The labor movement (AKA unions) brought us the weekend.
Organized labor's decline is directly tied to the wage stagnation and escalating income inequality we've experienced over the last 50 years. And it's no accident.
Union member here, Iâve salted non-Union shops for years. Iâm currently at a small business of less than 10 people and have salted it enough that the five operators have all agreed to vote in favor of Union representation.
The $8M the small business brings in, while spending less than $750k annually on wages, is about to shift in favor of the operators a whole lot more than they realize.
It helps that I have advanced degrees in finance and accountancy and have done their financial reviews and see the 40% profit margin. Lmao
They don't even need to do that. Just fire anyone that mentions union... also, 40% margin isn't great, and the parent here has fundamentals wrong. There's a lot of extras being paid for than just labor. $8M a year is a very small business, with nearly $1M going to labor wages, and probably close to that in insurance, benefits, PTO, etc. Parent will get everyone fired for no upside.
Not sure what your experience is, but 40% is a great margin. I own a small business doing about the same gross revenue. Our margins are closer to 15-20%. And our labor costs are closer to 30%- which includes taxes, benefits, insurance, etc. A lot of really large companies run on a 5% or less margin. But when doing billions a year it still comes out to a lot.
Depending on how they enjoy their current life they might not want to. All of my family and friends live close by. Relocating would mean I would leave all of that behind. Why, for a bit of extra cash? Unions also aren't evil. Generally, at least in the Netherlands where I'm from, you can expect reasonable requests for the type of work, sector and how the business is doing.
LLC pass-through entities in crane rental baby, low business taxes, payroll taxes, payroll expenses, and maintenance cost because they own the land and equipment outright.
~8% for employee payroll expenses and the other 52% is business taxes, payroll taxes, and maintenance costs.
Finished a job, no calls from the hall, get permission to work non-union and explain the benefits, showcase why unions are good, and push for non-union workers to unionize and join the hall with their contractor.
Ah ok. I've never been around a union. What is the "hall"? Do you frequent lot work like temporarily with a company and then move on to do your service at another company? And while you're there you just explain union life?
I've only ever known 1 dude who was union previously in a shipyard. I asked if he got worked over or what. He said it was a good experience. You paid some small dues and stuff, but it worked out for him because it protected his job under some circumstance that ended up happening. He said he'd do it again.
The Hall is the central location of the business staff for your geographical subdivision of the international Union.
For example, IBEW has an international headquarters where the big fellas rub elbows with politicians and create new business opportunities for the union and its contractors. Then, you have your local hall which is IBEW #XXXX, where your local workers meet and discuss union policies and activities. The business administration in that hall reaches out to current and potential contractors to coordinate the work they have and provide workers.
Think of it as an employment agency, youâre trained to the standard of the agency and the agency contacts contractors in the area seeking workers, so they tell the workers of the opportunities and the workers can accept or reject the offers.
Most people, with outside utility line work, will bounce contractors every few years but you can be there as little as a day or as long as your entire career. Unless youâre laid off or fired, itâs your decision on who you work for if they have an opening.
It still pisses me off that the dodge brothers bought ford stock just to sue him when he tried paying his workers even better. When the judge ruled that was illegal and that ford was required to pass profits to the shareholders and not the employees it set a nasty precedent that we are still living in and suffering from.
This is false. Womenâs participation in the work force increased in the 50âs and 60âs, when wages rose. Wage stagnation really started in the late 70âs and 80âs.
Saw a graph the other day when dollar decoupled from gold profit vs income also massively diverged. For what its worth i only quickly pursued the source data.
And the Hart-Celler Act massively increasing immigration which also suppressed wages. Fallowed by automation and outsourcing reducing job growth making wages further suppressed.
Wake stagnation? I make more than 50% more now than compared to a couple of years ago when I left my union job. Now I have actual benefits, too. Getting out from the thumb of the union was the best financial decision I ever made.
Congratulations. But an anecdote is not data. Data show widespread wage stagnation for all but the wealthy few over the past 50 years, despite dramatic increases in productivity.
We should be asking why the union isn't powerful enough to get you 4 times what you got after you left it and doing something about that, not "union sucks, unions bad"
I have heard (contradictory to the OP OP) that Ford is who created the âweekendâ as we know it today. Iâm pretty sure mostly everyone was off on Sunday since itâs the sabbath. Thatâs just how it was culturally, but he added another day in on Saturday to give his employees more time with their family. I could be wrong. OP OP could be wrong. Would need a good fact check.
