The new U.S. labor movement

@Profiler and now it's devolved into the classic right-wing war on education. Nobody learned any of this from a school, they learned it from experience and empathy with fellow workers I see getting crushed by the system time and time again.

Do you want replacement workers to get maimed by bricks thrown at their cars by striking workers like used to happen? Would that be more morally acceptable because that's how the older generation handled strikes?

 

Using very similar words to those you used . . .

A good starting point is cutting deeper into your profits to keep your people employed (can't imagine how true this rings for @Mopar Dude ).

Inflation has gone up over 4% this year, so Kellogg's worked to find ways to offset increases in all of their expenses. Their union's final refusal before striking was to a 3% raise, an effective cut into company profits. Kellog's union is not negotiating in good faith. They'd rather risk the company shipping the jobs abroad than lose the public relations war.​

For your information GW, I was offered a meager 2% raise this year, and took it. I didn't like the number, but understand why it is what it is. We all must tighten our belts . . . not just the employers. And contrary to popular opinion, it's not just as simple as expecting the employer to raise the price of the product even more. That's counterproductive, as it creates hyperinflation, bringing back the same insensitive workforce the following year for an even greater raise to deal with ever-higher price increases.

As in linking our current economic woes to policy decisions made last year, it's important to understand the causal relationship before deciding whether your demands are fair . . . not afterward.

 

No GW, that's not how the older generation handled strikes . . . it's how labor unions handled replacement workers.

 

Biden's own words . . .

"I have long opposed permanent striker replacements and I strongly support legislation that would ban that practice," Biden said, adding that it "undermines the critical role collective bargaining plays in providing workers a voice and the opportunity to improve their lives while contributing fully to their employer's success."​

The highlighted portion of that statement is absolutely laughable.

Unions do not . . . DO NOT provide workers the opportunity to contribute fully to their employer's success.

For every slacker member of a union, there is another productive member whose extra measure of innovation, of initiative, of effort goes to compensate for the slacker's lack thereof, and ends up not benefiting the employer.

In the absence of that parasitic relationship the employer could reward the productive employee, while shedding the slacker in order to find another productive worker.

Labor Unions preserve parasitism, and they need to be abolished.

 

That is exactly what has been forgotten about in this day and age. An employer should appreciate his help. Conversely, the help should appreciate his employer, but that end of this deal is no longer fashionable….. These are the same people that will hire a kid to cut the grass and not pay the kid until he has done the job to suit them. Yet we employers are lambasted for even remotely considering a similar level of commitment to the job that we are paying for…. I am so sick of this narrative and rapidly approaching the point that I want no more of it.

 

@GeneWright

Don't worry Gene, I haven't forgotten. I promised, and plan to respond soon . . .

 

Okay @GeneWright , your words in black and my replies in red (this could run a few posts because of length).

Quite a bit to address here. A few key things. As you stated, a lot to address here.

I’ll preface my response by stating I do not believe you’ll find this an agreeable read. You may even view it as adversarial.

1. This is NOT a movement of the "rebellious youth." Much of the demographic involved in this is millennials. So get used to it, it's coming from established adults. I don’t necessarily disagree. I’m not targeting any particular age group when it comes to my energy around surrendering one’s dependence on others and owning one’s outcome. In fact, there are plenty of millennials, X’ers and even Boomers that I would hesitate to call adults. Now, if one wishes to discuss a lack of wisdom, yes, I’ll place most of the emphasis on the youth, but irresponsibility is well-representred in all generations.

2. Why established adults? Because we're being put through an absolute meat grinder of a system. We apply for jobs on the internet and submit our life's record to a faceless corporation that doesn't even respond to reject you 9 times out of 10. I feel for you, as I went through the very same treatment when I got laid off 3 years ago. It took me a while to identify it as age-discrimination, as the result of settings in resume-screening programs employed by HR departments. Still, I had to accept it as a reality and work through it . . . not give up. Consider this . . . when I graduated with my Bachelor’s in structural engineering in 1983, we didn’t have the internet, typed our resume and cover letters on paper, made photocopies, and mailed them in envelopes with postage. Then, like today, the responses were neither numerous nor encouraging. Admittedly, 1983 was a particularly bad year for job hunting, and others likely had it easier before and after, but I tell you that because I can relate.

