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Ok
To a certain degree, but there's still a growing disparity when the shops are charging 5-8x what they're paying their mechanics compared to the roughly 50/50 split that most shops gave in the 80s. Especially since most shops require the mechanics to pay for their own tools.
In some cases, but not to the same extent. Most people aren't faced with the choice of immediately buying a particular food or starving, and there isn't as much information disparity between buyers and sellers.
Similar, but its quite a bit different. It's far easier to comparison shop, to become informed about costs and quality issues, etc. Food does display some elements of captive markets, but competition pressure is far more viable in food than in healthcare. Especially given the number of patients who are unconscious when they receive medical treatment so basically have to pay whatever the hospital bills them at.
Price and value are often not the same.
So, what would be wrong with workers recuperating from the banging they also got under Covid. Yes, some areas got increased pay, but many didn't. And where pay was increased, it was only because workers staged what was effectively a strike in those areas.
That is not attributable to an increase in the pay of the workers themselves.
Yep...a friend of mine used to be in construction, started in the mid-80s at $18 an hour. A few years ago we were looking at job postings for construction workers, starting pay was $16 an hour. Which is fairly typical of most industries, where workers haven't seen nominal wages go up in a minimum of 30 years. On the other hand, productivity across the board has gone up many times over. So workers are getting paid less for the same work by quite a bit, and then businesses double down by raising prices so laborers dollars aren't going as far.
Whoa, that is totally an argument based on ignorance of the matter.
In practice it is.
Might want to look at the price of cars again. Most are no longer selling over invoice and most manufacturers are now giving rebates. Car dealerships are dealing price.
How so? For example, most hospitals in Houston added a hazard pay to their front line workers.
But people do have to buy food, and for many people there aren't that many different food outlets available.
Food deserts are definitely an issue, especially the disproportionate impact they have on poorer neighborhoods. So yeah, food can operate as a captive market so its similar to health care in that regard. Though its more of an location by location issue, while healthcare is generally a global problem.
Yeah, misinformation is a problem in food. As is the fact that healthier foods tend to be more expensive and less plentiful in poorer areas. But insurance has made healthcare costs a nightmare, especially since how much a given treatment costs depends largely on who it is that's paying and what agreements exist rather than being inherent to the procedure.
Great. I’m an engineer so now I know how you feel about me lol. While some of what you say is true, I am able to work on my two year old truck much easier these days because the computer gives me the error code and the program gives me the probable cause. I like working on my own cars. Repairing cars in the old days were simpler in the sense of less parts and easier to repair in the sense of part replacement because of more space in the motor compartment, however, much harder to tune and make them run efficiently.
So which was it? Unions were already corrupted by the mob *before* Prohibition, or unions were corrupted *after* Prohibition when the mob needed new revenue streams?
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Yes, it's all part of the movement to de-skill the workforce so they can be paid less. The fantasy is that productivity improvements all belong to capital so there is no need to pay a worker any more just because he is more productive. That has been going on for some time. I was an industrial engineer myself back when GE first started getting into CNC, and they were quite frank about it in seminars and papers, They wanted skilled machinists out of the shop. It didn't really work out for them, but it has succeeded with some other trades in other industries.
The sad part is that the trend will probably now accelerate with the advent of AI. The world is changing at a fast pace and I don’t think we have the leadership in either party to make the right decisions to keep up with these changes.
Unions were corrupt from the very beginning, their whole purpose is corrupt from the standpoint of conservatives, stealing from honest and responsible business owners things like an eight hour day, a forty hour week, overtime pay, safe working conditions. Unions are bold and dangerous, sometimes pursuing their nefarious objectives in the face of actual gunfire. The laziness and greed of the working class is unbounded and unions are their enablers.
I'm aware that repairability is not one of the criteria that auto engineers are given to design for.
The components that require error codes didn't even exist on cars 30-50 years ago (going back to when I first started working on cars...ODB didn't exist, and its use was for components that were only developed after its emergence. IOW, it didn't solve any problems we already had, it just alleviated problems that came with it. The same is true, in spades, for CANBUS. The program doesn't really give you probable cause, it tells you what element is out of specification. That's like a thermometer telling you that you have a fever and a look-up source telling you all the things that can cause a fever.
Not what we were talking about, though.
