Manufaturing wages vs today....

[RadioRaheem84]

I was arguing with my uncle who said that we shouldn't be so worried about manufacturing jobs leaving because there is growth in Texas, especially on the outskirts of Houston that are paying high wages for manufacturing work. He said a guy can start off at 9 an hour where he works but in six years he can be making 22 an hour. In ten he could be making 30 an hour + benefits with overtime, you're looking at 100k job.

This didn't make sense to me considering that I was under the impression that when adjusted for inflation the minimum wage was like 22.50 at it's peak. Were not then union manufacturing making well more than this without the overtime or the long haul wait?

My grandfather is a retired property owner with several large investment and he worked the railroad as a union man. How did he make that kind of money to retire well off but these manufacturing guys can't if they're supposedly making so much?

How can one compare the same profession from two different periods? What am I missing here and what kind of fuzzy math is he using?

[subcp]

It sounds like your uncle is applying the experience of the post-war period (1940's-1970's) when real wages rose with increased productivity in the US- the difference from then to today is the return of crisis to capitalism in the late 1960's following the boom period. I have relatives like that: who worked in a semi-skilled trade or profession that was unionized with associated benefits (defined benefit pensions, decent health insurance) and often '25 and out' or '30 and out' contracts. A lot of workers from that generation retired before the most severe austerity took effect (although a lot of workers who retired in the late 1980's/1990's are having their benefit status altered years after the fact).

A lot of manufacturing work in the central capitalist nations has a high organic composition of capital (the ratio of variable capital/workers- to constant capital/means of production)- if you look at the numbers for the General Motors Powertrain plant in the Bay Area, it opened in 1916 with just over 100 workers. This gradually grew until the 1970's (4000 workers), when it began its descent. The plant is still open, but only has a few hundred workers (similar numbers to 1925); the difference is that the technological development (use of robotics/automation, brand new machinery) expels workers from the value production process (manufacturing commodities and creating surplus-value at the point of production). Due to the high OCC, productivity is extremely high despite having a much reduced workforce.

What used to be unskilled jobs (longshoreman, assemblyline worker/manufacturing worker) are now skilled crafts or somewhere between semi-skilled and skilled (in the GM plant, in 1925 workers did 1 simple task on the assembly line- today, the much reduced workforce is mainly responsible for upkeep of the factory and the means of production/automated equipment/robotics with a high degree of specialization). Accounting for benefits, longshoremen are among the highest paid workers- because they, like GM factory workers in the US, had to learn to adapt to and use more and more advanced equipment and machinery, which requires fewer workers but drastically increases productivity (and thus higher wages in some cases where workers can't be easily replaced- like longshoremen) in the context of a rising organic composition of capital.

Although the American South & Right-To-Work states almost act like Special Economic Zones (like those in China, India and dozens of other countries) which makes the landscape a little different in those areas. Relaxed labor laws, extreme tax incentives (such as paying no state tax for decades, getting numerous Federal tax breaks for 'keeping jobs in America', etc.) and a large labor pool (with associated high unemployment) to keep wages down and maximize profits. The other aspect of a SEZ is a migratory proletarian population: in union-friendly Northern states, sometimes these economic benefits follow businesses in an attempt to make states with a record of being union-friendly competitive with Right-To-Work states: up here in coal mining country, and the technical improvements in fracking technology, nearly all of those jobs are held by people from Right-To-Work states who are paid to come up here for the length of the job (where they not only get paid, but also have their room & board paid for by the company- i.e. putting them up in hotels for months at a time). The local building trades unions run TV commercials deploring how jobs at companies like Dominion are being done by people from Texas/Louisiana/Alabama/etc. instead of local workers. The miner's union (UMWA) is so reduced in political power and power on the job that it can't really do anything to stop fracking companies/natural gas/coal companies from bringing a migratory, $9-an-hour workforce with them when they set up shop in WV or PA. But the unions want to hold on to the kind of worker-identity and lifestyle from the 1960's/70s where ever they can- look at Hostess, they wanted to turn a job (industrial baking) that has traditionally been high paying with good benefits into another generic minimum wage job, and the union (BCTGM) wanted to keep the defined-benefit pension, the health insurance, the decent wages: and the company could not oblige (however the Teamsters almost immediately accepted the reduced contract imposed by Hostess rather than go on strike and destroy the company). It's like watching things from your childhood change; and the unions generally don't like it- but the more realistic will get their membership to take the reduced terms to keep the companies going and their seat as exclusive bargaining representative.

So the technical composition of capital in modern manufacturing is often significantly different than in the 1970's (or earlier), a high organic composition of capital, which means productivity is often exponentially higher than it was back then- but unlike the 1940s-1970's, wages are not directly tied to productivity, so a job that would've paid $22+ an hour (like at GM) now pays $9-$15 an hour with weaker benefits (no more defined benefit pensions) even though the company is getting exponentially higher productivity. Look at UPS- they are 100% unionized (Teamsters) and are littered with part-time jobs that pay $8.50 an hour (a dollar over minimum wage); despite the huge profits. Times have changed, capital has changed. This transition from 'Fordist' to 'post-Fordist' in the advanced capitalist countries has received a lot of attention from communisation folks. The Fordist compromise (high wages in exchange for the grueling toll of working on an assembly line) has been scrapped by capital; so we're in a 'post-Fordist' economy (the same grueling jobs with modern technology- like the assembly line at the auto plant in Lordstown, OH being the fastest in the US in the 70s, but without the high wages and associated benefits).