Union Decline and Trump’s Rise
One thing about the apocalypse: those who specialize in a particular part of it suddenly become high demand. I spoke to The Atlantic:
In Michigan, home to the influential United Auto Workers, Republican Governor Rick Snyder passed one such law in 2012 amid mass protests. In the first year after the law went into effect, union membership in the state fell by 11 percent (though it has inched up a bit since then). In 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker pushed the same type of law through with similar results. “Republicans knew this would decimate unions, and now we can see the impact,” says Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.
Back in the 1980s, unions represented 22 percent of private-sector workers, he says. Now they represent only about 8 percent. Loomis points to two major historical shifts that inflicted major damage to the labor movement: the drying up of manufacturing jobs in the late 1970s as factories moved overseas, and more recently, Republican-led movements to pass laws restricting unionization. This year, West Virginia became the 26th state to pass right-to-work laws, which went into effect this summer.
But it’s not just right-to-work laws that have weakened the labor movement. Unions had tried to stop the impacts of globalization and automatization, Loomis says, but “they were overwhelmed by a bipartisan belief in globalized trade and nobody has taken long-term unemployment and community decline seriously.” Neither Ohio nor Pennsylvania has passed right-to-work legislation, but their industries—and the chance that they would vote Democratic—have fallen nevertheless.
The election results in Nevada reflect a stark contrast. Hillary Clinton won the state with the help of the labor movement, and in particular, with the help of Culinary Union, which put on an aggressive campaign to mobilize its 57,000 members to vote for Democrats. Clinton won by a large margin in Nevada and so did the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Catherine Cortez Masto. “The key difference is that they were able to organize working-class people to get their votes,” says Loomis. There is also another key difference: The Culinary Union is mostly made up of Latino workers in the hotel and service industry, a different demographic from the predominantly white factory workers in the Rust Belt who made up the base of the labor movement there and have since seen their jobs disappear.
The real dichotomy in this election is how different right to work states have different labor movements. The role the Culinary Union plays in Nevada is a real model for other right to work states. Not easy to emulate but important. I hope to have more on this soon. It would help if I wasn’t getting migraine headaches as a result of post-election anxiety and fear and thus losing days of work.
Sorry to hear about the migraines. That’s rubbish.
Funny you should mention it . . . I started out this morning with a migraine, too. Lost a couple of hours . . .
It’s very difficult to even care anymore about these shortsighted beer-swilling morons in the rust belt who think a high-school diploma entitles them to a $23/hour job stamping sheet metal in the GM factory, but will vote against their own union because of the $40/month taken out of their paycheck, and because they can be distracted with race-baiting.
They got fat and lazy and forgot that it took generations of their parents shedding their own blood in order to to elevate themselves and their children to a middle class existence.
They got what they deserved.
Well, that’s a helpful response.
What actually can be done for you if you’re a 54-year old with a high school diploma in Youngstown who worked at the factory until it shut down? What possible action can the government take to bring back your $24/hour job with full benefits at the injection molding plant?
Empathy and compassion are important, but the truth is that these communities are economic dead weight. None of them want to hear it, but it’s true.
The only real compassionate answer is that the rest of us promise to carry that dead weight as long as we need to in order to see them through and keep them on their feet – but what happens when they won’t accept that answer? How do you fight back against someone who promises to bring the factory back?
Work to keep jobs in the United States? Create economic planning programs that center investment in needed areas? Guarantee full pay and benefits for several years? Revive the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment bill as it was originally intended?
But even in the good times we never had anything like this. Yes, the 1950s-60s postwar boom was great for white men, but, as always, built on the backs of a ton of low wage, unseen labor. We also, theoretically, have a full labor force now, which we did not in 1978 or 1946.
Plus, there’s the “wages of whiteness” problem, where the definition of economic security is most often defined as “the white man having a little more than the brown man.” I’ve seen nothing to make the thing the WWC is ready for racial (and gender, and ethnic) wage parity.
I’m not denying any of this. I am saying that we have to aim for better in our response.
Have you considered the strategy of nominating a highly charismatic, media-savvy candidate for president, and then pandering with completely unsupportable, vague, emotionally satisfying promises to bring all the factories back and restore the good times now and forever?
I’m just saying, it’s time we realize that the outcomes of elections are far too important, for hundreds of other reasons, to get cute with being bound by the economic realities of logic and sensible policy, which the voters who actually elect the president have demonstrated over and over again that they don’t actually care about.
