Reply #1: Organizing Wal-Mart empoyees is as useful as Moses organizing the slaves under Pharaoh.

[AdHocSolver]

Moses could have gotten the slaves an extra ration of crumbs. However, they would have remained slaves under Pharaoh.

The workers' power comes from being able to withhold their labor from company A which has competition from companies B, C, and D, through X, Y, and Z. When the UAW was strong, it would strike GM or Ford alone, while not striking the other auto companies. That competitive pressure pushed the struck company to negotiate with the union or lose a lot of business to competitors. Then the first negotiated contract was used as a model for negotiating other contracts. Without such leverage, the unions have little bargaining power.

Another source of employee bargaining power is the threat that, if the company won't negotiate in good faith, then the employee will leave and go to work for a competitor. Wal-Mart has used its deep pockets and political clout to put local businesses that would be its competitors out of business. Smaller businesses are inherently labor intensive. Big box stores like Wal-Mart can operate with surprisingly few employees (which is the purpose of building big box stores).

As long as jobs can be easily and profitably offshored, the U.S. economy will deteriorate, the middle class will slowly disappear, and organizing the workers just to beg for crumbs will be an exercise in futility.

What needs to be done is to rewrite the trade and tax laws to make it less profitable for the multinational corporations to offshore jobs and evade taxes on their profits. Then companies who want to create jobs here will be able to do so profitably.

No other course of action will save the American middle class or the U.S. economy. When just about everything is imported, all money, eventually including the stimulus package funds, will just leave the country. At least 75 percent of the money spent by Americans must go to other Americans, not to Asia. This is the only kind of economic activity that will sustain a viable American economy.