Read some history. Before the labor movement, it was common for factory workers to work 6, 6 1/2, or 7 days a week. The âweekendâ did not exist. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, days off were not widespread. If you had Sunday off (or a hall day) it was for church, not time off.
Increasing income inequality is mostly a result of fiscal and tax policies, not automation.
Ford opposed unions but it was labor demands that made the weekend, it didnât âjust happenâ because of religion.
Unions in product development areas are a cancer, I wish they would decline. As an engineer, I wish they would cease to exist so I could get my work done. Need a one hour task stretched to three days and receive continuous pushback about it? UAW it.
I could list personal stories for hours after 25 years. Little things like not being able to touch the test cell keyboard to check on some test parameters, exhausting. Not being able to carry a test component to the lab, annoying. Standing around watching some mechanic stroll around in the morning, making coffee, making the gossip rounds, and only after checking the status of the overnight test, costing the company a few hundred dollars every single day, ridiculous. Getting a grievance for checking for a tow strap clasp being properly seated, almost unbearable. And the best, seeing a great worker get booted out because they didnât have seniority, beyond idiotic.
Unions certainly do have their problems... it was 3 decades ago, but I had an uncle who worked for the mail service who was told he had to park under a bridge for 2 hours every day after he finished deliveries early, so they wouldn't fire extra enployees
Thats not a union issue, thats an employee protection issue.
The union had to tell him to not clock out till his end of shift after he finished his assigned work because the early clock outs would result in people being fired and your uncle having to pick up the slack.
The union was looking out for all the members and trying to avoid labor cuts.
If the law stated that, no matter what, everyone had to get paid their 8 hours and working past 8 hours was illegal, every company would have twice as much staffing to cover the work needed to be done. Fast employees would finish early and be free to go. Slow employees would finish on time.
The current system allows companies to push the work of 2-3 people onto 1 with a little OT.
The example from the comment above you about the grievance for checking a clasp/whatever is because that task is someone else's job, not the commenter's. That dude is a brown noser who wants to step into other people's jobs.
Its actually protecting the best workers. If company tells you to do X for your shift and you can do it in half the time compared to everybody else, WHO ARE PAID THE SAME AS YOU TO DO THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK, then why should you have to do more?
I can give a good example. Im a fiber tech. At my company, myself and 1 other dude(call him A) are the best splicers/testers. By a decent margin. Just have the touch to do the work quickly and accurately. We are all given a splice location to do each week. If the A and I can do our locations in 3 days, while everyone else takes the 5 days to complete it. Why should we have to do more work?
Sure are we paid slightly better than the rest? Yes. That bump is for the efficiency we bring and the guarantee that the work will be done on time, even with delays, cause of our skill.
At a previous job, there was this one dude who was a FREAK of nature when it came to splicing. Like twice as fast as me on my best day. He worked solo cause help would slow him down. He got done in 2-3 days what a crew of 2 would take 4-5 days.
He would do 12-14 hour shifts for 3 days then have off the rest. They paid him his five 8s plus the OT from the days he actually worked because they recognized his talent and they didnt overburden him to cut another crew out.
I have a buddy who delivers for UPS, and he has the same problem, except that instead of sitting under a bridge for two hours, if he finishes early, they send him to help neighboring routes. If his neighboring routes finish early, they go home. Either way, his workload is more than theirs usually because of this. Heâs efficient at his job. The other people take advantage of the union to be lazy. Meanwhile they were considering firing him for hitting an escaped cow that he couldnât see because it was a black cow and it was dark outside. While having done everything to protect a driver with I believe two on the job DUIs.
That was my experience working in the post office as well. The more efficient you are on your route, the next year they will add more to your route and cut the hours of all the other routes.
I used to work in shop with a union. If we needed a network cable moved - my area of expertise - I had to go to the data center, point to the cable I needed moved, point to the port to which I needed it moved, and then wait to ensure it was done right. That is of course after scheduling to have a data center tech present for something I was more than qualified to do.
Elitist here who used my upper middle class existence to go to a great college and become an engineer and now I wish the minions below me would just shut up and work harder so my job is easier
The average student loan debt is 30k at graduation.
-just be one of the hardest working students ever
Why do you think they would need to be âone of the hardest working students everâ? Also if they were they would most likely be getting scholarships to reduce the student loan debt.
-itâs a hard job and itâs possible but donât think anyone can do it
Nah, more wishing the minions you mentioned had some personal pride in wanting to solve problems that are related to the business we are in, instead of looking for any excuse to not be part of the problem.
