fact that maybe the executives and managers are overpaid. An equivalent decrease in executive pay alongside an increase in worker pay would therefore lead to no additional costs to the consumer. This is not hard to achieve since executives are making over 300 times as much as their workers.

Or are those arguing against better pay for workers merely unwilling to see management take home less? Is it that under no circumstances must executives receive less compensation, only workers must sacrifice? Executives can have golden parachutes, secure retirements, paid country club memberships, use of the company jet, and perks as far as the eye can see into perpetuity. But the workers are at fault for budgetary issues? The workers must sacrifice and go without? The $12 an-hour they are making is too much?

Second, I've see some defending corporations regarding the money they are making. Paraphrasing, "Not all received bailout money. So leave them alone." But as I've described in many previous posts, all, especially large corporations, do receive many forms of public largess. And, it has also been shown that public workers often would have cost less to complete a project rather than the contracted private company.

Third, unions don't "price themselves out of a market." Federal and state policies (influenced with corporate cash) eviscerate unions by making them compete with third world slave labor. We’ve allowed a regression to take place. We're watching all the struggles the labor movement fought for over the last two centuries go down the drain. As we use jargon like "globalization," "competition," and "efficiencies" to gloss over the fact that our government, complicit with multinational corporations, has allowed workers the world over to be exploited in pursuit of profit for a select few. They are not pricing themselves out of anything. The money that workers were previously earning is now being siphoned off by executives and CEOs. As productivity of the American worker has increased, they have not seen a correlated increase in their pay. Yet, executive compensation has skyrocketed.

Efficient markets, the private sector, supply-side economics are all dead. The emperors have no clothes.