International Working Class Economic Disparity

This is putting the cart before the horse, really. It wasn't always that way in Europe. These attitudes didn't come from nowhere. It came from the self-organization of the working class, which went on strike and rioted and battled police repression and fascist terror and produced communist, social-democratic and labor parties to represent it. Many of those parties still survive and, while most of them have strayed far from their old revolutionary principles, they still are rooted in the working class and have defended, either as a result of principle or popular pressure, the gains of the labor movement. It's this dynamic that has created the attitude you speak of, that employees are human beings who matter. It's because the employees raised their voices and demanded to be treated as such, for decades, and continue to do so. The fact that the European capitalists had to keep a wary eye to the east for 70 years, where several socialist governments existed as permanent reminders of what happens when workers become fed up, also greatly helped the cause of Western European workers.

The US once had a powerful labor movement, but it was never as radical as the European labor organizations and it never produced a strong political labor party to represent itself. Also, the way the US political system is structured is particularly inhospitable to such a party, which for various reasons would lack the power that European labor parties have been able to achieve in their parliamentary governments. As such, the US working class was unable to acquire a political class consciousness and it was unable to defend its gains once the McCarthyite Red Scare broke the unions by purging them of their most militant members. The American working class never acquired any measure of independent political power to assert a narrative of its own. The fact that the American workers were, and remain, far more divided by racism than the more homogeneous European workers has also long hampered their cause.

"the neoliberal offensive from the 1980s onward wiped out most of the gains the labor movement had previously made."

Don't agree completely with that. I think the problem was even more created by the unions, in typical American fashion, becoming greedy and corrupt and focusing more on lining their own pockets than helping workers.

I would be interested in knowing your background in terms of education and where you call home, To say that the USSR was admired for its economic success during the 1930's is very strange to me. It's like saying a patient who is on an IV and pain relievers is a success when compared to a patient on life support. To say that the Soviets bore the full brunt of the Second World War is a misnomer as France bore the full brunt first and buckled under because of under estimating German resolve. Had France and Britain taken the threat seriously during the mid-1930's Hitler would have neutralized well before the German's marched into Paris. The union movement suffered here because of internal corruption and international competition. Japanese products went from being jokes during the 1960's to well regarded by the late 1970's.

You have to ask yourself, what's wrong with the US's labour laws that BK, a huge, legitimate business, can get away with not providing a pension fund and pain vacation, at the very least.

There have been many excellent, well-reasoned and infomed posts here. Thank you! It seems most of us agree that the root of the different compensation packages lies in a nation's culture. Let me, as a US citizen, ask my friends around the world, is there any country other than mine that ADMIRES outlaws? I'm not talking about people like my Founding Fathers or Robin Hood, who are breaking laws in the service of what they perceive as a greater good. I'm talking about rustlers, crooks, hoods, hit men, wise guys; people who are only out for themselves. Folks whose code is "take whatever the fuck you can get away with." I think the US as a culture is unique in the world in its laissez-faire core value. We see life as a zero-sum proposition: for me to succeed, someone else must fail. That's why BK in the US is paying 9 bucks an hour. I don't agree that greed is good. Greed does great harm. And while I agree that the US labor movement lacks the robust laborite cultures found elsewhere, and agree that union leaders' personal greed harmed the unions, and that Joe McCarthy' Red Witchhunt also weakened the unions, I submit the most damage was done when so many major unions climbed into bed with organized crime. Whatever happened to Jimmy Hoffa? I'll end my rant about Outlaw Nation by asking you this: What other country, without coercion, would elect the son of a well-known bootlegger as its President? And, 3 years later, not really know who shot the top of that President's head clean off?