Workers Got Fed Up. Bosses Got Scared. This Is How the Big Quit Happened.

A few weeks after the end of World War II, New York City came to a standstill. Thousands of elevators hung without operators, doors stood without doormen, and buildings languished without repairmen. Business districts closed down; the Garment District emptied out. Almost all deliveries other than the mail stopped coming into Manhattan. America’s commercial center was shuttered. “Make yourselves comfortable,” one union officer publicly warned. It wasn’t a government shutdown; it was a strike—one that started with the elevator operators, doormen, and maintenance workers, and spread to other unionists across the city. (“Fur workers do not want any scabs to run elevators in fur buildings,” declared one sympathy striker.)

Depends on whether their pay increases exceeded the inflation rate (high as it is), which appears to be the case in the chart provided in the article.

I'm losing out big time from the current inflation rate because I work for a small company with limited capital. I had to wave a different offer in their faces to get what I have now, so the chance I'll get any raise approximating inflation is near zero.

The real problem is the parasites in the government, lawyers, and the rentier class gaining from tax increases, government borrowing, and asset inflation. I don't begrudge cashiers or wait staff a pay increase.

I don’t begrudge them increases but they are not being improved. They are losing, overall. And it was/is easily predictable. In fact it was so stated during the push for $15/hr: a Living Wage. Right...so now they have it. Now the loaf of bread they bought for $2.00 is $3.00 [just picking numbers]

Their lots are not improved much: rents are up, car prices are up: medicine, food, goods and the prices in the restaurants they service are all up and in double digits a lot of the time. And most of it is due to government spending: the economy is awash in created money and wage increases. The guy paying that server $15/hr now has to charge more for his food.

Any benefit of the increased wage is gone in a few months/years.

The ultimate benefit of higher wages is that employers have to make the investment in higher productivity. I've watched snickering on the sidelines the past thirty years as economists have wondered why American productivity barely budged while real wages actually decreased.

It's simple: no business is going to invest in expensive, risky process changes or new plant and equipment when they can just add more low wage bodies when times are good and lay them off when times are bad and be reasonably certain there will be a large army of reserve labor ready to work no matter how low the wages are.

The social cost of economic policies that allow this is enormous. As it is increasingly difficult for young men to find work that pays enough to establish a household, unwed motherhood soars along with drug abuse and crime. To be sure, welfare policies encourage this by raising the wages a young man needs to compete with Uncle Sugar. This is most obvious in inner city black populations, but the same malaise is now visible in the unemployed formerly working class white population as well. Sixty years ago even functioning alcoholics and the mildly brain damaged could find gainful employment without needing welfare and social workers. Yet businesses managed to do quite well also. That's what I call full employment.

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