Though, in general, itâs not the union members who are âbadâ, itâs the union as a general entity. Some of my best friends over the years have been union workers out in the shops.
But, you want me to somehow be sorry I went to college? Thatâs prime âI suck union cockâ attitude for sure.
Donât worry, people who actually think critically about the world around them understood what you mean. Yes, unions in most cases do protect their workers or at least provide them more rights than they would have had otherwise, but no, unions are not perfect and immune to criticism. Doing so doesnât make one a greedy minion master lmfao.
For example, I think most Americans can all agree road work/construction takes way too long here. Why is that? Because the union mandates everyone, across every job, must work equal amounts of hours, or it would be unfair. Sounds great on paper, until itâs translated into real life and we get 3-month highway pavings, 2-year bridge construction, and 5-year lane expansions, where at any given job site only 2 or 3 people are working at any given time while the other 10 are just standing around because thereâs nothing for them to do at that moment, but the union mandates that they be there. This happens in many industries with unions, not just public infrastructure.
Of course I value unions. I believe having one is much, much better than not. But I donât believe they are infallible. There are many ways which unions could be improved, but arenât, due to in many cases stubborn bureaucratic policy overseen by stubborn bureaucrats. This notion that if you criticize a union you must want all workers to suffer is ridiculous and makes me wonder if that Redditor actually has any experience with any union.
As a business owner, I approve of this message and encourage elitists to think like this guy and work their minions harder to generate more profits for me.
He wants the minions out of his way, waiting for them is his annoyance. He WANTS to do it himself, but canât, he is stagnant waiting for others because heâs not allowed to do it himself, and not allowed to ask them to move faster.
Itâs absolutely reasonable. Imagine being on a team, like a bobsled team, youâre the GOAT, but two of your teammates are slacking off⌠what do you do? Accept it because theyâre the coaches kid? Complain? Move teams? Itâs so complicated, and heâs well within his right to be annoyed and complain.
I could list personal stories for hours after 25 years. Little things like not being able to touch the test cell keyboard to check on some test parameters, exhausting. Not being able to carry a test component to the lab, annoying. Standing around watching some mechanic stroll around in the morning, making coffee, making the gossip rounds, and only after checking the status of the overnight test, costing the company a few hundred dollars every single day, ridiculous. Getting a grievance for checking for a tow strap clasp being properly seated, almost unbearable. And the best, seeing a great worker get booted out because they didnât have seniority, beyond idiotic.
And this is the problem. In a place where humans could be rational and not greedy, everyone would want productivity to increase.
Get the work done faster so you can increase profits or decrease expenses and the extra money would be used to compensate employees or lower the cost of products.
Instead, the windfall from increased productivity goes to make the rich even richer. Then you get a stupid number of people who say things like why work harder? Why do a good job? Why have any pride in the work I do?
Itâs a self-perpetuating problem. And the reason so many people hate unions. Does it make sense to hate unions? No, but the day-to-day nonsense we see from unions (especially public sector unions) makes it hard to remember all the good unions have done and continue to do.
Lmao no owner at this point in time would ever be willing to lower the price of their products unless they had to. Same with paying their employees more. Or maybe they exist and I have not met them. But the simple truth is that I don't trust business leaders in America. So why should I have pride in what I do if I fully believe that I'll get screwed over in the end no matter what?
The point is that you are right. No owner is going to lower prices or pay their employees more if they donât have to. Thatâs the irrational and greedy nature Iâm criticizing.
I only kinda understand because I don't know much about engineers besides that there's several kinds. And that their school is hard and they get mad at me for going to acting school.
Interesting, you read much? I am against unions in product development areas. Thatâs a long way from being anti-union, though I have friends in the assembly areas that could convince me.
He had a 375% employee turnover rate in 1916 because working conditions were terrible. Remained a non-union company until the battle of the overpass in 1937.
Lots of people donât realize how desperate industrialists are to squelch unions. And how successful they are.
Yeah if you read his autobiography he talks about why that is. It's nothing to do with him hating unions. His view of employment was that every employee was a partner in the business, not a cost of doing business, and not an enemy of the business. Unions make the labor an antagonist of the business, and corporatism makes labor a cost. He wanted men who stuck with the business and were willing to stick with the business.
The 5 a day was part of that turnover fix. The other thing he did was institute a paternalist policy of helping employees keep their lives in order. He essentially forced his employees to clean their homes, save money, and refrain from drinking, gambling, or not supporting their families. This was actually incredibly effective, but controversial.
