Why wont huge companies pay their workers a decent living Wage?

[Leo Gura]

22 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Is there any hope that labor unions in the US will ever regain the size and power they had in the early to mid 1900s?

There is some rise in labor unions lately, but I doubt it will ever reach the old levels.

A lot of industries aren't so suitable to unions, or people just don't want to unionize.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Girzo]

There can be a widespread protest for raising minimum wage on the national level, or capping CEOs income to 50x the lowest paid worker or something in that effect. I see it as a semi-realistic scenario in the next few decades. You need the government, it's hard to achieve anything through grass-roots ways nowadays.

[sholomar]

This is a hard question to answer. Partly it's greed, but if we did pay everyone more they'd just ratchet up their spending and inflation would increase. People tend to live paycheck to paycheck regardless of how much they make.  Look at the cost of real estate these days. Kids get some inheritance from their parents and they all bid each other up on housing because there is a shortage. Are they better off? They are paying more. Blackstone makes a cash offer on that house you wanted? Too bad, so sad.. our politicians won't ban this sort of real estate investing.

A lot of it has to do with supply and demand. A lot of it has to do with the supply chains and input shortages. Much of that was pandemic related, and I personally think the reaction to covid was far worse than the illness itself. A lot of it has to do with declining birth rates and less of a laborforce. The easy answer is to think paying people more will magically solve everything, or paying people UBI so that they don't have to work. The realities of markets and supply chains is far more complicated.

We've relied on Mexican labor to do the jobs nobody wants to do for decades. Now, we rely on Chinese and other low paid labor to make all the tech trinkets we take for granted, as everything has been outsourced. Nobody wants to talk about the child labor used to mine the minerals for our EV batteries as an example. Again, no easy answers. If you want everyone in the world to have a higher standard of living, it generally means first world nations will have to adjust their standard of living down.

The american lifestyle of a 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom house, 3 stall garage, with a boat parked on the lawn, is rather lavish by the standards of the rest of the world. The top 5-10% tend to live in a different reality than the bottom 90%. The bottom 90% tend to think they deserve this lifestyle without having to put in the emotional labor to achieve it. That's simply not going to happen. The middle class is slowly being priced out of the economy.

Much of the same drama they faced 2000 years ago in Rome. These things go in cycles.

Edited May 26, 2023 by sholomar

[Hardkill]

25 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

There is some rise in labor unions lately, but I doubt it will ever reach the old levels.

A lot of industries aren't so suitable to unions, or people just don't want to unionize.

So, then why are progressives like Bernie bothering to fight like hell for greatly increasing labor power in the US?

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Hardkill