To be completely honest, this is not so different from Obama’s campaign in 2008. Obama didn’t say he was going to bring all the factory jobs back, but otherwise, flowery language about hope and change is pretty much how he won (plus a garbage economy and 8 years of Bush).
Doesn’t this undermine your point, then? The point is you don’t need to aim for better. Not really. You just need to blow smoke up people’s asses.
The constant throughline of all of these posts of yours is a total absence of substantive answers. And I don’t necessarily blame you – substantive answers for this are very hard, but almost more importantly, don’t matter. The smoke goes farther than any possible fire – didn’t we just prove that?
And I’m saying that the only response that will satisfy the WWC under discussion is if they are better off than the BWC. How the hell do we agree to that? There may be times in American history when the WWC felt economically secure enough that they were not concerned with the gains made by non-whites, but they have been few and far between.
Now, maybe there is someone out there representing the WWC who is articulating a sophisticated theory of white economic distress that does not involved bring cultural issues into it. It’s certainly not Donald Trump, the man they voted to lead their movement.
We don’t. We fight for good jobs for all Americans.
You’re saying that, but maybe it isn’t true.
What do you base that opinion on? Do you realize that even if it is only true for 19 out of 20 Trump supporters, reach the remaining 1 out of 20 would be enough?
We don’t. We fight for good jobs for all Americans.
The WWC does not WANT “good jobs for all Americans.” They want good jobs for WHITE Americans, and ONLY white Americans.
Arguably not only was it built on the back of tons of low-wage, unseen labor, but also on the back of a completely bombed-out European industrial base and millions of crippled and dead European men that weren’t in the labor force.
Even that is going to take a substantially greater amount of resources than we’ve been willing to allocate so far, if we’re serious about this.
Which will be fought tooth and nail by the .01%, and most of the WWC as well.
Don’t forget a good chunk of the “enlightened” folk when they see that this will take real money that they will be asked to pony up.
Yeah. I’m sure. Lots of finger pointing at people who don”t deserve the way “my people” do…
It’s a really sticky wicket, and I wish I had an easy answer for dealing with it.
“What possible action can the government take to bring back your $24/hour job with full benefits”
Actually, this is an easy one. A solid stimulus program of reconstruction of infrastructure – roads, bridges, tunnels, rail, sewers, parks – plus new construction of solar and wind installations, etc – all funded by tax incentives and direct grants – deficit spending! And you do enough of this to raise inflation to 3 or 4 percent, which causes the dollar to fall and makes exports cheaper and imports more expensive. American manufacturing is competitive now – if we had no trade deficit caused by an overheated dollar, it would be the wonder of the world.
But we can’t do this because the fed won’t allow inflation of more than 2% and Congress won’t enact deficit spending. We have to keep Pete Peterson happy, no matter how many blue collar workers lose their jobs.
Which is no excuse for anyone to vote for Trump. You don’t get to be a racist fascist because you’re unemployed.
“think a high-school diploma entitles them”
I don’t even think that should be strictly necessary to earn a living wage. Does that help?
I’m a local union officer in Wisconsin. I haven’t seen any figures for the decline in private sector union membership in Wisconsin post-2015, but we’ve lost exactly 1 member due to right-to-work (and he worked mostly as an employer anyway.) We’re a small local, but that would be substantially less than a 1% drop in membership for us.
The figures for public sector unions in Wisconsin are far worse, but then Walker and the Republicans not only made them right-to-work but essentially destroyed their ability to negotiate for their members as well.
The real problem has been that Democrats at the national level have been taking unions for granted for decades. If Democrats did for unions what Republicans had done for rich people, we’ve have the most pro-union labor laws on the planet. Canada, despite suffering many of the same macroeconomic blows as has the US to its unionized sectors, has maintained virtually the same level of union density over the few decades while ours has fallen like a manhole cover, due (I believe) entirely to a less hostile legal climate.
Instead, unions got no help at all from Congress since… oh, say, the Wagner Act. No pushback on Taft-Hartley, no help with organizing – bupkus. Basically unions get decent NLRB appointments from Democratic presidents and the occasionally slightly helpful executive order.
Democrats brought this on themselves.
A big problem here is that in huge swaths of the country, union density has always been very, very low. Over 50% of CIO members in the early 50s were in five states (NY, PA, OH, IL, MI), with most of the rest in a few more states (like Wisconsin and Rhode Island). So even Democratic politicians in the South, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountains never had any reason to care much about unions. This was part of the reason the CIO went so hard after Operation Dixie in the late 40s. They knew they had to expand their geographical operation in order to thrive. They failed and ultimately the union movement really suffered.
