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> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices for many of the things you purchase.

I'm advocating for higher wages for truck drivers, and lower wages for trucking company executives.

Will it come out in the wash? I don't know. But it certainly means that the net increase in shipping costs is smaller than if you focus only on the increased driver pay.

Basic numeracy: looking at top transportation CEO pay, it is coming out at $5-30M. Grabbing the first company on this list, they have 12k employees. If we completely spread out the CEO comp (which is mostly equity) everyone makes maybe a couple grand more a year. That is going to affect employee pay by less than inflation.

https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-in...

A couple grand a year for 12k people isn't nothing. If you expand it out to more of the C-suite, it gets even higher.

Just looking at the salary is incredibly naïve; these CEOs and other higherups sit on immense piles of stock options purchased with the company's profits.

And way too often weird """loans""" on the companies books made to the execs, with no expectation of repayment.

I have no issue with higher prices to provide workers a livable wage. I have an issue with record profits and profit margins in a period of time that is also seeing record prices for consumer goods and services. The dishonesty from the profit makers is astounding

I've thought about his often, too, but I am of the opinion we can all thrive together or die together. As much as I would love to have 20-million in the bank, live off interest, and have the working class cater to my every need, it's an absurd dream.

I want the bottom of the barrel to lead a dignified life if they're willing to work a full-time job. If the upper, upper-middle, and even middle class have to readjust, then so be it. The working poor need to stop subsidizing others.

It IS a difficult problem, but if the answer from anyone in leadership is others should work full-time and not be able to go to the doctor when needed or buy a crappy condo or worry about food...then those people need to step aside from their positions and allow someone else to at least try (and when I say leadership I'm talking about those that allocate capital and pass laws/policies).

I am a big believer that work for work's sake has no virtue, it is better to die on the side of the road than work for peanuts (it's anti-labor and makes the world worse).

So next time you are purchasing something, do you promise not to look for the cheapest option, but the one that pays a good wage to the supply chain? As long as people make purchase decisions based on price, they will be part of the problem.

"Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent."

Oh - stumped. Were you in the debating club?

No, I don't. It is about bottom-up accountability. Expecting top-down accountability is stupid and a recipe for an unhappy life.

We need to teach people to stand-up for themselves, not expect those above them to eventually accommodate them.

Well, when they stand-up for themselves, cheaper labour (whether it's non-unionized / illegal immigrant / offshore ; you name it) comes and provides an alternative and people price hunting do actually enable them. In a free market the price signal will sort the bottom out. The only solution is top-down accountability, government enforcing rules, tariffs etc. and consumers voting with their wallet (kind of happening with ESG stuff now). But as people try to find the cheapest of everything, amazon and the like who works people to death and prevents unionization and what-not will prevail.

I upvoted you, because you don't deserve any downvotes for your comment.

However: If workers are paid more, they also have more money to spend to purchase products and services. This is good for the vast majority, including almost all businesses. It is good for the workers who get a better material standard and quality of life.

There has been a great increase in worker productivity in the last decades, why is that never accounted for? Almost everybody I know who actually work, produce the same as it would take 5-10 people to produce just 20 years ago. That's probably true for truckers as well, with modern logistic systems, huge lorries and better highways.

Higher wages and higher prices are probably bad for the huge amount of the population who don't work and never has worked. But with higher salaries, work will look more attractive to them as well.

I downvoted you just because you used upvotes for exactly the wrong reason, justifying it by encouraging others to use downvotes for exactly the wrong reason.

i haven't encouraged anybody to use downvotes.

> Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking? If so, you're correct.

Can you provide a source for that statement? There are certainly some kind of goods for which your statement is true, but as a general statement I'd say it is just plain wrong.

probably a bubble thing as most produce of the hn crowd does indeed not need any trucking

Well, "impacts most prices, the most" is a kinda complicated statement to parse, so I don't know precisely what the original poster meant.

But almost all products on store shelves got there by truck. As do almost all the products in an Amazon warehouse. And almost all the inputs a factory uses will arrive by truck. Even the gas in the gas station arrives by truck.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to things like video games, netflix subscriptions, gym memberships or electricity. And obviously, trucking costs are lower per-item for items you can fit more of in a truck, and lower as a % of item cost for higher cost items. You'll notice the cost of trucking a lot more on a bag of onions than you will on an nvidia 4090.

