Nothing I say is an infinitive, except for the beginning of this sentence. Please understand that I am not 100% against what many on this forum are saying. Obviously everyone in the US needs to work together, better at least.
A lot of people don't want to work, as in, outdoors sweating, toiling, getting dirty and making minimum wage such as a field worker/picker or even outdoors working in the ice and snow. It might be indoors getting hot, sweaty, greasy...processing chicken or beef. I know I didn't like it when I was a kid, cleaning up meat processing areas at the end of the day! I knew I didn't want to do that for the any longer than I had to!
No no no... a lot of people don't want to work in shitty jobs under shitty conditions with fast moving conveyors and production quotas in stinky unsafe environments, or... outdoors in the blazing sun tarring roofs or... swinging hammers on newly framed houses or... mowing lawns and raking leaves or... repointing buildings... (drumroll please) FOR PEANUTS.
Every man has his price and any American will do any work that is available they are physically capable of doing - but not for **** wages and no benefits and all while being treated like a bastard readheaded stepchild. Back in the day a butcher was in every grocery store - who cut the meat and packaged it - and for other stores there were the meatpackers union - those were not great jobs, but you could earn a living and raise a family and pay the mortgage... There was no shortage of applicants for those good paying union jobs. Now it's the immigrants where Tyson put ads in Mexican newspapers for poultry, beef and pork process workers. Owning 85% of the packaged and distributed meat market in the US.
Just like there's a growing income gap between the top mamagement and the middle working class, there's an ever widening income gap between the middle class and the blue collar class. Time was Bert the cop, Ernie the cab driver, and George the banker were birds of a feather... now the wages on blue collar skilled and unskilled work has remained flat since the 70's, has fallen well behind the inflation curve, and the conditions of more production demanded, and the "internalize profits, externalize liabilities" edict has making working in those positions even less attractive as people take those jobs simply because they have to. Oftentimes, because their worker status is "sketchy" and requires a degree of "plausible deniability."
Why do you think all these posters here are proudly showing off their collection of battery powered sawzalls, porta-bands, and hammer drills, threaders and grinders and impact guns? When the hell did the nonunion sector go from hiring employees with hand tools to requiring them to provide the power tools as well? When did roofers go from wearing company issued jumpsuits to wearing throwaway clothes purchases at the Goodwill?
If we as a country are to "globalize" exactly what is that supposed to mean? That all workers become disposable chattle owning nothing, entitled to nothing but the bare minimum in order to go home, wake up the next day ready to do it all again, with zero hope or chance of bettering themselves and their families lives, and no extra for eating out, a vacation or two, a nice car, sending a kid to college, proper medical care... while the company owners and corporate investors live like kings? Because that's where we are headed.
A lot might be 10% of the working population or it might be 50%...we don't really know. It depends on who one listens to. We might complain about 9% unemployment in Hawai'i while South Dakota complains about 3%. It's relative.
A lot of people want robots and people who are willing to work for very little pay to do their dirty work.
What makes you think unemployment is the result of worker laziness? A lot of people want to save a buck - and have to, they've no choice. People hire handymen from Craigslist to fix the receptacle because calling a real contractor is out of the question, financially. But a lot of people want to pay very little to do the dirty work because they can get away with it. It's a business model. And when you're competing with others following that model, it's almost impossible not to whether you want to or not. This is known as the race to the bottom. Exploiting labor is going to happen when the conditions are set for it to happen, and it's never off the table when a corporation legally cares about one thing only- the bottom line.
What makes it possible in the USA? Lax labor laws and standards and lack of funding the ones you do have. Who pushes for these things? Lack of worker education in our schools and education on labor law and employees rights - who pushes for that? Laws that stop or prevent of make unions financially possible or viable- who is out there advocating for that under the guise of "protecting workers rights to not have to pay union dues?"
What else make exploitation possible? Having a glut of workers in the USA. A shortage of jobs drives down wages. Who demands a raise when the overall feeling is you're lucky to even have a job? Open 500 factories in the US employing 1000 each and suddenly Target, the trucking company, the roofing company, and Starbucks and McDonalds isn't the primary employer in town... and competition for labor goes up - employees are seen as a much needed asset instead of a disposable, devalued commodity.
I'm using that as an example of what Biden hopes to accomplish with shutting down XL and saying solar and wind are where he is going to create jobs.
Solyndra as in the failed solar energy plant/company. Biden was the VP under Obama...
come on, man...you have to remember that! It's the type of new jobs that President Biden is saying that the XL would have provided for.
OK I see what you're referring to, but not what point you're trying to make. Solyndra was but one small failure of a program that was implemented which the right wouldn't stop crowing about and it was used to paint the entire green movement as an abject failure. Green energy isn't a question of if, it is a question of when. And subsidizing the oil industry and allowing for the construction of pipelines to further the reach of the oil industry is the antithesis of the direction we should be headed.
Yes...better their lifestyles...that is more accurate. But, if they can't even maintain their lifestyles, bettering is even less of an option.
True, and the banking industry was right there to cash in on the dysfunction and lend for college and lend for houses demanding the government drop those pesky regulations like proving income and ability to pay and no more of that 25% of gross income to house payment garbage... so that Americans could fool themselves into their lifestyle by getting into perpetual debt. And then fool American investors into purchasing commodities like safe AAA rated bonds of mortgage debt that the mortgagees proved their value and stability by making all of 3 on-time payments... until that came crashing down.
Now who pushed for easing all those different banking ans investment regulations to make all that possible? Where did all the money go?
That paragraph is pretty good. What you describe is part of what I was saying earlier about my own family. My cousin lost her job at the Ford plant in Michigan a few years ago, around the same time that
American Axle closed up shop in Hamtramck. Those jobs went to Mexico as well. The UAW saw pay drop from $45 to $30 according to that article, and they still closed the entire factory and moved it.
I wonder if those workers want to move to Mexico to follow those jobs, like the XL workers are expected to pull up roots to move to wherever the work is.
Sorry for the XL workers but, if you want to make an omlet you have to crack some eggs. If we stop importing and make our own durable goods, there's going to be a lot of job losses at the ports and in trucking too... But you are taking a tiny bit of bad news and using it to decry the overall betterment of everyone in the country - a typical right wing tactic. Nobody has a solution that will have no bad effects on somebody, if that's what you need to go along with a national policy I'm afraid you are never going to be satisfied with anything the government ever does. And maybe that's the position you want to be in.
And Ford made record profits before, during, and after the 2008 crunch and then killed jobs while doing it. There are your gold-plated toilets.
Trust me, I see what you are talking about.
Just because a company makes record profits doesn't mean they're satisfied. Joe and the dems are going to have to get on the ball on a lot of different issues, monopolization is another one. And it's clear neither he nor the current dem party is interested in too much progress, too radical of an idea, or making too many waves. It's typical the dems want to stop the right wing carnage against the non-1%, but I don't see them pushing for fixing any of the damage already done, or reversing course.
I pull that crap out of the European Union which the UK is hopefully extracting itself from. This isn't made up...it's happening all over the world, ergo: globalism.
Pretty sure the UK is pulling out to implement even more vulture capitalism, If I'm wrong I hope so.