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Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

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Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#761

Post by 8note »

shakezula wrote: post #654
pydry wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gun industry started the culture war for profit and fans the flames for profit. Take away the profit margins and have a few more mass shootings and I imagine the 2nd amendment would melt away as easily as the 4th did.

I disagree that it was the gun industry that started the war, but they absolutely fan the flames for profit. The 2nd amendment will never go away as long as conservatives use it as a wedge issue. It's far too important as leverage, and they've been incredibly successful in cementing it further into law even very recently. My state just passed Constitutional Carry into law this year.

Conservatives will happily do away with the 2nd amendment if you arm a bunch of black people, and have them constantly open carrying while black

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#762

Post by mc32 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #740
mc32 wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not only manufacturing though. And we don’t have to export to the world. We just need to support our own manufacturing and our own service workers. My school janitors used to be able to send their kids to college and afford a humble house. Retail store clerks (Married with Children). All that is now cheap labor --you can't expect to pay a mortgage and send kids to college/uni. You may be able to afford the cheap…

Why do Americans deserve jobs over foreigners who are willing to do them for less?

Every State has the obligation to look after its own citizens. Otherwise, we should organize into a state that will as no other state will look after us. Can I go to Brazil or Russia and say, hey Russia, hey Brazil, you know, I'm neither Russian nor Brazilian and I didn't contribute anything to your country nor my did my ancestors, but I'd like some of your pie.

Also, we can't cry "wages have been stagnant since the 70s" and also want to continue ex-patriating jobs and ability to command better pay.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#763

Post by NoGravitas »

lelanthran wrote: post #450
JohnWhigham wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already came and half went. Yup, and the worse part? Nothing changed. Trump didn't didn't do a single fucking thing of material value to ameliorate the positions of those who voted for him, or the middle class for that matter. And yet he's almost sure to win again in 2024. I think in an astonishingly short amount of time, people in the West forgot what revolution is.

> And yet he's almost sure to win again in 2024. Wait, what? He's running again?

He hasn't declared yet, but that's mainly only because being a declared candidate would put restrictions on how he can fundraise and what he can spend those funds on. He'll either run, or he'll anoint a successor and guarantee them a primary win.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#764

Post by WalterBright »

avgcorrection wrote: post #433
WalterBright wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are real wages flat? Good question. One answer is the government consumes ever more of the GDP. This is going to negatively impact real wages.

One answer? Or an answer that happened to fit the predetermined conclusion “government’s fault”? More of the share of productivity has gone to the owners and CEOs compared to the workers over the last 40 years. That’s the fact base that we are working from. Your supposed answer fits like a square in a round hole.

Where do you think all the trillions the government spends comes from?

You could give all the CEO pay to the workers and it won't make any difference, except you won't have a competent CEO anymore.

Any worker can become an owner by buying stock.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#765

Post by 8note »

xwolfi wrote: post #539
throwawaycities wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad this was the top comment. Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US. We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.

Wages ARE the cost of living. Who do you think make your food, your clothes and your light ? Are you sure it's not your own desires getting ahead of your wage ? I feel we can do things our grandparents couldnt even dream of (mines remember a time in his French village when horses would collect garbage, horses!) and that our parents suspected only. Hell the fact I can speak English and all it cost was a few taxe raise…

There are costs besides wages.

Eg. Profit, tax, and rent

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#766

Post by sokoloff »

what_is_orcas wrote: post #729
cherrycherry98 wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nothing but a platitude that attempts to shame businesses for not meeting some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be. There's no hard rules about what wages should or should not be, as with any other market price. A business will pay however much they need to attract and keep the labor they need. If no one wants to work for them they need to increase the wages they offer, which may in turn result in…

> some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be Yeah, I think it's a tragedy that we have constructed a society where everyone doesn't have basic needs met. I think it's a bigger tragedy that the alternative to the current system is considered idealistic . You don't have to agree with me, but if nobody talks about the ways that things could be, not the way that they are, then things will never change. I'm not s…

I don't have a strong position either way on exactly what the best minimum wage is, but I think it's clear that there are people who have skills and abilities in line with creating maybe $10, $12, or $15 per hour of value for a business. If you make it illegal for an employer to employ them at a rate where it's profitable, you're either forcing them to be out of work, to accept a quiltwork of hours ("we will only employ you for 2 hours at lunch and 3 hours of dinner rush"), to be in a precarious situation at work, or to find an employer willing to dress charity up in work clothes and lose money by employing them. I don't know how common it is, but I'm quite certain that I know people (in the sense that I can name them) who fall into that category.

I think substantial increases in the minimum wages force those people into a lottery where some are made better off and others are made worse off, but where the ones made worse off are made much worse off (out of work, higher barrier than today to finding work, everyone around them has more money and everything is more expensive than today).

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#767

Post by jdavis703 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #707
jdavis703 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The causes of decreasing life expectancy are fairly well understood and have little to do with the economy. We know many young people are dying early deaths of despair. We can make mental health easier to access (there’s a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy just to get pills for well understood mental illnesses). We can help folks avoid drug overdoses. One piece of low hanging fruit is to make opioids over the counter —…

Your point is very strange to me since every single one of the things you listed: deaths of dispair, drug abuse, even obesity are strongly correlated (inversely) with economic health.

The Bay Area is booming, and yet even here this is a problem. There were more drug overdoses than COVID-19 fatalities.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#768

Post by engineer_22 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #52
tjpnz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

The best thing you can do is organize your workplace. Job hopping allows businesses to eat the market at the edges and eventually squeeze those demands out of the labor pool.

Unions dont help new employees or high achievers. Unions help the ones with "the most time in".

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#769

Post by montblanc »

willcipriano wrote: post #443
montblanc wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving with a map was better than how it is now? We're 10 years from having the damn thing drive itself for us. I suck at directions, I can imagine without the internet I would just avoid drives to places I wasn't familiar with and miss out on a bunch of things.

Yeah, you have to use a map but your kid only has to interact with the school bullies at school and you aren't temped to reach out to your college fling behind your wife's back beacuse you never see her bikini photos. Things have gotten better, but in lots of ways they have gotten worse.

Have no argument with you there, I'm not saying it was all a win. Mental health problems seem to be increasing and the internet is part (but probably not all) of the problem.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#770

Post by redisman »

pydry wrote: post #525
ricardobayes wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about spoiled children, I see janitors walking around with 800 euro phones here. It's just a psychological way for low earning people to 'keep up with the Kardashians'. AS they can't buy cars or houses they buy gadgets.

I saw this in Myanmar. There were people living in mud huts but they had smartphones. I also had the same thought - it's the one luxury they can actually afford if they save up. I dont really get how people can look at that and think that these people are better off than a middle class 1950s US family. It's insane.

Phones are also not expensive unless you want them to be. You can get a great phone for any use for about $100 used. Streaming, playing Fortnite, productivity tasks. Any 5 year old phone can handle all that. It’s very cost efficient to get free entertainment, communication, portability
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