Southern Autoworkers Call B.S. on Republican Anti-Union Agitprop
The guilds and subsequent unions, through the Renaissance and the later Enlightenment, largely created the movements for universal suffrage and public education that led to the formation of the first middle classes and ultimately to our modern systems of democracy.
Modern American corporations have never been more profitable than today, and their CEOs have never taken more out of our economy than in the past few decades, partly because of technology that improves productivity and partly because our pathetic percentage of unionization means CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives are free to pillage their companies while ignoring the very workers whose efforts made them rich.
According to Goldman Sachs, American corporations will spend over a trillion dollars this year on stock buybacks alone, all money that could instead have better compensated workers and thus strengthened our working class. Historically, as union density goes up, inequality goes down and vice-versa. In the years since Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981, the wealth of the morbidly rich has exploded while worker salaries have largely stagnated.