Caymen,
People willing to work for less do not posses the same level of skills or experience. The employer is only getting what he is paying for. Yes, many companies do hire people fresh out of school, but they are getting an unknown quality. Someone with skills that have been honed over the years may require a little more money, but the employer gets a better worker who can hit the ground running and will often have highly developed leadership skills.
If you let your skills fall behind or don't keep up with the technological updates to your job, then yes, someone else can and will take your place at a lower salary.
Also, Unions contribute to this by demanding such lucrative pension plans for their members. The companies don't want to pay all that money for someone who may retire in a few years, so they hire a younger person and pay them less. They will eventually train them to do a good job. If that person developes good skills, they will often move on to another job that pays more for their skills and the employer does not have to pay all that retirement.
Now the union only helps subsidize marginal workers who don't have skills or their skills are no longer in demand.
As for companies not taking care of their workers. that is now more myth than fact. There are enough agencies that monitor labor, safety, etc that those are not real issues anymore except for a few industries. Henry Ford used to pay $5 a day for auto workers when he first started his plant building model "T's. That was a lot of money back then and it was more money than most unskilled workers could make anywhere else. Later, the unions got involved and the greed for more money by the unions and their members has artifically inflated the UAW pay scales.
Quality is never out of style or overpriced. Unions have driven up the cost of manufacturing in this country so that most companies must go to China, Bangeladesh, Indonesia, etc to get cheaper labor....Of course quality suffers, but even these countries continue to improve the quality of their work and products.
Germany has one of the highest salary ratings in the world but they continue to manufacture many things there because they have a highly skilled and educated work force and people will pay a premium price for those skills and the quality products they produce.
The real problem in the US is that we have a wide range of skiled and educated people in our work force. The people who do not have the skills and education want the same salaries and company benefits as those who are highly skilled and highly educated. To exist in the US you need some level of skills and education to succeed and be part of the middle income taxpayers. Unions help prop up some of the less skilled, but even they can't help everyone. If you depend on the unions or the government for your living you will sorely be disappointed. The US is moving away from manufacturing and shifting jobs to Service and Technology jobs. More and more unskilled manufacturing jobs will continue to be exported to countries that has a large pool of cheap labor.
While we are loosing manufacturing jobs, we are creating many more jobs that require technology skills, be it medicine, mining, or computers. They are all hiring highly skilled technicians and if we fail to make those technology shifts, the unions or the government will not save us.
...Rich
