Where the Middle Class went.
Jan 1, 2014 07:35:15 #
Blurryeyed wrote:
Just out of college I worked in restaurant managem... (show quote)
A long time ago somehow I heard the true cost of a drink at McDonald. They have sold them up to two dollars a drink. Their true cost is less than 1.5 cents . That is for the cup, syrup, soda water, straw and cover.
I do understand about over head and other related costs, and realize the importance of having standards for the brands. But when a company says you can only buy from us for all your products, that is not capitalism.
Are corporate jets a necessity or a luxury. McDonalds have them. Where does this money come from to support the costly behemoth. The money flow within the organization is huge, and all off a $5 Big Mac. Poor, poor corporations.
I am not a liberal. I am a realist.
Why didn't anyone in the higher echelon of corporations see by sending all jobs overseas they wouldn't have a consumer base to buy their products that they are making cheaper. They given it a unique name "Consumer Confidence". when people can't afford to purchase something they have lost consumer confidence. You can't buy luxury items on McDonald wages. Crap you can't even pay the rent.
Then again maybe they did and this is a big conspiracy.
Jan 1, 2014 07:43:16 #
Blurryeyed wrote:
Just out of college I worked in restaurant managem... (show quote)
happy new year, blurry's back. who are these rich liberals? the conservatives have all the money and want to keep it all.our wages are going down and prices are going up like duh. bush and all the republican talked of how we needed imigrents because they did work americans wouldn't do , but they always left out the last line." for starvation wages".
Jan 1, 2014 08:09:07 #
SteveR wrote:
I have to question whether $2.32 was enough for an apartment and a car in 1965. In 1967 or 68 I worked as a laborer for the City of Pontiac on a Park and Recreation crew. I was entry level and made $2.78/hr. I lived at home and borrowed my parents car. Believe me, I was not rolling in dough.
Yes, it was. At that time I made $1.50 and hour as a short order cook. I had a small apartment, a 1940 Plymouth and money in the bank. When I joined the USMC in 1963 my starting wage was $85 a month. We had to pay for our own uniforms out of that.
GNSLNGRs article makes a good argument for a higher minimum wage. However, Blurry makes a point also. The rich libs like Kerry's wife do not pay more than they need to in their businesses. The minimum wage is a mandated starting point. There is no law that says a company that feels it is too low cannot pay more as a starting wage.
The liberals like to scream for the protection of the low wage owner but, when it comes to hiring them, they are no different than any other business.
Jan 1, 2014 08:13:41 #
bull drink water wrote:
happy new year, blurry's back. who are these rich liberals? the conservatives have all the money and want to keep it all.our wages are going down and prices are going up like duh. bush and all the republican talked of how we needed imigrents because they did work americans wouldn't do , but they always left out the last line." for starvation wages".
If you look at the list of the richest Americans you will find that the majority are Democrats.
As far as immigrants doing work Americans won't; that is bull. Those jobs were done before we let this army of illegal immigrants invade our country. I have nothing against immigrants and their willingness to work at anything. I have a big problem with illegal immigrants.
Jan 1, 2014 08:41:53 #
Blurryeyed wrote:
Most employers are concerned with the welfare of their workforce
Wow. Most? You have a very Pollyannish view of businessmen. I guess you and I differ in that you see paying a living wage as some kind of burden that is too much for poor business to bear, and I see it as a basic necessity of business.
So long as you believe that the world is full of compassionate business owners (and not business owners concerned not with the welfare of their employees, the society and planet they live in and take so much from, but their bottom line and bottom line alone) then you and I will never see eye to eye.
But I won't see eye to eye with people that believe in Santa Claus, either.
Jan 1, 2014 08:45:03 #
[quote=Gnslngr]From Salon, by EEdward McClelland:
Let me tell you the story of an unskilled worker in America who lived better than most of todays college graduates. In the winter of 1965, Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the citys Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house. So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid $2.32 an hour enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.
Stanleys wages would be the equivalent of $17.17 today more than the Fight For 15 movement is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanleys job was more difficult, more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job. And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin good menu items, or keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter. Shovelers didnt need to speak English. In the early days of the steel industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from Poland or Bohemia.
Youd just sort of go on automatic pilot, shoveling ore balls all night, is how Stanley remembers the work.
Stanleys ore-shoveling gig was also considered an entry-level position. After a year in Vietnam, he came home to Chicago and enrolled in a pipefitters apprenticeship program at Wisconsin Steel.