If you get a job after college, $15/hour entry level is remarkably common for those with a bachelor's, 60 hour weeks are expected too. I’m not surprised that many college graduates today are offered $15 hourly. The degree held is often completely unrelated to the job, thanks to many profiteering universities promoting completely useless degrees nowadays. In fact, $15 hourly doesn’t even seem fair to employers in my mind. It’s just being touted as such by those who want it to be.

No one should be able to walk in to an employer, not already knowing how to do any of the offered jobs at that location, and be able to earn $15 hourly. Training and / or skills are needed to be worth that sort of money. Just as employers should, new employees should feel compelled to invest in job-related skills and training. Receiving $15 hourly to start, with no skills or training leaves far less incentive to improve oneself than does starting at significantly less with the prospect of being increased to and beyond that level for having demonstrated that effort and ability.

People are already complaining about inflation, and wage pressures are a very significant contributor. Not all that long ago, I wrote that wage inflation would come home to roost, negating all of the near-term gains of the higher starting wage. We’re living that now, partially because of what it now costs to employ warm bodies that do little more than offset the employer’s heating expenses.

As for any supposed expectation that hourly workers routinely put in 60 hours weekly, I don’t see that anywhere. I do see occasional, seasonally-demanded increases in workload, and those employers must pay overtime to compensate for that extra time. Believe you me, they would rather have more employees working at a fair wage than have to dish out an extra 30 hours pay for those 20 hours of work. Any perception to the contrary demonstrates pure ignorance.

Working harder isn't rewarded and loyalty is discouraged because the only way to get ahead is to jump to competitors that buy your labor at higher wages and make this jump every 2-4 years. To many, jumping ship for an increase reveals a level of impatience that belies poor suitability for promotion to more responsibility in their organization. I’m not saying someone should necessarily pass up better money at another employer, but they may be sacrificing better long term prospects for short term gain. Everyone who observes the job-hopping pattern on a resume is thinking exactly the same thing . . . “another temporary hire who’s not worth investing anything extra in. Just a warm body until I find that really strong long term prospect”.

While on this subject, I’ll add my piece of mind about labor unions . . . Something slackers know, and do not say, is that they need the majority of the employees standing with them to get what they want from an employer . . . unlike the individual employee who knows the employer values him / her as an individual contributor.

Nobody can buy homes, start families, or establish themselves on these wages, and cost of living adjustments aren't keeping up with inflation. 52% of millennials were living with their parents after covid went into swing. Complete balderdash! Everyone, and I do mean everyone who sincerely wanted to work during COVID could have worked a job. Perhaps some training would be needed in a new industry, but work was available for those who wouldn’t go on the government dole! In exchange for generous federal benefits combined with those from the state, people dropped their work ethos like a hot rock and justified their move as being no different than what everyone else was doing. It was wrong, they knew it, and they did it anyway. If so many had not decided to turn their backs on work, if the fighting spirit for which this nation is historically known had shown up again in its time of need, we’d not be where we find ourselves today. It’s not like America to capitulate . . . we’ve lost our gumption!

 

(Continued)

We've had so little opportunity to build safety for ourselves that more of us had to live with our parents this year than young people did during the Great Depression.

Owning property is out of reach. Yeah, you’re right . . . but owning a home has always seemed out of reach . . . every generation faces the same uphill battle. When we got married (1993), the price of an average new home in our area was more than 3 times our combined annual income. Today it appears to still be about the same.

• The cost of real estate has been driven further out of reach by government funding of programs to extend home ownership to more renters. The problem is that as more government money is made available to the real estate market, it drives prices up, just like with education and medicine.
• It certainly hasn’t helped that excess immigration drove up demand for housing.
• With conventional investments fatiguing, and the increased demand for homes, investors have stormed the real estate market chasing better returns than they believe they can get elsewhere.

I didn’t become a homeowner until I was 39 years of age . . . I believe it will be 5+ years before you are the same age. What is it that makes you believe you should necessarily be a homeowner at your age?

My wife and I were patient, and very disciplined with our saving plan (a la Dave Ramsey’s system, without even knowing it existed . . . highly recommemded, by the way). When I was 33 years of age we picked out a nice piece of buildable land, and financed that for 5 years (the week of our wedding), intent on cash-flowing the payments. We dealt with the continued inconvenience and dissatisfaction of multiplex dwelling until we’d paid off the land and saved enough extra cash for 20% down to eliminate the PMI, designing the house along the way. Presto . . . at the end of those 5 years the banks were practically pushing loans on us! Believe me . . . it was a difficult time, working long hours, passing on things we wanted (and sometimes thought we needed), building our weekends around low cost activities, and yes, delaying having a child. Not only did we end up where we wanted, but we were also able to take our time to make sure the house was exactly what we wanted (Because our eyes were bigger than our stomachs,we went through the entire design / quote cycle twice before setting on what we would build), and not some cookie-cutter spec house.

