And those posters are just absurd. "Your dues will pay for a six figure salary for the union president" rings hollow when your labor led to Bezos' net worth.
This illustrates an important point:
The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class.
https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
A different perspective is that two income households enabled housing costs to rise, rents to rise. And causes the cost of having a child increase due to childcare costs.
Overall maybe society is better having 1 parent (male or female) stay at home to raise the children. Or re think our North American living situation ideals of 1 family per house.
And it is indeed a positive socioeconomic shift. But it isn't the kind that the AEI means to imply: they're a neoconservative foundation that's attempting to post-hoc justify deregulation and de-clawing of federal agencies under false premises.
Hard to say that's an unalloyed positive.
And this chart is skewed by the underlying baby boomer generation which made up a bigger percent of the population (which is why you see the downward trend recently - they retired).
Interesting these charts start in 1980 as well. The average real hourly wage went down from 1972 to 1980, then began a recovery. So when you don't show things were better beforehand, it looks like a constant rise, which it was not.
And the entry of women in the workforce happened in the 1970’s. The start date of 1980 might be arbitrary, but you seem to ignore the trend being pointed out.
What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued to climb into the higher economic tiers over the last 40-50 years. In their place, hispanic households that have rapidly expanded in numbers in the US since the late 1970s are taking over an ever larger share of the middle class demographic.
When people claim the middle class has seen no economic gains in the last 40-50 years, they're either lying or painfully ignorant of what's actually occurring: a dramatic and rapid demographic shift. It takes a mere few minutes to dig up the relevant economic data and see how the middle class of ~1980 was nearly entirely white, and many of those formerly middle class whites have now shifted upward in the economic tiers (which you can spot today by looking at the median or average white household net worth vs the national median or average).
So what some of that middle class disappearing into the upper classes represents is an ongoing bifurcation by race among the classes. The US middle class will soon be overwhelmingly hispanic, in other words. That's tremendous progress in a sense, given the people it represents often came from third world countries with nothing to their names and speaking little to no English. Will they see continued progress or will their position ossify there? That's the next issue for the new, vast US hispanic middle class for the coming decades.
And what about black households over that time? They're being left behind by hispanic household net worth growth and are not seeing nearly the same progress in moving into the middle class. That is going to cause significant political ramifications as hispanic political power in the US continues to expand.
The typical drawing of the line in US discussions within the working class is; the middle class is a distinct economic class with distinct interests, but it is a much narrower and generally (though not entirely, because economic class and wealth are different though correlated things) richer group than the usual US understanding of “middle class”.
Source: lived it
The programmer has far more in common and can relate (both culturally and economically) far better to the C suite crowd than to the janitor or landscaper.
That’s a matter of perspective. Yes, both are degreed and educated.
But that’s where the sameness ends. One may think they’re like the other, but have you heard the term “coding monkey”?
Without fail and by necessity every single company has fallen victim to leadership who are less technical and more business minded.
Think of Boeing and Google as two recent examples. The better ones tend to keep a strong technical person as a sidekick, but everyone else is fighting for scraps.
The rarest and “best” individuals possess both technical savvy and ruthlessness.
Yes, and no.
Yes, in the sense that as an engineer you tend to have goals and work directed in the same overall direction as management. Optimize for max output for minimum cost. Your work product also typically is geared toward the eventual outcome of decreasing reliance on manual labor through automation.
No; in the sense that you don't get to set the incentives. You're optimizing toward what they will let you optimize toward which will often not actually be what you're told it is. The familiarity you develop as white collar can make this stand out in stark relief if you pay attention to it. Examine a call center implemented well vs. one implemented poorly. Completely different beasts. Or a warehouse. Same thing. You're a force multiplier for those there. You don't get to set the resources, you just have to do the best with what you've got.
Ultimately, it comes down, for me, what are you automating for? I wake up, and I try to deburden people first and foremost. I'm there to make sure people have the tools best fit to helping them do what they are there to do in the most ergonomic way possible.
Over time, I've skewed more blue collar in my sympathies. I don't like being perception managed, and management theory 101 is chock full of it. I work to get shit done, and help make it easier for others to do so. This creates... more quandaries than I like with traditional leadership types than I like at times, but it is what it is. I will say that if anyone has responsibility for the creation of inequity, at the end of the day, your capital allocating institutions are it.
If European companies had the same attitude towards unions as American ones, our unions would respond more aggressively too.
As someone who grew up lower-class and now makes six figures in tech, I don't think this is true.
There's a world of difference between a janitor and a white-collar programmer. A janitor worries paycheck-to-paycheck and has to consider every purchase, constantly lives in stress of a large unexpected expense, and so on, it's just vastly different.
