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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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

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