I understand your point, and no doubt that was part of the problem. But I’d bet Canada had a similar distribution of unionized jobs without leading to the same catastrophically bad labor laws. And the density of rich people is pretty low in parts of Wisconsin, but that doesn’t stop Republican elected officials from those parts from making the welfare of rich people Job One.
It’s too late (or maybe just not important any more) to figure out why the US and Canada diverged so radically on unions. But there’s no question that, had we had the kinds of strong unions in the last two decades that we had post-WWII, Democrats would have looked at issues like financial reform and trade much differently.
Of course, it would have helped had Republicans not been such dicks about unions. Like the civil rights movement, they were left with nowhere to go but Democrats, regardless of how little they got out of the deal. But asking Republicans to respect working people and minorities is like asking Trump to be Obama.
Canada doesn’t have analogues to the ridiculously undemocratic US Senate and electoral college.
Exactly this. Too many veto points. Which works both ways I suppose, or at least used to. The last time we had any chance to make things right for Unions, Roosevelt had to try to pack the court, and failed, IIRC.
And FDR elected only because of depression far worse than 2006-2009
Cultural difference, maybe?
This might seem kind of silly, but my dad grew up in Canada, and I remember asking him about what was different about Canada from the US (it was for a middle school “ask an immigrant” project). One of the things he told me was that there was more of a collective “we’re in this together” spirit in Canada compared to the US.
I don’t know how true that is, but they have kept stronger unions and labor rules, and they don’t have a two-tiered health care system.
No, the American people brought this on themselves.
I am sick of people basically claiming that if only the Dems. had pandered correctly, a bunch of people would not have chosen to commit Sepukku. At the end of the day people are responsible for their own choices. Anyone who voted for Trump thinking he was going to bring the good times back even when all the evidence of how wrong that thinking is exists out there has to be made responsible for their choice.
Well, lived my life and never stopped to worry ’bout a thing
Opened up and shouted out and never tried to sing
Wondering if I’d done wrong
Will this depression last for long?
Won’t you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
Well, once we had an easy ride and always felt the same
Time was on our side and I had everything to gain
Let it be like yesterday
Please let me have happy days
Won’t you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
Ma and Pa look back at all the things they used to do
Didn’t have no money and they always told the truth
Daddy didn’t have no toys
And mummy didn’t need no boys
Won’t you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
Well, yesterday was such an easy game for you to play
But let’s face it things are so much easier today
Guess you need some bringing down
And get your feet back on the ground
Won’t you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
Where have all the good times gone?
Then the teathugs pretended that RTF proved that employees never wanted to be union members.
They could say the same after banning gun shops.
“Look, nobody is buying ammunition from gun shops. We were right that nobody wanted gun shops.”
“Look, more people are drowning after our lifejacket ban. We were right that nobody ever wanted lifejackets.”
I think a beginning would be to demonstrate that decline in rust belt communities is in fact linked to lowered trade barriers rather than lower transportation costs and a growing developing world.
In other words was this avoidable by stopping NAFTA or was it happening anyway?
If neoliberalism isn’t the enemy then we have to figure out how to make it work rather than how to stop it.
Money, for starters. But a lot of people don’t want to pay it.
It’s a combination of factors. But millions of jobs were sent out of the Rust Belt to Mexico, Central America, and Asia between the 1960s and the 2000s. And it’s still happening today with the Carrier plant. So it’s not the only issue. But it’s a huge issue.
Is it an avoidable issue? To what extent it it a net positive or net negative for the working class.
I mean these are tedious questions but we are liberals. Evidenced based policy is kinda our thing.
I think if you bring the empirical heat (some) policy shops will bend. But if it’s guesswork they are sticking with Samuelson.
It’s almost entirely a net negative for the working class. I suppose there are some cheaper goods but there aren’t the wages to enjoy any kind of good life. And the level of drug use and community decline in these places is absolutely brutal. Again, I spend a couple months a year in western Pennsylvania. And it’s incredibly depressing. The good jobs are just gone. And there’s nothing left.
I’m from Birmingham, AL. I know US steel is dead in many places.
My question is who killed it.
Well, steel is a more complex story than most industries. Steel was mostly killed by cheap imports from US allies in Asia, not capital mobility. Of course, had US Steel and Republic and the other companies actually invested in new factories, they might have competed. But they didn’t. US policymakers however had a huge part to play here, as even going back to FDR, there was a desire to move a lot of this heavy industry out of the US to allied nations. Especially after the 1959 steel strike, this became a major policy goal and Japan and Korea and then China stepped in.
