John Deere Reports $6B Profit After Fighting Workers over Meager Wages | Hacker News Reader

John Deere Reports $6B Profit After Fighting Workers over Meager Wages

gizmodo.com

65 pointskungfudoi21 comments

The mindset of exploiting your customers by denying them the right to repair is the same for denying your workers any improvements in their earnings. Luckily workers are in short supply and can easily get other jobs in this super hot job market.

The union workers went on strike and won. John Deere also raised non union wages after agreeing to the new union contract.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/business/john-deere-uaw-strik...

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_John_Deere_strike

> John Deere also raised non union wages after agreeing to the new union contract.

Which goes against one of the common anti-union arguments....that it somehow hurts non-unionized labor.

Back in the 70's ~25% of the US workforce were unionized. Now it's well under 10%.

Take it from someone who wasted too much time from 2018-2020 trying to elect progressive candidates that support unions/universal health care/tuition free college.

The population at large does not care, will gladly believe misinformation given to them by mainstream sources, and will not even fathom changing until it gets unbearably painful. I suspect what will happen is that little by little each sub-class gets squeezed and broken. It is effectively happened with the low 20% now the middle class is at the point of breaking and the upper middle classes are next as we automate and outsource more while collar jobs.

All workers benefits increase with proximity to unions. Doesn't even have to be the same industry, but often it is. See: nurses and teacher unions.

And median wages are much higher than in the 1970s, and more women and minorities get jobs too.

Wages have only gone up appreciably for people well over the 50th percentile. For those at or under 50th percentile, they've stagnated.

https://media.cleveland.com/datacentral/photo/11557873-large...

Adjusted for inflation, median family income has risen by less than 10% in fifty years:

https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/mfi3.gif

More: http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1366245050708/salary-an...

Also, look at more metrics like rate of home ownership, general savings, retirement savings, etc.

Over the last fifty years, the top 1% wealthiest have pillaged the lower and middle class.

Those don't capture total remuneration, as captured by the BLS. Since 1970 employees have received more of their total remuneration outside of wages, and these benefits are usually fixed cost.

More relevant is total cost to employ, also tracked by BLS [1]. This accounts for legislative changes that add cost to employ, which lowers money available for wages. Such laws are generally beneficial to workers, and there have been gains here too

Also the top is not some fixed group. Over a career a significant percentage of people enter and leave.

The top % contains so many people it's simply bigotry to claim their gains were taken from others.

The correct answer is that low skill jobs haven't seen the productivity gains that skilled ones have since 1970. Computerization didn't help plumbers or cooks increase output as much as it helped architects, accountants, etc.

If anything, Baumols Cost Disease [2] is pulling up wages for lower incomes beyond their productivity warrants. Otherwise they'd have similar income to the same jobs in 1950.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Repair is nowhere near fundamental enough to be considered a right. There is a reason it's not in the Constitution. The other rights give people the ability to repair things.

Repair isn't a natural right, but it is a natural consequence of natural rights. IF you don't own your devices enough to swap components, flash their firmware, and root around their insides, your natural rights of ownership over your possessions are being trampled. Your freedom to tinker is your freedom to learn and think. Your freedom to break and reprogram is your freedom to protest. Your freedom to change and repurpose is freedom to be secure against search and seizure. These freedoms are being trampled by corporations that are certain that their right to profit overrides them - Don't let them.

No, "Repair" isn't a right in and of itself, but by the time you've lost the ability to, you've lost all of your other rights.

> No, "Repair" isn't a right in and of itself, but by the time you've lost the ability to, you've lost all of your other rights.

If you don't mind, I'll be stealing this the next time someone doesn't understand why I care so much about r2r.

Sure, but r2r activists are doing things such as requiring OEMs to sell spare parts and release proprietary documentation. That is where I draw the line, it is clearly government overreach.

> There is a reason it's not in the Constitution.

Indeed, DRM hadn't been invented yet. The simplicity of manufacturing technology available was what gave people the ability to repair things. And, don't forget the Ninth. The enumerated rights are not exhaustive.

2nd Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The keep there bundles the acts of manufacture, upkeep, and maintenance. Arms? What is a man's tool if not his weapon beared in the everyday struggle that is keeping civilization peacefully chugging along day by day.

You may disagree with the broad reading; but hell, if everyone else gets to split hairs to try to turn these damn things into an excuse to shackle people's liberties, might as well have an interpretation or two grant a few back.

A much more convincing argument would be that r2r falls under the umbrella of the right to private property in general. What you're saying would only apply to r2r for weapons.

Repair is a right, but the right to repair movement goes far beyond the right of an individual to do what they want with their property. R2r involves requiring businesses to sell spair parts and go out of their way to support people who want to repair things.

I was replying to the assertion that no Constitutionally granted right suggests a right to repair. The 2nd Amendment very clearly does in explicitly calling out a citizen's right to keep arms, which back then also meant in being secure I the capacity to keep those arms operating.

Nevermind the 10tg that calls out everything not explicitly listed, and sets up an implicit grant to the People of any Rights not specifically disincluded by State Constitutions. So the entire assertion of the non-existence of a right to repair is fundamentally ludicrous.

I don't get the tone of the article. The author comes off as a whiny, smarmy, entitled asshole. What's wrong with a 20% raise? Article seems to be written by a hard, hard, hardcore socialist. My math tells me that lowest payed employees make around $35,000 USD, with a raise getting them closer to $40,000 USD. Nothing to snarf at.

"The final union-approved contract, close to Deere’s preceding “best and final offer,” grants 10% pay raises in 2021 and 20% raises overall in four years. That sounds great, until you learn that a 10% increase could mean pay bumps of less than $4,000 for some longtime workers. "

You should not reach to defend these guys. I worked there as a contractor and witnessed rampant H1-B exploitation and dozens of other things that mortified me. After 6 months I took another job offer with 50% pay-cut and left with no regrets.

Ok. I am sorry they treated you that way. It must take a lot to take a 50% paycut.

It was not a good time - thank you. Things get better though!

A “a hard, hard, hardcore socialist” would be advocating that John Deere reorganize as a workers’ co-op. This article is certainly pro-living wage, even anti-corporate, but I wouldn’t call that hardcore by any means.

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