Them that’s got, gets
Corporate Taxes Plunge to Historic Low
Bush and the corporate lapdogs in Congress certainly take care of their friends. Thanks to massive back-to-back cuts, corporate income taxes have plunged to their second-lowest level in 60 years, Citizens for Tax Justice reports.

Bills rammed through Congress and signed by Bush in 2001 and 2002 (justified in part as a way to combat terrorism!), slashed total corporate income taxes 31 percent, from $197 billion to $136.3 billion.

As a result, corporate income taxes shrank to 1.3 percent of the U.S. domestic product this year. (They were 4.5 percent of GDP under Truman and Eisenhower – the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.) Only once since 1942 have corporate taxes represented so small a fraction of the national wealth: in 1981, as the Reagan-era tax cuts transformed the U.S. from the world’s leading lender to the world’s leading debtor nation.

Are U.S. workers the world’s best off? Not by a long shot, new reports reveal  U.S. workers put in longer hours for less pay with fewer holidays than workers in other major industrialized nations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor and the International Labor Organization.

For the year 2000 (the most recent year studied) U.S. workers ranked ninth in the world in total hourly compensation -- the cost per-hour of wages and benefits combined. The U.S. average $19.86 an hour of wages and benefits is well behind compensation rates in the former West Germany, unified Germany, Norway, Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden.

Ironically, that was the best U.S. showing in 15 years! The U.S. hasn’t even ranked among 10 best-paid countries since 1987, when the U.S. also finished ninth.

U.S. workers also spend far more time on the job (1,979 hours a year) than their main industrial competitors. And while work hours fell in all other industrial nations during the 1990s, they increased in the U.S. by 36 hours -- nearly one week per-year, per-worker, the ILO reported. 

The U.S. is also the stingiest country of all when it comes to paid holidays. Here are the numbers:

Source: International Labor Organization

South Korean authorities crush Power Workers’ Strike

South Korean officials forced an end to a five-week long strike by 4,000 power workers after the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions backed down on a threatened general strike.

The KCTU had vowed to shut down the country to support an anti-privatization strike against five state-run power-generating companies. Union members said the government’s plan to place the companies in private hands provided no protections for workers’ jobs or incomes.

Minutes before the announced deadline for the general strike, the KCTU bargained a settlement with the Ministry of Labor to allow the privatization plan to move forward and to submit all remaining issues to arbitration by the National Labor Relations Commission.

Despite the settlement, the power company officials say they will fire at least 600 strikers, discipline at least 1,434 more and lay off the union leadership.

Lee Ho-don, president of the power workers’ union, has refused to sign the agreement and hundreds his striking members refused to return to work.