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So he paid them enough to buy his cars back from him that they built AND he paid them enough to buy food, clothing, and shelter?Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
How did Ford get rich doing that? I am no mathamagician but something ain't adding up!
If it worked for Ol' Hank Ford then it can work for America!Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Give up on blocking the new minimum wage , that is a done deal. Three quarters of the population are in favor of it. Adjusted for inflation, minimum wage peaked in 1968. Given how well off we are compared to the rest of the worlds population, you'd expect a better minimum wage. So the proof already exists that stifling the minimum wage doesn't do a thing to help the economy. We've been doing it since 1968. How has it worked out?
If we raise the minimum wage then all the corporations will just raise their prices. Duh.Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
But if we lower minimum wage then corporations will lower their prices. They have to!
And if we lower the minimum wage to $1 an hour we'll pay almost nothing for everything!
Some jobs just aren't worth $15/hour.
https://youareobsolete.files.wordpre...1/auto_kfc.png
When I was a kid my feet would get cold during the winter because my blanket was too short.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
One year I decided to cut the top 12 inches of blanket from the top and sew it onto the bottom of my blanket.
When I got in bed and covered up I noticed that my feet were still uncovered and cold!
How could this be?
Correction: Some people's lives are aren't worth $15/hour, right!?Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Not what I said, now is it?Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
No, not really. But were you implying that?Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
My words were pretty simple and clear. Only one word even had two syllables, and that one was a "contraction".Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
Some jobs don't generate $15 of value/utility. Such as punching your order into the order screen at KFC. So if you require $15/hour for that task, the task is quite likely to end up getting performed by some other less-expensive means.
I was travelling the past 3-4 weeks. I stopped at a McDonalds the other day, and the fellow behind the counter at the non-busy restaurant took about 5 minutes to punch in the order for my family of three, and we were each ordering simply "meal #X" off the screen above his head - nothing complex. I could have placed our order in about 5 seconds on a touchscreen or phone app myself. I suspect at a mandated $15/hour, in a few years that's how food will get ordered at such places.
Heck, they'll probably invent burger-flipping robots too. Oh wait, I seem to recall that they have.
I'm curious, why is $15 the magic number? Why not $12? Or $50?
Interesting article on Ford that just popped into my mailbox this morning:
http://priceonomics.com/henry-fords-...a-great-again/
It is an interesting question. As technology advances, and it becomes increasingly cheaper to substitute capital for labor, what do we do with the people whose labor isn't valuable enough to support them?
Some form of a dole?
Government-funded make-work?
Mandating a certain level of inefficiency into the economy to force firms to use labor where technology would be cheaper?
Soylent Green?
It will be interesting, if somewhat heart-breaking, to see how we solve the problem.
WS: tool and dye makers used to make the big bucks in Wi. My ex made great $ and got lots of overtime. It supported the 5 of us and allowed me to get 3 college degrees all paid for in cash. We lived frugally but owned a decent home/cars, etc. He always worked for the big companies and when he was laid off he would go work at a smaller place that didn't pay as well and wait to get called back to the bigger place. He was never out of a job more then a week. I suspect you guys are living in a small town which might be why his pay is low. There is a shortage of real tool and dye makers that have been through the 4 year apprenticeship program. Manufacturing jobs allowed people that did not go to college to have middle class life styles and yes Ford understood his workers couldn't buy his cars if not paid enough. You don't have to be greedy to be rich.
Am I really the only one here who thinks this mythical Ford economic model does not make sense?Quote:
Originally Posted by Teacher Terry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_storyQuote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
I grew up in a blue collar manufacturing town and people made decent $ at their jobs. Often the wife didn't work and men made enough to support a decent lifestyle. Not a grand lifestyle but decent.
This link safe for work?Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Some job sites prohibit Kipling, so be careful.Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
Welfare capitalism - Endicott-Johnson shoe company and IBM (once upon a time) followed this model (my father was employed by IBM in the 60's). It worked for a time - eventually it just could not compete with businesses who could cut their labor costs to the bone by relocating overseas.Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
The folks at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, otherwise known as MIT have studied what it costs people in different parts of the country to live. They have defined a living wage for full time workers and then classified the hourly rate in three categories....living wage, poverty wage and current minimum wage. I live in one of the cheapest counties in the nation except for gasoline which is the highest due to our crumbling infrastructure of bridges on highways.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
So in my county one person should earn $9.40/ hr for a living wage...$5 / HR for poverty and the current minimum wage is $7.25. Contrast with San Fransisco.....$14.37/ hr for a living wage ....$5 poverty and current is $9. They even have it broken down in expense categories to justify their numbers.
Now that is just one person. Say they have to support one child. California becomes $29.37/ hr for living wage, $7 for poverty and $9 is the current.
My county, $20.14 living, poverty $7 and current is $7.25.
Im no genius but the folks at MIT usually know what they are doing with numbers.
My way of thinking, if you can't pay somebody enou to live decently then you shouldn't be claiming to be a decent businessman. Admit it, your business model sucks.
Or just invest in industrial robots.Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
Or just say: "Hey, we're making massive profits!" And then leave it at that.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
Or keep turning people into robots. After all, I am pretty close to one now. And I know many who are too.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
A local business I help own and operate decided several years ago to pay our workers a living wage. This was. substantial commitment on our part - this is a very expensive part of the country to live in, and you can't generally manage to hire reliable unskilled labor for $15/hour.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
We went down this path partly out of a sense of social justice and honoring labor and all of that. But frankly, mostly for self-serving reasons - employee retention, emote reliability, quality and predictability of work output, and all that evil business stuff. Most of our jobs require some specialized training and skill, and the use of judgment. Retraining new people every year, only to have them quit after two weeks of hard work wasn't really economical.
