I just find it astounding the double-standard here.

Like I said, I'm no fan of unions because of every experience I've had with them (granted much of that was second-hand, having to deal with peeling my ex-wife off the ceiling from the stress that she got from the postal unions which she refused to join).

On the one hand, when the workers band together and demand better wages and benefits, this is bad. (My personal belief when it comes to public unions is that you could fix a lot of the problem if you simply made it less impossible to get rid of do-nothing or incompetent employees - there used to be a guarantee of quality when you 'bought union')

On the other, when you get the logical result of the "race to the bottom" wages, people scream that workers aren't being paid "a living wage". Worse yet, someone in China or Mumbai might do the work for pennies on the dollar.

This is a fundamental problem with unskilled labor. Where is the middle ground? We're no longer in the position we were in the 1950s when we were the only industrialized nation that hadn't had it's base bombed back to the Stone Age.

By no means would I want everyone replaced with minimum wage drones. "Back in the day", minimum wage was a place to START your career. You weren't expected to be able to afford everything (like your own 2BR apartment or something like it) on that money (as many so-called "advocates" would have you believe). When I worked for minimum wage, I had this thing called "a roommate". Apparently, due to the financial crisis, this forgotten concept is coming back into vogue - like some paleontologist just rediscovered it..