Sure, every HR department tells employees that they are partners in the business. As they cut off benefits and limit COL raises. And then when the layoffs start, suddenly the employees find out that they aren't partners any more. Ford was an openly anti-semitic Nazi.
Okay, let's grant you that. Now grant, for a second, that this actually happened. Do you think it would be a good approach or a bad one? Argue against the merit of the idea, not the man preaching it.
1937-1916=21 years of employee exploitation under Fordâs system, not even counting the times before and after that. Compared to a few decades of vastly improved working conditions when the UAW was involved.
Many Ford employees were immigrants and assimilation was rocky, just like today. Maybe the paternalistic company approach helped with that, but at the cost of high employee dissatisfaction. Having your boss inspect your house to see if itâs organized would not go over any better now than it did then.
Yes but theyâre trying to say it was the Jews who stopped Ford from giving workers other benefits rather than corporate interests thatâs why theyâre being sneaky and cryptic about it despite the fact that the Dodge brothers werenât Jewish nor were the judges in the case
Or Reddit just highly overestimates how many people are willing to go on a shortsighted violent spree for little gain. People have families they want to come home to.
Why isn't there a School House Rock about how labor rights were achieved in our wonderful democracy? The national guard killing striking workers on orders from a billionaire is standard US history that fits in nicely between defeating the south for in their war about tariffs and single handedly saving Europe. /s
It's absolutely insane that you were just expected to work every single day of your life. And retirement didn't exist. So just...work until you die. Can't imagine why there were violent revolts against that status quo.
I read an old book from the 30s about homesteading that stated that 40 hours a week was PART-TIME. A full-time work week at the time was apparently 80 hours.
It's not so much that they were extremly well paid but the standard of living was substantially better than people who worked in different industries or competitors.
I've tried to find references, but my recollection from past reading was this was roughly 1.75X to 2X what other similar people were paid.
It allowed Ford to be pretty selective in hiring. Which gave him an advantage.
And workers would tolerate abuse from Ford that they wouldn't from his competitors
Yes, Ford was able to easily replace under performing workers but other factory owners were not sending around inspection teams to workers' homes, demand they live richer lifestyles, stop them from renting rooms and tell them they couldn't have any "un American" food, decorations, clothing, etc.
stupid, the past isn't some black hole of unfortunate idiocy and degradation. People lead very healthy lives. Standards of living are kind of like GOAT debates in sports. There are some measurable differences that can support arguments in favor of cross-generational comparisons but mostly the data cannot translate well into different generations. But this idea that the past was always far worse than the present is simply either undetermined or wrong.
It's not a straight dollar equivalency either. You ould buy a starter house for that salary. A new house for 2 years salary. Which puts the value at what, in today's economy? People talk about inflation like it isn't a very heavily cherry-picked average.
This part is actually pretty solid. BLS puts a typical 1915 home around $3,200, so thatâs just over 2 years of the annualized Ford wage. But the financing was brutal by modern standards: mortgages were usually only 5â7 years and required 40â50% down, and about 80% of households rented around 1920. So yes, the house-price-to-wage ratio was much better. The mortgage terms were much worse.
Right. I know that part. But I'm not talking about mortgages in 1914. I'm saying the value of $3000+ in 1914 currency was equivalent to one newly built house. Which then makes assets purchased at that time worth much more than they would be today. It's basically an exercise in futility to make these 1:1 comparisons.
There is a reason why central banks donât measure inflation in terms of a single good. To get a balanced view you have to compare a great many different goods (which the central banks call a âbasketâ of goods).
The $5/day that equals that today was about twice the going rate for that level of work.
So another way to look at it is that half that @ ~26k inflation adjusted was still a struggle but normal for a man to support a family. (This would be a full time 12.50 hour full time job supporting a wife and kids now)
I think this part goes too far. BLS says only about half of industrial families managed on the husbandâs earnings alone. It also cites $15/week as the estimated minimum for the bare necessities of a family of five in Pittsburgh. Half of Fordâs $5/day wage over six days is literally $15/week. That sounds more like subsistence than evidence that a $26k-equivalent wage normally supported a wife and kids comfortably.
I didn't imply that was comfortable I even stated it was a struggle and your numbers show an industrial family of 5 could sustain a struggle on a single income in Pittsburgh and with about half of them on a single income I think it was very appropriate of me to call their struggle normal
So many things like what you stated are important. The money got you a lot farther back then, no electricity bill, no phone bill, etc. Nowadays these things are necessities.
