> "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.
This illustrates an important point:
The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class.
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.
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.