Where the Middle Class went.
Jan 1, 2014 11:18:05 #
GAClowers wrote:
The middle class you refer to is gone because the unions forced such high wages and benefits that the company's that once paid them all went abroad. Nice going.
The middle class you refer to is gone because the unions forced such high wages and benefits that the company's that once paid them all went abroad. Nice going.
Gnslngr wrote:
Wow. Let me guess: you skipped history in school and went straight into Propaganda of the Wealthy 101, right?
While GAClowers may have stated it simplistically, he is correct. We live in a world where we have global production but local wages and regulations. That means by default that the lowest net cost producer will get the work. And right now, that means that our 1950's-early 1980's middle class jobs are elsewhere.
Jan 1, 2014 11:23:46 #
Gnslngr wrote:
Wow. Let me guess: you skipped history in school and went straight into Propaganda of the Wealthy 101, right?
GA..its pretty obvious that good ole Gnsgr has never been a businessman ..never had a business with inventory, accounts receivable, payroll,insurance, taxes, rent, maintenance, shrinkage,breakage,unemployment, loan payments, advertising, employee bickering,shoplifters,utilities.accounts payable.etc., etc if he had he would know that what he is spouting is total horse-socialist-shit..yes it would just be peachy if everyone made 20 bucks or so/hour but this is the real world he just isn't here!!!! or then again, maybe he is a failed independent & resents those others who are successful the principals are the same whether its a small business or huge corporation it has to be profitable or sooner or later it will fail oops said that ugly word..PROFIT..
so..WOW back to him ..
Jan 1, 2014 11:25:01 #
deberry
Loc: Spartanburg, SC
If you were concerned with the $50,000 dollar price tag, then why didn't you just buy a union made Ford for $21,000. You got a deal with the BMW. If that plant was union....you would have paid much more.
Thank you BMW and Boeing for locating in South Carolina. We welcome with open arms.
We don't need union stooges in SC!
Thank you BMW and Boeing for locating in South Carolina. We welcome with open arms.
We don't need union stooges in SC!
Jan 1, 2014 11:32:38 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
[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]
Is this the entire article?
I agree with what it says, but...why publish it here in the face of union-hating conservatives?
I was a union man and benefited a great deal from unions. I have talked to lower paid workers who complained of their wages, but were hostile to unions--the only way they were ever going to improve their wages.
Go figure.
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]
Is this the entire article?
I agree with what it says, but...why publish it here in the face of union-hating conservatives?
I was a union man and benefited a great deal from unions. I have talked to lower paid workers who complained of their wages, but were hostile to unions--the only way they were ever going to improve their wages.
Go figure.
Jan 1, 2014 11:34:12 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
HEART wrote:
As the new year unfolds, trust you'll clearly see ... (show quote)
Don't understand where this post is going. I sense your hostility, but what is your point?
Jan 1, 2014 11:34:18 #
Twardlow wrote:
Is this the entire article?
I agree with what it says, but...why publish it here in the face of union-hating conservatives?
I was a union man and benefited a great deal from unions. I have talked to lower paid workers who complained of their wages, but were hostile to unions--the only way they were ever going to improve their wages.
Go figure.
I agree with what it says, but...why publish it here in the face of union-hating conservatives?
I was a union man and benefited a great deal from unions. I have talked to lower paid workers who complained of their wages, but were hostile to unions--the only way they were ever going to improve their wages.
Go figure.
:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
Jan 1, 2014 11:40:04 #
Jan 1, 2014 11:42:42 #
Schwabo
Loc: Florida
Blurryeyed wrote:
I don't have the patience to read all the nonsense... (show quote)
Brilliant and to the point. I have seen it, worked in Detroit for about 10 years.
Jan 1, 2014 11:45:56 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
Blurryeyed wrote:
Got an idea for you GNSLNGR.... Why don't you go out and buy for yourself an assload of KFC's, Wendy's, McDonalds, and Burger Kings and pay all your employees $20 to start...
Problem solved!
Problem solved!
Another glib retort from the conservative warrior and enforcer who is very impressed with what he thinks.
Of course, the retort isn't very good, is it?
Folks, the disappearing middle class is an important issue. People who make a million dollars a month plus stock options pay those who labor seven or eight dollars an hour.
Estimate a budget --housing, auto and insurance, health insurance, food, etc--for someone making $8/hr, $320/wk for 40 hours (if he can get them)--$16,000/annum.
You can't live on that, and forcing people to try is going to lead to disastrous results.
The solution to this is not found in oily, un-informed, and snarly quips.
This is a real problem which requires real thought, which should preclude it from being discussed on this forum and in the above manner.
Jan 1, 2014 11:51:17 #
Schwabo
Loc: Florida
blacks2 wrote:
That's funny, what you are saying is that the none union made BMW cars made in the Carolinas, should be cheaper? How come I had to pay more than $50,000 for it.
You did not have to pay, you wanted to pay that much.
Jan 1, 2014 11:58:22 #
Twardlow wrote:
Another glib retort from the conservative warrior ... (show quote)
LOL... You have got to be kidding me.. So lets just pay everyone $50/hr that solves everything does it not? So do you have any problems with that? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Jan 1, 2014 12:03:37 #
Gnslngr wrote:
The two posts above this are not worth responding to, but I will take this opportunity to note that with attitudes like those expressed above, it is no wonder the middle class is disappearing.
No, the middle class is disappearing and will continue to do so because that's part of the plan. The plan; more and more people beholden to the government for their very survival = more people who will continue to vote and support the liberal left ideology. Also, the middle class is taking it in the shorts in more ways than one. The rich, and the uber rich will always have wealth and will always be able to support their lifestyle regardless of social, and wealth redistribution programs of the government. Plus, it is that group, regardless of what you think of them, that is paying the lion's share of the taxes in this country. The poor, and very poor on the other hand, pay no taxes and their life is fully subsidized by the government by virtue of welfare, food stamps, free cell phones, and more! So, that leaves the middle class who, as a group, are paying taxes. However, there are many other regressive taxes that they are paying that are sorely eating into their disposable income. The rich could care less if fuel to heat their house(s) costs $3.75 gal, or because of various regulations, union demands, and minimum wage increases that a loaf of bread now costs $4.50 instead of the $2.00 it should cost...who is footing this burden every day of their lives, but the obvious middle class.
Jan 1, 2014 12:04:37 #
deberry wrote:
If you were concerned with the $50,000 dollar price tag, then why didn't you just buy a union made Ford for $21,000. You got a deal with the BMW. If that plant was union....you would have paid much more.
Thank you BMW and Boeing for locating in South Carolina. We welcome with open arms.
We don't need union stooges in SC!
Thank you BMW and Boeing for locating in South Carolina. We welcome with open arms.
We don't need union stooges in SC!
First, did I complain? So you are saying the union made Ford is cheaper as a none union made car? As for Boeing, I am very familiar with the situation, Boeing is loosing out to the European Airbus, since they have better engineering, the fully unionized Airbus workers make about 10% more as the Boeing worker and much better benefits, so it is not the union it is management. As for Boeing going to South Carolina, the present production there is under performing, the cause is there are not enough qualified workers.
Jan 1, 2014 12:14:07 #
Blurryeyed wrote:
I read the couple of paragraphs that I did not fin... (show quote)
Ever think of running for public office? If it were possible, you'd certainly have my vote!!
:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
Jan 1, 2014 12:18:42 #
Twardlow
Loc: Arkansas
Blurryeyed wrote:
LOL... You have got to be kidding me.. So lets just pay everyone $50/hr that solves everything does it not? So do you have any problems with that? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Snarly Quip...
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