EconomicsUSA: Obama vs Free Enterprise: How Obama's stance toward Romney undermines a healthy society

Criticism of Mitt Romney by Republican rivals over his private-equity record at Bain Capital LLC is fair and will haunt him in November ... “The critique against Romney, really, is the way, under his leadership,  Bain Capital operated in the fact that so many companies went bankrupt under his tenure .... They put a lot of people out of work, shipped a lot of jobs overseas."  "Romney's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry, have critized the former Massachusetts governor's role at Bain as they campaign in South Carolina ahead of that state's primary election January 21.  Romney won the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Perry said companies like Bain are "just vultures sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick."

Gingrich is now looking to recast his attack on Romney’s investment background as Republican commentators and business leaders call for him to tone down the attacks. Gingrich said Jan. 12 he wanted to focus on a bigger critique of Wall Street bailouts. -- Criticism of Romney Private-Equity Record Is Fair -- Businessweek 

The Obama regime in the USA is the first place to look in the suddenly controversial case of "private equity" company Bain Capital in which Mitt Romney was once a key leader.  The term "private equity" makes reference to a particular kind of structure of financial organization or business), while "leveraged buyout" refers to what private equity often does when a company or set of investors buys an existing company to take possession of it, change it to function better or to subdivide it and dismember its subdivided entities for resale.  In the capitalist case, this is always an attempt to realize a monetary profit (dollars, in the USA), most of which is added to the principal invested and the total of profit + principal is repaid to the original investors.

In a non-capitalist situation engineered by the state, whether in the case of a socialist regime or a socialist manoeuvre in a mixed economy where the state (not primarily an economic entity like a free corporation that instead pursues profit by use of private equity raised from investors), the socialist(-manoeuvering) state uses taxes from the people to take over the management, subsidize or re-organize, and perhaps dismember a private company):  this is precisely the definition of the Obama regime.

Let's focus on the state (in this case, the Federal government's) deployment of tax monies from all the people to prevent the free market from working appropriately in the notable instance of just once industry -- the automobile industry.  A few over-arching facts, first about Chrysler and even more prominently General Motors Corporation (GM).   

GM collapses into government's arms - WSJ.com

The headline regarding how "GM collapses" into the USA Federal "government's arms" is followed, in this article by Neil King Jr and Sharon Terlep (June 2, 2009) some two-and-a-half years ago, is followed by a subtitle reading "Second-largest industrial bankruptcy in history; Obama defends intervention as CEO asks public for "another chance."  Immediately after GM filed for bankruptcy under Chaper 11, President Barack Obama, after some few months devoted to rescuing GM (largest auto maker in America)and Chrysler LLC (third-largest) by deploying $62 billion of taxpayers' money. "GM officials portrayed the bankruptcy…as an unprecedented opportunity to reverse decades of decline.  GM said it woud close 17 factories and parts centres and lop off 20,000 more jobs by the end of 2011 in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and other states."  In capitalize this market interventionism, the USA Federal govt took money from the 50% of American households who actually pay taxes, as well as tax-paying corporations (some corps do not pay any taxes at all, like General Electric) in exchange for part ownership of GM.  "[T]he USA will own 60% of the new GM.  In all, the rescue of the car industry coud cost taxpayers close to $100 billion."  

King's and Terlep's 2009 report continues:  "Some Republican lawmakers called the move another sign of the administration's deepening incursion into the private sector. And the risk remains high that the administration or Congress coud meddle in the company's day-to-day affairs, an experience familiar to banks that took government bailout cash last fall" (2008). What does "incursion into the private sector" mean?  

