<story><title>If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour</title><url>https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/if-worker-pay-had-kept-pace-productivity-gains-1968-todays-minimum-wage-would-be-24</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martin_bech</author><text>Hi from Scandinavia, we dont have a monopoly on anything, and no actual minimum wage, yet people make about $20+ at the lowest paying jobs, enjoy 5 weeks paid vacation, free healthcare and cheap childcare..</text></item><item><author>rmason</author><text>All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly.  We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe.  It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries.&lt;p&gt;Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing.  Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since.  Sure there have been booms but the long term trend has been down.&lt;p&gt;The Japanese started importing cheap motorcycles to the West coast, then cheap cars.  We didn&amp;#x27;t see them in Michigan and if auto execs did they would have laughed.  The Big 3 saw VW and their Beetle as the big import threat.  Suddenly those Japanese cars became better in quality.  Then the Koreans went through the same cycle and Japan introduced luxury cars as well.&lt;p&gt;Because wages were much less in Asia even after accounting for shipping this exerted downward pressure on wages. Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour.</text></item><item><author>michaelbuckbee</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage&amp;#x2F;salary spectrum.&lt;p&gt;There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millennials-print&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millenn...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The portion relevant to this discussion:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.&lt;p&gt;The effect of all this “domestic outsourcing”—and, let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt’s papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they’re “re-classified” as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart “lumpers,” the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there’s enough work for them that day.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mortenjorck</author><text>The wild thing is that even if you were to apply Scandinavia&amp;#x27;s highest tax bracket of 57% to this (which someone in the lowest tax bracket would never pay), you&amp;#x27;d still come out above the US national minimum wage, out of which one is also expected to pay for healthcare and budget for unpaid time off.</text></comment>
<story><title>If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour</title><url>https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/if-worker-pay-had-kept-pace-productivity-gains-1968-todays-minimum-wage-would-be-24</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martin_bech</author><text>Hi from Scandinavia, we dont have a monopoly on anything, and no actual minimum wage, yet people make about $20+ at the lowest paying jobs, enjoy 5 weeks paid vacation, free healthcare and cheap childcare..</text></item><item><author>rmason</author><text>All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly.  We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe.  It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries.&lt;p&gt;Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing.  Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since.  Sure there have been booms but the long term trend has been down.&lt;p&gt;The Japanese started importing cheap motorcycles to the West coast, then cheap cars.  We didn&amp;#x27;t see them in Michigan and if auto execs did they would have laughed.  The Big 3 saw VW and their Beetle as the big import threat.  Suddenly those Japanese cars became better in quality.  Then the Koreans went through the same cycle and Japan introduced luxury cars as well.&lt;p&gt;Because wages were much less in Asia even after accounting for shipping this exerted downward pressure on wages. Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour.</text></item><item><author>michaelbuckbee</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage&amp;#x2F;salary spectrum.&lt;p&gt;There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millennials-print&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millenn...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The portion relevant to this discussion:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.&lt;p&gt;The effect of all this “domestic outsourcing”—and, let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt’s papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they’re “re-classified” as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart “lumpers,” the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there’s enough work for them that day.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>burntoutfire</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t you have industry-wide agreements, negotiated with unions, on minimum wages in these industries though?</text></comment>