Category Archives: Labor

Over Supply, by The Zman

Posted on February 20, 2021 | 1 comment

A lot of highly touted new technologies and developments are supplying things the market isn’t demanding. From The Zman at theburningplatform.com:

One of the first lessons in economics is that demand drives supply. The more a product or service is desired, the greater the supply of it, barring some artificial constraint on supply. The relationship between supply and demand is expressed in the price for the good or service. A rising price means demand is outpacing supply and a falling price means supply is outpacing demand. If demand falls low enough, supply will disappear as there is no profit to be made in the transaction.

Supply and demand used to be an article of faith in capitalist countries, but it seems that our rulers have abandoned that axiom. Take for example labor markets. They insist that flooding the American labor market with new people from abroad will lift wages and increase employment. All that diversity will cancel out the collapse in demand relative to supply and something will happen. With regards to the labor market, the new article of faith is that unlimited supply drives up demand somehow.

Now, a lot of people think this new universal truth about the labor markets is just a trick to fool people into voting away their inheritance. Collusion between the cheap labor lobby and the cheap voter lobby has resulted in this weird libertarian argument that the old axioms about supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. That way heritage Americans will not resist the flood of foreigners into their country. That could be true, but it is not an isolated example of this new economic law.

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America’s Top Union Boss Nervously Slams Biden Over Keystone XL Decision, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

Who knew the Biden administration would cost working people in the private sector their jobs? Anybody paying any attention at all. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

America’s top union boss isn’t happy that President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline his first day in office, and doesn’t think promises of ‘retraining’ programs are much consolation for union workers who will find themselves unemployed.

“If you destroy 100 jobs in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and you create 100 jobs in California, it doesn’t do those 100 families much good,” said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in comments which aired Sunday evening on “Axios on HBO.”

Axios notes that there are significant tensions between environmentalists, the Biden administration team addressing climate change, and segments of the labor movement. By canceling the Keystone XL project, approximately 1,000 existing union jobs and 10,000 protected construction jobs are estimated to have been lost.

Trumka, who fully supported Biden’s run for president, told Axios’ Jonathan Swan that he thought Biden’s decision to cancel the pipeline project his first day in office, without pairing it with an initiative that would create as many (or more) jobs as would be lost, was a bad move.

“If you’re looking at a pipeline and you’re saying we’re going to put it down, now what are you going to do to create the same good-paying jobs in that area?” asked Trumka, who “appeared to be uneasy – pausing for a few seconds and ducking the question — when asked whether he was comfortable with Biden’s plan to ban fracking on federal lands,” according to the report.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Economy, Energy, Government, Labor, Politics

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Minimum wage? Self-service pays $0 per hour…with absolutely no benefits, by Ethel C. Fenig

Posted on February 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Make your customers do what employees used to do, it’s a lot cheaper. From Ethel C. Fenig at americanthinker.com:

As Parker Beauregard proved once again yesterday, when preening politicians force businesses, in this case grocery store workers in Long Beach, Calif., to pay their workers higher wages — for the workers’ own good, of course — the workers lose.

Indeed, just about everyone loses.  Except the politicians.

In this case, the grocery store workers lost their jobs.  The residents in the neighborhoods where these grocery stores were located lost the convenience of having reliable, well stocked grocery stores serving a wide variety of fresh food close by.  The city lost the tax revenue the stores generated.  The residents of the city will lose money or services because the city will have to charge higher taxes or reduce services to compensate for lost tax revenue.  The remaining stores will increase prices to cover their increased labor costs.

Indeed, so the only winners will be the politicians, who will pat themselves on the back as they compliment themselves for their own wonderfulness.

Something similar is occurring in my city, hundreds of miles from Long Beach, Calif.  When the minimum wage increased, a local grocery chain, Target, Home Depot, and a number of other stores reduced the number of full-service checkout lanes and 10 items or fewer checkout lanes while greatly expanding the self-checkout lanes.  Boom!  Many of the cashiers lost their jobs!  The baggers, many of whom were (warning: P.C. speak ahead) developmentally delayed and were placed in these jobs through a coordinated effort with the company, neighboring schools, and social workers, lost their jobs.  Instead, now, with multiple closed-circuit cameras overhead, one worker, enjoying newly increased pay, supervises the multiple terminals, watching as shoppers scan, bag, and pay for their items, helping out when necessary.

