Why I love unions.

[Coito ergo sum]

Meaning that a family of four could be earning $55,000 a year at Walmart, about triple their poverty level.

Federal poverty level, by the way, for a family of 4 is $23,050. It has been about 13 years since it was around $17,000.

The $13,000 and change figure is probably also 13 years out of date, and I would bet dollars to doughnuts that it's an "average" that includes part time workers as well as full time workers, thereby dragging the average down.

[Coito ergo sum]

Used to be in a union when i worked and when i get a job again i'll once again be in a union. Seth dystopian idea of the world where the few can do what the fuck they like and the many might as well lube up and take it where the sun don't shine is something i'll fight until my last dying breath as did my forefathers who unionized and fought for these laws that he quotes.

United we bargain Divided we beg.

I have personal knowledge of a situation where a group of employees unionized and by doing so they got (a) the right to pay union dues out of their paychecks every pay period, and (b) the same pay and benefits that the employer was offering before the union came in. About 2 years later they decertified the union.

Employees considering unions need to evaluate what the union is going to do for them versus the union dues they'll be required to pay. It's not always a good deal.

[Seth]

Of course they get better productivity and, as a result, better profits. If history has shown us anything, however, it is that greed is stupid. Corporations are greedy. They seek to slash overhead wherever possible.

What's "greedy" about that? Cutting overhead to increase profits is the entire purpose of the corporation, which is to make a profit for its owners. The flaw in your argument is that you seem to assume that corporations and businesses (the "bourgeois merchant class") exist for the purpose of guaranteeing the "working class" useful and economically-satisfactory employment.

Clue: They don't. The benefits to the employee are a necessary and largely unavoidable expense to the company. If the company can find a way to slash overhead while maintaining productivity and quality, and therefore market share, it is in the natural best interests of the company to do so. If someone invents a robot that can assemble the product at a fraction of the cost of human labor to do the same job, the corporation is violating its fiduciary duty to the people who own and have invested in the company with the expectation of a profitable return on their investment.

It's not the corporation's duty to create sinecures for workers, it is the duty of the workers to improve their skill set and price their labor in the free market for labor so that they offer good value to the corporation. If they fail or refuse to do so, as in the case of Hostess, then the corporation is fully justified in either firing them or closing down the business because it's unprofitable for those who own and have invested in it to continue.

In Capitalism, which is the only economic system that actually works, it is the profit motive and the ability to cut overhead when competition demands it that makes the system work...including the capitalist labor market where laborers market their skills in return for a paycheck.