School and business difference from the state: 

Examples of public/private distinction in social philosophy

The state is a public-legal entity for balancing all the "private" interests and r+ts in the various spheres of societal functioning, to ensure public justice in our h+ly differentiated society of today.  Public education and public-support for non-govt education, is an example of public justice in regard to the different modal orders of society -- where entities (institutions, organizations, etc) that interact with each other both within a given order and between each order, each with its own different set of typical institutions (some schools interact with businesses by training future leaders and workers, some businesses interact with schools by supplying goods and services to the schools for a competitive price, including a profit).  An "outside" societal order of public-legal justice (of course, it too is "inside" the the broader configuration of society as such), a government function must be kept separate from schools and businesses in order, in part, to balance the interests and r+ts of the institutions that are outside 1.) the distinct public-legal order of the state structures -- in these examples, we mention again institutions within 2.) the distinct order of education and within 3.) the distinct order of business.  If the government and its agencies (public-justice entities) intervene in another mode of societal order -- such as educational institutions or businesses, especially corporations listed by the govt-regulated stockmarkets (policed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA, for instance) -- then government sets itself up to function as a corporate-governance institution that intervenes "lawlessly" ( = antinormatively) in another kind of order.  

The order of for-profit enterprises operating freely in a free-market economy is one where businesses compete with one another, that is part of their function in the order of a free market.  Businesses are thus subject to laws of efficiency proper to their order (in order to compete), competition in the free market is one of the paramount rules to sustain a free enterprise and a free market (speak of sustainability!).  The govt is subject to paramount "laws" ( = meta-rules, norms) other than efficiency (efficiency is always necessary, in govt too, but that is not the priority-norm of public-legal functioning, which is society-wide justice between and within societal spheres, institutions, organizations, and other entities of these kinds (thus, individuals and groups with consociational standing also have legitimate interests and r+ts, with consequent claims against all other societal entities which must be balanced in a state that is not functioning within the competition of businesses, but outside it as a public-legal government for justice).  The govt, contrary to Obama practice, should not be competing with businesses, should not be favouring some businesses over others, shoud not be preventing the collapse of businesses headed for collapse (becawz they did not compete well with other businesses in their sector and industry), and should not be preventing the firing of individual managers and workers and indeed the whole labour-union structure that contributed to the collapse.  The govt should not be playing the role of a private-equity firm and its investors, the govt should not be playing favouritism among the competing businesses or unions ("crony capitalism").

But the Prez has been practicing all these worst business practices (WBPs), not letting diseased businesses and union locals die.  In pursuing his policy of protecting GM and the United Auto Workers at all costs from suffering the consequences of their failures to behave with any economic-financial competence, Prez Obama distorted the role of govt, using it as a competing business on a playing field where the competitors were blocked from bidding with investors' capital to re-structure and make profitable the new businesses that emerge from the wreckage of GM -- a wreckage cawzed by GM's failed management and by the UAW.  If he woud stop playing his infernal game of favouritism in the marketplace, capitalism woud open the opportunity for better-run companies to thrive becawz of their better business practices (BBPs).  Or, non-intervention by the govt, as in the cases of the auto industry overall, GM, and Chrysler, woud allow private-equity firms to raise capital from investors for the purpose of  a leveraged buyout of the failing GM, Chrysler (autos) Solyndra, Evergreen, (energy)  Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (housing), the banks and insurers, and so many others.  GM and Chrysler coud well have been dismembered with the good parts of the companies (if any) being re-established with workers transferred/re-hired (but not necessarily the unions) by the new, smaller companies under new managers.  Also, the UAW structure coud have been been dismembered, with considerable justice, becawz it contributed very deeply to the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, where inquitous labor laws prevent a principially-differentiated array of unions to compete for workers' individual votes that woud assign a plurality of unions selected to jointly and proportionately represent workers.  I have little doubt that a significant segment of surviving workers in the restructured healthy new companies woud have voted to be represented by the Christian Labor Association USA.  Remember that Obama's takeover used the taxes paid by all taxpayers (ruffly 50% of the population), not just those who favour monopoly unionism.  Among the other ills that Obama nurtures is the anti-democratic obsolete laws that prevent more than one union from representing workers in a workplace or company.  CLA-USA has a r+t in union elections to campaign for workers' support and, as a result of the vote, to represent proportionally the segment of workers who choose it to represent them.

