[lbo-talk] Unproductive Workers = The Best Organized in the USA

[Jim Devine]

Yoshie:
> Among the overlapping categories that [WS] listed, the only sector
> that's relatively well organized in America are government
> employees.  According to the BLS, "About 36 percent of government
> workers were union members in 2004, compared with about 8 percent of
> workers in private-sector industries" (at <http://www.bls.gov/
> news.release/union2.nr0.htm>).  That is a huge gap.  When the only
> stronghold of organized labor becomes workers whose wages and
> benefits directly depend on tax dollars, which in turn depend on
> profits produced by the work of unorganized workers, organized labor
> has a big political and economic problem at hand.

yes, it's a problem, but I think it's a mistake to call them
"unproductive." They are directly unproductive in that they don't
contribute directly to individual capitalist profits, but they are
indirectly productive, in that they help the capitalist class as a
whole.

--
Jim Devine
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an
intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin