this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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This is just how things worked back when unions were in the equation. If you sold TVs or drove a truck for a living, you got a house. If you had a good job, you had a house like this and basically everything you wanted.
We traded that life for a few hundred people having yachts instead.
My mom worked in a factory, my dad has been chronically unemployed and her parents worked at a food cart.
We owned a 3 story house with two kitchens, four bathrooms, and six bedrooms for $70k in the hood. Gentrification happened and it's worth a million now.
I make double what my mom makes, and with the combined salaries of my wife, we still rent.
People insisting trickle down economics worked, when, in fact, it tricked up into the pockets of Bezos and the Waltons.
It trickles up almost by definition.
In fact the only way to effectively redistribute wealth, proven time and time again, is taxation, which Reagan gutted.
"Trickle down" refers to urine, not wealth.
Tinkle down economics
This belongs on T shirts and beer cozies.
I don't think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.
People talk about union jobs going away, but don't forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.
Hm, I'm not really all that expert on the topic, but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone, even the people who have nothing to do with it.
Of course, UPS drivers are making $175k/yr right now, and there doesn't seem to be a lot stopping other companies for paying people in washers and balls of lint for doing the exact same job. My feeling is that it's an issue of critical mass, but like I say that's more or less just a guess.
Even if that is an effect where increased unionized non-supervisor wages push up supervisor salaries, my point is that there are simply fewer middle managers to benefit from that effect.
Plus the second order effects of a hollowed out middle choking out the pipeline for promoting and training future business leaders, so that it's a small number of big corporate executives overseeing jobs they've never had instead of the older system of a lot more small and medium sized business leaders supervising jobs they used to personally work.
Yeah. The amount of fuckery is large, and varied.
Union membership in the US was at 16% in 1991. Obviously that's better than today's 10%, but that spread is hardly big enough to be the difference between the presumed worker's paradise of the early '90s and the dystopian nightmare of 2025.
Thing is, you don't even have to be in a union to get the benefit of other industries having them. They raise the bar for everyone.
I'm a Teamster - you don't have to sell me on unions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map
It doesn't change overnight. Union membership was the plug holding all the money in the barrel, holding back the pressure of the bosses just taking whatever they could squeeze, gradually in a coordinated bloc, but not enough that people would jump ship from their specific operation and go to another place, but enough that every year there would be less and less, until now a majority of Americans can't pay their expenses.
Maybe it wasn't unions. You might be right. There are all these graphs pointing to something specific that happened in the 1970s that suddenly divorced productivity gains from wage gains, so maybe whatever it was that caused that finally began to have its real awful influence in the mid-1990s and finally really bear fruit in the late 2000s. Kevin's dad didn't buy that house in 1991. You get what I'm saying. There's a delay. But, like I say, I have no real idea. I'm just guessing and throwing out random possibilities. Something fucked everything up. Probably a combination of things. Not having unions definitely couldn't have helped.
If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.
Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn't get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.
Well let’s change that!
Yeah, affording a house isn't the same as having a mansion and taking everyone you know on a vacation.
You gotta read past the first sentence my man lol
I did
I'm sorry about your poor reading comprehension.