If you count a weekly food shop of 50 items as 200 prices per month and a single netflix bill as 1 price per month, "impacts most prices, the most" could be true.

Politicians are generally very wary about things like gas tax increases because they don't just increase the amount households are paying at the gas station, they also increase the cost of the weekly grocery shop and many other things too.

Even for relatively cheap and bulky food like potato or onions I’m quite certain that trucking is only a small part of the price in the store.

To everyone advocating for lower C-Suite pay, let me explain how it works:

1. Trucking company ABC needs a new CFO or CEO.

2. Mrs. Smith is a Wharton grad qualified for the role, and Mr. Smith is a Michigan State grad also qualified. Mrs. Smith is 3x the compensation expense to hire as Mr. Smith.

3. Mrs. Smith has a network of bankers, industry contacts and Wall St. analysts she's cultivated over years. Mr. Smith has no such network or specific industry experience.

Who would you hire?

Who would you want hired if you were an investor in the company? If your existing 401k was invested in this company?

As previously stated - the medium/long term considerations are entirely lost on the "pay 'em less" crowd. Its feels great to say and that's about it.

To everyone advocating for lower corporate profits:

1. Good luck attracting investment capital.

2. Have fun competing against companies not similarly constrained.

3. Enjoy down cycles where the additional retained earnings would've helped you stay in the fight.

The lack of real-world experience and considerations to my original comment is disheartening.

It's much simpler than that. Marc sits on Board A, which has CEO Daren, who sits on the Board for the company that Marc is CEO for. Marc votes to increase Daren's comp, who will then go on to vote to increase Marc's comp.

CEO pay is completely divorced from reality, and from their performance.

My math is that for something worthless like bananas, the fuel I buy to bring them a couple miles from the store costs more than the fuel to ship them to the store. Of course they truck rather efficiently, but they also sell for ~nothing.

How does it work then that the trucking cost is the primary component of the price? Or do you mean something different by "Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking? If so, you're correct."?

> Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking?

How much of that is the cost of the driver though?

Around 70%, if it's a owner-driver (so includes fuel and maintenance) in UK.

> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices

I'm constantly amazed at how commonly people have been brainwashed to miss the other perfectly valid option.

Lower profits.

If you look at the margins on logistics and grocery stores (at least over here in Europe) you'll find the profit margins are quite poor, around 10% or less.

Even if all profits were directed to reduce prices or raise wages it wouldn't have that big of an effect.

Reduce profit of the oil company, reduce profit of the company that made and sell the truck, reduce profit of the tire company, reduce profit of the private company that charges tolls on the roads, etc. etc.

The market is due for a correction after decades of outsourcing and undercut goods. Convenience came on really fast and now our expectations for the true costs of things have been completely skewed. I'm fine with certain goods getting more expensive, but I fear without the proper treatment the govt will continue to let food and medicine compete in the same markets as luxury and convenience goods (consumer electronics, etc.).

Many shipping (as in, the ships on the seas) use slave labor. If the cost of transporting goods raises far enough, including coast-to-coast domestic shipping, that will provide an economic incentive to produce things domestically.

> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices for many of the things you purchase.

I don't think this is necessarily so. How do you know that prices can be raised? What if the market won't bear those price increases? If the price of a product could be raised profitably today, why wouldn't the the company do so, regardless of their labor costs?

If McDonalds could sell 10 million burgers for $2 each and 8 million burgers for $3 each, they will raise their prices to $3/burger, regardless of what they pay their employees.

How can "public policy changes toward immigration" replace wage hikes? Won't that just result in a large population of untermenschen suffering substandard living conditions? Essentially a slave class?

> It doesn't end well for the United States unless public policy changes toward immigration and public aid competition to gainful employment.

You mean COMMUNISM!

It's communism unless it's for the benefit of the military industrial complex, then it's patriotism.

Three of the biggest per capital military spenders are communist countries, and its all sold as 'patriotic duty'. Capitalism is a hope fraud from some, but Communism is hope fraud for all but a few.