re: UAW goes on strike

This only makes me hate the auto industry more, and you know it's all a ploy to charge more.

sorry your hemi dodge POS just went up 20k on the lot.

The frickers want us all to pay 100k for a car.

Bidenomics, baw

I mean I want a 32 hour work week and a 40% raise too… but I also know that if my company does so with enough people then we all will get a 100% pay cut and a 0 hour work week.

Economics are a bitch…

The total compensation they are demanding is ridiculous. The traditional US automobile manufacturers are already comparatively inefficient and agreeing to the union demands would be another nail in the coffin.

For their parts the CEOs and other leadership are significantly over compensated and typically pretty unimpressive. They probably want a worker strike right now because the combination of higher interest rates and markedly increased purchase prices have been destroying the ability of customers to buy new cars. And the wave of car repossessions is slowly starting to provide used car inventory that will only increase over the next six to twelve months.

The unions have overplayed their hands at this time because of the market realities.

Another person in the thread mentioned the failure of real wages to keep pace with the costs of living over the past 50 years. That's a totally legitimate point. And nothing can be done about part of that problem. Per capita labor essentially doubled when women working full time jobs phased in about half a century ago. Increasing labor supply will affect (reduce) the price workers can demand.

But there actually is something that can be done about the working class incurring costs of food, housing, and goods. That would be making energy cheaper. Energy affects the cost of everything and investment in cheap energy sources will eventually have to be addressed instead of lied about. Cheap energy does not come from wind and rarely from solar. It comes from nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, oil, and coal. If carbon reduction is the goal then get more serious about nuclear as well as replacing wood or manure with coal, coal with oil, and oil with gas.

Sooner or later the political elites will have to face up to of costs of energy on costs of living for "regular people". Nothing drives up poverty and ultimately death like a family that can't afford food (produced with gas), transportation, housing, and consumer goods. All of these things are unaffordable without affordable energy because energy inputs are required for all of these things.

Great post


The other big labor impact I’d add is the massive influx of low skilled labor from Central America. That’s not going to cause much disruption to the top quintiles of earners, but it’s unquestionably adding to wage suppression on the lower end