All the foregoing shows how Obama's regime in its takeover of business and labour, protecting from competition his donors and supporters like the UAW which, thru its contracts with management, locks in workers by automatic checkoff of dues, even where significant numbers of workers don't want to be represented by the privileged union in power, don't want to pay dues to it, and can't gain democratic workers representation thru a union of their own free choosing.

-- EconoMix

EconomicsPakistan: Labor: Incipient Christian labor movement

Compass Direct via  Christian Post (July9,2k11)

Pakistan's 

Christian Sanitation Workers 

swept into societal gutter

'Sweeper' leader faces suspension, criminal charges; for others, disease, death – and murder.

LAHORE, Pakistan 

The often unseen or unrecognized abuses suffered by Christians at Pakistan’s lowest level of society – street sweepers – have come into sharp focus this year.

Related

• Slain Pakistani Christian Minister's Brother Says Probe 'Finally on Right Track'
• Cardinal Urges Pakistan to Amend Controversial Blasphemy Laws
• CIA Informants' Arrest Shows Pakistan's Duality, Expert Says
• Pakistani Families Flee After Another Bogus 'Blasphemy' Charge
• Christian Minister Stopped From Presenting Provincial Budget in Pakistan

While one Christian sanitation worker in Lahore has been suspended and criminal charges filed against him for objecting to discrimination against fellow workers, another was killed the same month for not tending to a shopkeeper’s command fast enough.

Anayat Masih Sahotra, who has worked as a street sweeper for Lahore’s Solid Waste Management (SWM) department for 24 years, said he is facing baseless charges of forgery and fraud from his employers because of his work as a labor leader for area sweepers, who are nearly all Christians. He was suspended and accused of the crimes on May 14 after he asked SWM Managing Director Wasim Ajmal Chaudhry to fulfill a promise to make 400 Christian workers regular employees with full benefits, he said.

Read more of this vitally important article  + refWrite editorial comment 

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EconomicsUSA: Construction: Indicators: volume of contracts and number of uneployed are pr+m indicators

It's one of my working rules of economic analysis of the nooz that the construction industry is a pr+m indicator of the overall economy's health (I'm thinking USA and Canada, but the rool seems to be the same also in UK).  Jim Puzzanghera, reporting for Los Angeles T+mz, gives us this boildown:

Government data released Thursday showed that economic output dropped 2.2% last year in California, one of 38 states that saw declines in its output as the nation's real gross domestic product fell 2.1%.

The drop in GDP nationwide was caused by downturns in construction and the manufacture of durable goods, according to a report by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real GDP by state, which generally tracks the nation's GDP, increased 0.1% in 2008. [Updated at 11:25 a.m.:An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that 2008's increase was 0.9%.]

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Juridics: USA: Proposed anti-democracy union law may die on the docket

Congressional newspaper/webs+t, The Hill, reported yesterday (Michael O'Brien, Sept 14,2k10) that the Obama AFL-CIO consortium in the House of Representatives may not be able to muster the votes to choke democracy in labor representation, as it has planned.

Obama: Chances of passing 'card check' now are 'not real high'

By Michael O'Brien - 09/13/10 02:42 PM ET

Controversial "card-check" legislation doesn't have a good chance of passing through Congress, President Obama acknowledged Monday. 

Obama, during a question-and-answer session about the economy in a backyard in Fairfax, Va., said the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, or "card check") likely doesn't have the 60 votes right now to make it through the Senate.

"The opportunity to get this passed right now is not real high," Obama said.

The president noted his administration is supportive of EFCA, though the window of opportunity to push through the union organizing bill has diminished over time. Labor groups had been hopeful it was one of the first items on which Democrats in the House and Senate would act after winning big majorities in the 2008 elections. 

With this fall's elections likely to give Republicans stronger footing in the House and Senate — if not a majority in one or both houses — the chances of EFCA advancing come next year are seen as fading.

Obama told the AFL-CIO in early August that his administration would "keep on fighting" for the card check bill, which Republican and business interests have rallied against. But the president also pivoted to note that many of the problems in organizing rules that EFCA sought to address might be fixed through administrative action. 

In the opinion of this observer, the card check scheme is a full-fledged totalitarian manoeuver to establish one philosophy of labour representation and to block permanently any really-alternative unions based on latent forces for change in the American workforce's system of unionization.  Read more ...

It's no secret that a nonsectarian Christian re-unionization of workers has long been advocated by refWr+t.  Certainly this horizon of hope is possible across the USA.  Opportunities to campaign publicly were offered by the tangle of events in the auto industry in recent years, where the hegemony of the UAW was not broken and opened to alternative unions (plural streams of representation at General Motors for its workers), altho the taxes of all Americans were deployed to keep the company going and its workers employed at public expense.  My guesstimate is that a Christianly-principled union coud garner upwards of 20% of workers'   votes at that company.  Closed shops must go!

Another situation occured at the un-unionized workplace of West Virginia workers where safety measures were in abeyance and the anti-union company was found to be complacent in protecting mineworkers, deep in WV's Bible Belt.  Surely, a Christian alternative union that excluded no one and forced no one coud have been powerfully and effectively offered to the miners who have long resisted joining the secularist United Mineworkers (I'm not trashing this union, because my grandfather worked under their auspices for year).  They're still good guys in my perceptions (altho I haven't kept up with the 60 years of internal developments in the UMW, since Grandpa Frank died of black-lung disease in the Pennsylvania coal region).  To have been brawt the Good News for WV's workforce still languishing unorganized and un-unionized in many of its mines, coud have made labor history.

Many other instances, especially in locations in America where the Christian demographic is relatively large, coud be listed.   A social-studies researcher coud wr+t a Master's thesis on the correlation between faith-commitment demographics and unionization / nonunionization patterns, locality by locality of h+ Christian presence, employer by employer in each locality.  I think such a study woud tell us something important about opportunities for a wave of pluralization of labor representation.  There is a very small Chrsitian labor union in the USA, the Christian Labor Association USA.

Christian Principles are in our founding and guiding philosophy, the CLA is not a church or a church-based organization. We accept and represent members of all faiths. Members are attracted to the CLA by its labor relations policies, its principles, its common-sense approach to workplace issues, and by the services it offers. We believe in justice in the workplace, whether it's about pay, benefits, work relations, or conflicts that arise, people expect and deserve to be treated fairly.  ... The CLA works to promote harmony between Employer and Employee. This makes us a unique organization. The CLA is a labor union, certified by the National Labor Relations Board and similar state and local agencies. Our right to act as bargaining agents for employees is protected by law. The CLA is not affiliated with a large international union, but democratically governed by its membership. The CLA promotes harmony among all workers. Our method of operation allows for the crossing of trade lines, eliminating craft disputes. The CLA realizes that the livelihood of the employer and employee is derived from the same source.

CLA-USA has been around since 1931, but of course it has had its own internal development (amidst strong and hateful resistance from America's monopolistic unions which don't have room in their values and practices for a pluralization of representation so that cooperating multi-union representation can flourish, affording to each worker membership in a union formed on the basis of different life-principles in the sphere of work relations.  That woud entail inter-union negotiation in many places -- automakers, miners, airline workers, construction s+ts, docks and American-flag ships, industrial farms, you name the trade or profession -- as it occurs in the Netherlands, France, many other European countries, many developing countries.

Rather, in America (Canada, UK, Australia) unions woud rather retreat into arrangements that further curb democracy in workers representation, such as the Obama govt and the AFL-CIO masters have proposed.  May the pining legislation die on the vine!  May the True Vine prevail, also in labor relations in America.

-- Lawt

Economics: Labour: Vision needed for the spread of Christian unions in North America and China

If you are a member of a labor union, most likely you are a member of the overall global labor federation called the"World Trade Union Confederation."  Some of the WTUC members are unions of Christian inspiration and principle, like the national Christian Labor federation in the Netherlands (CNV) and the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) -- but not (yet) the Christian Labor Association in the USA (CLA-USA).

The present WTUC has evolved from previously separate global labor centers of different principles: the secularist and hence atheist labor central embracing the main capitalist and socialist unions and the more Christian-hospitable union then called the World Confederation of Labour.  Both bodies worked assiduously with the UN-affiliated International Labour Organization.  The WCL of which the CNV (Netherlands) and CLAC (Canada) have long been members was the bastion of Catholic-inspired global unionism, with a few Protestant-inspired unions also principially in this day of ecumenism actively affiliated.  One of the causes, the Catholic and formerly Catholic unions championed, a cause which the CLAC atypically concerned itself with, was the independent trade unions of Cuba where the unions were severely restricted and their leaders, including leaders of Christian labor there, were jailed -- with the keys to their cells virtually tossed into the ocean.  Instead, in old Soviet-style the Cuban govt established its affiliated Communist-inspired unions with a monopoly of representation / repression of workers.

Catholic unionism, now within the WTUC, still exists, but because of changes in the interpretations of the Catholic social encyclicals since Vatican II, the nature/grace conceptualization underlying these unions has become seriously attentuated, not least in regard to passing of the old concepts thru Vatican II's new dogma of the "preferential option for the poor" and the broader rubric "solidarity" (made famous by Lech Walesa's leadership of the Solidarity organization in Poland).  The transition from the grace side of the schematic to the nature side is a global phenomenon among formerly forthr+tly Catholic unions, once outfitted with priestly chaplains who kept the affiliates and the locals at large industrial facilities on the strait and narrow. But solidarity-thinking and an option preferential to the poor helped move Catholic industrial organization of workers to a more secular way of existence and functioning.  I think of Hendrik Hart's rubric, "biblical secularity" in my own attempt to fathom the necessity of Christ-principled labour unions distinct from institutional churches (denominations), genuinely free organizations for representing workers in the h+ly differentiated-zone of industrial labor that marks our Western societies, and which is exploding enormously in China in its quick-paced capitalist transformation under a Communist govt (with again soviet-style govt labour organizations to control workers).
Read more ...

Economics: Labour USA: Jobs disappear, membership erodes, as some labour unions re-invent themselves

Washington Times carries a report by John Seewer and Dan Sewell "New face of unions" (May28,2k7) about the misfortunes and fortunes of American labour organizations

TOLEDO, Ohio -- The new faces of organized labor are immigrants working at construction sites, and as hospital nurses, parking lot attendants, mechanics and casino dealers -- all groups who are unlikely to lose their jobs to overseas workers.

Union leaders, trying to stop the erosion of organized labor, are looking beyond their core auto and steel industries to recruit service workers making low wages and professionals worrying about losing their health care.

"What's left anymore?" said Al Mixon, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 507 in Cleveland, which just finalized a contract with American Red Cross employees in northern Ohio. "We're all forced to look into new areas."

This may be just the beginning of the reshaping at a time when factory jobs are being sent overseas or lost to technological changes.

"As we lose manufacturing jobs, we're going to move more into nontraditional occupations," said United Auto Workers [UAW] Ohio President Lloyd Mahaffey. "The issues aren't different whether it's a health care facility or a factory. It's about having a voice."

In the past year, the UAW signed up 2,500 new members in Ohio at auto parts plants, county jails and a juvenile courthouse. The national union last year voted to move $60 million from its strike fund into recruiting new members.

"We had a good year," Mr. Mahaffey said. "But it wouldn't be fair to say we're replacing everyone we lose."

Job losses at the Big Three automakers and at parts makers knocked UAW membership to fewer than 600,000 members in 2005, from a high of 1.5 million in 1979. [A 6 out 15 ration, ruffly only 3/7 left. - EM]

Union membership has declined steadily nationwide in the past 50 years. Only about one in 10 workers belongs to a union compared with a third of all workers in the 1950s.

"The question is, 'Have unions fallen so far and so fast that they can't get up?' " said Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "I give them a 50-50 chance."

The fall has been most pronounced in the industrial Midwest, where hundreds of thousands of union jobs have disappeared and unions in states such as Indiana and Ohio have recorded double-digit percentage drops in membership in the past two decades.

Jon Spears, 35, became one of the casualties in September when he accepted a separation package from Delphi Corp.'s auto-brake plant in Dayton, Ohio, where he had worked since 1999. He has no regrets about his union membership or the representation he received. But he felt beaten down by the unrelenting "gloom and doom" of the loss of security as the company filed for bankruptcy and the union weakened.

"I thought I was going to be there for my 30 [years]. When I started working there, I was very excited to have that job. I loved going to work," said Mr. Spears, who now is looking for a job.

Unions likely need at least 500,000 new members each year just to make up for their annual losses, Mr. Chaison said.

"They don't have to look overseas for fertile fields," he said. "It's all around them. They just have to use their imagination."

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has organized child care providers who work at home in Illinois and janitors who clean office towers in Houston.

The union has doubled in size in a little more than a decade, to 1.8 million members, and now is trying to unionize janitors in Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus.

"We need health care, we need better wages," Lauressie Tillman said at an organizing rally in Cincinnati in March.

Mrs. Tillman makes $6.85 an hour cleaning offices downtown to support her family of four. She has diabetes and must pay for doctor visits. "I don't have money for my medicine," she said.

One challenge in organizing new members is that many workers don't value unions like they once did, forcing labor leaders to reintroduce and redefine themselves.

They are pushing for more than better wages, telling workers that access to health care and the ability to join unions are civil rights -- not just bargaining chips.

And they are becoming less adversarial.

"Workers are looking for an organization that solves problems, not one that creates them," said Andy Stern, president of the SEIU.

Too many labor leaders are concerned only about negotiating contracts for their own members and aren't focused on solving problems facing all workers such as the lack of an adequate health care system, he said.

"For way too long, we've tried to stay the same and, in some cases, stop change," Mr. Stern said. "That's a losing strategy."

Organized labor is declining for a variety of reasons, including improved technology and productivity that requires fewer workers, more aggressive anti-union action by employers in the era after President Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981, movement of jobs overseas and the rise of mostly nonunion foreign automakers. US economic growth also dilutes the urge to unionize.

"It is very difficult for the unions to get a foothold where there is not a need," said Brian Burton, vice president of the Indiana Manufacturers Association, which represents about 1,500 companies in the state. Mr. Burton said workers there are able to get nonunion jobs with good pay and benefits.

Much of the economic growth in recent years has been in the Sun Belt, including states with little history of union support but an eagerness to welcome good-paying jobs.

"They give 'em just about anything they want to locate here," said Robert Shaffer, president of the AFL-CIO labor federation in Mississippi, where the state recently offered an incentives package worth about $300 million to Toyota. The Japanese automaker will build an assembly plant in Tupelo, bringing 2,000 jobs to an area where other jobs have moved overseas.

Economics > Labor USA

"If they treat the people good and don't [hurt them], it will probably be hard to organize them," Mr. Shaffer said.

Toyota, which employs 7,000 at its Georgetown, Ky., plant, is viewed favorably locally, even as US automakers cut back in the region, said Kenneth Troske, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky.

"If we didn't have Toyota, we'd be even worse off," he said.

During the past year, Toyota's advertising has emphasized the company's deep involvement in the United States and economic contributions. Similarly, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has touted itself as helping working families save thousands of dollars by offering low prices and providing jobs.