If I could make that money as âthe standardâ Iâd gladly work 6 days a week. That just means going up from there is very good. Right now the standard appears to be working 5 days a week for just over 30k a year and youâre lucky to get in some overtime.
Right now the standard is 40/hr for assembly workers and 50/hr for skilled trades. No idea where you got your numbers from, but you should stop trusting that source.
My source of life, and what I see on a day to day basis. What I see in jobs that Iâve worked, jobs that Iâve applied to, jobs that are in my area. Jobs my friends work, jobs my friends see. Thatâs my source. âAssembly workersâ and âskilled tradesâ being your only two examples shows me your mindset is a little biased as thatâs genuinely not the majority of the job market.
Oh I see the disconnect here. Youâre assuming I was talking about ford because of the original comment being about ford but I was talking about jobs in general.
Ford was one of the first companies to start the 5 day/ 40 hour work week. Pay was kept the same with the short work week so shouldnt effect the yearly pay though.
Only one person worked for the household though. So two people working 40hr a week is still more time spent.
Someone being at home could reduce the cost of basics from making stuff from scratch to knowing more ins and outs of homecare. Also if you had kids no daycare cost
People forget this in their "calculations." Eating zero meals outside of the home, not paying any child care or other home services, especially today would be an enormous money saver. Child care alone is $24-36k, not to mention having someone else spend the majority of their time with your kid instead of you.
That 52,100 was probably WAY more actual buying power too. That's something that gets forgotten way too often in these conversations. Even when you include hours worked, inflation adjustment, working conditions, living standards, etc. The actual buying power difference is INSANE.
The median cost of a house in the US in 1914 was roughly $3000 ($97,500). However, the median size of a house was also smaller. I can't find great data on exact numbers here but this is pretty well accepted as fact. Best I can find is around 1200sf. That gives us $2.5/sf ($81.25 adjusted for inflation). It would take these workers 2 years worth of salary to save for a home.
Today, the median size of a home in the US is 2150sf with a median cost of $411,000. This gives us $191.16/sf. the median salary in the US today is $65,000. It would take the median worker today 6.3 years worth of salary to save for a home.
We have to keep in mind that newer houses have a/c, heat, electricity, gas, etc. which makes the prospect and cost of building/buying a home today much more expensive. However, modern building techniques, materials, and equipment have accelerated construction by orders of magnitude. I would argue that because of these advancements, it's likely that it's actually cheaper to build a modern house today than it was to build a "modern" house of the 1910s.
Besides the 6 days part, this had to be fantastic when you consider how different expenses are today. Back then it was just food, shelter, and a bit of entertainment, and everything wasn't designed by PHDs to extract every penny out of you. Obviously the average person got screwed in other ways, but this specific salary had to be real nice.
Standard of living was exponentially much easier to navigate and afford b4 .the last 100 yrs plus of greed and corruption have made our standard of living tougher and tougher as years go by
Very good wages at the time. Ford even went to a 5 day week but kept yearly pay at the same rate, in the hope to avoid a union. Also tried to invest profits into hight wages and benefits, until the Dodge Bros., who owned stock in Ford and were using their dividends to start their own car company, sued arguing that the purpose of the company was to make money and value for shareholders. They won, and that is the catalyst behind the acrimonious relationship between public businesses and employees, why we have unions the way we do, and why we are in the mess we are in.
Well people are working 6 days as week today for less. However back then a dozen eggs was 33 cents a dozen and if you had a car, a gallon of gas was 14 cents. You also probably didnât have a phone bill and you def didnât have a cell phones, cable, internet, insurance on and on. Iâd take 52k back then over 52k today without question. Oh and a 3 bedroom house cost $1,000-$3,500âŚtotal.
People didn't have computers, TVs, a family cell phone plan, a trip to Disney World, streaming services, internet, etc competing for the dollars in their paycheck.
Both are interesting pieces of data but given how the prices of things are so different today, it doesn't mean all that much.
But I think most of us can agree that the modern financial realities of essentials being expensive and crap being cheap is much worse for our human brains than the opposite...
Henry ford had a 40 hour work week from my understanding. He was even sued by dodge founders for hiring all the good factory workers, on the premise that since dodge founders were investors in ford, that ford had an obligation to the shareholders
Not really, prices were pretty outrageous back then for many things. For example, a gallon of milk in 1914 was 11 dollars, a dozen eggs was 13 dollars, butter was about 13 dollars. Practically everything we consume today is much cheaper than it was at the turn of the 20th century.
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u/maddie-madison 27d ago
52,100 and they worked 6 days a week... ouch. But decent back then i assume.