Reporter Nate Sanford looked into the pros and cons of higher wages, and why they haven’t solved Seattle’s cost of living problems
https://www.kuow.org/stories/higher-minimum-wage-levels-help-many-workers-but-there-are-tradeoffs
#KUOW #News #Employment #Wages #Economy
Today in Labor History March 31, 1883: Cowboys in the Texas panhandle began a 2-and-a-half-month strike for higher wages. Investment firms from the East Coast and Europe were taking over the land and cutting benefits that cowboys had accustomed to, like keeping some horses for themselves and holding some of the land for their own small farming. New ranch owners were more interested in expanding holdings and increasing profits, forcing their hands to work entirely for wages, and maintaining all livestock entirely for the profit of the owners.
Media from as far away as Colorado accused the cowboys of being incendiaries, threatening to burn down the ranches, attacking ranchers, and indiscriminately killing cattle.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #cowboy #strike #texas #wages #books #nonfiction #author #writer @bookstadon
The most interesting part is how the whole thing has been hidden in plain sight.
#ConsumerCredit reached an all time high under the #Biden/ #Harris administration in the #USA. And while they tried to mitigate that somewhat by for instance restructuring programs for #StudentLoans, the double #burden of stagnating #wages and rising #inflation has pushed many households over the edge.
Now #Trump is adding way more inflation to the mix & laying off tens of thousands of govt #workers.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.
Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.
The "Mainstream Media" are no strangers to lying for the purpose of generating attention to their product.
#USPol #Wages #Media
https://cepr.net/publications/media-lied-about-pre-election-economy/
Today in Labor History March 18, 1970: The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the U.S. Postal Service began on this date in New York City. The walkout was illegal, giving President Richard Nixon the excuse to send in federal troops to sort the mail. But the strike succeeded in forcing Congress to raise wages and reorganize the postal system and marked a new militancy among postal employees.
This is an amazing story, this poor woman. She couldn’t get a raise as the town administrator for years and years so she finally quit. So they decided that they needed to offer her job back to her at the median rate for town administrators, but now everyone is flipping out about her huge raise. The only reason it is so huge is because they refused to pay her what she was worth all these years. And apparently no one else was willing to do the job at the shit wages she was taking, so now the town has voted to eliminate her position.
The stupidity is astounding, and I’m a little worried about the amount of rage she must feel. Like I’m still mad that people in my community have decided that they would rather see me die than simply wear a mask at the grocery store or the doctors office or the pharmacy. But this lady had the majority of her community come out and say she doesn’t deserve to get paid what other people in that same position get paid.
THE RAGE OMG I hope she’s OK and fuck this entire town.
But this is another great example of how trying to help out just screw you over in the end, these entitled people used her labor all these years and now they don’t even want her to get paid??
Concord Monitor - ‘What the hell is going on?”: Chichester votes to defund entire town administrative office, but may reconsider https://www.concordmonitor.com/Chichester-NH-town-meeting-2025-60007764
Today in Labor History March 11, 1811: Luddites attacked looms near Nottingham, England, because automation was threatening their jobs. At the time, workers were suffering from high unemployment, declining wages, an “endless” war with France and food scarcity. On March 11, they smashed machines in Nottingham and demonstrated for job security and higher wages. The protests and property destruction spread across a 70-mile area of England, reaching Manchester. The government sent troops to protect the factories and made machine-breaking punishable by death.
**1 out of 7 EU employees is a low-wage earner**
_“In 2022, 14.7% of employees in the EU were low-wage earners, against 16.2% in 2018. Low-wage earners are employees earning two-thirds or less of the median gross hourly earnings in the country of work.”_
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250227-1
#Europe #EU #Data #DataViz #Statistics #Wages #Economy #Economics @economics
Today in Labor History February 26, 1941: 14,000 workers struck at Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna mill in Buffalo, New York. As a defense contractor, the company had $1.5 billion worth of armament orders, but refused to pay the minimum wage mandated for government contracts. Furthermore, they had recently fired 1,000 workers, blaming their last work stoppage for damaging some coke ovens. The pickets effectively stopped scabs from getting in. After less than 2 days, the company agreed to rehire the fired men and began talks on a raise and union recognition. However, a month later, they reneged.
**Rising Wages Drive Innovation in Automation Technology**
_“A new UZH study shows for the first time that higher minimum wages for low-skill jobs drive firms to develop automation technologies. Rising wages for high-skill labor, in contrast, can hamper this effect.”_
https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2025/rising-wages-and-automation.html.
#Research #Study #Economics #Wages #Tech #Technology #Automation @economics
The Great Prosperity: 1947-1979 after the new deal but before Reaganomics took hold
The Great Regression: From 1980 until the present, as neoliberalism successfully stole the value of improved productivity, paying themselves overvalued compensation but paying workers little.
The 80% difference between what you're worth based on productivity and what actual average wages are is the work you're giving away for free.
This chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows how #inflation has outpaced wage growth for many years in the US. The red squiggly line at the bottom essentially shows #wages (wage growth) as adjusted for inflation (described from an employer’s view as the “Employment Cost Index”). The blue squiggly line above it shows the inflation trend (as the CPI, or Consumer Price Index).
#USA #wages #WageGrowth #economics #inflation
https://www.bls.gov/blog/2023/more-ways-to-look-at-wages-and-inflation.htm
Trump axes $15 Contractor Wage, Infrastructure Project Orders.