So time to step in with public policy and build something.
Well that would be nice. But saying that evidently means that I only care about white workers and am apologizing for racists.
I think there’s so much focus on the particular sliver of white Obama-to-Trump voters in the Rust Belt (as opposed to any of the other groups of voters in swing states that might have turned the tide) that people are conflating the sappy bullshit “heal the divide” appeals we’re hearing so much of with the economic policy argument you’re making.
I think I agree with you that it’s not about cooking up some pet policy proposals designed to narrowly appeal to working class whites, but making sustainable and equitable full employment a major unapologetic cornerstone of economic policy. It would be the right thing to do regardless of the outcome of this election.
Yes.
Look, racists have a right to a decent life, too. Any decent government would serve the needs of all people regardless of their failings, instead of demagoguing them to exploit their weaknesses. Just stop claiming they’re not racists.
Ironically, they blame their fate in part on competition from people who have taken the initiative to move to new and potentially unwelcoming places in search of greater economic opportunity.
If only there were some solution.
Let’s blame the poor for their own problems! Move you lazy slackers!
The Republican Party ideology is strong in some of you.
I think you would find, if you were to study the history of American organized labor, that immigrant workers have typically been more closely associated with Democratic Party ideology.
Maybe I should study the history of American organized labor someday
There’s a really good series of posts highlighting what happened in labor hostory on a whole bunch of specific days of the year. You could maybe start by doing a Google search for that.
But, more to your point, you should at least entertain the possibility that even optimal public policy toward full, secure, and meaningful employment may involve some degree of geographic rebalancing.
Otherwise, you’re taxing areas in economic surplus to preserve legacy worker populations in what effectively become industrial zoos. Nobody wins.
Federal relocation and retraining grants may make better public policy than trying to bring back the good old days for the sake of bringing back the good old days.
This all neglects the core problem of demographics, especially in light of the baby boom and the huge amount of people right now from the ages of 50-65.
You can’t retrain a 55-year old assembly line worker to program a CNC machine, or make him move out of the only community he’s ever known.
He’ll stick his shitty town until he kicks the bucket, possibly from shooting horse.
Thing is, for it to be worthwhile, it would have to be pretty comprehensive: moving and housing assistance, training for jobs that actually exist in the areas to which people are being moved, assistance while people are looking for jobs, health care assistance, etc.
Plus there’s a political challenge, such as possible resistance from communities that would receive these migrants, but also from places that are effectively being asked to pay for their own depopulation.
You’re suggesting the unemployed should move to Bangladesh to grab one of those sweet 65-cents-a-day jobs?
Even including annually distributed expense of some residential building supplies (fixtures, cabinets, plumbing…), I suspect the % of price savings due to slave-made imports sums to less than 20% of income. Losing half your income due to job scarcity is worse, imo.
(There are too many interactive factors, though)
Erik Loomis says:
The “high tech” and finance occupations aren’t tied to location, thus those jobs choose otherwise more desirable locations.
I’m sure that Apple, Intel, Google would love to pay lower real estate costs, but few in their “pool” of potential employees look for jobs in Brownbackistan.
“Rust Belt to Mexico, Central America, and Asia between the 1960s and the 2000s.”
And in doing so lifting hundreds of millions of human beings out of poverty – meaning that this transfer was a massive net boon to the human species and its overall prosperity.
And now people in those countries have earned enough to maybe import stuff from the US. The problem is NOT Free Trade. The problem is that there are no system means to redistribute the net gains from a societies’ increased income. And that failure to share the general wealth is driven more by internal societal fissures. Its easy to note how the generally monochromatic societies of Europe were willing to establish generous welfare states, ones that are now in danger mainly because these societies aren’t so monochromatic as they used to be.
It wasn’t as easy as is often portrayed. It took decades of social struggle, a couple of huge wars, etc.
The nascent Welfare states predated the big wars – actual socialists could gain power in Europe prior to WW1 – something never achieved in the US at all.
That’s one reason I also included the “decades of social struggle” part. There are other significant sources of social cleavage and tension besides race.
Yes. I think one response that could work for the Democrats is a full-throated commitment to fiscal policy that provides income support and direct job creation with full employment and sustainable growth as a primary, major policy objective. Inflation and debt management should be secondary concerns, all hands on deck for full employment.
