Dictated by devaluing the value of work, and demonizing the people willing to do it. IOW the days of an honest days pay for an honest days wage is long gone.
Yeah you have a point. I do not like the whole idea of educating ourselves out of this because there are many people that just don't get it. That is not to say that those people are dumb it is simply saying they are going to resist the change. Many people just want to put in a hard days work and go home to their families.
To a degree NONE OF THE ABOVE applies. In times of low unemployment, wages rise due to competition among employers (labor market). When unemp is high, wages decrease (employers market) and that's where we are today. However, with the continuing glut of over-educated non-professionals, I doubt if we'll ever return to the 'labor market' -- when you can hire PhD's to wash dishes, why not do it!
To a degree all can apply but your point is well taken. PHD dish washers. Hey we must educate them so they can make more money. Oh crap all those promises the Free Trade pushers never came true.
Take a look at what happened with labor jobs, picking, digging, meat packing, dishwashing, concrete and construction. Jobs that at one time, some paid VERY well! The business owners massively imported an illegal underclass of subsistence workers kept cowed by lack of legal protection and fear of government raids, to undercut the USA's labor class wages by pouring excess supply of labor into the market. Its hilarious, that even now, as a few states pushed by popular opinion scare away the illegals, the employers will do ANYTHING except RAISE the WAGES to get workers!
All 3 factors come into play, but I wouldn't say they're equal: Productivity Demand for a skill set Market saturation Can't vote in your poll because the option is not available. Sorry.
NP. Why do you put productivity first? Just curious. Demand would need to be there first would it not? How does productivity set a wage?
Actually, it's a highly complex question, especially when you get down to the particulars. But "all of the above" is a start. If someone tries to tell you that it is simple they're probably trying to pull the wool over your eyes and are about to trot out a scapegoat. You guys are probably comparing against a bizzare historical high water mark in the 70s when the US was still acendent after WWII and the labor force was busy fighting in Nam or busy going to college or elsewhere to avoid having to fight in Nam. It was a crazy time where you could get paid more for hammering in drywall than you could with a college degree. If a nuclear war breaks out that devestates Eurasia and we once again start drafting anybody not in college, than we might return to those times. Otherwise it's just not happening.
What determines wage? .....in the Government/Union world.......Presence. .....in the Private Sector/Real world.......Productivity. . .
Wages are determined by how little workers will accept compared to how much they make for the company.
An oversupply of workers reduces wages. But an upper limit also exists, depending on the productivity of the economy. Usually fewer people (shortage of workers) increases wages, but at some point there will not be any incentive to increase wages any higher. The lower limit is set by the desperation of the portion of the workforce willing to work for subsistence levels.
No. I am comparing to the late 50s and the 60s, many of my neighbors parents owned homes and supported their families doing drywall, tile, cement, and framing, including having benefits. Doing drywall and these other things is HARD, and takes more than a little skill to do a decent job, and a LOT of skill to do well AND productively! Meat pack plants are hell to work in! The radio had a grower in Alabama complaining that the inexperienced help she got, after the new laws chased all the illegals out, could not choose and pick tomatoes and peppers properly, and wasted her crops with what little they accomplished. YOUR attitude that all these jobs are "simple and worthless" is ONLY because we have had the illegals to exploit and threaten since 1970's as all those jobs went from good pay to lousy pay due to employer flooding the labor markets with illegals.
The problem with that is that wages DO NOT follow what people are willing to work for, but how much an employer can afford to pay you to do the job. No matter what happens, you cannot raise the wages above that point without drasticly cutting staff. If you pay $20 dollars to have people dig a ditch, and the job can only be profitably filled by paying $10, you'll be out of business if you pay the $20. It doesn't matter what people want the wage to be, just what the job is actually worth. Manual labor is worth $5 or so tops. You just can't pay more for those jobs and expect to stay in business that long.
Man I've seen crews of Mexican drywallers who put "native" Americans to absolute shame in both speed, efficiency and quality of the work. I remember once I was working for a landlord and these two mexicans he hired to do the drywalling we dropped off a huge stack of drywall and went to work at another property for a few hours, then lunch, when we came back early that afternoon they were sitting out on the curb. The landlord gets out and starts hollering "Why are you out here and not hanging that dry wall? They looked at each other then laughed and took him inside. They had that (*)(*)(*)(*) hung, taped and mudded, all of it, almost an entire house. They were just waiting for the mud to dry. Our mouths dropped. Never had we seen that before from any "native" American crew. We have a suspicion they called in help, but that's not our problem if they wanted to split the pay.
Well, I'm not sure where the lines are, but you're starting to drift into skilled trades. For example, I don't believe plumbers and carpenters have it so bad. I figured drywall didn't fall into that catagory. If it does than it's probably a bad example. 50's and 60's still had the WWII bounce though I do believe wages rose through the 70s. Though they also didn't have a number of the costs we do today. Little things like internet and cell phones add up, and as what doctors can do has balloned so has the cost of health insurance, which I think is significantly complicating the concept of a living wage since it's a new cost on the order of magnitude of a new car every few years. I'm from meat packing country and that still gives $15 an hour roughtly. (Though we do have a whole lot of illegals.) Well they aren't worthless jobs, and I do have respect for workers. While the illegals probably do have some effect on price, I don't think it's as simple as that. We've had that since at least the 1920s when "wetbacks" was coined, and significantly by the 50s at least. Looking it up, we didn't even limit immegration until 1921. We've long been a country of immegrants, most of them unskilled. And remember just because an illegal has a job, doesn't mean that someone would pay twice as much for someone else to do it. The job simply may not exist, or these days be replaced by a robot.
