It’s the Unions, Jack - Why American workers would fare better in a social democracy

[BridgeTheGap]

Americans may believe that the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let’s put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Walmart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That’s who Europe is for: people like me.

OK, I’m a union-side lawyer, so Europe’s really set up for people like my clients, or those who used to be my clients before the unions in America collapsed. Let’s put my own self-interest aside: Where would my clients, who are not poor, who make $30,000 to $50,000 a year and yet keep coming up short, maybe by $100, $200 a month, really be better off?

That’s easy: Europe. I can answer that as their lawyer, the way a doctor could answer about their health. The bottom two-thirds of America would be better off in Europe. I mean the people who have not had a raise (an hourly raise in real dollars) in maybe 40 years, and who do not even have a 401(k), nothing but Social Security, and either have no health insurance or pay deductibles of $2,000 or more. Sure, they’d be better off in Europe. When they’re unemployed, they’d certainly be better off in Europe. Over there, even single men can get on welfare. And in much of Europe, contrary to what we hear, overall unemployment is no higher than it is here.

One of the ways Europe is set up for the bourgeois—including, perhaps, many readers of this magazine—is the very fact that it is also set up for people who make $50,000 or less. Since it’s set up for these people, too, the bourgeois—me, maybe you—get the political cover to have it set up for them. What the people-in-the-unions get, people-from-the-good-schools also get. (And indeed, in Europe people-in-the-unions are often people-from-the-good-schools.) They get the six weeks of vacation each year and the pension like a golden parachute. And the higher up we are in terms of income, the more valuable these things are. In America, they don’t tell us: Social democracy, or socialism, or whatever Europe has, pays off biggest for people in the upper middle class, those just below the top.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Unions-American-Working-Class-United-States-Europe.aspx#ixzz1BgW05nKx