A programmer, like a CEO, has none of those concerns. Who cares if the CEO has earned enough for a bigger mansion or a more prestigious car?
At some point (lower than most expect), money offers diminishing returns. A difference of +$100k/year will take care of most of Maslow's hierarchy and have you set for life unless you're financially irresponsible.
People in the middle-class want to believe it has more in common with the lower class.
Everyone thinks the person slightly richer then them is the one making money they don't need and lives the luxurious life, and everyone their income and lower are the ones with real struggles.
The middle-class (me included) might not like it, but they aren't the same as someone who struggles to make ends meet.
An uncomfortable truth is that many in the middle class are just a couple of shitty situations away from falling on seriously hard times, and even homelessness. Sometimes it's permanent. Illness, injury, divorce, bankruptcy or just bad luck can do it. Treatment for a heart attack can cost $800k to over $1 million, for example.
That's just not a worry or reality for the majority of the wealthy.
Lower, middle and upper middle classes are working class, as their livelihoods precariously depend on their labor and the continued whims of employers. The upper class has no need work, nor to worry about their livelihoods, as they live on appreciating assets. They can do what they want to, you have to spend your days working for them or your kids won't have health insurance.
Some of these places are doing outsourcing for US companies, where the developers do indeed get six figures, and that is why those companies are getting their contract deals.
holding this opinion means you've bought into the false narrative.
While true, that is not illustrated by the thing you are pointed to, which is the upper class using the working class against leadership within the working class.
The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is mostly not involved in this instance.
Everyone wants to believe they are marching upward, so if they or their children are trending up (no matter that they are probabilistically not likely to get near the very top), they still do not want to lower the ceiling.
I feel like this quote summarized a lot of tribal conflict, whether it be delineated along socioeconomic class or race or whatever:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
Everyone is happy when the tide is lifting all boats, but when some are rising more relative to others, implying some are moving down relative to others, there is inevitable chafing as resources are re-allocated.
It is pretty absurd to make the six figure claim when the boss is sitting on a 13 figure bag of money.
So the question is not “do unions help union members?” (they almost certainly do), it’s “do unions help workers like me?” - maybe the average worker is not confident that they can move to their next job if the industry is unionized?
$22/hr in 1995 was almost the median household income in the US. It's a lot of money for a fast food job.
And yes, the union reps got the best positions, the best hours and two salaries. The next best positions and best hours went to their friends.
The unions only stepped in for the most egregious cases but not in the way you might think: When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.
Outside of federal employment and outside of hollywood, where the strongest unions are anyway, the history of union activity in the US is quite unremarkable. It is most frequently anti-consumer and often works against the long term interests of the workers that it's supposed to represent.
Literally 99% of the time I hear somebody shouting support of unions here, they've either never been in one or they've always been the reps. Voices like mine, of those who've been in unions and got the shit end of the stick, get shouted down.
I would rather die than participate in a labor union again, for as long as I live.
That's the issue though. The inability to be treated as an individual. Time is the most precious commodity in life that we have -- the only thing that we can't get back. Nobody values your time as much as you will. I don't know about you, but being able to negotiate my own exchange of time/labor allows me to conserve as much of that resource as I can. I can negotiate for myself to the fullest. I have the option to walk away and negotiate elsewhere -- in most unionized positions in the US that is simply not possible.
Nobody negotiating for you is going to put the same value on your time that you do. It's not fair-trade.
If questions and disagreement make your comment 'not welcome', you are indeed in the wrong forum, but not for the reasons you think. ;)
I've experienced that. Maybe mods could limit each user's downvotes of each other user, especially across different discussions. Some ideas:
* Amy could downvote Bob's posts in discussion D1 an unlimited number of times, but only downvote Bob's posts in other discussions N times per hour.
* In any case, Amy cannot downvote Bob more than N times per minute.
* Nobody can downvote on another user's comment page (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wolverine876 ); they must open the discussion page for each comment. Upvotes would be still possible.
Do you have a source for this? It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.
It's also the kind of thing that every party involved would try very hard to keep on the down low. I can definitely see it not making the news since there's probably only about half a dozen people party to it and nobody is a celebrity or otherwise public personality.
Without evidence, assume it's invented anti-union bullshit.
Nobody's gonna leak that to the news because "trashy line cook does something trashy" isn't really a story worth getting a new job over. You just joke about it with your coworkers friends and move on.
I was there when it happened.
Now as far as the urinating in batter? Abhorrent, and disgusting. Totally worth a firing or severance with cause. Contract's a contract though. You catch that sort of thing, when you're doing something you've promised specifically not to do, you better bloody have an alternate way of acting on it.