So why did Rob Stanley, an unskilled high school graduate, live so much better than someone with similar qualifications could even dream of today? Because the workers at Interlake Steel were represented by the United Steelworkers of America, who demanded a decent salary for all jobs. The workers at KFC are represented by nobody but themselves, so they have to accept a wage a few cents above what Congress has decided is criminal.
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The argument given against paying a living wage in fast-food restaurants is that workers are paid according to their skills, and if the teenager cleaning the grease trap wants more money, he should get an education. Like most conservative arguments, it makes sense logically, but has little connection to economic reality. Workers are not simply paid according to their skills, theyre paid according to what they can negotiate with their employers. And in an era when only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, and when going on strike is almost certain to result in losing your job, low-skill workers have no negotiating power whatsoever.
Granted, Interlake Steel produced a much more useful, much more profitable product than KFC. Steel built the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Navy and the Saturn rocket program. KFC spares people the hassle of frying chicken at home. So lets look at how wages have declined from middle-class to minimum-wage in a single industry: meat processing.
Slaughterhouses insist they hire immigrants because the work is so unpleasant Americans wont do it. They hired European immigrants when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, and they hire Latin American immigrants today. But its a canard that Americans wont slaughter pigs, sheep and cows. How do we know this? Because immigration to the United States was more or less banned from 1925 to 1965, and millions of pigs, sheep and cows were slaughtered during those years. But they were slaughtered by American-born workers, earning middle-class wages. Mother Jones magazine explains what changed:
[S]tarting in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to revolutionize the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a new division of labor that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its business methods or go out of business. Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as much as 50 percent.
In Nick Redings book Methland, he interviews Roland Jarvis, who earned $18 an hour throwing hocks at Iowa Ham until 1992, when the slaughterhouse was bought out by a company that broke the union, cut wages to $6.20 an hour, and eliminated all benefits. Jarvis began taking meth so he could work extra shifts, then dealing the drug to make up for his lost income.
Would Americans kill pigs for $18 an hour? Hell, yes, they would. There would be a line from Sioux City to Dubuque for those jobs. But Big Meats defeat of Big Labor means it can now negotiate the lowest possible wages with the most desperate workers: usually Mexican immigrants who are willing to endure dangerous conditions for what would be considered a huge pile of money in their home country. Slaughterhouses hire immigrants not because theyre the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs, but because theyre the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs for low wages, in unsafe conditions.
In Rob Stanleys native South Side, there is more than one monument to the violence that resulted when the right of industry to bargain without the interference of labor unions was backed up by government force. In 1894, President Cleveland sent 2,500 troops to break a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Factory. On Memorial Day, 1937, Chicago police killed 10 striking workers outside the Republic Steel plant. The names of those dead are cast on a brass plaque bolted to a flagpole outside a defunct steelworkers hall. They were as polyglot as a platoon in a World War II movie: Anderson, Causey, Francisco, Popovich, Handley, Jones, Reed, Tagliori, Tisdale, Rothmund.
I first saw those sites on a labor history tour led by Oil Can Eddie Sadlowski, a retired labor leader who lost a race for the presidency of the USW in 1977. Sadlowski was teaching a group of ironworkers apprentices about their blue-collar heritage, and invited me to ride along on the bus. Oil Can Eddie had spent his life agitating for a labor movement that transcended class boundaries. He wanted laborers to think of themselves as poets, and poets to think of themselves as laborers.
How many Mozarts are working in steel mills? he once asked an interviewer.
In the parking lot of the ironworkers hall, I noticed that most of the apprentices were driving brand-new pickup trucks Dodge Rams with swollen hoods and quarter panels, a young mans first purchase with jackpot union wages. Meanwhile, I knew college graduates who earned $9.50 an hour as editorial assistants, or worked in bookstores for even less. None seemed interested in forming a union. So I asked Sadlowski why white-collar workers had never embraced the labor movement as avidly as blue-collar workers.
The white-collar worker has kind of a Bob Cratchit attitude, he explained. He feels hes a half-step below the boss. The boss says, Call me Harry. He feels hes made it. You go to a shoe store, they got six managers. They call everybody a manager, but they pay em all shit.
The greatest victory of the anti-labor movement has not been in busting industries traditionally organized by unions. Thats unnecessary. Those jobs have disappeared as a result of automation and outsourcing to foreign countries. In the U.S., steel industry employment has declined from 521,000 in 1974 to 150,000 today.
