A lack of employee power at the workplace. Due to manufacturing outsourcing, labor laws favoring employers, denigration of workers' unions, etc. Once upon a t

A lack of employee power at the workplace. Due to manufacturing outsourcing, labor laws favoring employers, denigration of workers' unions, etc. Once upon a time, in the US's 'golden time' of the 1950s-1960s an ordinary blue-collar worker on the production-line at Ford or GM could afford a good car, a good house, good vacations, eating out or at home on steaks, on a wage sufficient for all of those as well as support a stay-at-home wife and probably three children. Today you have that guy and his wife, both working, and at possibly more than one job unable to afford to buy any house and a good car, living on cheap groceries and ground beef, and who certainly couldn't afford more than one or two kids. So obviously wages have not kept pace with the increases in the cost of living. To have kept pace with cost increases, a blue-collar worker would be earning at least about $150 grand a year. That ain't happening. Which is stupidity for the big corporations. If their workers (and other companies' workers) can't afford their own products, sales will be nowhere. They haven't listened to Henry Ford who deliberately paid the workers making his cars enough wages that they could afford to buy the cars that they had built themselves. Real wages haven't been STAGNANT. They have deliberately been REDUCED. And that is bad for the country. === https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/employment/pages/1960-1964/17610_1960-1964.pdf https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/employ... "The average weekly earnings of factory production workers surpassed the $100 mark in June 1963," - in 1963 $100 was a touch under the value of three ounces of gold - in 2023 that amount of gold (at $1900 per ounce) is worth $5428 (or about $270,000 per year). In 1963 $100 would buy about 55 barrels of oil (at $1.80 per barrel) - in 2023 that amount of oil (at $89 per barrel) is worth $4944 (or about $247,000 a year). FACTORY PRODUCTION WORKERS ARE NOT EARNING MORE THAN TWO-HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR.