Worker power in the coming years (a note for workers and unions)

Sorry, but I'm elevating a reply of mine to the status of top-line post, because I think it's getting short-shrift and because it encapsulates information I've been seeing lately.

DEMOGRAPHICS: In 2008, the leading edge of the baby-boomers
begins to retire. We all know this because Greenspan has been repeating it and it has become part of the wanky SocSec-destruction punditry's mantra lately - boomers begin retiring, OH GOD, OH GOD, OH GOD.

Leaving Social Security solvency aside (that will be fixed easily by a wage cap solution (that you know is good because the Heritage Foundation is foaming about it), unless Social Security is stolen from Americans by Bush's idiotic cut-out privitization scheme ((make me take a margin loan of 3% plus inflation (((currently 3.5%, so that's a total margin loan rate of 6.5%))) to buy a crappy Bush-picked balanced account and hope to make back enough to pay off my fucking margin-loan from these fucking churners?)) in which case a few trillion in debt will shine among the polished jewels of the Cheney/Bush/Frist/Hastert deficit crown),

there is soon to be a huge worker shortage in the United States., and this is one reason for the current corporate and national outsourcing mania. This is a growing concern on Wall Street, indeed some analysts see the job market tightening up significantly as early as 2006, just as a result of economic cycles, "soft patch" or no soft patch.

But by 2008, an age-wave does indeed begin to hit the labor market in the United States, and analysts worry now that worker wages and benefits, once workers are again in high and increasing demand will skyrocket and erode corporate profits.

Ask yourself, worker: Got Power?

Sure, will Corp American dislike it, YES! Will it decrease their profits, YES! Well, TS!!! Maybe some of the execs need to consider something less than millions in compensation each year!

The demographic shifts will create some large economic problems, but as people like Jeremy Siegel have pointed out, much of the rest of the world (particularly the developing world) have demographic trends that offset our own.

People have fretted here and elsewhere, for instance, that the stock market will collapse as boomers retire and try to sell off all their assets to a dearth of buyers. Just one of the things that's missing from this outlook is the growing wealth among workers in the developing world, wealth that is finding its way into the capital markets. The best investment journalism I find is from newspapers in India. Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" has just been translated into Chinese.

Not to get all Tom Friedman on anybody's ass. Globalization is not everybody's buddy, and there are horrible things associated with the march of industrial "progress" around the globe, among them profound environmental and human impacts. And there are terrible imbalances in the global economy that are not going to be corrected without some rather large financial crises.

But I'm straying from the point. American workers have been taking a beating from their corporate masters, with both real wages and benefits eroding, with the collapse of pension plans and health care coverage, with the blatant corporate grab at Social Security, and with the rise of big-box Sweatshop America working conditions. Soon we will reach a pivot point where we can turn these tides, and we need to be ready to go.

from Goldman Sachs (May 10, 2005) -

"The slow rate of job creation in the current expansion has limited labor cost inflation thus far. However, we expect a pick-up in 2005 and 2006 for three reasons: (1) Job growth should continue through 2006 (185k/month); (2) The unemployment rate should fall from already low levels; and (3) Rising headline inflation will cause consumers to demand wage increases."

There is much in the note for anybody to disagree with (particularly point 2, about unemployment being a "already low levels," but corporate America is hearing some alarm bells about a breach of their precious bottom line.

Now I'll let this thread die in peace.