These union workers don't know how good they already have it . I'm paying about 8x that amount for much worse coverage, and I have NO retirement, etc.
Well maybe we should have socialized medicine like every other industrialized country rather than a broken for-profit system where "administrative" costs (insurance company paper shufflers collecting co-pays and denying doctor-requested treatment) accounts for 35% of health care costs vs. administrative costs of 1% in Canada. Americans spend FAR more on health care, both in
absolute terms and as a percentage of
GDP than any other country on the planet and still have more than 70 million people with crummy or no health
insurance. 18% of workers have no health insurance at all and no way to afford their own health care. Oh, and our vital statistics are pretty lame, about
18th out of 30 OECD countries for life expectancy and way down the list for infant mortality. One international metric I read placed our health care system at No. 35 (Cuba was No. 37, but has much better health care for poor people than we do).
Actually, every time they've been polled the American people have said that they wanted national health insurance (though a whopping 1% of Canadians would prefer the American system), but it will never happen because the farce of an electoral system is about the most undemocratic among developed countries (single member constituency elections, no IRV, disproportionate electoral power for small, reactionary states, mass media monopolized by a few large conglomerates, campaign funding overwhelmingly from the rich and special interests, etc). At least in most of Europe you have some form of proportional representation so you have a little more of a choice than between demublicans and republicrats.
Americans themselves have the class consciousness of a bag of hammers. They won't stick together, and as a result real wages have been declining for the vast majority of the American workers for a
generation,
8% since 1973, despite 2% annual productivity gains. In the meantime the share of national income that goes to the hard-working coupon-clipping classes has skyrocketed. The top 0.01% has seen its cut go from .5% to more than 2.5% from
1973 to 1998. It doesn't have to be that way; income differences between the bottom 10% and the top 10% are about 16.6 to 1 in the U.S. and only about
4.5 to 1 in Japan. As a result of these trends, in 1976 10% of the population owned 49% of the wealth; by 1999 they had racked up 73% of the goodies, while the bottom 40% have more debts than
assets. I'm sure it's because the working class are feckless evildoers who deserve to live in grinding poverty, while exemplary folks like the five Walton heirs worth $19 billion each are paragons of virtue, contributing untold amounts to human happiness (and politicians' coffers).
But 19% of Americans think they're in the top 1% income bracket, and another 20% believe they will be at some point, while the reality is that there is actually less mobility for low wage workers here than in the UK, Germany, Italy, etc.
A quarter of the U.S. work force earns $8.70 or less (Wal-Mart wages), poverty level for a family of four. These jobs rarely provide health care, child care, pensions or vacation benefits. Yet most of the jobs being created in this economy are in retail & service, the lowest paid categories (which have increased from 30% to 48% of the labor force from 1965 to 1998).
It's easy to be smug about how you worked hard & got a better job. But most Americans work too bloody hard already, an average of over 1,978 hours a year, substantially more than workers in any other industrialized country, including the Japanese, and about 62 extra days a year compared to Germans. American workers even log about a week more labor than they did in 1990, reversing historical trends going back to the Victorian Era. Most Europeans start with three weeks of vacation, rising to six weeks after a few years. Even our hourly wages are substantially lower than in many (if not most) developed countries. Of course, European workers have some inkling of the concept of solidarity, so naturally they get a better shake.
Besides, if all the baggers went to school and became techies, etc., it would just drive wages in those areas down. As it is, high tech companies have prevailed on the government to allow more work visas in those fields in order to drive down compensation costs even though there are plenty of Americans who could fill those jobs. If you scab on your fellow workers don't expect me to cry for you when your programming job is exported to Bangalore because your corporate master found an Indian to do your job for $15 a day. Maybe you can get a job as a union-busting temporary bagger and see how you like it.
Veteran grocery clerks top out at $17.90 an hour & I understand it is becoming rare for managers to schedule workers to come in for more than 30 hours. That would be about $2150 a month or so. Then the government takes its cut, including pay roll taxes that are currently being squandered cutting taxes for the rich and invading Iraq for Exon & Haliburton, instead of being put in the "trust fund." Try and find a rat trap 1 bedroom in El Lay for much less than a grand a
month. Then pay auto insurance, utilities, transportation, food, clothing, etc. Add a medical insurance payment and imagine how much you have left, especially if you are at the bottom of the pay scale.
Personally, I prefer to shop at union grocery stores because I get better service. Since the stores pay better wages, they attract competant, fast, friendly clerks. We had a K-Mart Superstore around here where they paid workers a couple of bits more than minimum wage. Even if there was only one person in front of me, it took much longer than a far lengthier line at a union store. I tried to shop at Super-K at 2 AM, figuring I wouldn't have to wait in line. I filled my cart & realized that the prices were just as high as at the union stores. When I got to the check out counter I found a long line of people waiting for the privilege of scanning & bagging their own groceries (then waiting in line to pay a single harried minimum wage clerk). I sent my cart sailing back in to the aisles and never shopped there again (and the K-Mart went belly up last year, in part because of an unanticipated level of "inventory loss" from their own starveling employees).
Oh, and by the way, Albertson's is doing just
fine financially, despite Wal-Mart (which has less than 1% of the food market in California). In the last five years Albertson's has actually increased its sales 123%, while increasing its profit from each dollar of sales by 4%. Meanwhile, the top 15 executives of Kroger, Albertson's & Safeway pulled in an average of $2.6 million a head.
I don't see why any smart shopper would shop much at WalMart or Cost-Co anyway. Their normal prices might be a little lower, but they don't really have sales, per se, so you can't stock up on the loss leader. I practically never buy anything that isn't on sale, and hence cheaper than I could buy it at Wal-Mart.
also i heard on the radio. go to ralphs. get the flyer inside. 12 pack soda is 1.49, and gallon of milk is 2.19
What a gip! Judas at least got 30 pieces of silver, not just a mediocre price on some grocieries.
We should all hang together or we'll all hang seperately.
![register@proletariat.com[/i][img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif](http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=mailto:register@proletariat.com[/i][img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif){kind=link}