It's too expensive to have children

· People want too much / too many things / costly things for their children these days. The tastiest foods, the most entertaining day care, the most popular birthday parties, the best electronic games / toys, the most stylish clothing, the nicest cars, the most revered diplomas, etc. You must pick and choose, and cannot provide it all, no matter how good you know it would make you feel. It’s not about you, it’s about them, and about raising them to be dependent upon themselves, and not upon others. Giving children all they want is bad for them. In fact, giving them a lot more than they need is not good. You grew up in a generation of parents who made themselves feel good by showing others how much they could give their children, and it’s paying terrible dividends. This is not a retrospective viewpoint. I knew it at the time because it was all around me, and I lamented it in real-time.

Sorry, but this system has absolutely failed us. My preceding comments clearly establish my disagreement. If you still feel our system has failed us, then I submit that the community with which you spend most of your time has worked hard to bake that into your persona, and apparently succeeded.

3. Something else I've noticed from this thread, the whole idea of you have to go fight for and earn everything in life. Nobody has a right to be alive innately. It's funny after kids are always taught to think about solving world hunger as aspirational. Solving problems is indeed aspirational. Do you not view the lack of self-sufficiency in adulthood as a problem?

You want to know why liberals have the moral high ground? It didn't help that you all elected Mr. Grab them by the p****, but you lost the high ground long before that. Don’t kid yourself Gene. Liberals don’t have the moral high ground . . . they just pretend to. The Democrat Party talks the good talk, labeling theirs as the agenda of choice, following through only with the lollipop at the candy counter, while getting the next person in line to pay for it. The worst of them waste energy, commit sexual harassment and abuse, cheat on their taxes, and defraud others just as much as the worst of conservatives do . . . they have the moral high ground in their imagination only.

You lost it when the idea of solving world hunger became fundamentally incongruent with your interpretation of capitalism. People must have the threat of starvation to be coerced into labor in the conservative interpretation. It's no wonder the right jumped so hard on sacrificing people to the economy in COVID, they've been doing that all along. While I am neither a staunch supporter nor foe of abortion rights, I find those words incredibly hypocritical.

I think you feel left out, not because modern life in particular is unfair but, because life is unfair in general. Life has been unfair since the dawn of mankind. Still, it certainly doesn’t help that our representatives sold out productive taxpayers to curry political favor with those who would benefit from their promises of more of our money. You grew up during that time, and don’t know that what you saw all around you were, in comparison to what American norms had been, aberrant excesses. Government’s acquiescence to demands for more free stuff has resulted in the belief of many that they are entitled to things that they are not. None of us are entitled to what we want. True, some of us have more than others, but did not acquire them the way the majority of the current electorate wants to.

In closing, I don’t mean to discourage you with this response. Like others here, I’d like to help you find sound footing for what choices you make going forward, whether those be which existing beliefs to question, what new ones to consider, what path to choose, or even that I am a completely off-my-rocker, supposedly Trump-brainwashed crackpot who has absolutely no business spewing his hurtful invective on the internet.

It's neither your right nor government's obligation to help make you a homeowner. If you’re really intent on sacrificing to live more fruitfully, I wholeheartedly recommend you at least give Dave Ramsay a chance ( https://www.ramseysolutions.com/tools?snid=free-tools ). I didn’t follow his plan, but it’s very similar to what we did when we were saving for our house. I think that if you do, down the road, you’ll pat yourself on the back.

 

@toughcoins just wanted to say I appreciate your thoughtful response and didn't find it adversarial. I am intending to respond soon! In the meantime, funny you should mention Dave Ramsey, both my parents and my wife's parents have used aspects of his method successfully and found them quite helpful. He keeps being recommended so he must be doing something right

 

Sorry this took so long, work has been busy lately coming up on the new year. Formatting this has been difficult, so I'll talk to a few key points. If I ignored a point, I generally agree with it. Let me know if there's anything I missed you want me to address specifically.

$15/hour isn't even a living wage. You really think it's fair to offer someone with a college degree less than they need to live? The skill any "useless" degree offers is general education and development. At the absolute minimum, they've shown an ability to succeed in a setting where they're treated as adults and complete work requiring skills well beyond that of a high school graduate.