And also–the working class doesn’t generally want welfare benefits–they want jobs. It seems to be impossible for any form of social benefit to replace the general social benefits of manufacturing and mining jobs.
Look at France; look at the UK; look at Belgium. The much more generous benefits haven’t made everyone OK with the decline of manufacturing jobs. There’s a reason that UKIP and FN and Vlaams Blok are popular in the old manufacturing towns.
And none of those parties are pushing for the end of the Welfare states – they just get to be more openly racists about denying those benefits to others.
The obvious answer here is that rather than giving them welfare, that same entity could hire them to do work. But those are “government jobs” and therefore anathama to the same voting base that needs them.
It’s a bit of a quandry…
They don’t seem to mind being police officers.
I wonder why.If I look at the map of Belgium, the old mining and manufacturing towns – Liège, Mons, Charleroi – are in French-speaking Wallonia. Flanders had little industry before 1945, and got the high-tech stuff like chemicals after it. Funny that that’s the part that has the near-fascist movement.
I know France rather better than Belgium, but it was my impression that Flanders had a huge manufacturing boom in the 1945-1970 time period and had lost a lot of its manufacturing employment since.
Yes, the people of Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras are rolling in the wealth because of free trade….. Free trade has brought such wonderful stability to these places. Just ask all the dead girls in Ciudad Juarez or the families in Oaxaca or Guerrero who don’t see each other for years because they couldn’t make ends meet on the farm anymore thanks to American corn imports flooding the market and so all the kids had to cross the US border as undocumented immigrants.
And either way, even if you can make the argument that trade is a moral good for the world, it still contributed to the decline of unions and Trump’s rise in the nation you have to live in. If all of this also leads to John Bolton blowing up Iran, then, yes, the moral good of this system is I guess indeed unimpeachable!
The rot in those places you mentioned predates free trade, and if any sort of trade is to blame for the violence, its the drug trade. And even with that, incomes have risen, and remittances from those unwanted immigrants also lift people up.
In my view, you are blaming the wrong things, in pinning for a world that won’t be anymore and that only ever existed for very particular reasons that have gone away. In diagnosing the wrong evil, you are then asking for actions that won’t really solve the problem.
And as I said elsewhere, people are responsible for their own actions. Anyone who voted for Trump bears the full and sole responsibility for that choice. They are about to let someone like John Bolton be Secretary of State, and they bear the blame, not the people who urgently asked them not to do it. That they chose from despair doesn’t change that. That they have repeatedly spurned those who want to help them out of misplaced pride or a desire to stop time is also all on them.
Republicanism 101!
Really? Please.. This is pathetic.
If you chose to vote for someone who is completely unqualified for a position on the basis that you want a bomb thrower, you are guilty of whatever damage the explosion causes. Its called negligence.
Wasn’t this the site constantly pushing the notion that voting as a consumer choice is stupid and obnoxious and people needed to own their vote, and throwing invective at the Bernie folks for being soft on Hillary and therefore possibly bringing us a Trump presidency? Well, I was right here with you guys in doing that. but now all of a sudden this Trump voting cohort, who did exactly that -voted their rage and not with their minds is supposed to get a free pass and we have to care about their feelings? Fuck that.
SIS1 says:
“Save themselves from themselves (if possible)!”
(Un?)fortunately, to save ourselves from “themselves”, we can’t avoid saving “themselves”.
not if we have to run over their “feefees” to save them (and everyone else).
their feefees.
SIS1 says:
The problem is that the trade is slave trade, not free trade.
Allow – in all trading nations – employees equal legal rights as the predatory class, and much of these social problems wane.
Income inequality. The gains from sending those jobs abroad went into the financial sector via portfolios of the 1% instead of the real economy to create offsetting job growth that would have provided opportunity for those workers displaced.
The local factory in my town moved all of its manufacturing to Mexico. It still houses its HQ in the factory building but that’s it.
A couple towns over lost all the manufacturing when Motorola decided to decamp from the US. Up the road in Paul Ryan land, Janesville lost their GM plant. These sorts of stories are common all throughout the Midwest.
I recall reading that for a short period of Google ownership, one Moto phone was US made.
You completely neglect the role of automation and efficiency gains.
My understanding was that between 1945 and 1973, a huge amount of unionized factories were essentially coasting off of legacy investments, often government subsidized, in WWII-era heavy equipment, and both the labor and management simply didn’t invest in modernization. Management was happy to pocket the profits, and labor was happy to keep the labor-intensive machinery, and the U.S. consumer was a captive market.
