Reminds me of the period after the dark ages,when skilled workers suddenly became a luxury.The Mantra my employers used to chant was" a operator behind every tree,truck drivers a dime a dozen" anyway they found out with thier attitude and 20 year behind wages,it wasnt necessarily true.Good for you Dagosa,I agree whole heartidly-Kevin
Then at the end gave the wage rate they were offering: $12 per hour. Maybe that's ok in Texas or New Mexico, but that's really not a competitive wage.
$12/hour will barely pay your rent here in southern NH or northern MA. My daughter rents an apartment with 2 other girls in MA. NOT the greatest neighborhood…But they can’t afford much else since they’re all graduate students. Cost $2100/mo. So how can $12/hr support a family.
Its a shame Mike,used to be motivated people could work hard and get a degree and be rewarded financally,I hope the disincentives stop,before our great country slides farther behind-Kevin
The middle class is like frogs in a pot of warm water that has been set on a burner. They are in a slow decline and don’t recognize their plight. We are slolwly becoming a nation of a few wealthy families living in isolated gated communities or large estates with the vast majority declining into townships. It is becoming a de-facto appartheid government.
Its a shame Mike,used to be motivated people could work hard and get a degree and be rewarded financally
Unfortunately $12/hr is MORE then what a starting Teacher makes in many towns in NH. To start out on a teachers salary you either have to live at home with your parents or your spouse has a real good job. Go to college…get a good education…and you CAN’T support yourself as a teacher.
Something is really haywire on the pay scales. Back in 1968, I took a semester off and worked as an assembler making air cooling equipment. It was pretty much the lowest pay grade outside of janitor, but it paid $2.40 an hour. Plus we had an incentive plan and most of the time out team got paid 120% of base pay for productivity. I made enough in four months to pay for a year and a half of college again and still went out once in a while. Now granted gas was 35 cents and houses were about $18,000 but comparable today should be $15-20 an hour for minimum skilled labor. Just not happening.
“Go to college…get a good education…and you CAN’T support yourself as a teacher”.
MikeInNH–I would bet that if you compare the teachers’ salaries with the salaries made by school administrators, you will find a whopping difference. In fact, I would bet that the custodians may be making more than the beginning teachers. Back in the late 1940s through the mid 1950s I attended a rural consolidated school that housed grades 1-12 and had an enrollment of 300 students. It was run by a principal who also taught one class. There was an office secretary, a janitor and a part-time matron. Now the school district has a superintendent, an assistant superintendent, a principal and an assistant principal for the high school, a dean of boys, a dean of girls, a guidance counselor and of course principals for the separate elementary schools. There is also a director of transportation.
I’m certain you find the same thing true in many industries. When Lee Iacocca became CEO of Chrysler, there were 36 vice-presidents. He fired 33 of them the first year. He brought each VP into is office and asked them to describe what they did. Apparently 33 of the 36 had no clue as to their job responsibilities.
College tuition has outstripped the rate of inflation because colleges and universities add more and more administrators. In the university where I retired after 44 years of service, the college in which my department was housed initially had a dean and an assistant to the dean. When I retired, there was a dean, three associate deans, a business manager, an assistant business manager and a fund raiser. There were also fewer departments in the college because three of the departments split off and formed a new college.
In the “good old days”, teachers ran education, doctors ran the health profession, and automotive engineers ran the car business. When I think about the GM of the 1950s when the Chevrolet small block engine was developed, or Chrysler corporation where the hemispherical combustion chamber engine was produced, automobile men ran the corporations. When the bean counters started running these companies, the companies went bankrupt.
I think one way to improve the economy in most professions would be to let the experts in a field run the organization and remove the business managers who have limited knowledge of that which they are supposedly managing.
He fired 33 of them the first year. He brought each VP into is office and asked them to describe what they did. Apparently 33 of the 36 had no clue as to their job responsibilities.
My brother-in-law is a retired Chryco Plant Manager. He met Iacocca a few times. His plant and two others were the ONLY plants that were making money at the time. I have a LOT of respect for my brother-in-law…and he had a great deal of respect for Iacocca.
I think one way to improve the economy in most professions would be to let the experts in a field run the organization and remove the business managers who have limited knowledge of that which they are supposedly managing.
Couldn’t agree more. Especially in technology fields. I’ve worked with NON-technical managers who were in charge of software engineers…Most were a complete joke. I can’t tell you how many managers I knew exactly like the pointy-hair manager in Dilbert. The reason Dilbert is so funny to engineers is because it’s so true.
I hear you Treidaq. Some of the most successfully businesses let the workers “own” the decisions the business makes and become significant share holders. If they have a stake and are given the opportunity to have a say, it works. In the school I worked, the administration wanted me to take over as head of the Math Department, because in their words, they trusted my decisions. I told them I would do it for two years but would not make any decisions without majority support of everyone and that included scheduling assignments which was the golden cow. I would act as a moderator and chair the meetings and set the agenda, but the teachers collectively would make all the decisions. That upset the" good old boy" routine of a few of the old timers, but they got used to it.
It would be up to the majority of the teachers in the department to OK anything the administration asked. I also informed them that in two years, I would appoint another teacher to chair meetings as acting department head and each would take their turn every two years. I felt all the teachers should have equal ownership. In those two years, we instituted more changes then in the previous twenty and everything went very smoothly. Meetings were a little longer then usual but everyone said they felt more involved. Everything went very smoothly until the end of the second year when I announced that we would start rotating…the school wasn’t ready and tried to convince me to continue. I quit the position and they hired a permanent decision maker and it was back to business as usual.
