Showing posts with label variable capital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label variable capital. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Unions=Competitiveness


Yep I know it appears counterintuitive but it' s true. Labour and Capital go together like a horse and carriage. Labour produces capital and so a merger like this is the very anti-thesis of the term One Big Union.

In order to be competitive Mr. Anti-Union has made a satanic pact with Mr. Union.

In this case its the grandest merger of them all, between Frank Stronach's Magna and Buzz Hargrove's CAW.

In the global economy corporations and unions are swept up by merger and acquisitions mania. However usually it was corporate mergers or union mergers, now we have a union-corporate merger in order to compete in the global market.

After all that is why they are called 'business' unions. They sell workers labour to the boss.

Auto parts entrepreneur Frank Stronach and Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove have signed a deal allowing the union to organize at Magna International, citing the need to work together in non-traditional ways.

Hargrove said that the two sides have been working for years on developing non -adversarial relationship to help deal with challenges from offshore manufacturers.

Stronach, who founded the company and grew it into Canada's largest auto parts manufacturer, says society needs "checks and balances" and unions help balance the profit motives of companies.


Buzz has now really joined the Liberal family. Literally. After all they both hate Harper.

Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove says he's at least partly to blame for it taking so long to unionize the workers at Magna International . "It's probably more my fault than it is Frank Stronach's," Hargrove said today at a signing ceremony with Stronach, Magna's founder, at the auto parts manufacturer's headquarters in Aurora, Ont.

Frank Stronach, the founder and chairman of the auto parts maker Magna International, urged his 18,000 hourly employees in Canada on Monday to join the Canadian Auto Workers.

Mr. Stronach’s endorsement followed two years of talks that concluded Monday with a formal agreement on how the union would organize the company’s employees. Under its terms, the C.A.W., Canada’s most prominent union, agreed that Magna’s workers would not strike and the company, in turn, waived its right to lock out employees.

The unusual agreement developed from an unsolicited approach Mr. Stronach made to the union’s president, Basil E. Hargrove, in October 2005.

At the expense of the workers he represents.

Magna's union deal: no strikes



Gee that's what Sam Gompers father of business unionism said too;

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit
The more thoroughly the workers are organized and federated the better they are prepared to enter into a contest, and the more surely will conflicts be averted. Paradoxical as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that militant trade unionism is essential to industrial peace.

What we have endeavored to secure in industrial relations is industrial peace.
Hey Buzz whatever happened to; "workers control of the means of production?"

Guess Sam Gindin will have to quit ghost writing his socialist articles in the Monthly Review.

Magna, union in `template' pact
CAW secures representation at auto-parts giant in return for suspending workers' right to strike

Magna International Inc. and the Canadian Auto Workers have reached an unprecedented deal that will make union organizing easier at the company's plants here but eliminate the right to strike for several years.

Under the deal, the Aurora-based auto-parts powerhouse will allow workers to decide on union representation at each plant by voting on tentative contracts, instead of experiencing the divisiveness of organizing drives and lingering acrimony.

The deal follows an initiative by Magna chair Frank Stronach more than 1 1/2 years ago to develop a "Framework for Fairness" so the company could improve productivity, innovation and labour relations in North America amid growing competition offshore.

It will give the CAW a major opportunity to gain thousands more members in a sector where its traditional membership and clout have plunged over the past two decades, at slumping General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Magna operates 61 manufacturing plants with 20,700 workers in Canada, mostly in southern Ontario.

The union currently represents only about 1,000 workers at three Magna plants.

One reason the CAW never broke into Magna, despite numerous attempts, is that employees were happy with Magna's deferred profit-sharing plan, recreation areas, and daycare facilities, Mr. Lilley said.

For more than a year however, Mr. Stronach has been talking about letting both the Canadian Auto Workers and the United Auto Workers unions in as a way to put aside old management-labour divisions in the North American auto industry and ensure its survival. The hope is that the newfound co-operation could foster a new work model -- and keep auto parts and automaking jobs that might otherwise move to other continents. As Dan Luria, an analyst at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center put it, Mr. Stronach "wants to be able to say he remade labour relations in North America."