Confused?? Not hardly. I've seen fair realistic wages in my lifetime and what is offered today for a fair honest days work, in relation to the actual cost of living, ain't it. As a direct result of undercutting the value of labor, the rich/elites get richer and the poor become dependents of the best government corporate money can buy to assure it stays that way.
Seriously?? Do you just make this sh(*)(*) up in your head? 　 　 In comparative, in the 1970's (when minimum wage was $1.35), real jobs didn't fall under the minimum wage window. A carpenters helper could make almost 5 times the minimum to help build an average home with a cost of $24,000-$30,000. Today a carpenters helper or an illegal wetback, will only be offered minimum wage, or less to help build an average home with a cost of over $150,000. 　 　 The reason wages are not realistically comparable to the cost of living any more is because of the illegal invasion of slave labor, and the sorry POS who hire them as an alternative to paying a livable realistic wage to an American citizen that will keep them in the category of a viable productive member of society. Instead because of this destructive mentality, a person who works for a living is demonized and vilified to assure they only get a menial wage from the profits their work creates. This does a two things, it makes them automatically eligible for food stamps, and perpetuated an unrealistic level of poverty for one of the richest nations on the planet. It also reduces the ability for average working class American to afford the inflated price of a used home much less the ridiculously over inflated price of a new one, and the economy is in the crapper. 　 　 　 Greed and once again the best government corporate money can buy is at fault. That and this supremacist attitude that only less than 3% of the population actually "deserve" everything they have, and everything the other 97% hopes to have.
How much would your house cost if we did what you suggest? Even with so called slave labor, housing costs $250,000 for a four bedroom. Double the price of labor to provide a living wage, and the cost may pass $1,000,000. Good luck with having a housing market when houses cost that much. The problem as always goes back to entitlements. The job simply can't be done at the inflated wages that Americans believe that they "need" to survive. As I've said elsewhere, you can live on $5 an hour. And being that that's really what manual labor is worth, anything beyond that is what is driving the need for illegal immigrants and Chinese factories. If you can't do the job profitably hiring americans, then you have to hire the illegals. And the sad truth is that you really almost can't afford the American because of all the benefits he demands and the shoddy nature of his labor.
May I ask what you consider manual labor? Also do realize there is a different level of risk involved with each type of labor. We also need to consider what we expect out of people. Do you want a drug user (AIDS crack head) flipping your burgers? Would uncleanliness be acceptable to you in that same position? Don't get me wrong I agree that wages, all wages, are inflated in the US and need an adjustment but your blanket statement needs a little clarification.
Wages are detemined by labor markets....specifically, scarcity and abundance...or "supply and demand" Low wage jobs require skill sets that can be found in abundance.... where the opposite is true for high wage positions.... unless, of course, labor markets are artificially manipulated by "collective bargaining"...then we see abundantly available skill sets receiving unwarranted, non-labor market driven compensation.... which is one of the reasons why government entities that permit union representation continue to grow exponentially in size and expense... and why they are all on the precipice of insolvency....or, are already hopelessly bankrupt.
Alright, you got me curious enough that I started poking around for any studies on the effects of illegal immegration. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back504.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5312900 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401686.html http://www.ocregister.com/news/illegal-197701-immigrants-wages.html Now, you're free to find something else. But a trend I'm noticing here is that while yes, wages would be higher without the illegal immegrants, the change if they were here is going to be less than 10%, maybe a fair bit less. One quote I like from one of those was: "California may seem the best place to study the effect of illegal immigration on the prospects of U.S. workers. Immigrants have rushed into the state in the past 25 years, competing for jobs with the least-educated among the native-born population. The wages of high-school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004. But before concluding that illegal immigrants are undercutting wages of the least-fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high-school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent." So fine, continue to try and shut down illegal immegration. There are reasons enough for that. But don't delude yourself into thinking that a wall across the border is going to bring back 1970. There are a number of things in play here. For one the rest of the world being bombed out in WWII and Nam sending the unskilled workforce into the jungle, canada, or college. The 70s were a freak time, and I pray we never see the sorts of conflicts required to bring it back. There are other things in play as well. Let me put it this way: You've been mentioning drywall. But it occurs to me that the house I grew up in had lath and plaster. A lot more labor intensive thing. Now you've got drywall, nailguns, and who knows what else. I bet home depot is taking a bite out of construction with all their factory premade stuff. Actually on that note my dads house came premade. It looks like a traditional house, but it was built in a factory, shiped out in big chunks, and assembled quickly on site. Poking around the net on that them from http://homehug.com/factory_built_home/ "Historically the vast majority of homes have been site built homes. However with tougher standards in the manufacturing and modular home industry builders and consumers are coming to realize 20 - 100% savings with a factory built home. Today most new construction has some degree of factory built components. " Fundamentally people have to adapt. This goes for the educated as well in the modern workforce as a change in the market or technology sees entire divisions laid off. Our country has enjoyed a long period where a few hours of unskilled labor here could get someone the fruits of many many hours of unskilled labor in other countries. This was because of a number of factors that are slipping away unless we maintain an edge in science and technology. If we can't keep ahead of the third world we will join it. I wonder if this might be a bit behind the feeling of disdain for workers. The idea that you ought to be keeping America's edge by putting together CAD designs for someone in another country to build. But you can't, so go clean some toilets while the country also heads down one. Well, that and the fact that for many of us the people we know who are now in the unskilled labor market were real jagoffs in high school.
Labor, like anything else, is a commodity. It is bought and sold on the market, and therefore the market sets the price of labor. It is a complex commodity in that each labor provides different sets of services and there can be no general wage rate. However, the employer deals with labor as a commodity because those who consume the product or service force him to do so.