Do you realise that "that sort of money" is only ~31K/year? Average monthly rent in the U.S. is ~$1100. Average student loan payments are $400/month. I'm just going to stop there because take home on $15/hour is just over $1000/month.

For that to "come home to roost" wouldn't we have needed actual higher starting wages? Doesn't it make more sense that inflation is being felt globally (it is) due to covid? It's not like wages have kept up with productivity, and only barely kept up with inflation through the years.

Absolutely not. My wife, straight out of college, went to an engineering/manufacturing company where you were expected to work at least 50 hours/week. I won't name it, but it was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees. Here's the trick. You salary people at over $17.10/hour (the federal overtime threshold). Once you're past that, you are no longer obligated to pay overtime.

I'll leave this with the notion that loyalty is no longer earned, it's bought.

What if they sincerely didn't want to die? On top of that, jobs were laying people off left and right. You really think a lack of "fighting spirit" is the reason 52% of people aged 25-40 had to live with their parents? I don't know what to say to that.

Oh this is objectively untrue.

 

That's a weak argument when we have more homes than households. If supply/demand economics worked here, houses would be virtually free. It's roughly ~120 million households and ~140 million housing units. Why isn't the supply fending off any demand?

Now this I can agree with to an extent. We can't afford to do the things previous generations could, and as a result there's an implicit shame.

sure do, we just seem to disagree on the root of that problem.

On the moral high ground -- I think we may have lost each other here, it didn't have anything to do with abortion. Do you think we should solve world hunger in such a way that everyone has food no matter their situation? Or is it necessary for people to starve to coerce them into working?
At the heart of it, I want to detangle work from basic survival. And yes, I do understand it has literally never been that way. However, as the richest nation in the world at the most technologically advanced time the Earth has ever seen, I think we can finally manage it. Besides, it's not like "work" in its modern iteration is anything like humans have done for 99% of our existence. The 9-5 is entirely unnatural if you want to go down that route.

It has far more to do with looking at other nations and seeing the government actually working in service to its people. "Government for the people, by the people" used to mean something. The notion of "free stuff" is entirely misleading as well. We pay for it! Nothing is free, it's our taxes that are paying for it.

I appreciate you taking the time to address those points, and of course no hard feelings either way. I enjoy talking through these things with those that have opposing viewpoints for a slim hope of changing minds, but more often so that I can learn and refine my own points for the future.

 

Capitulation to union demands? Okay, now it's time to boycott Kellogg's products!

 

Interesting. This is gaining momentum quickly.

 

Gene... This is interesting. Just for a juxtaposition, when I was young I was taught that Mayday was a communist holiday. Something to be reviled by. I find it interesting that it is embraced today in an entirely different way.

All these things that are being demanded. Well, I would have liked all those perks coming up myself. The fact that I earned them throughout my professional life makes them precious to me.... Do you ever read stories of average people that hit the lottery and find themselves broke and bankrupt in a few short years? There is a reason for that. When you don't put the sweat equity into earning something, then you have no true appreciation for it. That is simple human nature.... I often say it in jest, but I would have loved to be an NFL quarterback. Thing is, I don't have that gift so I pursued other avenues to enrich my life..... The more that we as a nation hand out for free, the less it is appreciated. Gene, it is human nature. This is a foolish and very shortsighted movement.

 

Yes, but it is not THE PEOPLE to which the poster refers.

THE PEOPLE are working. the slackers are not.

 

If nothing else, most important is universal healthcare, that has massive implications for labor.

The easiest to implement would probably be visible wages though. The idea being that job postings frequently bait-and-switch applicants by not being transparent about their salary range. We'll see how it works out, but NYC just passed a law requiring job listings to have salary ranges posted.

 

Well that just confuses me, only people that are working are actually capable of going on strike. We'll see in May if it pays off.

To be honest, I'm not confident at the moment anything will happen or a general strike will materialize. 4 months is a long time to organize though, so we'll see.

 

Are you saying that in this day and age a person will apply for a job not knowing if that job is worth 25k a year or 50k a year? Is that because people are expected to apply for jobs on the web? I think I can see that conundrum. As an employer, if I listed a job opening publicly via the web I wouldn't post a salary range on that posting. Once I narrowed the field down to a handful of likely candidates, I would certainly be up front about the salary range..... But am I understanding the issue correctly?