Successful auto companies run that way as those on the line often know best. Everyone has to feel they are part of the administration of any business. It was amazing how much extra work the teachers were willing to do on their own time in my school by letting them take ownership. Doing things this way requires a minimal number of administrators.
I don’t disagree. During one of our more chaotic reorgs, I was being analized by one of the gurus and she asked me who my heros were. I said Lee Ioccoa and Henry Ford. Wrong answer. She wanted more like Carl Jung and Mother Terresa. They never had to run an operation though.
Yes business is unfortunately is business and it takes the likes of Henry Ford to start a revolution.he paid enough so his people could afford what they produced,bet that was radical then-Kevin
Businesses are very very very short sighted. Very few understand that without the middle class most will cease to exist. They are looking at how much money they can amass in as little time as possible. Pay the ones at the top obscenely high (and IMHO mostly undeserved) amounts of money…and at the same time paying their employees as little as possible. When the economy is bad they get to pay their employees next to nothing. But when the economy turns around…they either have to raise the pay…OR their employees leave. Then their hiring standards get lower.
The company I work for is privately owned. So we don’t have to do Wall Streets bidding. While the owner of the company is somewhat clueless as to plights of the average worker…he does understand business very well. He knows it’s GOOD business sense to pay a decent competitive wage and not have a high turnover rate. The company is growing SLOWLY. We’ve seen a growth rate of 5-10% a year. But I’ve seen MANY companies that grow so fast …that within 10 years the company has run it’s course and is no longer in business. The people at the top made their fortunes and went on to start another fast growing company. It’s GREAT for their pockets…but lousy for the economy and the workers. A prime example is Best Buy. They weren’t even in existence 15 years ago (at least not here in the north east). All indications from Wall Street is they’ll be closing shop in less then 5 years. Their motto was - “Grow as fast as we can”.
What is with the formula that growth is the only way to succeed? My small business remained small for 25+ years and I did relatively well. My most profitable years were when I had one full time and one part time employee. A friend/competitor went ‘the all ahead full on growth’ formula and his business now has a grand image from the curb and in the customer waiting room but he is financially strapped, upside down on his shop building and has been forced to mortgage his home to pay monthly operating costs.
What is with the formula that growth is the only way to succeed?
I agree…Why are companies only looking at HIGH growth. Moderate to low growth is fine. Companies need some growth to keep up with inflation and cost of living increases. If not they’ll loose their employees.
I think that the next crisis to follow the housing mortgage bust will be the college and university bust. When a person is upside down on a home mortgage, the house can be foreclosed and the person can file for bankruptcy. However, there is no way out of student loan debt and many students owe upwards of $100,000 when they graduate.
One of my most unpleasant years as a university professor was the year I chaired a big governance body on my campus. I had quite a few battles with the administrators who tried to tell me how I was to chair this body. More than once, I told an administrator that I was elected by the faculty and not appointed by him/her. My office telephone rang constantly and several times I would say to an adminstrator “This conversation is over” and hang up the telephone so I could go back to work with a student. What has happened in college and university administrations, and I suspect management systems in big businesses, is that an administrator is paid directly proportional to the number of people that answer to the administrator. My solution is to put in a different system by which an administrator is paid inversely proportionally to the number of peope that answer to the adminstrator. If an administrator can do his/her job with fewer people, that administrator should be rewarded. My system would prevent “empire building”.
@Rod_Knox:
"The middle class is like frogs in a pot of warm water that has been set on a burner. They are in a slow decline and don't recognize their plight. We are slolwly becoming a nation of a few wealthy families living in isolated gated communities or large estates with the vast majority declining into townships. It is becoming a de-facto appartheid government."
One of the reasons we are so slow to realize it is that the decline of our standard of living has been slowed by big box stores that sell us cheap goods made in Asia.
There are two ways to measure standard of living:
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Per capita real (adjusted for inflation) GDP - By this measure, our standard of living has been declining for longer than I’ve been alive.
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How far you can stretch a dollar, or what your dollar will buy - this is where cheap Asian goods and services (not just Chinese, but from China’s neighbors as well), have kept inflation under control. Eventually, China might stop manipulating its currency, and as the standard of living in Asia improves, so will wages. When this happens, the cost of even the cheapest overseas goods and services will hit us in our pocketbooks. We might be clamoring for American made goods, and some of you might be able to afford them, but Americans have voted with their pocketbooks; time and time again, we’ve chosen cheap goods over American jobs.
@kmccune, Henry Ford didn’t give his workers a raise on his own free will. His workers had to bargain collectively to force his hand.
This frog recognizes his plight…but can’t figure out how to get out of the pot!
Whitey I wasnt refering to what came later,only what started-he was very conservative,at least he was pro farmer-
Kevin
Well lets not let the business schools of the 80’s off the hook when they started teaching short term profits, high finance, outsourcing, and how to make money buying, selling, and breaking up susceptible businesses. We reap what we sow with this group of Harvard MBAs, then we look in the mirror at those of us that shrugged our shoulders when Wally went from “made in the USA” to “made in China” at 18 cents an hour. It might be a long road back but unlike the stupid frog, I have a lot of faith is the average citizen.