Consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote to the New York Times Magazine in response to its “Money Issue” (4/10/22), which focused on billionaires.
Your engrossing issue on megabillionaires—their road to riches and influence—devoted little attention to billionaire CEOs directly running their giant corporations. For example, how did CEO Tim Cook of Apple get his board to pay him $50,000 an hour or $850 a minute, while Apple store workers are making under $20 per hour? Apple’s wealth draws from a million serf laborers in China making iPhones and computers they cannot afford to buy.
Under Cook, Apple decided to pour over $400 billion of excess profits into unproductive stock buybacks. How fascinating would have been the Times covering how these decisions were made, in place of raising wages, thorough recycling, reducing prices for Apple’s expensive consumer products, bringing some production back to the USA or, heaven forbid, paying its fair share of income taxes.
While the hyperwealthy do attract celebrity treatment, it is when they manage multinational companies that their extraordinary supremacy becomes clearer.
Ralph Nader
Washington, DC
The EX-ACT same U.S. billionaires are crushing union organizers… a-n-d dodging federal tax!
True. But what of those union organisers? Many of them are happy to act as corporate labour police, ensuring that workers are quiescent and that their demands are acceptable to the bosses. Unions are not a panacea and never have been.
So unions don’t fix every ill. OK.
But out of curiosity, what *is* the panacea? We should all be pushing for that, rather than some pie-in-the sky notion like”organizing workers”. /s
I am not anti-union. I am against those many bosses’ unions that fight only to deny workers their rights and to create lucrative careers for their top executives. There are no easy panaceas but there is socialism, a notion far too radical for those complacent union chiefs. That is what we in the working class need to be fighting for. There is a class war going on, the rich against the working class. It is a real war, not a metaphor.
That’s called concern trolling, Rebecca. You’re deflecting from the actual issue and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn you’re either being paid to do so or have a personal vested interest in the failure of American workers to unionize in order to achieve more wealth equality. Shame on you.
I’m really not sure whether your pro-union… or pro-billionaire. Please explain.
I’m working class and we need trade unions here in Britain as anywhere else. We do not need bosses’ unions that undermine and sabotage workers’ interests. The kind of unions we need are run by and for workers, not by overpaid union executives to police labour in the interests of the employers. I remember the 1984-85 miners’ strike in which two unions were involved: the pro-miner NUM and the pro-employer UDM. That’s the difference.
As Joe Burns wrote for Jacobin recently: “Class-struggle unionism is based on a very simple concept: that workers create all wealth in society through their labor, but their bosses steal that wealth from workers and sock it away for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of the workers themselves. That is how and why we have billionaires in society. To take back that wealth and all the power that comes with it, we need unions that are willing to go toe-to-toe with those bosses.
In contrast to the strategy of business unionism, which seeks to represent the interests of narrow groups of workers at an employer or industry and fights for “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” class-struggle unionists believe that there’s no such thing as a truly fair wage under a system in which bosses steal from workers all day long. Those workers create all wealth, and our union struggles are part of a larger fight between labor and the billionaire or owning class.”
https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/class-struggle-unionism-business-labor-movement
Thank you Rebecca, Oi!
And to you Mister Tom Q. Collins, I say this:
“Things get worse with every hour.
The future fades into the past.
All they want is total power.
Climbing on the backs of the working class.”
– Cock Sparrer