> He reads headlines of UAW workers going on strike to ask a company making $10b/yr in profit to give them a bit more and he sides on the side of the company, y

> He reads headlines of UAW workers going on strike to ask a company making $10b/yr in profit to give them a bit more and he sides on the side of the company, you know what I mean? He makes a good point though. Ford's current return on equity is a bit north of 9%, there's really not much more squeeze to give. People like to think of companies as giant monoliths of money that can be freely diverted, but that's really not the case. The other big automakers are roughly around the same place I believe, so it's really not that far off. 10% is roughly the RoE you're looking at for the auto sector, going higher means they're somehow getting capital for cheap, too low and they're not efficiently deploying capital and should just return it to shareholders for better use elsewhere. The current two-tier system doesn't make much sense and is mostly a relic of the 08 era, but the current union demands are just ludicrous. The union protected old members at the expense of new ones, and a re-negotiation of that makes sense, but most of the other demands are nonsensical. > He thinks that what we classify as a $20/hr job in America is $2/hr elsewhere. Seeing as low-skill service workers are making $20/hr in major cities, and $2/hr is literally what the exact same job gets you in developing countries, he's not wrong? The guy manning the Walmart checkout counter probably makes close to 10x what the guy manning the same counter in, say, Bangalore. > If that's the case culturally and the Chinese value working hard (where as in America if you scroll on Instagram you'll see 5-10 memes recommended to you about 'you are not your job, fck your job, fck your meeting'), why is our economy more successful than theirs? There are other factors of play, of course. Labour productivity is only one part of the economy, arguably not even the most important. If "working hard" is all that's required for a strong economy, then yes the Chinese with their 996 schedules would have the strongest in the world. So would the rest of the developing world. The rest of the story is the boring economic stuff that nobody outside of finance thinks about: highly functional capital markets, low costs of capital, strong investor protections, strong disclosure regimes, existing structures around accountability, a managerial class that's somewhat aligned with investor objectives, etc. Things that many countries are trying to develop, albeit without much success. The US model is not the only path towards success -- there are many others, and many are hard to replicate. Singapore was invited to try duplicating their success in China and it was mostly a failure. Export-led growth has served many other Asian countries well, but many get stuck in the middle income trap. Truly climbing into a developed economy is a hard task, one that not many succeed in.