There is hard work, and there is work with qualifications.
I've worked in kitchens, as a personal assistant to a disabled guy, and a secretary of an educational committee.
The kitchen work was way harder, and I could feel exhausted after the day, and dreading the morning when I woke up. But any able bodied person would become adept after a few months.
The personal assistant was mind numbingly boring, long hours, and you were essentially there to be on standby for when he needed something. Of a 14.5 hour workday, maybe 2-3 were active work. The rest standby.
The secretary job, is moderately active, I can plan my days/weeks mostly how I see fit. Attention to detail and qualifications are essential. And it's mostly about problem solving, research, and being able to assist.
The kitchen work is definitely the hardest out of all of these, but anyone could do it. The personal assistant was definitely the easiest, and anyone could do it.
The secretary job is in the middle. But to be able to do it, you need 3-5 years of studies in the field, and a lot of hands on guided training.
My dad built a 3 br house in 1988, paid for 2 kids to go to college, owned 5 cars, took us on vacation, retired making $27/hr and has a pension. His qualifications? He stocked shelves at Stop and Shop for 30 years. Copium is in demanding more of ourselves and less of the people who pay us.
Is it glorified? We have people will literally billions of dollars. That money came from somewhere. If wages kept up with production, 6 figures salaries would be the norm here.
Yea man, just because I own a couple $500 million dollar yachts and houses doesn't mean I have anywhere close to a billion dollars! What logic. Tell it to the Sackler family who was required to pay over $5 billion in restitution for the opioid epidemic, which was less than the interest on their equity. They somehow paid it over the years! Must've been in ghost money! Billionaires don't actually have the money they took from the surplus profits of labor! They just pay for things with billions with mythical leverage!
Oh, so having a billion dollars in assets means you don't have any money and you aren't a billionaire? Ok, right. We can measure wealth through assets, but let's keep acting like the income of these people wasn't high enough to afford billions in assets which is safer to have over cash. Let's pretend there isn't billions in the stock market so we can keep playing this dumb game you're trying to play to justify why people don't deserve a living wage while they make enough money that someone can have billions in assets! But it's not cash so workers don't deserve to live.
Your original argument was senseless, now you're just doubling down. Yea dude, billionaires don't have a vault on site with billions in it, we all know that, it doesn't mean they don't have enough in assets to leverage that money if they needed to, or didn't already leverage that money when they obtained those assets. You're arguing that my multiplication sign looks like a plus sign despite the total equalling the same.
27/hour in 1988 would be 71/hour today, so you probably need to be more specific. If it was 71/hour back then, that's still pretty great. And at 27/hour today, he would be making over the average income back then.
And oh boy, he was living the life.
The median size of a new home in 1980 was 1600square feet. So he was probably above that. (That said, I'm pretty sure you could build such a house relatively easy in for example north Dakota, assuming you maintain the standards for a house in 1988)
Only 17% of households owned 3 or more cars in 1990, so that's pretty significant.
Private college really has exploded in pricing, but state college remains pretty affordable, so if you make the median salary, sending two kids to college isn't particularly noteworthy.
And yes, there is higher demand on the low skilled labourers today, because there is more competition for them.
He retired in 2011 making $27 an hour. Stocking shelves with a pension. So you need to compare $27 an hour to retail workers 2011 in which he was still living the life because he was grandfathered into the benefits his union gave them before they broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Unionized retail in the '90s was making about $15 an hour in New England. By comparison when I applied for the same job in 2011 I was offered around $8 an hour with no pension and a pay cap at $13/hr no matter how long youve been there and if I wish to be in a management position I would have taken a 25% pay cut from previous generation managers and be required to have a college degree. Around that same time people were fighting for $15 an hour to be the minimum wage because it was clear that historically companies could have afforded it. Said they cut pension funds dumped everything into 401Ks and have been making bank ever since.
Median salary 2011 was 34.4k, he would be making 51,8k (assuming a 160 month twelve months a year).
Well, its a big complicated mess in general related to fewer positions with more people applying to them.
Only thing i would find weird is people advocating for 15/h in any major way in 2011, since the 7.25 was signed in 2009. The 15/h movement as far as I know is more recent, and several states have already adopted it.