When I joined the company, it had 28,000 employees, said George Ranney, a former executive at Inland Steel, an Indiana mill that was bought out by ArcelorMittal in 1998. When I left, it had between 5,000 and 6,000. We were making the same amount of steel, 5 million tons a year, with higher quality and lower cost.
The anti-labor movements greatest victory has been in preventing the unionization of the jobs that have replaced well-paying industrial work. Stanley was lucky: After Wisconsin Steel shut down in 1980, a casualty of obsolescence, he bounced through ill-paying gigs hanging sheetrock and tending bar before finally catching on as a plumber for the federal government. The public sector is the last bastion of the labor movement, with a 35.9 percent unionization rate. But I know other laid-off steelworkers who ended their working lives delivering soda pop or working as security guards.
Where would a high-school graduate go today if he were told to pay rent or get out of the house? He might go to KFC, where the average team member earns $7.62 an hour 57 percent less, in real dollars, than Stanley earned for shoveling taconite. (No hourly worker at KFC earns as much as Stanley did.) The reasons given for the low pay that fast-food work is an entry-level job that was never meant to support a family or lead to a career are ex post facto justifications for the reality that KFC can get away with paying low wages because it doesnt fear unionization. Its a lot harder to organize workers spread across dozens of franchises than it is to organize a single steel mill.
As Oil Can Eddie pointed out, a class consciousness discourages office workers from unionizing. Theres a popular discounting company in Chicago called Groupon, where the account executives who are all expected to have bachelors degrees earn $37,800 a year. Adjusted for modern dollars, thats about Stanleys starting wage, without overtime. Because theyre educated and sit safely at desks, they dont think of themselves as blue-collar mopes who need to strike for higher pay and better working conditions.
The fact that many of todays college graduates have the same standard of living as the lowest-skilled workers of the 1960s proves that attitude is wrong, wrong, wrong. If we want to restore what weve traditionally thought of as the middle class, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as middle class, no matter how much we earn, or what we do to earn it. Working class should be defined by your relationship to your employer, not whether you perform physical labor. Unless you own the business, youre working class.
The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill, Oil Can Eddie once said.
They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the companys profits.[/quote]
Hmmmm..hog killers or oil-field?? from Louisiana to North Dakota rough-necks are making 18 buck/hour on up & jobs are going begging .Now entire crews aremade up of Mexicans & they are glad to make those wages..its HARD work..
strictly depends on the job..BUT go to any mall & ask clerks what they are making you wont find anyone who is making that kind of money because their employers simply cant afford it I ran a small drug store for too many years & would have loved to pay
Gnsngrs pie in the sky wages but if I had there would have been no more drug store thats just the way it is...
Let me tell you the story of an unskilled worker in America who lived better than most of todays college graduates. In the winter of 1965, Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the citys Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house. So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid $2.32 an hour enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.
Stanleys wages would be the equivalent of $17.17 today more than the Fight For 15 movement is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanleys job was more difficult, more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job. And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin good menu items, or keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter. Shovelers didnt need to speak English. In the early days of the steel industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from Poland or Bohemia.
Youd just sort of go on automatic pilot, shoveling ore balls all night, is how Stanley remembers the work.
Stanleys ore-shoveling gig was also considered an entry-level position. After a year in Vietnam, he came home to Chicago and enrolled in a pipefitters apprenticeship program at Wisconsin Steel.
So why did Rob Stanley, an unskilled high school graduate, live so much better than someone with similar qualifications could even dream of today? Because the workers at Interlake Steel were represented by the United Steelworkers of America, who demanded a decent salary for all jobs. The workers at KFC are represented by nobody but themselves, so they have to accept a wage a few cents above what Congress has decided is criminal.
ADVERTISEMENT
The argument given against paying a living wage in fast-food restaurants is that workers are paid according to their skills, and if the teenager cleaning the grease trap wants more money, he should get an education. Like most conservative arguments, it makes sense logically, but has little connection to economic reality. Workers are not simply paid according to their skills, theyre paid according to what they can negotiate with their employers. And in an era when only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union, and when going on strike is almost certain to result in losing your job, low-skill workers have no negotiating power whatsoever.
Granted, Interlake Steel produced a much more useful, much more profitable product than KFC. Steel built the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Navy and the Saturn rocket program. KFC spares people the hassle of frying chicken at home. So lets look at how wages have declined from middle-class to minimum-wage in a single industry: meat processing.
