Blame jobless rate on corporate fraud
by Mike Phillips
Wednesday, August 20, 2003 8:44 AM PDT
Printable version
E-mail this articleI read with interest the Aug. 15 Daily News editorial bemoaning the high wages and safe workplaces that unions have helped secure in Washington. The paper's admiration for so-called "right to work" is a puzzlement.
First, the paper should employ some journalistic integrity and correctly state that it is "right to work for less." Unionized state workers make on average more than $3,400 more per year than right-to-work state workers. Of the 21 right-to-work states, none has average wages above the national average.
Union states also invest 30 percent more per student than right-to-work states.
As for those onerous safety laws, only three right-to-work states had on-the-job fatality rates below the national average. Twenty of the union states have rates below the average.
The high rates of unemployment in Cowlitz County have much more to do with corporate greed and mismanagement than high wages. High wages did not kill Longview Aluminum. It was corporate greed, both by the owners and the power traders.
Corporate greed at Weyerhaeuser continues to add to local unemployment by persisting in shipping raw logs and, with them, hundreds of jobs overseas. Ross Simpson was not killed by high wages; again, it was the corporate geed of Weyerhaeuser.
The Daily News is curiously silent in decrying corporate officer pay rates, which are over 300 times the wages of workers.
The local economy will not be helped by turning Cowlitz County into a low-wage ghetto. Good paying jobs for workers in safe workplaces will, in turn, spur other local business.
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