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Posted in Business, Economics, Government, Labor, Law, Politics

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In First Week As President, Joe Biden Tosses Women, Unions and the American People Under the Globalist Bus, by Robert Bridge

Posted on January 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Anybody regret their vote for Joe Biden yet? From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

Anything that remotely promotes the interest of the nation will be ostracized as racist and working to the advantage of white supremacist tendencies.

In a brutal display of presidential powers that would have made Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un green with envy, Joe Biden rammed through a raft of pro-globalist executive orders just hours after being sworn in as president.

For those U.S. voters who were more obsessed with removing Donald Trump than seriously questioning who or what would replace him, they got their answer shortly after Biden made it through his locked-down inauguration where the soldiers outnumbered the guests by a margin one would not expect to find during a democratic pageant.

Following a subdued masked ball and strained photo ops, Biden was whisked from the Capitol straight to the Oval Office where he was tasked with signing off on executive orders – 17 in fact, followed up later by a baker’s dozen. The swiftness of the bureaucratic blitzkrieg, impressive for a 78-year-old president who campaigned mostly from his basement, was as shocking as what the 46th POTUS put in motion. In a matter of minutes, and without a precious drop of democratic debate, Biden diverted the future course of America forever.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Cronyism, Energy, Government, Labor, Politics

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Why Los Angeles Is In Trouble – Average Pay For 20,000 Highly Compensated City Employees Nears $150,000, by Adam Andrzejewski

Posted on December 31, 2020 | 1 comment

Any government that pays tree trimmers 200 grand deserves to go bankrupt, and the voters who voted for the clowns signing the checks deserve their misery. From Adam Andrzejewski at forbes.com:

The Los Angeles area comprises the Hollywood movie studios, Beverly Hills, Muscle Beach, and a previously booming economy that trailed only New York City and Tokyo.

The city is also home to powerful politicians such as U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of House Judiciary Committee; U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, Chief Deputy Whip; and Mayor Eric Garcetti, the National Co-Chairman of Biden for President.

However, LA itself is in trouble. Whenever we open the books, the city consistently ranks among the worst tax and spend offenders.

Last year, there were 20,000 highly compensated city employees whose average pay exceeded $147,000 and cost taxpayers $3 billion. All of them made more than $100,000 and nearly 2,000 out-earned California Governor Gavin Newsom ($202,000).

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found painters making $113,943; “tree surgeons” trimming $207,058; police officers with an arresting $325,942; legislative analysts earning $399,631; firefighters hosing down $486,674; and “harbor boat pilots” swimming in $515,000.

Mayor’s Office – Mayor Garcetti cost taxpayers $269,375 in salary – $67,000 more than Gov. Newsom. Seven “deputy mayors” earned $1.44 million with individual salaries each exceeding $200,000. Chief of staff, Ann Guerrero, made $232,205– compensation out earning the mayor of Chicago ($216,000).

Garcetti has an executive staff larger than 48 of the 50 state governors. The mayor employed 261 people last year for $20+ million in salary cost.

While permanent staff enjoy handsome salaries, Garcetti also relies on unpaid labor. Although intern positions are available in dozens of departments working on issues such as homelessness, sustainability, and immigration, those internships are not compensated.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Labor, Pensions, Politics

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2020: The Year We Lost Our Common Sense, Courage and Civil Liberties, by Robert Bridge

Posted on December 29, 2020 | 1 comment

This year has been marked by off-the-charts duplicity, cowardice, and idiocy. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no ‘return to normal’ in the foreseeable future and, possibly, never.

If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.

On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic “transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes…transmissible from person to person.”

The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later – from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain – that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Governments, Labor, Law, Morality, Politics, Propaganda

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Stopping the Spread, by Eric Peters

Posted on December 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

Wearing a mask you know is ineffective to either prevent you or prevent others from getting sick, and insisting everyone else does as well, that qualifies as a psychosis or mental illness, regardless of how many people do it. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

How do we cure Sickness Psychosis?

We don’t. But each of us can act individually- and that becomes a compounding and cumulative thing of eventually great power, in the manner of rain drops becoming rivulets becoming creeks and streams, then mighty torrents.

As an individual, I refuse to play Sickness Kabuki. I have never once worn a Face Diaper and have ignored all the “lockdown” decrees issued by the Gesundheitsfuhrer of my state.

This is all I can do.