Slaughterhouses insist they hire immigrants because the work is so unpleasant Americans wont do it. They hired European immigrants when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, and they hire Latin American immigrants today. But its a canard that Americans wont slaughter pigs, sheep and cows. How do we know this? Because immigration to the United States was more or less banned from 1925 to 1965, and millions of pigs, sheep and cows were slaughtered during those years. But they were slaughtered by American-born workers, earning middle-class wages. Mother Jones magazine explains what changed:
[S]tarting in the early 1960s, a company called Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) began to revolutionize the industry, opening plants in rural areas far from union strongholds, recruiting immigrant workers from Mexico, introducing a new division of labor that eliminated the need for skilled butchers, and ruthlessly battling unions. By the late 1970s, meatpacking companies that wanted to compete with IBP had to adopt its business methods or go out of business. Wages in the meatpacking industry soon fell by as much as 50 percent.
In Nick Redings book Methland, he interviews Roland Jarvis, who earned $18 an hour throwing hocks at Iowa Ham until 1992, when the slaughterhouse was bought out by a company that broke the union, cut wages to $6.20 an hour, and eliminated all benefits. Jarvis began taking meth so he could work extra shifts, then dealing the drug to make up for his lost income.
Would Americans kill pigs for $18 an hour? Hell, yes, they would. There would be a line from Sioux City to Dubuque for those jobs. But Big Meats defeat of Big Labor means it can now negotiate the lowest possible wages with the most desperate workers: usually Mexican immigrants who are willing to endure dangerous conditions for what would be considered a huge pile of money in their home country. Slaughterhouses hire immigrants not because theyre the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs, but because theyre the only workers willing to kill and cut apart pigs for low wages, in unsafe conditions.
In Rob Stanleys native South Side, there is more than one monument to the violence that resulted when the right of industry to bargain without the interference of labor unions was backed up by government force. In 1894, President Cleveland sent 2,500 troops to break a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Factory. On Memorial Day, 1937, Chicago police killed 10 striking workers outside the Republic Steel plant. The names of those dead are cast on a brass plaque bolted to a flagpole outside a defunct steelworkers hall. They were as polyglot as a platoon in a World War II movie: Anderson, Causey, Francisco, Popovich, Handley, Jones, Reed, Tagliori, Tisdale, Rothmund.
I first saw those sites on a labor history tour led by Oil Can Eddie Sadlowski, a retired labor leader who lost a race for the presidency of the USW in 1977. Sadlowski was teaching a group of ironworkers apprentices about their blue-collar heritage, and invited me to ride along on the bus. Oil Can Eddie had spent his life agitating for a labor movement that transcended class boundaries. He wanted laborers to think of themselves as poets, and poets to think of themselves as laborers.
How many Mozarts are working in steel mills? he once asked an interviewer.
In the parking lot of the ironworkers hall, I noticed that most of the apprentices were driving brand-new pickup trucks Dodge Rams with swollen hoods and quarter panels, a young mans first purchase with jackpot union wages. Meanwhile, I knew college graduates who earned $9.50 an hour as editorial assistants, or worked in bookstores for even less. None seemed interested in forming a union. So I asked Sadlowski why white-collar workers had never embraced the labor movement as avidly as blue-collar workers.
The white-collar worker has kind of a Bob Cratchit attitude, he explained. He feels hes a half-step below the boss. The boss says, Call me Harry. He feels hes made it. You go to a shoe store, they got six managers. They call everybody a manager, but they pay em all shit.
The greatest victory of the anti-labor movement has not been in busting industries traditionally organized by unions. Thats unnecessary. Those jobs have disappeared as a result of automation and outsourcing to foreign countries. In the U.S., steel industry employment has declined from 521,000 in 1974 to 150,000 today.
When I joined the company, it had 28,000 employees, said George Ranney, a former executive at Inland Steel, an Indiana mill that was bought out by ArcelorMittal in 1998. When I left, it had between 5,000 and 6,000. We were making the same amount of steel, 5 million tons a year, with higher quality and lower cost.
The anti-labor movements greatest victory has been in preventing the unionization of the jobs that have replaced well-paying industrial work. Stanley was lucky: After Wisconsin Steel shut down in 1980, a casualty of obsolescence, he bounced through ill-paying gigs hanging sheetrock and tending bar before finally catching on as a plumber for the federal government. The public sector is the last bastion of the labor movement, with a 35.9 percent unionization rate. But I know other laid-off steelworkers who ended their working lives delivering soda pop or working as security guards.
