Jesse,

Working hard and getting paid for it is NOT the issue. Being told how hard you must work, not earning enough to even live where you work, and having your fair share of the rewards used to pay the CEO more than 300 times the average worker's salary is. My father was an Hungarian immigrant. I grew up poor and paid my own way through private high school and then Dartmouth College by working multiple jobs all the time. Today I am fortunate to have earned, invested, and saved my way to prosperity, and I would never deny anyone the right to "work hard and get paid for it", but your boss should not have the right to tell you that if you don't work as hard as the factory worker in China then you'll be fired. As with everything in life there is a balance, and without healthy unions that balance has become tilted immensely in favor corporate management. I agree we should never encourage able bodied citizens to perform zero labor with monetary incentives, but then that is an altogether separate discussion from the topic to which I was responding namely the culpability of unions with regards to their current demise.


Joe