Another Reason to Shift

Boeing and union leaders reached a tentative labor deal that includes:

  • 25% pay increase over four years
  • bolster retirement benefits
  • lower healthcare costs
  • commit Boeing to building its next plane in the unionized Pacific Northwest

The rank-and-file object. They want a 40% pay increase over four years, and they’ve characterized it as a hard line. They’re also still upset that Boeing dared set up an aircraft production plant in the non-union south. They voted Thursday to reject the contract and then to strike beginning that night at midnight.

The strike will halt most of Boeing’s aircraft production, and that would occur

at a time the aerospace giant is bleeding cash and piling up debt….
A prolonged work stoppage could further strain the industry’s supply chain and exacerbate jet shortages for airlines struggling to meet resurgent travel demand.

A strike—telling company management that if the union doesn’t get its way, it’ll destroy the company by preventing it from operating at all—is nothing more than legalized extortion.

This is one more reason to move even more aircraft production to right-to-work States.

With unions having monopoly power over business labor, and this Boeing branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union (among so many other unions) so blatantly abusing its monopoly power, this also is one more reason to rescind the special status of unions as being exempt from antitrust laws.

As Predicted

Early on in the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s mandates and other pushes of our nation’s car and truck assemblers* to stop producing ICE vehicles and switch over to producing battery vehicles exclusively, some folks were predicting that the transition from ICE vehicles to battery vehicles would be a net “green job” loser rather than grower.

Stellantis now is living that prediction.

On Friday the auto maker announced plans to lay off 2,450 workers in Michigan as it ramps up electric-vehicle production. As consolation, the laid-off workers will receive a generous parting gift.

The fact is that battery cars and trucks have fewer parts and so need fewer employees to assemble them. Upstream, battery vehicle components have fewer parts, and so upstream component manufacturers need fewer employees to make them. Look for those component manufacturers to reduce their hiring needs and then to start laying off employees that are no longer needed.

My added prediction: with the electricity grid becoming more unstable with the accelerating Biden-Harris administration and Progressive-Democrat-run State governments pushes to “green” energy production in parallel with their push to shut down fossil fuel-powered electricity generation, our national power grid is becoming more unstable. That instability, coupled with our industrial base dependency on our power grid and with the expected battery vehicle very large demand on that same power grid, will lead to downstream layoffs as those industrial companies’ ability to produce becomes increasingly hampered and those companies begin their own sequence of layoffs.

*Too much of the components which car and truck companies operating in the US use are manufactured overseas and imported for these companies to be considered manufacturers.

Idiotic

Only Progressive-Democrats could come up with such an idiotic idea, and then demand to spend taxpayer—average American—money on it.

California Assembly Bill 2586 has been passed by the State’s Progressive-Democrat-run Assembly, and it would

mandate[] that illegal immigrants with no US work authorization should be given access to apply for and take jobs provided through taxpayer-funded universities run by the state government.

It now sits in the State’s Progressive-Democrat-run Senate.

This is yet another example of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ utter contempt for us average Americans.

Teachers Union Audacity

The Chicago Teachers Union wants a new contract. Among other things, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates wants salary increases of 9% per year over the next five years, through 2028. That would bring these teachers’ salaries to $144,620 per year.

Ordinary residents’ current income is $65,250 at the 50th percentile and $143,550 at the 90th percentile.

These top 10%-er wannabes aren’t producing commensurate with their current incomes, though.

…only 21% of the city’s eighth graders being proficient readers, according to the last Nation’s Report Card….

Gates again [elision in the original]:

It will cost $50 billion and three cents…. Yes it will, and so what, that’s audacity.

No, that’s teachers union greed. But since it’s negotiating with itself—formally they’ll be negotiating with Chicago’s government—it’ll get all of what it’s demanding.

Impact of Biden’s Border and Immigration Policies on Employment

Another outcome of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disdain for our national borders and for actually vetting who comes into our nation is this. Notice, too, that the graph isn’t some tenuously done aggregation of data from questionable sources; it’s a FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) graph.

In just February, 1.2 million immigrants (legal and illegal) gained a job. Meanwhile, 500k native-born Americans LOST their job.
Since Covid, native-born workers have actually LOST 2 million jobs. All of the net job gains are immigrants.

 

The sharp dip is from the Wuhan Virus Situation. After that, the sharp increase in employment is nearly exclusively from a mix of immigrants, temporary and otherwise, and illegal aliens, whom the poster euphemistically terms “illegal immigrants.”

In just February, there were those 1.2 million immigrants of one sort or another. In January, the latest month for which data are publicly available, there were more than 176,000 illegal aliens encountered at the Southern Border, and an unknown number of undetected illegal aliens. Those 176,000 are roughly one-seventh of that total.

The problem here isn’t that immigrants are successfully competing with “native born” Americans for jobs. It’s that all those illegal aliens appear to be successfully competing in an arena they should never have access to.