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Jerry,
I agree that what I wrote was incorrect. There has been more than a de
jure change or change in status, though of course the de jure change is
what matters in terms of the legal right to unionize. From Greenhouse's
report, it seems however that the most important change is that the
shipping/warehouse companies are enjoying lesser costs/greater profits by
having busted unionized trucking firms and instead contracted out to
(formal) independents whose incomes have taken quite a hit in no small part
exactly due to how much of their gross revenue is reduced by payments for
the truck, insurance, maintainence, fuel, etc(I think Greenhouse notes an
example of one trucker logging 60 hr/weeks for $20K/yr). Now it seems to me
that by your (and the Fed's) criteria of the working class, these truckers
are not proletarians. It seems to me that in terms of the arguments you
advanced in our discussion of slavery, you must take the Fed union-busting
line against the so called petit bourgeois truckers.
Yours, Rakesh
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