Unions such as the CAW have become more pragmatic by promoting productivity and other business goals at the same time Magna has warmed up to organized labour, one analyst said yesterday.

It's the final nail in the coffin of the labour movements failed anti-NAFTA campaign.

This merger between the CAW and Magna gives new meaning to North American Union and deep integration.


In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy


See:

Unions the State and Capital

Chrysler Made In Canada?

Buzz the Protectionist

Steel Merger

Union M&A

Mittal Plays Monopoly

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Friday, July 27, 2007

$63.90 Per Hour


On average, B.C. and Alberta saw productivity gains worth $122,698 per net worker gained from migration. Provinces who lost population due to migration, however, saw average productivity gains of $82,955 per worker.


Based on these productivity estimates it means that workers in B.C. and Alberta should have earned wages of $63.90 an hour. In fact in the Trades most earned less than half that. Leaving the surplus value for the bosses. In Ontario the wages were closer to unionized manufacturing rates at $43.50 per hour.

In fact average wages even in booming Alberta are 1/3 of what each worker creates in surplus value, profit, for the bosses.

Alberta continues to lead all provinces in average weekly earnings despite a drop in May, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

Earnings for payroll workers, including overtime, hit $818, down from $825 in April but up 2.3 per cent over May, 2006.

Earnings are up 4.3 per cent so far this year, second only to the 5.1 per cent in Prince Edward Island, which has the country's lowest weekly rate at $635.

Ontario has the second highest earnings at $798, up from $796 in April, followed by B.C. at $750, down from $755 the previous month.

Average earnings for hourly paid employees edged up 14 cents in May to $19.04.


Which is why the bosses demand concession bargaining as they are in the case of Molsons Edmonton strike, since the CAW and the Molson bosses are negotiating in Toronto. They are overlooking the Alberta boom and the fact that Molsons corporate productivity and value has increased since its merger with Coors.


SEE:

Pay 'Em What They Want

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit


Go figure. Under capitalism an increase in labour, that is real productivity, means a real reduction in profit levels, a decline in surplus value, thus a falling rate of profit.

In other words more workers available means the economy is less productive than if you laid off workers and replaced them through technology or outsourcing. Go figure.

This is of course an analysis that is not based on the labour theory of value, but rather 20th Century Macroeconomics. And yet the mainstream economist outlines the essential truth of the Marxist critique of capitalism.

Last year's freakish growth disguised our falling productivity, said professor Ted Chambers of the Western Centre for Economic Research, University of Alberta. "Full-time employment rose by 7.6 per cent -- 114,000 jobs," he said.

If employment rose even faster than total output, then output-per-worker must have declined, Chambers explained.

"Provincial productivity numbers, released by Statistics Canada not long ago, showed Alberta at the bottom."

Productivity -- not GDP -- drives profits, incomes, and competitiveness.


The reason for the decline in 'productivity', is the decline in profits due to the increase in wages earned by the growing workforce.

Economy churns out 55,000 new jobs in March; unemployment holds at 6.1%

In the first quarter of the year, the agency estimated that employment grew by 158,000, the strongest first-quarter growth since 2002.

The booming job market has also resulted in Canadians earning more. Hourly wages rose 2.4 per cent during the first three months of this year, compared with last year, well in excess of the 1.6 per cent inflation rate.

Alberta's booming economy was mostly responsible for higher wages, rising 5.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year, from the same period in 2006.

The rise in March employment was led by women aged 25 years and older as adult women reached a new high in workforce participation at 59 per cent. In March, women in this age group captured over 39,000 of the new jobs created.

Over the past 12 months, adult women more than doubled their male counterparts in finding new jobs. Women over 55 also reached record levels of participation in the workforce, at 25.8 per cent.

By sector, employment growth in the services sector grew by 66,000 jobs in March, more than making up for the continuing weakness in Canada's beleaguered manufacturing.

Employment in trade grew by 27,000, with Alberta registering almost half the gains. The agency said the strength in this sector in March reflects gains in wholesale trade as a result of increased activity following February's CN strike.

Canada's labour force participation, the proportion of adult Canadians that have jobs or are actively looking for one, has jumped 0.6 per cent since last October and now stands at 67.7 per cent.

See:

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital


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