Sorry, I was referring to household income, but I can't pretend I made that clear.

"And they repeatedly shell out the hundreds of dollars it costs for plane tickets, according to you? "

When did I say anything about "repeatedly"?

I know such people who, once every year or two, will pony up $200-$300 each for a plane ticket.

This might be a good time to repeat, of course, that I find this whole side-discussion execrable, and am appalled that there are living people today who have to know how much somebody is making to know how much they care about his welfare.

Draug + Dexter win this thread, imho.

@Putin,

"The other important point is nobody cares about spoiled airline passengers."

Ah yes... The *true* nature of the communists reveals itself. It's not that they have a problem with the poor being poor, that's just a side show. Their problem is with the rich being rich. If you ever ask yourself why people hate you and your ideas so much Putty, that's why.

The poor are poor because the rich are rich. It's called surplus expropriation. Don't worry redhouse, I don't lie awake at night contemplating why the Dutch neoliberals hate the idea of working class power.

"am appalled that there are living people today who have to know how much somebody is making to know how much they care about his welfare."

Then I trust you won't be voting for Romney? Where is the evidence that you actually care about "all Americans" and that all of this hand wringing & jumping up and down isn't grandstanding? You've made it clear you assume all trade unionists are criminals before bothering to know any facts. You've made it clear that you don't think transgendered people are entitled to basic human rights in prison. You've made it clear that you support the execution of the mentally disabled. You've made it clear that you have no capacity for empathy for anybody less fortunate than you so what is with all the self-righteous indignation here?

"When did I say anything about "repeatedly"?"

You said lots of lower class people 'fly'. Usually when a statement like that is made, it means repeatedly. For instance, if I tell someone that I "drive", that doesn't mean that I drive twice a year. It means that that's a frequent mode of how I get myself around. If you admit that "lower class" people very very rarely fly, then I don't see what all the damn fuss is about. The vast vast majority of airline passengers are affluent. The airlines themselves brag about this when they reveal the demographics of their customers.

So let's say I start a company, Putin, that sells clothes to people, nothing fashionable, just the simplest kind of clothes (jeans, t-shirts). Then let's say I make lots of profit. You believe that my making profit is actually theft from the people I'm selling it too.

No, theft from the people employed to sew the jeans and t-shirts. Duh.

""When did I say anything about "repeatedly"?"

You said lots of lower class people 'fly'. Usually when a statement like that is made, it means repeatedly."

Gotcha. I was talking about them as a class, though.

Your logic is all fine except for one thing. As you're always telling us, there are few rich people and tons of people with more modest means. So you have to multiply the few times they each fly by the huge number of them there are to fly, recall. Subjectively, I'd think that maybe 20-30% of the time that I fly I'm sitting beside somebody I'd think was working class. (This is thinking back and trying to guestimate. I don't really pay much attention to the socioeconomic status of the people beside me). (I'm afraid the numbers you posted are wrong -- they imply that 100% of CA passengers have a household income above 85%. I fly CA airlines with some frequency and am nowhere even vaguely close to that).

"You've made it clear you assume all trade unionists are criminals"

Not at all. I'm sure even if this is happening here, only a small minority of this union are involved, and while this would be far more typical than it should be of unions, it's hardly the norm.

"You've made it clear that you don't think transgendered people are entitled to basic human rights in prison."

More accurately, I don't believe having a gender change surgery paid for the by the government IS a basic human right.

"You've made it clear that you support the execution of the mentally disabled."

Rather, I believe the evidence that the person in this particular case was mentally disabled in any relevant way is ludicrously slim.

As for voting for Romney -- unlike you, I don't believe somebody born poor is condemned to stay that way, and I support the policies that I think are most likely to keep the opportunities in place that would allow them to improve their lot.

Actually, Putin, the median income for someone with a high school degree over 25 years of age in the US is $31K. With just an associates degree it jumps to $40K and with a bachelor's it jumps to $57K. So under $30K is officially below average income (not middle class). And when you consider that minimum wage is nearly $20K now, you need to update your thoughts on what level of income constitutes what class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

semck: "As for voting for Romney -- unlike you, I don't believe somebody born poor is condemned to stay that way, and I support the policies that I think are most likely to keep the opportunities in place that would allow them to improve their lot."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States#Comparisons_with_other_countries

Then perhaps we should be more like Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Canada, which have more social mobility than we do.

Um....here's teh deal....unions screw people ALL THE TIME by driving up prices. It's hillarious that this incident would prompt someone to think so.

GM...Chrysler...when Obama was finished with those companies, he had *slashed* Union wages significantly...that was the only way to make those companies financially viable.

So...yeah....Unions screw you all the time, my friends...

True that, krellin.

"Then perhaps we should be more like Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Canada, which have more social mobility than we do."

I highly doubt that we rate lower than those countries because of economic systems, but rather because of the same issues that give us higher crime rates, lower education, etc. -- we've all but abandoned education in the inner cities (and large swaths of urban areas generally) and thus have a large subclass that has little chance of rising above their parents educationally. Neither party has a great record of addressing this problem, but since _some_ amount of innovation -- vouchers, charter schools -- has come from the right (to fierce opposition from the left), and the left has nothing offer than rallying around the teachers' unions, this too reinforces my vote.

