And catch up with the times: most employees aren't miners, dockworkers, and illiterate laborers any more.

Between your antiquated characterization of union members and your fixation on corporations of the past, I'd have to say that you need to catch up with the times.

The job titles and company names may change, but the fundamentally adversarial relationship between employer and employee remains. The basic principles are eternal, and ER expressed it well as a competition between employer and employee. It's a zero-sum game: Employee pay is a cost that reduces profits. Reduce employee pay to increase profits. The math is braindead simple. It's worth noting, too, that while productivity has gone up something like 18% in recent years, average worker pay has remained essentially stagnant, rather decisively putting the lie to smarmy business slogans about the value of their "human resources" (read: "human husbandry"). Employment is not a partnership.

Union membership has declined in recent decades, but that's hardly a guarantee that it won't rise again. It might've been you who posted some statistics indicating union membership was down in the 10-20% range, but the same statistics also noted that about half of Americans would like to join a union. Guess which way the trend will go in the future? Offshoring, declining real pay and standard of living, excesses and corruption at the top...how can unions not make a comeback? You're guilty of serious tunnel vision if you think that only grubby manual laborers can join unions. The world already has plenty of white collar unions, and they work for their members for the same reason that unions work for anybody. As ER observed, unions work because of, ironically, sound free-market principles:

[ER wrote] But for the last century or so, the recognition has dawned on those who do the work that competition can work both ways, once the playing field is leveled a bit.

At the moment businesses are exploiting geographical differentials to shop for the most wretchedly-paid workers and playing labor forces off against one another. Businesses are leveraging the global economy and global communications for their own short-term gain. But how long before workers have a similar epiphany about their competitive power in the 21st Century, and again turn the tools of capitalism against the capitalists? Think of the organizing power of the Internet that's been used in political campaigns, and imagine it applied to labor organizing. Shivering yet?

I'm sorry to be blunt, but I've been involved in several entrepreneurial efforts, and you really don't know what you're talking about.....I sometimes wonder where you guys worked in your pasts in order to shove this Simon Legree image of employers into your heads. I doubt it was an entrepreneureal startup.

Do you ever read what you write? Are you ever embarrassed by your arrogance? You're hardly the only person who's ever worked at a startup.... Damn, I had to delete the rest of it, cause guess what? I'm currently working for a startup and my lips are hermetically sealed by a contract and a non-disclosure agreement which prevent me from even speaking the name of the company aloud. So you'll just have to take my word for it: You're full of it.

Perhaps you'll try to appeal to my self-interest and imply that I'm a "class traitor" for not being smug and self-satisfied because I happen to possess skills currently valued by the oligarchy. The difference between you and me is that I have a conscience, and I recognize that it's just good luck that I'm in a privileged position at a time when so many others are at the mercy of selfish neofeudal lords who view their employees as nothing more than organic machines to be discarded when used up.

"neofeudal lords"...I'll have to save that one to use again. I was struck recently by the essentially feudal nature of the concept of "trickle-down economics": The duke comes into some gold and the serfs get new thatching for their hovels. Why is dependence on governemt--our government--bad, while dependence on those neofeudal lords is just fine and dandy?

Gotta run. Working for a startup, I have several hours to go tonight before I sleep. ;-)