Would you pay someone $38.00 an hour to mow your lawn and weed your garden?
Would you believe you already do?
One of our little government entitlement programs is the process of paying prevailing wage. Prevailing wage is essentially the union scale for services. It's a way for cities and states to avoid paying non union workers a lower wage and thus making union workers less competitive.
Every month, I receive an email from some state entity updating the prevailing wage for various trade jobs.
Now I have a client who did landscape work for the city of Cincinnati. This client pays their guys somewhere between $12 and $20 an hour for their workers which is in line with my other landscaping employers.
As a result of accepting a contract with the City of Cincinnati, this employer now pays $38 for doing the same work they do for the average homeowner. (BTW it's $34 if you offer health benefits).
What's disgusting is that the employees making $12.00 actually pay the wages for someone making three times more than they do.
Why would anyone pay a wage that's more than they make for the same work?
If you believe that doesn't make sense, then you'll understand why it is that Governors Kasich and Walker are waging war on these practices.
You'll also understand why the unions will fight this one to the death.
You'll also understand why people flee to the suburbs, where they farm this crap out for a third of the price that a union friendly city/state charges the residents.
1 comment:
The theory goes that those evil republicans want only to make others' lives miserable. That they want to break unions just for sport. Truth is, if I wanted to break the union I'd be in favor of staying the course we've been on for 40 years.
A government is not like a factory with hard collateral assets. It's ability to sell debt today is based solely on confidence it can sell more debt tomorrow. When that confidence disappears, default will be incredibly swift with equal effect on paychecks and pensions.
Then it won't matter if a dem or republican in office. The dems might pass a law saying paychecks will keep going out. And paychecks will bs printed. But when union boy goes to cash it, no real bank would cash it.
At that moment, the union will swiftly, violently, and painully implode. If I were an evil man, if I wanted to see the humiliating defeat of the union, if I wanted to see working families lose everything overnight, I'd be in support of the self destructive union practices going on since the 70's.
But I want to see us continue to make it. So the American dream may be a little slower to achieve than some of us were led to believe. But it can still be a dream possible to achieve. But to do so we need to get out of the financial debt fantasy that unions and governments are in.
Post a Comment