> Real wages and real purchasing power must keep going up.
Yes and yes - but how? The interest rate is only monetary policy, not fiscal. Traditionally, low rates were expansionary. Maybe we need lower rates?
Yes and yes - but how? The interest rate is only monetary policy, not fiscal. Traditionally, low rates were expansionary. Maybe we need lower rates?
That's not true at all. There is no dataset that supports this position. And we have data against it. Mainly every time we've forcefully increased the minimum wage.
Maybe if there was a way to band together and seek a unified compensation policy on a company/industry basis.
I don't think the problem is that people haven't considered unionizing, nor because of constraints put on union due collection.
Productivity up, population up. That will have an impact on wages for sure.
Outside of technology workers are still looked at as replaceable and expendable. I’m not sure what is going to break the ceiling in this climate.
I know HN users tend to have 'high horse' syndrome, but this is incredibly naiive. There are plenty of skilled jobs where workers are not easily replaced/expended. Physicians, RNs, higher education teachers/professors, many jobs related to architecture design, construction, etc.
> I’m not sure what is going to break the ceiling in this climate.
There's been recent success in the old school technique of 'striking'.
My past experience is from working in farming, then manual labor, then skilled labor, then engineering, then hospitality, then technology. In none of the fields other than technology did I feel that myself or my colleagues were viewed as anything other than a source of costs by management. Even when our contributions were praised by customers as the reason why they continued their business with the company, we were barely rewarded with more than a pat on the back. Perfection was assumed as the standard, however it was not rewarded as such.
It was not until I taught myself to program, with the help of a great number of people, and jumped over to working in the tech industry that my managers looked at me as a source of value in the company, as the reason why the company made money, and as less than disposable.
That is not to say that my experience is everyone's experience, and I didn't mean to imply such an extreme position as "only in technology can you be valued as a worker". If you work in healthcare, or law, or the sciences, or manufacturing, or construction, or education and your organization values you then I applaud you and efforts.
With that said I still feel that it's a tough road ahead to get the compensation you deserve. Even when the economy is strong, it is hard to get a raise, and people have been waiting on those raises for a long time. I sure hope they can get them.
All of those skilled jobs you speak of are full of people who don't understand what good a union does. Literally complaining that a union is worthless while reaping the benefits and job stability that only a union can provide. I don't know if it's a matter of education or if people are really just going to have to experience for themselves how horrible the working world is/will become when there are no unions to protect them...
This is a ridiculously juvenile view of how the world works. You need not look further than insert fortune 500 company who lays off highly paid sr. technical staff and replace them with jr. Claiming they provide no value to the company is asinine.
That might have worked 15 years ago, but I think it's going to take unions and government, working along near-parallel vectors, to bring the economy back into a sustainable power-balance among its various institutions.
Corporate management and moneyed elites have erected a nice little fortress full of positive feedback loops for themselves, and have been steadily plugging the holes in it for 40 solid years now. They're working on mindless, robotic slave labor in an effort to defeat the labor unions forever, but they're also still relatively open to attack by government, as buying it off with corruption has so far been sufficient to keep it at bay.
There's no more effective way for labor to throw its weight around than collectivizing in bite-sized (i.e. company-sized) bargaining units; history tells us this is so and evidence gives us no reason to think it won't work again.
They're not perfect (no democratic organization is), but the only thing more corrupt than a union is management.
Taft-Hartley banned wildcat strikes, but I think if we saw more of those (despite their present-day illegality) we'd see a ton more actions favorable to workers taking place.
Of course, we should roll back the labor-hostile parts of Taft-Hartley (like the bans on wildcat strikes and the restrictions on speech surrounding union organizing), but that'll take more time.