Also, I'd need deets. I'd actually not be convinced of a breach if the work was being done somewhere with a security camera and somebody caught him doing so on unrelated footage. There's a difference between "here's your company issued camera to surveil yourself" and "WTF the security guy was reviewing some footage for something else, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"
It's called good faith. Not everyone has it, and it leads to some shitty behavior, but it is what it is. No reason to demonize a union over.
With union meetings, both parties chose to be there. With the work meetings, one side is compelled to be there as part if their work duties.
And yes, they pay them to be there, but that also implies that if they don't listen to what is said at those meetings they'll stop paying them. As most work meetings are about things employees have to do or they'll be fired.
The company meetings are compulsory. The union meetings aren't.
> Or do you think workers can’t be trusted to decide what’s in their best interests if exposed to both sides of an issue?
We like to believe ourselves to be discerning, rational beings, unswayed by propaganda but study after study and the existence of the entire advertising industry provides strong evidence this is not the case.
Would you still object if the union could hold mandatory meetings, if they were able to pony up the cash?
The labor board issue was with the voting procedure.
Makes you think.
The fact the most effective at doing so have a tendency to carve themselves out a niche doing so is more of an internal union matter.
Put differently, if a company loses money, is it always because the employees aren’t working hard enough?
Or a company could be ordering their employees to work in an unprofitable way, or the company could be spending the money on unnecessary non-labor expenditures...
After all, Amazon famously doesn't need the labor of their employees to sell the products and services that support their value :-)
The LTV doesn't guarantee a direct relationship between real labor and realized value (which is a combination of market and economic value): it describes a relationship between socially necessary labor and economic value.
I personally think that idea is incorrect (and labor theory of value has limited application), but I have been seeing arguments where everyone picks and chooses the idea when it is applied personally vs applied to someone else.
Yes, this is what happens when the labor is something that can effectively be independent, operate without massive capital investment, or be relocated easily. E.g. doctors, programmers, lawyers, plumbers.
But many kinds of labor are only useful in a coordinated context, requiring capital support and infrastructure, perhaps due to economies of scale, natural monopolies, regulatory restrictions, and the like. So that kind of worker must be embedded in a firm to be effective. Currently, policy is written to support corporate firms, and suppress cooperative organization and independent labor, so there's not really an option for most workers to depart. There's no such thing as an independent one-man freelance car manufacturer, for instance.
This is the distinction between the marxist concepts of petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat.
So if labor is just one of many inputs, it seems wrong to attribute all profit to labor as if it played the only part.
land itself is just about the only thing that is arguably not ultimately labor, but it seems that through the capitalist lens, land is only valuable due to location (proximity to labor?) or resources gained by application of labor to the land. you could make some arguments about conservation, but those tend to be either moral arguments about externalities which by definition are not systematically considered by capitalism, or arguments about natural environments as a resource, in which maintenance and access management become the value-creating labor.
The point is that being in a union will increase wages more than the cost of the union dues.
I think it's easy to forget just how uneven things have become since the middle of the previous century: someone making more money than 95 out of every 100 Alabama residents is doing quite well compared to most of the people in the state and is still nowhere near CEO-level compensation.
No question that it's better but it's going from average to “highest income person you know who isn't your doctor” rather than executive class income.
Still a ridiculous talking point.
Median Value of owner occupied housing units:
National[0] - $217,500
Bessemer, AL[1] - $86,500
Median household income:
National - $62,843
Bessemer, AL - $32,301
[0]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
If a large minority of it is derived from capital directly or the majority of it is derived from the worker’s labor applied to their own capital.
If it is derived from wage labor and is the worker’s entire income, its just relatively high-income working class, and isn’t “close to” middle class.
I think it should be some kind of law of the internet. Any discussion of socioeconomic topics ends up reinventing the classic class system on a long enough time scale.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2021/11/04/jeff-bez...
To the discussion of public shares: Yes he couldn’t cash out all 177B for cash, however a significantly large portion (i.e many billions) can be over a relatively short span of time, additionally shares still possess a barter-like function.
These are not small numbers and indeed such sums could be used to resolve some pretty significant issues (see Bill Gates who is in a similar public-share-wealthy position.)
As for taking part of their pay for union fees. This is like trying to save on toothpaste: The small cost of union fees will deliver benefits for these employees that would easily outstrip contribution costs. Such an argument would only be valid for employees that already have good pay and benefits/ where a union wouldn’t be able to deliver significant change.
Bezos cries, as I wave a tenner in his face and say, mockingly: "You don't have any money, its all in stocks! You're as poor as I am!"