By myself, it’s not much. One person out of a supermarket-full of the Faceless presents the spectacle of a curious heretic to the Faithful, who remain secure in their Faith – in the manner of everyone at a Hare Krishna gathering wearing the same saffron robes. The robe-wearers appear to be the “normal” ones, as far as they can see.

But if even a third of the rest of the people in my area or yours refuse to wear the Holy Vestment of the Sickness Cult then it would not appear normal. Those wearing the Holy Vestment would look like the small group of Krishnas you used to see at airports – i.e., obvious weirdos to be avoided. 

Which would discourage people from joining up.   

The “lockdowns” and Sickness Kabuki – including the locking up of elderly people – would end within a week. 

If even a third – perhaps it would only take a fourth – of small businesses had defied the Gesundheitsfuhrer orders that they shutter their businesses the only businesses that would now be out of business would be those that freely chose to close their doors – and that would be on them, economic suicide being as much their right as personal hari-kari.

But they would not have enabled the economic murder of the businesses that wanted to live.

Conformity is the killer. It is the thing which tyranny requires before it becomes inescapable.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Labor, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology

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“We Hadn’t Really Thought Through the Economic Impacts” ~ Melinda Gates

Posted on December 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

Why can’t they eat cake? Marie Antionette wondered. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.org:

In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters than do not affect one personally.

It’s a maddening statement, to be sure, as if “economics” is somehow a peripheral concern to the rest of human life and public health. The larger context of the interview reveals the statement to be even more confused. She is somehow under the impression that it is the pandemic and not the lockdowns that are the cause of the economic devastation that includes perhaps 30% of restaurants going under, among many other terrible effects.

She doesn’t say that outright but, like many articles in the mainstream press over this year, she very carefully crafts her words to avoid the crucial subject of lockdowns as the primary cause of economic disaster. It’s possible that she actually believes this virus is what tanked the world economy on its own but that is a completely unsustainable proposition.

Further, her comments provide a perfect illustration of the core problem all along: most of the people who have been advocating lockdowns in fact have no actual experience in managing pandemics. To many of these, Covid-19 became their new playground to try out an unprecedented experiment in social and economic management: shutting down travel, businesses, schools, churches, and issuing stay-at-home orders that smack of totalitarian impositions.

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The Past Lives On: The Elite Strategy To Divide and Conquer, by Edward Curtin

Posted on December 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

Every politician pays homage to the working class, then ignores it (at best) or pursues policies that destroy it. From Edward Curtin at off-guardian.org:

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts.  It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt,” wrote the marvelous New York journalist, Pete Hamill in “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” in New York magazine.

He added:

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians….Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar types.’ But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He wrote that on April 14, 1969. Yesterday. Little changes.

Transferred from NYC to the middle of the country half a century later, these people are referred to as Trump’s “deplorables.” They comes in baskets, as Hillary Clinton said.  And even though they represent nearly half the voting public in the last two presidential elections – 70+ million Americans – their complaints are dismissed as the rantings of ignorant, conservative racists.

Name calling substitutes for understanding. This is not an accident.

Like Hamill, I am a NYC born and bred Irish-American – my working-class Bronx to Pete’s Brooklyn. We both attended the same Jesuit high school in different years. Unlike Hamill, known for his gritty street reporting, because I have been a college sociology professor, I could falsely be categorized as a northeastern liberal intellectual oozing with disdain for those who voted for Trump.  This is false, because, like Hamill, I see it as my intellectual duty to understand what motivates these voters, just as I do with those who voted for Biden.

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Posted in Collapse, Government, Labor, Law, Politics, Propaganda

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Hacking at the Root, by Eric Peters

Posted on November 20, 2020 | 1 comment

Businesses need government permission to operate in the land of the unfree. Not surprisingly, business has become the government’s coronavirus totalitarianism enforcer. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

 

The chief enforcement mechanism being deployed to force Americans to join the Sickness Cult – to give the appearance of universal agreement with its tenets via the wearing of the Holy Rag over their faces – isn’t the government.

It is the “free” market.

In air quotes to emphasize that it is not free.

The market – businesses – have become adjuncts of the government by dint of having accepted that they must obtain permission from the government in order to be in business. This, in turn, gives government control over the business – which now extends to the demand that businesses enforce “mandates” that are not even laws such as the wearing of the Holy Rag within their establishments.

If they fail to enforce the “mandates” – irrespective of their dubious legality – they are threatened with extortionate fines and the rescinding of the government’s permission to be in business.

And so they enforce the “mandates.”

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