The UAW is still pushing to organize workers at the foreign automakers, and Wal-Mart remains under fire by union groups who criticize the Bentonville, Ark., retailer for low wages and benefits and would like to organize its workers. Critics of unions say millions of Americans vote with their pocketbooks by buying Japanese cars and shopping at Wal-Mart.

But labor analysts say many Americans view labor favorably, even though they don't belong to unions, adding potential for growth.

One way unions are working to drum up members is by trying to become a bigger part of their members' everyday lives. That means bringing back labor-sponsored family events such as pumpkin patches and mother-daughter banquets.

"It's an old idea regenerated," said Bill Lichtenwald, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 20 in Toledo. Its membership has been cut in half since 1980 and now is down to 7,000.

The union offers casino bus trips and ballroom dancing lessons at special rates.

Teamsters are going into schools to talk with students about what unions offer their members and how they have shaped the middle class.

"We're taking a lot of steps to re-educate," Mr. Lichtenwald said. "It used to be that labor unions were respected. That reputation went away."

David Weil, an associate professor of economics at Boston University, expects unions will look much different in the coming years. He predicted that unions may offer more job training, serve as a third party to resolve disputes or work more as a support organization for immigrants.

Some unions now don't fit the traditional mold.

The Freelancers Union, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., doesn't bargain for wages or benefits with employers. Instead, it offers low-cost health care, life insurance and networking for its 45,000 members who are writers, artists and Web site designers.

"The idea of a union conjures up so many images," said Sara Horowitz, who founded the union in 2003. "The real answer is you have to be helpful and provide something valuable."

She said that unions don't need to engage in collective bargaining to grow.

"There are many structures that have helped workers from mutual aid societies to guilds," she said. "The essence of a union is people coming together to solve their problems."

The article and those quoted completely erase the issues of closed shops, freedom of association, viewpoint pluralism of workers represenation (even in the same factory), national-sectoral multi-union collective bargaining, and the philosophy of workers representation in itself.

In the USA there happens to be an alternative-viewpoint union since 1931, certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the tiny Christian Labor Association - USA.

Likewise, in Canada, Christian Labour Association of Canada. CLAC Campaign for Cuban Trade Union prisoners.

The Netherlands: Christelijk Nationaal Vakverbond which translates to "National Federation of Christian Trade Unions".

The CNV is a federation of eleven affiliated trade unions. Altogether, the CNV has around 355,000 members. The current chair is René Paas. Although the CNV is formally independent of other organizations there are strong ideological and personal links with the Christian Democratic Appeal [CDA] political party. Former CNV vice chair Aart-Jan de Geus currently serves as CDA minister of Social Affairs and Employment for instance.

The eleven affiliated unions are:

* CNV Heavy-industry union (88.000 members);
* CNV Public union of civil servants and healthcare personnel (84.000 members);
* CNV Teachers' union (56.000 members);
* CNV Construction Workers, and Woodworker (54.000 members);
* CNV Services union (37.000 members);
* CNV Police Personnel union (21.000 members;
* CNV Military union;
* CNV Arts union 6000 members);
* CNV Church Employees union;
* CNV Joung People's union (1300 members).

Internationl: World Confederation of Labour, which had Christian origins from its outset in 1920 in Nov2k6 folded itself into the new International Trade Union Confederation, dropped its Christian identity completely but still maintained its commitment to trade-union pluralism, freedom of association, and a multi-union theory of workers' represenatation.

Brussels: In a May29,2k7 letter to President Hu Jintao of Communist-Party-run China, "the ITUC criticises a major failing of the draft law [to govern labour reiations] – the absence of any reference or commitment to allow workers in China to form and join independent trade unions and bargain collectively with employers in line with International Labour Organisation Conventions. “”The Chinese authorities have missed a real opportunity to allow their own citizens the best guarantee of decent work – the right to trade unions which they themselves control. Without this, employers will continue to be able to exploit their workforce virtually at will, and no amount of tinkering with regulations will change that”, said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.