Of course it couldn’t last forever – the reason the US auto industry couldn’t compete in the 70s with foreign imports was exactly because nobody really wanted to make capital improvements until it was too late.
So why would anybody who wanted to build a factory today willingly invest in equipment that is less efficient?
The roots of the decline of unions as a political force for Democrats are based on racism, too.
The original “Reagan Democrats” were many public safety (police and fire) and construction trades unions, which were dragged kicking and screaming to integrate and admit women in the 70s.
They couched it in different ways, but that’s what it was really all about.
As union jobs diminished almost to oblivion for many external; reasons, and industrial towns (especially one-industry towns) from Allentown to Dearborn were laid waste, the reaction, in retrospect, was inevitable.
Well, it’s also that the CIO unions that moved the labor movement away from those old trade union positions were decimated during these years, allowing the trades to retake power within the movement. So even a big part of this is structural transformations within American work and American labor unions.
This is a very real issue. I am in a trade union, the UA Plumbers and Pipefitters, and there is very little leftism in my local at all. Our union could not give a rat’s ass about workers in general, and frankly sometimes seem more concerned with union bottom line than even our own workers.
It’s an improvement on non-union conditions, but it is a very long way from a socialist workers movement…
brainwashing due to degradation of 1a…
compare to you know who…
Let’s not forget the abandonment of class language because of the need to fight the Cold War. One of the many seeds of the decline of the labor movement was the embrace of nationalism. Which is also echoed in the call for the end to free trade and for tariffs. It seems as if we’re rejecting the “White” part of White Nationalism and thinking we can win people over with just Nationalism. Maybe. Is it worth it?
Related and depressing thought I had today watching some people get super excited about Trump’s proposed infrastructure plan on Facebook: These are basically the exact people you’re talking about here. One of them even spent over 10 years in a UAW plant before they lost their job to downsizing. But one thing they all definitely have in common? Infrastructure construction isn’t going to directly benefit them AT ALL. None of them are remotely qualified for the work, and neither are the WWC people we’ve been talking about when we talk about how trade and automation are impacting jobs. Working an assembly line might give you comparable pay if you’re unionized, but it sure as shit doesn’t qualify you to get hired as a plumber building civic water supplies, a crane operator building new highway overpasses, a welder fixing big bridges, etc. And jobs as laborers, apprencices, and non-union journeymen sure as shit don’t pay anywhere near the wages these people were making in unionized factories.
And hey, big surprise, they don’t get anywhere near this excited for the same proposals when Democrats make them.
You don’t want an unholy alliance of Trump and GOP writing and administering an infrastructure bill. Remember Denny Hastert’s Prarie Parkway? Don’t fall into this trap.
We can build our own infrastructure here on the west coast. We can build project that we really need in the 21st century, a far better value for our limited resources. Look out for the no bid contracts to do nothing but tear things up, then the guys above lean on their shovels (so to speak) building over-priced highways to nowhere. I somewhat sympathize with the plight of the workers who can stand to benefit, but they only have opposed with their black hearts, their withered souls, and there useless minds anything we have tried to do to help them through stimulus legislation that wasn’t a giveaway to the Kleptocrats. They can go fuck themselves. Our future is more important than their past.
Prepare to pay a high price for things of little or no value.
Brien Jackson says:
Partly because teathug brainwashers scream, TAXES11!!”
IOW, IOKIYAR
I should mention that in my home state (Virginia) we defeated an attempt by wing nuts in the General Assembly to turn our right-to-work law into an article of the state constitution. So…some progress?
Definitely yes.
If basic constitutional principles are amended into constitutions, the amendments must ensure equal rights.
So a RTF law or amendment must pertain to all memberships that enhance income pursuits.,
Some corporate shareholders may prefer not paying the group expenses of negotiating and legal benefits of corporate membership. By RTF principles, these corporate members have the same RTF right (as employees) to receive same income obtained by shareholders who choose to pay those expenses.
OT, but have you looked into Botox for your migraines? I was skeptical at first, but have followed a migraine specialist who does it and patients love it, especially those for whom triptans failed. You basically get a vanishingly small injection in the muscles nearest where your head hurts most – a good practitioner can put it in an area where you won’t get “Dead Face” like some reality star, and the relief lasts weeks to months.
It takes months to years of treatment to have any effect, and is better for chronic rather than acute migraine. Not a good first choice. And for acute occassional migraine, an abortive strategy is probably preferable to preventative. Why not recommend Imitrex injections, or Zomig in inhalant form?
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