That whole generation was living the high life. Not only were wages and benefits higher then to scale, many also already had substantial equity much earlier in life compared to today.
CoL was already through the roof compared to the lives of boomers back then, and corporations haven't done much to improve it even back to the 1990s standards since, as CoL continues to outpace wage growth which continues to remain stagnant, unlike year after year of record profits.
Ah there we go, i only remember them making the news around 2014-2015.
Well so so.
The median wealth and income has increased since then adjusted for inflation. And the median standard of living is better. But its a big country, with many pockets of highs and lows.
The median house price has actually not increased very much since 1963 (adjusted for inflation). But, in certain states it has, and in certain areas it definitely has. While in others it's the reverse.
You want to live out in the country, that would today be cheaper then in 1963, but in New York? Forget it.
This is a result of urbanisation, and it is a global phenomenon. (And houses today are better then back then)
And when you say substantial equity, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean share of equity, because that is true, but also a half truth.
12 years of the public knowing $15/hr would need to be livable and we still don't have it. Locale for real estate is surely important, but due to the lack of minimum wage growth, you also likely won't get a job in the area that will pay enough for you to afford a house.
Wage theft also still is the number 1 crime in the US, with little to no penalties. McDonald's franchise last year had 300 kids working for it, fined less than $700/kid. Ouch, that dinged their profits a little. If minimum wage was higher, it would have had more of an impact, but it's a joke now. Sackler family gets a fine that doesn't even exceed the interest on their equity for killing thousands and getting millions addicted to drugs. Banks get a bailout for knowingly giving out bad loans and leave the people who trusted them high and dry. Hell millennials were lucky to see Enron execs go to jail. It was probably the last time we will ever see accountability.
New build quality of houses is also tied to newer more efficient technologies to build them, with better methods while usually using inferior materials in comparison. So it's cheaper to build them but exponentially more expensive when supply is controlled by the wealthy.
In short, the US economy for most Americans, specifically working class/ millennials and younger is joining a monopoly game about 40 turns in and getting told, well if you work hard you'll at least get $25 for passing go, oh and there's no luxury tax.
That's why it's not the minimum wage in most states, and even places without a state minimum wage has an effectively higher minimum wage. But I'm sure you could build a house to 1980s standard in rural Arizona for example.
I think you're broadening the discussion right now to places I can't really follow. If you want to discuss for example the sacklers, I'm sure there are more qualified people.
Well so so, there is usually nothing wrong with the materials, and they hold higher standards then from the 1980s (not to mention higher environmental standards, electrical standards, and internet) what really drives the cost is the more advanced regulations compared to then.
Most millennials are, and will be doing just fine. Millennials trying to get into the pockets where housing costs have exploded will admittedly have a way harder time. And they're competing with Gen X for the top income brackets.
Speak for yourself. The majority of single millennials like myself are nowhere near buying houses unless their parents already helped them. In my case, the home owning millennials I know, one got married in the 2010s, early, and got housing cheap, another was given her husband's mom's summer home, my sister's husband was given a loan from his parents, also in the 2010 market. The mortgage for those houses is about $1100/month. My rent is $1923. I won't be able to look at a house for another 5 years to a decade making near 6 figures, and I just left a neighboring state where the low end of rent is $2200.
If minimum wage is so easily obtainable over $7.25 that everyone is doing it, why not just raise the minimum wage? Oh yes, because it would hurt profits and the stock market, and we all know the economy makes no sense with a pyramid scheme that has infinite growth YoY, yet somehow we all are fine with companies doing that with Wall Street. US economic profit policy is short term only, let the pigs have their fat, cut the rest.
Labor doesn't actually add value to work, it just gets things done. And it's also important to not confuse different scales of work. A psychiatrist that spends 12 years getting qualified to do their job works an extremely relaxed job sitting on a couch helping people out while their cat sits on their lap, making a ton more money than someone who works retail for 13 hours a day. Working harder doesn't magically sweat money into your job.
329
u/CappyJax 6d ago
I never believed it. The hardest working people are poor, and the most evil exploiters of them living a life of luxury are rich.