The Coronavirus

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-31-2020, 10:36 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: But every business regardless of size has to turn a profit in order to survive. With this in mind, a good question to ask would be how then were the big companies of the immediate postwar years able to all but guarantee their workers lifetime security?

Three things which I have recently mentioned.  One, the rest of the advanced world had most of their factories at one point in bombing range.  A good part of their manufacturing was in ruins.  

Second, they owed a lot of cash to the US in Lend Lease payments.  If the ports of their colonies were not opened, the US would not forgive these debts.  This rapidly ended colonial imperialism and colonies for the most part.  For a time the US manufacturing had a free run.

Third, this was the Progressive Era, which ran from the New Deal to the Great Society.  For the most part, the Democratic controlled congress was actively supporting the labor unions and forcing companies into benefits.  The corporations were forced to give an unusually large slice of the pie to the people.  Once Nixon’s time and the Unraveling came around, this policy reversed.  Union power was attacked by the government, many jobs became part time so the corporations would not have to give benefits, and many manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas where the labor was cheaper or eliminated entirely by automation.  Either way, the corporations and elites profited rather than the people.

That was the time when America was Great.  The first two cannot be redone.  They were an accident of history that cannot be easily duplicated.  Neither can we get a lot of the jobs back that were shipped overseas.  Some, but not all.  The major powers have rebuilt their factories, as have the former colonies built factories to take advantage of the cheaper labor.

But we could return some power to the labor unions, require some benefits, and send less possibly critical manufacturing overseas.  We could attack the division of wealth, the steering of much of the advantage of wealth towards the elites.  In this case much critical PPE and ventilators are manufactured in China, and we are at the moment behind a lot of people in getting them.  Until China satisfies their own need, shipment overseas will be minimized.  One need to convert other US manufacturing to producing PPE, tests and ventilators, which takes time.