Where would a high-school graduate go today if he were told to pay rent or get out of the house? He might go to KFC, where the average team member earns $7.62 an hour 57 percent less, in real dollars, than Stanley earned for shoveling taconite. (No hourly worker at KFC earns as much as Stanley did.) The reasons given for the low pay that fast-food work is an entry-level job that was never meant to support a family or lead to a career are ex post facto justifications for the reality that KFC can get away with paying low wages because it doesnt fear unionization. Its a lot harder to organize workers spread across dozens of franchises than it is to organize a single steel mill.
As Oil Can Eddie pointed out, a class consciousness discourages office workers from unionizing. Theres a popular discounting company in Chicago called Groupon, where the account executives who are all expected to have bachelors degrees earn $37,800 a year. Adjusted for modern dollars, thats about Stanleys starting wage, without overtime. Because theyre educated and sit safely at desks, they dont think of themselves as blue-collar mopes who need to strike for higher pay and better working conditions.
The fact that many of todays college graduates have the same standard of living as the lowest-skilled workers of the 1960s proves that attitude is wrong, wrong, wrong. If we want to restore what weve traditionally thought of as the middle class, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as middle class, no matter how much we earn, or what we do to earn it. Working class should be defined by your relationship to your employer, not whether you perform physical labor. Unless you own the business, youre working class.
The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill, Oil Can Eddie once said.
They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the companys profits.[/quote]
Hmmmm..hog killers or oil-field?? from Louisiana to North Dakota rough-necks are making 18 buck/hour on up & jobs are going begging .Now entire crews aremade up of Mexicans & they are glad to make those wages..its HARD work..
strictly depends on the job..BUT go to any mall & ask clerks what they are making you wont find anyone who is making that kind of money because their employers simply cant afford it I ran a small drug store for too many years & would have loved to pay
Gnsngrs pie in the sky wages but if I had there would have been no more drug store thats just the way it is...
Jan 1, 2014 08:48:52 #
GNSLNGR - This is a very great article and sums up part of the problem in our society where profit is worshipped more than God. But you will get little support from people who claim to be Christians but who see no problem with allowing Americans to die as a result of not having access to health care.
Jan 1, 2014 08:52:31 #
sb wrote:
GNSLNGR - This is a very great article and sums up part of the problem in our society where profit is worshipped more than God. But you will get little support from people who claim to be Christians but who see no problem with allowing Americans to die as a result of not having access to health care.
yup..profit is truly an evil thing!!! give me a physical break!!!
Jan 1, 2014 08:53:49 #
rayford2 wrote:
I worked for an aircraft company as an electrician in 1971 for $3.08/hr. It was a UAW union job. When the overpaid autoworkers in Michigan opted to strike for more money and benefits we were asked to "donate" to their strike fund.
Don't bring up unions to me. Their management is as corrupt as anything else.
Don't bring up unions to me. Their management is as corrupt as anything else.
You have hit one of the key reasons. Unions were good for working Americans until many of them became greedy & corrupt just like the companies their members worked for. 8-)
Jan 1, 2014 08:56:49 #
nascar27 wrote:
You have hit one of the key reasons. Unions were good for working Americans until many of them became greedy & corrupt just like the companies their members worked for. 8-)
I am so sick of this meme in today's society - the unions died because they were bad. Simply not true.
Unions died because they union busted - and big business had taken over a government that was supposed to stop that. Sure, there was corruption - there is in religious organizations - but that didn't bring them down. Big business did.
Jan 1, 2014 09:00:04 #
unions brought themselves down..theyare the reason some new cars cost 50K
greed & corruption...
Jan 1, 2014 09:03:36 #
Ka2azman wrote:
A long time ago somehow I heard the true cost of a... (show quote)
Cost of ingredients is not "true cost" .
Jan 1, 2014 09:05:04 #
wilpharm wrote:
unions brought themselves down..theyare the reason some new cars cost 50K
greed & corruption...
Please tell me - unions alone made cars cost 50K? Wow. All that profit went into the unions? Can you source that?
Jan 1, 2014 09:15:45 #
I didn't say ALL that profit went to the unions
.but a helluva lot of it did
YOU source it
.did you get that response fron OLE SARGE???
Jan 1, 2014 09:18:24 #
wilpharm wrote:
I didn't say ALL that profit went to the unions
.but a helluva lot of it did
YOU source it
.did you get that response fron OLE SARGE???
Well, Wilppy, you made the statement. So I guess it's just your best guess and you cannot point to any source?
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