So, as a total side point, it seems like there's a bunch of references in here to unions deliberately sabotaging products in the past, things like "why haven't they learned" and such, and really, are there honestly cases of manufacturing products being deliberately mis-manufactured in order to gain leverage? I've never heard of one, and I have studied a lot of the history of labor in the US. I'm sure some people would lump strikes by garbage collectors or firefighters into that category, but that's not quite the same thing.

I'd like some concrete samples of this, since it seems a lot of the case for believing the unions did this is based on some hazily referenced prior similar situations.

The old Fresno GM plant is the clearest example that comes to mind, SD. Whether it was mainly to gain leverage or just spite the company is unclear.

Googling Fresno GM plant isn't bringing me any results. It's not on wiki's list of GM factories past and present either.

Sorry, my mistake -- Fremont. (These "Fre" California cities, you know?)

Can't really blame that on the union, looking it up, since even the UAW listed them as "the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States." And even then, it seems most of the things they were doing were designed to be obnoxious rather than dangerous.

In short, it wasn't the UAW that was telling them to do what they were doing, they were just a bunch of assholes. And when Toyota took them on in the NUMMI joint venture, the change in corporate leadership seemed to change their attitudes quite a bit even though it was pretty much the same people.

Cool, SD, thanks for the clarification.

I also read about some healthcare workers in CT (I think) who were claimed to have sabotaged nursing homes. That was claimed by management, so to what extent it's credible would be up to individuals I imagine.

So basically we have some vague unsourced stories about unions deliberately sabotaging products or services, but nothing concrete with which to make these claims of "why haven't they learned" or whatnot.

A couple things about unions. First, they're not the ones hiring the employees, that's the company. So while retention of employees is a union issue, if you have a factory full of assholes, that speaks more to there being inept management (especially in the hiring departments) than anything else. Secondly, it's not in the union's interest, pretty much ever, to make products worse deliberately, as everyone here knows. Guess what, the unions know that too, and have known it for pretty much the entire existence of unions. Their main bargaining tool tends to be work stoppages which hurt the company without directly hurting the consumer.

But of course krellin is also right here, the unions do drive up prices compared to non-union labor. But regardless of how much factory workers make, the US has by far the grossest disparity of income between CEO and median employee salary. No other country comes close. So the prices aren't all factory worker salaries, as some anti-unionists would have you believe. Which also kind of messes with that idea that higher taxes on the wealthy would lead to them moving their companies overseas...no other country can give the top dogs the compensation that the US can give, even if they were to get taxed more than they currently are. Sorry, tangent.

Through income disparity is actually a misnomer resulting from comparing dollars to dollars. When evaluated by percentage, several eastern companies (Taiwan, China, etc.) actually have a greater disparity. Yes 20k to 20million is more than 19 million, but 520 per year versus 5 million is roughly 10 times greater as a percentage.

Also, US companies don't move all their operations. Just manufacturing, call centers, and enough middle management to keep things running.

Oh, right, but there's been a made-up argument for a while now that if we increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans they'll just move out of the country.

And no, it isn't comparing dollars to dollars, the disparity is percentages. In the US, it's several hundred times the rate of the average employee, the next biggest nation is the UK at 32 times.

Look to Taiwan. Look to China. I think you will see a bigger, by percentage, disparity. The US is the largest *in the developed Western World* but not in all the world. There are nations in the east where the workers make in a week or even a month what our people make per hour.

It's hard to say, they don't have the same reporting metrics in those countries. I mean, I lived in Hong Kong for two years, and Japan for a while after that, I've dealt with numerous Asian companies. Generally speaking, it's not the CEO's who are getting crazy rich there but the owners, which is a pretty big difference. Still, it's difficult to get a valid metric of what everyone makes because the reporting structure for such things isn't as robust as it is in the western world.

Hong Kong and Japan I can see not having the disparity because they pay their working class well. Abuse them like hell with the hard nosed approach to management, but still reward them for their efforts.

But countries where slave labor/child labor stille exists or where the typical worker makes less per month than American and Europeans workers make per day (or in some cases per hour) and where the government owns the business or the CEo is the owner...

In places where the statistic is tracked, the US is far in the lead.

That is a better way to put it than "the US is the worst in the world". Because you can't make that absolute statement when you don't know what the entire world's stats are.

Besides, I mean, is "We're better at income disparity than places with slave labor!" really something to brag about?

It's right now at a place where the average American CEO makes 540 times his average employee's rate, compared to 32 times in the next biggest (among tracked countries) which is the UK. It's for this reason that I hate the whole "Unions drive prices up!" argument because while it is true...there's a dude making 540 times their pay sitting around. Even in the US, it was much lower before the 80's...I think it was 40 times in the 80's, and I think that's pretty reasonable compared to 540. And if you think a factory worker is overpaid, I don't think you can argue that a guy making 540 times that isn't.

So you are saying the avergae CEO makes 15 million a year? I have a hard time believing that. I think that needs to be qualified to Fortune 500 companies or something. Because SMB Owner/CEOs do not typically make 15 million a year.