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Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

economist.com

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Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#581

Post by wils1245 »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #348
lostlogin wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time? The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast. And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why? It would…

Every white collar job I've held in the last decade had mandatory drug tests.

What sector are you in?

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#582

Post by crankylinuxuser »

taway_1212 wrote: post #573
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the "I know you are but what am I?" defense? Capitalism fails for many. It succeeds for a very few, with most stuck in the cycle of "Work to live, live to work". It's not much different than a slave or indentured servant class where for the necessities of life; Instead of a single owner, I must find an owner who will take me in. And if you fall through the cracks, it's almost impossible to move back up. I'm sure…

> Capitalism fails for many. It succeeds for a very few, with most stuck in the cycle of "Work to live, live to work" As long as the goods required to survive (food, housing etc.) don't materialize out of thin air, it makes sense to expect people to work for them.

This is the R-libertarian aspect that uses the refrain of "You cant make me".

And I agree and disagree with you. Yes, we can make you, governmentally speaking. However there is a different way out: automation and robotics.

We could live in a society that we strive to make more and more automated solutions so that all can benefit. Solar means effectively free power. Food generation allows food to be made so cheaply that the cost is inconsequential. Transportation, same thing. (Yeah, you might not "have" a car, but you can summon one whenever you need.)

If you want to rehash old failure modes of capitalism, so be it. It's a 300 year old system that's bursting at the seams with failure modes everywhere. Communism isn't exactly much better - in that system you trade one master for another.

A mix of socialism, capitalism, and a healthy amount of automation would work. And the machines that produce essentials should be owned by all of us, with the benefits from these going to all of us.

That would maintain no forced working by people, maintaining freedom, AND cover the essentials of all citizens. No?

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#583

Post by SilasX »

eru wrote: post #567
SilasX wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what would it have to be about, for employers to consistently turn down an approach that gets them access to a bigger class of labor and better filtering for safety?

Good question, and worth investigation. While you do, please keep in mind that employers are not monolithic, but made up of lots of different humans with their own agendas. (And lots of those agendas include the objective of "cover your ass".)

There's a great book about (what might be) the general problem here: that there are many factors that keep us at a bad equilibrium, where a bunch of people would have to change at once to accomplish anything.

https://equilibriabook.com/toc/

Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#584

Post by dang »

bluthru wrote: post #532
dang wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it's right to hate people who have no respect for your This crosses into political ranting which is definitely not what we want here. Thoughtful discussion, please, or nothing. We've had to warn you about this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The best word would be "understandable" instead of "right" because the intent was to explain their political perspective, but I was quoting the parent's matter-of-fact use of "right".

That's a fair point, but the larger issue is that your comment and others you've posted are in the genre of political/ideological battle, which is not what we want here. It destroys good conversation, which is what we do want.

That doesn't mean you can't express your point of view, just that you need to try an order of magnitude or two harder to do it with respect. This means respect for the ones you're talking to, for the ones who have reason to disagree with you, and for the community at large. That takes effort and practice, but it's an effort many of us have made, and it turns out to be pretty satisfying as well as a way to make the community better instead of destroying it.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#586

Post by dbingham »

Danihan wrote: post #580
dbingham wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worker co-ops in and of themselves aren't a novel idea. Universally replacing the stock corporation (thus doing away with the mechanism of equity financing) in favor of worker co-ops is an idea that seems to be largely absent from our public debate. There are definitely people exploring it, The Next System Project [1], Democracy Collaborative [2], and Foundation for a New Economics [3] have all toyed with it to varyi…

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check out these books before the year is out and get back to you. The co-op model is something I've personally thought a lot about as well. I actually own a valid testing arena even -- a successful restaurant that I've been wanting to convert into some form of co-op at some point. Personally, I don't think capitalism is going away any time soon, it's just a question of which versi…

Cheers!

Another good book, more about the practical realities of creating a worker co-op in the current context, is Companies We Keep: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place by John Abrams[1]. It's more a story about his experience founding and running his construction company as a worker cooperative. It would probably be a lot more relevant to pondering whether and how to form a cooperative business in the current world.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Companies-We-Keep-Ownership-Community...

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#587

Post by taway_1212 »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #582
taway_1212 wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism fails for many. It succeeds for a very few, with most stuck in the cycle of "Work to live, live to work" As long as the goods required to survive (food, housing etc.) don't materialize out of thin air, it makes sense to expect people to work for them.

This is the R-libertarian aspect that uses the refrain of "You cant make me". And I agree and disagree with you. Yes, we can make you, governmentally speaking. However there is a different way out: automation and robotics. We could live in a society that we strive to make more and more automated solutions so that all can benefit. Solar means effectively free power. Food generation allows food to be made so cheaply th…

I think the vision you described is already a reality. Thanks to technological advances (incl. automation), a day or two of unskilled labor (in developed countries) earns you enough money to eat for a month. Compare that with the lives of farmers from before the industrial revolution, where they toiled for months and still often didn't produce enough to feed themselves.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#588

Post by hotgoldminer »

bluthru wrote: post #454
hotgoldminer wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the employers should quit hiring them?

It's a huge problem that requires enforcement at all levels. People should stop abusing opioids, but we should also make sure they don't cross the border into our country.

I think we should legalize and regulate personally.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#589

Post by productboy »

tjpaudio wrote: post #374

Data Scientist at major company here that was pounding nails in construction circa 2005. This to me is no surprise. At the time I was early 20s and needed that job that would be sort of an apprenticeship. The problem was, these jobs just didn't exist. The young guys (me) got laid of every winter to keep on as many senior crew members as possible and every spring the jobs were less skilled and more labor (think demoli…

What industry are you in now [as a DS]?

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#590

Post by raarts »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #566
raarts wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't worth the extra 600k Do you really think you should pay twice as much in the US compared to other countries with equal quality?

If what you're quoting is what you are actually responding to, you've missed the point. That quote is a comparison between a UPS driver and a Doctor, not a Doctor in the US and one in Norway. If you're trying to compare countries, you're not paying twice as much once you account for what goes into achieving that income .

Maybe I didn't get my point across, but what I was getting at: salaries really have to do with the extreme healthcare costs in the US.

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...

(Also on HN today)

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