To find this increase in payroll expenses, we doubled the price of our product, and *eliminated many of the unskilled positions* by investing in machinery or hiring specialists to come in to perform just the needed work.
At the end of the day, we now have positions that pay a living wage, but fewer positions overall. So, that's a win for the people who retained their jobs, maybe a lose for those who found that glueing wine labels onto bottles wasn't worth $20+/hour.
it makes as much sense as the present model which is massive debt (that's how people buy things these days, not wages but massive debt). Even if it makes narrow sense for business, consumer debt is certainly not making sense in the big picture as a way to run an economy - with all the periodic default on debt it implies.Quote:
Am I really the only one here who thinks this mythical Ford economic model does not make sense?
Sure Ford was a rather dislikable fellow often of rather fascists political opinions but that is neither here or there. It makes business sense if it's a tight labor market (probably the condition Ford himself ACTUALLY faced), if labor is a fairly small cost of production anyway (this is often the case), if a company benefits significantly enough from happy workers (service work might actually benefit a lot from this) or from having it's pick of workers for it to be more than worth it (Costco), or if there aren't extreme competitive pressures to lower wages (competing with China on labor costs or something - good luck with that - $15 a DAY might be too much if that's what you are trying for).
Specific example I didn't manage to get typed in above:
Pruning grape vines properly and tending to their trellising is a semi-black art. You can train someone how to do it in a few hours, then they need supervision for the first few hundred hours, and the new person tends to screw up a bit, which messes up the vine and the yield. Also, it's pain-in-the-bleep work, and a bit physically demanding.
Someone who is *good* at it is 4-8x as productive as someone who is merely "OK" at it, or new to it.
So, previously to get this job done, we hired 3-4 people, at $15-$20 an hour, and then spent additional payroll for someone to train and supervise them. It was a constant pain hiring, training, and retaining novice workers.
Now we pay one guy $30+/hour, who does the work of 3-4 novice workers, in less time, with better results, while freeing up our other skilled staff to attend to other functions. He always shows up, doesn't quit because "the work is hard", and gets the job done very well.
Result: one living wage job created, 2-3 jobs eliminated. Payroll *reduced*. Pain-in-the-bleep staffing/training issues eliminated.
That's happening all over the country. The problem is what to do with the unneeded workers. Have government support them, directly or indirectly from taxes on a diminishing cadre of highly compensated "makers"? Force them on businesses? Will the politics of the later 21st century focus on the size of the dole 80% of us have to live on?Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Some other nations are doing some interesting things to cope with this problem of "unneeded" workers.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
For instance, in Brazil's major cities, people are living in the landfills. They scavenge things, sell something here or there, built a small hut out of trash and refuse, and they also beg and get a little charity. Some have part time jobs doing this or that.
It is a simple life really, and they might be impoverished, unhealthy, and desperate...but they're happy!
The Swiss considered simply paying everybody an income decoupled from work, but decided against it. I hear the Dutch, the Finns and the Canadians are planning experiments in the same vein.Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
Other countries try addressing the problem with regulations making it extremely difficult to shed employees no matter how they perform, but that tends to make firms reluctant to hire new staff, especially if they are young or inexperienced.
We could consider putting more people on government payrolls in CCC type arrangements.
I'm not sure what the solution will eventually be.
Maybe the robots will be super-productive, and we'll end up like:Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
https://archive.org/stream/galaxymag...ge/n7/mode/2up
If we end up having an economy of abundance of goods/materials and "excess" free time, might be worth looking at the how the First Nations cultures of the Pacific NW coast developed.
I wouldn't mind being able to live in a reasonable home, devote most of my time to my research and projects, and recieve an allotment of enough goods/services to live happily on, without the nonsense of all this money-and-accounting that's necessary to do that sort of thing today.
Well, there are a lot of things that could happen. If antibiotics are no longer effective on some major diseases the population could drop.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
Some new discovery could create an employment bubble for a decade and hold the wolves at the door for a while longer.
I know this: It is possible that my greatest skill -- not needing much -- could come in handy.
I doubt that the US govt will do much more than let the market sort it out. I mean, the govt will indeed do a little, but not much at all.
Are large federal-scale governments traditionally good at "doing much" about this sort of thing?Quote:
Originally Posted by UltraliteAngler
I could repost my usual pictures of Zimbabwean grocery stores and factories... Or giant empty Chinese manufacturing cities.
Who should do something about it? State gubmint? Local gubmint? A corporation?Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
It's possible that we could become so wildly productive that work becomes more or less voluntary for virtually everybody. We might evolve into a system of patronage power relationships similar to some Classical civilizations or the old Pacific Northwest. We might simply realize the dream of a happy entitlement state.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
I'm not sure you could you could run a civilization without accountants, though. We'd probably need to maintain some Morloch CPAs.
Let's make Alan do it.Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
yes, but we've outsourced them to China .. needed but not at wasteful first world wages.Quote:
I'm not sure you could you could run a civilization without accountants, though. We'd probably need to maintain some Morloch CPAs.
By that time all of China's skilled labor will be directed to censoring internet blogs.Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
Maybe he'd be interested in handling Rob's account.Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
Quote:
Originally Posted by bae
I don't think so!Quote:
Originally Posted by LDAHL
So far, I've spent the past 43 years supporting myself, my family and Rob's right to free or very low cost services from highly skilled professionals. When the utopian entitlement state comes along, I'm going to assert my right to a life of leisure.
Ummmm.....I'm lost. Totally lost. How do you support my paying for high quality low cost services in Mexico again? No snark here. I'm just not seeing a connection. RobQuote:
Originally Posted by Alan