Reich on Plight of U.S. Workers
* Re “Meet the Frayed-Collar Workers Getting the Boot,” Commentary, Sept. 4:
Labor Secretary Robert Reich made many valid points about the sad state of the labor movement today. We must be lean to compete in today’s global market, but we may also be destroying the very consumer base that American industry depends upon to buy the bulk of its products. Exploitation of workers may bring about a resurgence of labor unions, but I think it will only be a positive development if unions abandon their Luddite stance of preserving obsolete jobs at any cost.
Unions would do their members, and industry, a much bigger favor if they would concentrate on keeping their members’ skills up to date, even to the point of educating members to do completely new jobs as industry changes. Members would benefit by becoming more valuable, industry would benefit from a better educated work force, and unions would survive, something that is now in question.
GAY ANDERSON
Long Beach
* Reich misses the point in prescribing a cure for job loss and wage decline because he doesn’t seem to recognize the basic problems. It’s amazing after so many years of failed government “cures” that he still proposes more “laws and rules.”
He and your Column One article of the same day cite the trend toward people working “harder or at two jobs” without recognizing that it has been our own government spending and taxing that has raised our cost of living but not our standard of living. He writes about what companies are doing to stay alive, in an ever-more-competitive world economy, as though it is immoral.
What’s the answer? In today’s world of advanced technology we need much better education than we now provide our kids, and less, not more, restrictions by government and unions on people and companies that innovate and thus provide jobs. After all, new products and new jobs only come from company profits and investors who will use their money where it will bring the best return.
DICK ETTINGTON
Palos Verdes Peninsula
* Thank you for your critical article “Merger Frenzy Adds to Angst of Wage-Earners” (Sept. 4). The historic shift of profits from labor to owners of capital appears to be responsible for the stagnant wage growth and human pain from layoffs. Your sources attribute this maldistribution of profits to the “inevitable side effects of a globally integrated economy.”
In the words of the social movements of the rural-based right wing, “government” and “corporations” are putting the well-being of Mexico (NAFTA) and the hidden agenda of the “new world order” (global economy) ahead of the American people. Disenfranchised white families have circled their wagons and moved to their hilltops, and disaffected individuals, such as the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bombers, have struck violent blows against the “enemies.”
The connection between corporate mergers, the power of corporate paradigms over personal relationships and the increasing paranoia of the socially displaced in America may not be apparent to Michael Boskin or the Economic Policy Institute. They may regard “notions of disgruntled American workers smashing computers to stop mergers” as “laughable,” but it is clear that a dialectic pattern (non-Marxist) is emerging on the right, between the winners (owners of capital) and the losers (the displaced).
JEAN E. ROSENFELD
Tarzana
