Union bosses have been engaging in class warfare for so long now that it’s become standard for the media to echo the meme without challenge. An example of such mainstream Marxism is in today’s Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Runaway CEO Pay’ Could Support 102,000 U.S. Jobs, AFL-CIO Says. Bloomberg’s piece relies heavily on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch, which was set up years ago to conduct a haves vs. have nots class warfare campaign to eventually have CEO pay limited by law or regulation. This was something union bosses accomplished to some degree with last year’s “Wall Street Reform.”
However disdainfully un-American it is to argue whether someone makes too much money in what was once the nation known as the land of opportunity, sometimes you have to roll with the pigs in the pigsty to show how stupid their arguments are. So here goes:
Here is the AFL-CIO’s statement:
In 2010, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index company CEOs received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation. Based on 299 companies’ most recent pay data for 2010, their combined total CEO pay of $3.4 billion could support 102,325 median workers’ jobs.
Using a simple calculator, it is easy to determine that the “workers’ jobs” would pay $33,227 per year (about $16 per hour), not counting union dues, of course.
Given the AFL-CIO’s penchant for pushing an eat the rich ideology, it seemed worthwhile to use the unions’ own logic to run our own set of numbers to determine how many workers’ median jobs one years’ worth of union dues could support.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010, there were 14.7 million union Americans belonging to unions. While that only represents 11.9 percent of all wage and salary earners, there is a substantial amount of dues money flowing to unions.
If we were to use a conservative figure of $50 per month for union dues, in 2010, unions collected $735,000,000 per month in union dues from America’s unionized workers. Multiply $735,000,000 by 12 months and you get a whopping $8,820,000,000 that was collected in union dues in 2010.
Divide $8,820,000,000 by $33,227 and you’ll find that if unions did not take union dues from workers in 2010, 265,447 workers’ jobs could have been supported.
Since union dues only go to support the salaries and benefits of union bosses, their staffs, and their golf courses, airplanes, and other costs, perhaps the argument really needs to be reversed. Rather than creating or saving jobs, given that unions do not produce a product and can actually be attributed with being masters of manipulation, buying politicians, killing companies, pushing policies that stifle growth, as well as creating huge pension and health care deficits, perhaps it’s really time to rein in union dues.
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
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