I'm for wage parity and the longshoreman's union broke the parity scale long ago. When a kid can come out of high school and make more than someone with a 4-year engineering degree, the situation is beyond madness. When looking at the history of the creation of the NAU by our politicians, the complicity of the unions in its creation is hard to deny. Unions have gone from the noble purpose of protecting workers from abuse in the workplace to the greedy purpose of extracting as much as they can out of big business and ultimately, consumers. The efficiencies and cost savings that engineers and businessmen brought to big business in the form of automation and innovation in business operation were quickly evaporated by union greed. Big business effectively had its hands tied and resorted to buying off politicians to 1) ram through free trade so that they could move their factories overseas and take advantage of cheap labor and 2) foster lax enforcement of our nation's immigration laws to supply cheap labor to those businesses that couldn't move overseas due to relatively high distribution costs of doing so.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but some reality needs to return to how a worker is valued- WAGE PARITY. In my perspective and most others, for that matter, creativity, vision, education, skill, and efficiency should be rewarded. That is one of the guiding principles of a capitalistic society. Unions have effectively subverted that principle and now protect relatively unskilled workers using socialist practices that would make Marx proud. While I am concerned for the US worker in the face of foreign competition whether legal or illegal, he is going to have to accept a greater wage disparity between those who practice creativity, vision, education, skill, and efficiency and those who do not.
But CEO's are worth 262 times what they pay their employees?
Likewise many doctors and hospitals are sending tests and x-rays off to Pakistan and India to be read vs paying a radiologist here in the USA to do the readings -- and the people doing the reading in those countries may not have the same level of education as the radiologist here in the States. Also... hospitals sending billing (with your ID number) off to Pakistan for billing is quite common these days. Recently a person over there decided she wanted a raise and held up a hospitals records until they gave her the large raise... something that if I did here in the States would be a crime, but was legal being done by someone overseas.