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If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

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Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#321

Post by sokoloff »

bsanr2 wrote: post #264
mgolawala wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point the OP is making is that the benefit of this efficiency gain is passed on to the technology teams that implement and maintain those intelligent inventory tracking systems. They are the ones getting paid the higher salaries. They are the ones making the the store workers more efficient. What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consid…

SWE's don't have a union, so of course they're getting relatively hosed, too. Though the disparity is somewhat justified in that the efficiency of software (neither in its running nor production) haw kept up with Moore's Law. In any case, owners and executives are funneling up the excess value created. It's there, you're just not getting it.

My experience as a long-time SWE is that companies are willing to pay us upper-middle class (or better) salaries to do things that many of us would happily do for free in our spare time. The only “catch” is that we have to work on their problems instead of ones we pick.

If that’s “getting hosed”, I hope they never run out of water!!

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#323

Post by ZephyrBlu »

m0zg wrote: post #286
bsanr2 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWE's don't have a union, so of course they're getting relatively hosed, too. Though the disparity is somewhat justified in that the efficiency of software (neither in its running nor production) haw kept up with Moore's Law. In any case, owners and executives are funneling up the excess value created. It's there, you're just not getting it.

> they're getting relatively hosed If by "hosed" you mean getting $120K salary right out of school, then I guess that's true. I'm just not sure I'd call that "getting hosed" though. If you want to see what "getting hosed" means, go work as an SWE in Europe.

Yeah, it always baffles me when people say things like that.

Yes, SWE's only get a piece of the pie but it's a pretty nice piece (Especially compared to everyone else). If you want more, go and bake your own pie.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#324

Post by chordalkeyboard »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #255
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CEOs work isn't any more demanding than it used to be, either. I think it has, actually. The CEO's job became more complicated as a result of the increased complexity in the world. There used to be only brick-and-mortar and mail order, now there is internet. They used to advertise on tv, radio, and newspaper. Now they can advertise tv, radio, newspaper, online ads, and social media influencers. They didn't have to…

Has it gotten 10x harder? Was running the vast agglomeration of companies that was ITT really less difficult than running today's sprawling companies? Do you think the CEOs of today's companies get into the nitty gritty of all of those issues you talk about, or do they, as always, delegate the real work of understanding those issues to their subordinates?

I’m not sure it can be quantified except perhaps by something like “amount of money necessary to motivate a sufficiently skilled person to do this job.”

I’m certain that they delegate those issues to subordinates; do you feel that there is skill involved in managing and supervising subordinates, and melding their disparate opinions into a coherent and profitable direction for the company?

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#325

Post by CryptoPunk »

This is an inapt comparison.

The seeming divergence between productivity and wages is mostly a result of the price index used to track the price inflation of productivity diverging from the price index used to track the price of inflation of wages:

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#326

Post by marketingPro »

I think every discussion about worker pay should include the Federal Reserve/fractional reserve banking/fiat currency.

CPI is a terrible indicator that doesn't include productivity gains. Inflation numbers from the government are notoriously unreliable.

Is the problem corporations? Or fiat currency?

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#327

Post by dragonwriter »

marketingPro wrote: post #326

I think every discussion about worker pay should include the Federal Reserve/fractional reserve banking/fiat currency. CPI is a terrible indicator that doesn't include productivity gains. Inflation numbers from the government are notoriously unreliable. Is the problem corporations? Or fiat currency?

> I think every discussion about worker pay should include the Federal Reserve/fractional reserve banking/fiat currency.

Why?

> CPI is a terrible indicator that doesn't include productivity gains.

It's a price measure, why would it “include productivity gains”. There's certainly a use for a productivity index, but it has very little to do with the basic purpose of CPI.

> Is the problem corporations,

No.

> Or fiat currency?

Also, and even moreso, no.

It's largely fiscal policy doing exactly what it was chosen for the purpose of doing.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#328

Post by claudeganon »

DuskStar wrote: post #221
claudeganon wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do, which is why the US made that in impossible in the 30s. Making it so that unions can only form on the basis of company level votes, along with myriad other restrictions, made it so that the labor movement could never have as much power as it does in Europe.

Don't multi-company unions exist, though? The UAW is a pretty famous example. Unless you're saying that the problem is that the US doesn't make every new auto manufacturer a UAW shop with no opt-out?

In parts of Europe, individual workers choose their unions. You don’t necessarily join a union simply because it’s the one that is exclusive to the company. Instead of fighting myriad individual battles to unionize workplaces, workers join independent unions, the unions collaborate to bargain in a sector, and set things like wage floors and working conditions across the industry.

The US specifically did not want this to happen, which is why it made unionization only valid on the basis of the adversarial, shop-vote model, but grandfathering in some unions that already functioned along similar, sectoral lines, such as the Hollywood unions.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#329

Post by Jedd »

rmason wrote: post #116
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #40

There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage/salary spectrum. There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn... The portion relevant to this discussion: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could wa…

All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly. We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe. It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries. Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing. Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but t…

> Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but the long term trend has been down.

There were a few potential inflection points / events that happened around then.

1971 saw the perhaps ill-considered abandonment of Bretton Woods - arguably this ineluctably led to an ongoing boom / bust cycle.

(Can recommend John Ralston Saul's discussion around this in his book 'The Collapse of Globalism'.)

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