Letter to the Editor 10-1

To the Editor,

It was quite refreshing to see one of The Pitt News’ columnists write… To the Editor,

It was quite refreshing to see one of The Pitt News’ columnists write something remotely interesting and controversial, even if it came in the form of Jacob Brown’s assault on organized labor, “U.S. suffers union-itis,” Sept. 29. There is certainly little that can be said for Jacob’s thesis that unions are obsolete, given how he notes in his own article that non-unionized workers are paid less than their unionized counterparts. No, what was most interesting to me was Jacob’s atrocious understanding of the class relations in the realm of production. Profit does not create value but instead the other way around. Workers produce value over and above what is needed for their subsistence and this in turn is appropriated as profit by the capitalist class. Profit flows not from “entrepreneurial skills” or “business ingenuity” but naked exploitation of working people; it’s the “inner secret” of the entire system. And the necessity of labor unions follows immediate from this; unions are nothing more than organizations of workers fighting to prevent legalized theft of “the fruits of their labor.”

Matt Kosko

School of Arts & Sciences