State doesn’t need ‘right to be poor’

Our country has seen an ever expanding income gap. Since the recession in ‘07, statistics show that the 1 percent have gotten pretty close to 99 percent of any recovery benefits, so the gap continues to grow. Wall Street is seeing records in corporate income and wealth while the victims of the recession still struggle.

Contrary to what the extreme right wing Supreme Court justices said, corporations are not people. They function only in the realm of profit and loss, good deeds are done largely for public relations and spin. Caring and concern don’t figure into decisions, just dollars and cents, stockholder benefits and corporate bonuses.

One of the few restraints on corporate greed has been labor unions. Any move to change our state to a right-to-work state would lead to a right to be poor in this state and an end to the middle class. Boeing offered a corporate wish list to the Machinists, not any sort of negotiation. I guess they figure they’ll need all these concessions if they continue to mismanage yet another new plane program. The out sourcing of construction on the 787 to many subcontractors saved Boeing much of their own money in R&D costs, but in the long run cost Boeing billions in huge problems fixing what should have been a seamless construction process. We need our unions as a check on corporate excesses and as a leader in family wage jobs.

Steve Morse

Snohomish