Any company that is in dire straits and still pays off their officers with big bonuses is self-vulturing and doesn’t care about their business. B&N management deserves no sympathy for their recent behavior. It’s the employees and customers who are being screwed.
My daughter will lose coverage, from me anyway next year when she turns 26. And part of it is age, the wife and I being in our early 60’s. She will qualify for medicare next year so there is that.
But the ACA never had a chance, but I also don’t think it really had any hope on it’s own lowering costs. There had to be more to it.
So by increasing labor costs somehow the cost of health care doesn’t seem as bad. Yea…
We also reduce the work week to 25 hours, make February a 30 day month by stealing a day from January and March, and eliminate day light savings time.
It all makes sense.
Nobody is shedding any tears for the corporate execs. Nobody is arguing that $15 million golden parachutes for one year of CEO service aren’t ridiculous company expenditures (that could have saved thousands of jobs had the money been invested back into the company).
All we are arguing is that the steep decline of full-time employment positions with the retail sector and several other industries is directly related to healthcare costs in America. And yes, the corporations are in a better position to lobby for change on that front, and many have, but the healthcare industry is in even better position to lobby that it all stays the same.
All that will do is accelerate the race to full automation on minimum wage jobs. The McDonald’s near me was recently completely remodeled. A big part of the remodeling was the installation of half a dozen very large self-service ordering screens in the front of the restaurant and the reduction of actual registers to two, only one of which is open at a time. The net effect was the loss of at least two, and probably as many as four, employees working at any given time…and those are part-time minimum wage jobs. Raise the wage to $15, and you’ve just made it cost effective to pretty much cut/replace nearly everyone at the chain stores and restaurants, while at the same time killing off tens of thousands of mom and pop businesses that can’t afford to pay a few part time employees $15 an hour. Meanwhile, you’ve done nothing to actually decrease the ridiculous false inflation of healthcare costs.
Yeah. Without at least single-payer there’s no way to keep costs down in a reasonable way. And really you need something more NHS-like to do a good job, so that hospitals don’t charge $10,000 a day and routine procedures don’t cost a life savings and all that stuff. No need for that giant money-sucking black hole of an insurance and administration industry if no one has to pay for care to begin with, after all. ACA is laudable for extending coverage to the poor, but it didn’t do anything about costs to speak of.
Honestly, full automation is far better than jobs that need to be subsidized by the US tax payer. I would rather be paying them to get an education, job training, starting art exhibit or some other crap. Instead we subsidize companies like McDonald’s by making up for their lack of wages.
This is nothing good about a McDonalds job, no lesson learned that can’t be learned better else. And if means that teenage employment takes a hit, so be it. Those teenagers should be studying for their next test, or volunteer, not working a dead end job.
I know it’s cliche now but originally nobody was meant to earn a living working at McDonalds. You were supposed to work there as a kid and then move on. The problem is it is the economy that has moved on. The jobs those kids were to move on to don’t exist or the fact that they have no education makes them unemployable elsewhere.
Exact, so let’s get them out of those jobs ASAP. The sooner that money goes to training or education the better. Micky D’s can automate everything, and that’s good for them and good for the people maintaining those robots.
At the worst, all those former employees can get jobs as middle managers some where. It’s not as if those are hard jobs to do. Probably a bit harder then CEO, but not much.
(1950’s) minimum wage workers could pay rent for a month for less than a week and a half of full-time work―or catch Disney’s
Cinderella
for just over a half-hour of labor.Minimum wage:
$0.75/hour
Gas:
$0.27 or 22m
Movie ticket:
$0.48 or 38m
Rent:
$42 or 56hrs
(All figures represent the average cost of a movie ticket, a gallon of gas, and the median rent.)
What the Greatest Generation Gifteth, the Baby Boomers Taketh away.
So is it the employers problem when inflation outpaces his employees wages. I would agree that you could argue it is, but it is also the way of the marketplace.
I am just getting started with Perlstein’s book on Goldwater and the start of the new conservatism (I have already read the other two) and it is interesting that it was the union movement that galvanized the conservative/cheap employers into forming the far right groups of the time.
Another fine cliche… :)
Hey, if the shoe fits…
When the market place fails, it’s up to the Government to step in.
I’d be interested to see what the effect of a distancing from WW2 has in that perspective. Something I was thinking about as part of this debate the other day, was that part of the reason there were more good jobs then may have had to do with the huge factor of the American military had in both training (discipline, working together/depending on squadmates, and skill acquisition) and egalitarian thought (any soldier could end up in command, theoretically, with enough attrition, and for the most part was trained thusly - as well as knowing everyone is working together and won’t leave anyone behind) in the workforce. Both in terms of a slimmer gap between management and employees from both status and wage perspectives. I could also see Managers who had been in the military as more likely to stick up for their employees.
Just a thought which has been knocking about my head recently.
A lot of it was unity and the decimation of every other industrialized nation.
People were patriotic after that shit and the rest of the world was mostly piles of ruins so we dominated with that combination.
Inflation applies relatively equally across an economy. If inflation outpaces wage growth it’s because something is distorting the economy so that as inflation raises prices, ownership is picking up a bigger and bigger share vs employees.
We can argue over what that something is, but the data is super clear that the something exists in the American economy in the last 30 odd years.
A cynical person might be inclined to believe that the people who benefited from such a strange shift might be somehow possible for arranging it or at least perpetuating it. But I like to keep an open mind and look at all possible explanations, so I’m willing to entertain the belief that the culprit was leprechauns, immigrants taking our jerbs, or flouride in the water.
Isnt that “something” unequal access to capital?
In this case, arguably yes. But in broad terms not always. And not entirely in this case. Additionally we have eroding (both intentional, policy, and technological) of the bargaining power of labor.
Additionally many in labor have supported their own demise, through propaganda convincing them that the very things preserving their ability to bargain from a position of strength were actually harming them.
That’s one thing. Another thing is a distorted labor market with the offshoring of both capital and industrial labor to cheaper countries. Combine that with the destruction of unions over the last 50 years and you have a subject workforce that is incapable of defending itself, and in any event has no useful work to do.
There has been a concerted program of wealth stratification since Reagan’s time, and now it’s become virtually impossible for high-school-educated people to get respectable jobs. So they are forced into contract or part-time work with lower salaries than union staff used to get, and also have nonexistent benefits. These pathetic dupes of contract coal miners trying to defend the coal industry wouldn’t just make Karl Marx cry, they’d make Adam Smith throw up his hands and give up economics for gardening.