American Thinker: How much is unskilled labor worth? For liberals, you might think the answer is an astronomical $15 an hour, the minimum wage many states have set, destroying jobs that cannot provide that much value. But for libs, $15 an hour is just the starting point.
The Atlantic wrote a sob story about someone who took a part-time job delivering packages for Amazon for $18 an hour (which would eventually go up to $25). Her anger and indignation explain what is wrong about the liberal entitlement mentality.
The Amazon Flex program lets workers deliver packages as independent contractors. They can choose when and for how long they work. It’s an extremely flexible job that accommodates the need of people who have irregular part-time schedule. The tradeoff, of course, is that it is not like a full-time job with full benefits, and contractors must pay costs (fuel and car repairs) themselves, which does eat into earnings. But it is still a generous payment for unskilled labor. But what irritated the Atlantic writer the most was that “good jobs” for unskilled labor are being replaced by independent contractors who are not being paid the same generous wages as they were in the past as employees.
How ya liking your lib friends now Bezos?
Trump should suggest that Amazon pay their workers 35.00 hourly just to stick it to that prick Bezos.
It would be hilarious.
Twenty bucks an hour to be a Ama-Zombie… Brains! Need more brains
No wonder these companies want to fill the skies with drones.
The USPS has been delivering mail WRONG for decades.
Those assholes are overpaid at $5 an hour.
They only occasionally go postal, but when they do…
I imagine there are basements across the land filled with undelivered mail.
It likely takes an IQ of 78 to deliver packages but these asswagons will still fuck it up.
So, if they’re paid 20 bucks per hour, would they stop throwing the packages onto the customer’s patio or nah?
Can you imagine? Less than a decade ago I was paid $12 per hour in an accounting office (full time) handling company cash and other financial shit. But these mother fuckers want 20 to bounce fragile items onto your driveway.
CA Supreme Court ruled a couple of months ago in a way that may force Uber to classify drivers as employees. I’m sure the same ruling would apply to Amazon.
Our mail was delivered by a contractor.
Suddenly we no longer have individual delivery, you have to put up a box on the main road.
Got a PO box instead, saw the mail lady delivering, in her fancy new car.
Didn’t want to drive down my dirt road.
My neighbor and I joke about it.
What was the old saw about appointed rounds?
Oh, you’re right Al, it was the Persians.
I’ll step away from the rest of the crowd here and say SURE!
Real minimum wage, when you compare purchasing power parity with what it was in 1968, should be something close to $ 20.00 an hour.
Okay, closer to $18.25 an hour, but you get my drift.
If you adjust for worker productivity at 1968 rates forward, you get a number closer to $32.00 an hour. Worker productivity and wages pretty much marched hand in hand from the mid 1930’s to about 1970, but hasn’t since then as wages fell way behind.
This is one of the reason your semi-skilled parents (assuming you are about fifty-ish) could raise a family and sometimes even buy a house all on just one income while mom stayed home.
So, I think the average American worker has silently had his pocket picked from about 1968 to 1970 forward.
Kicking out America’s excessive immigrants, and not allowing anymore in, especially unskilled illegals from Mexico and Centeral America, and while we are at it, excluding all of the third world, even China, our standard of living would skyrocket.
Our uncontrolled Immigration from the late 1960’s forward has eroded the earning power of our entry level workers with the effects over time spreading out into the areas where they are not even present in significant numbers.
Think of a cascading displacement syndrome.
In before the “well let’s just raise it to $100 an hour” morons show up.
BTW, I’m not a communist
Use flying robots
What do the socialist, protectionist Unions say about this?
Do private contractors have the right to work?
“So, I think the average American worker has silently had his pocket picked from about 1968 to 1970 forward.”
You didn’t explain the half of it.
Inflation. Just as much an imaginary thing as fiat currency. No need for it unless you want to make cash not in the stockmarket lose value.
Here’s another enormous scam that has government blessing, at the behest of the bankers. Commodity trading. You can buy millions of barrels of oil, from a cubicle. Not as an agent of a refinery, or energy company, or shore facility that could tranship, just a cubicle. You can’t possibly take delivery of the cargo of those super tankers, you have no business relationship with anyone who could, but you can drive the market in crude oil.
That is wrong. Want to put some sanity in ‘energy trading’? You buy oil, you take delivery in thirty days. Your terminal, your refinery, doesn’t matter. You have to have infrastructure you own to swallow that cargo. Or you don’t get to bid on crude oil. Just that simple.
You put that rule in place in the commodity markets from oil to pork bellies you’d see a lot of the volatility the banks make money on just stop.
But the last thing these people want is predictability and stability.
if they’re using their personal vehicles for commercial deliveries, their insurance providers should be made aware, so their rates can be adjusted accordingly.
Maybe I can help some with that. Oh, happy day- another way to help.
And now I wonder if they might need a CDL, in that it is interstate commerce, after all.
I would demand more the $20 per hour to deliver Amazon packages. But then again I have a CDL. I am a trained, professional driver. That training was not cheap and over half that attempt it, fail.
I believe that anybody that has to drive as part of their job needs to be subject to the CDL rules. They are far more extensive on what you can and cannot do on the roadway, require drug testing, and a physical.
And to think I carried bricks, stocked scaffolds, built scaffolds, mixed mud, and cleaned the pans at the end of the day for $2.75/hr!
izlamo delenda est …
@Anonymous July 1, 2018 at 6:43 pm
> I’m not a communist
Are you saying the low to un- skilled, invited, invasion force, took all that money? Because it had to go somewhere.
Wait! Before you answer. Don’t sound like a Communist™.
@Lowell July 1, 2018 at 7:45 pm
> Here’s another enormous scam that has government blessing, at the behest of the bankers. Commodity trading. …
> …
> That is wrong. Want to put some sanity in ‘energy trading’? You buy oil, you take delivery in thirty days. Your terminal, your refinery, … Just that simple.
Do not, even approach, a “simple” answer for this. These perfectly “workable” methods have bought the murder of millions. Put on your tinfoil hat, and guesstimate, how much the murder of the “provider” of a simple, practical, solution, is worth? Before that spark is fanned to flame.
@Care to play one on teh interwebz?
Well, YES, they did steal some of it.
Much of the money that illegals and low/no skilled immigrants earn gets shipped right out of the country, and most never comes back. What little that DOES come back does by nature go to internationalists.
Nothing tinfoil about that.
The rest went to the pockets of those higher up the food chain and much of that money went to Wall Street.
Some of it did useful stuff, some didn’t.