TheStar article - America - the world's sweatshop

And the march to becoming the next third world country continues...

 

Well, not everybody can work with Obama's UAW at their wage rates. Or even the federal government, with a far higher percentage of $100K/year salaries than the private sector...

 

I worked for a very large computer company that went through year after year of layoffs. We were told that it was hard to layoff the Europeans in the company because you needed to give them 18 months advance notice. Here in the US you didn't need any advance notice. Because of that they would lay off more of us (US workers) to make their numbers. This was back in the 80s.

Today nothing has changed its only getting worse. We are well on our way to gaining wage equality with China and India.

 

Oh please, that's a completely bogus statistic. The reason the federal government has a higher number is because a majority of federal government jobs are in DC where the cost of living is higher and employers pay more to compensate for that.

I make $X a year at my private sector job in St. Louis. If I did the same job in DC, I'd probably be making closer to $2X but after all the bills are paid, I'd probably end up with about the same amount of money.

A $100k/yr salary in DC and a $100k/yr salary in Bum**** Montana are 2 different things.

 

yg17, GS pay is uniform across the nation, whether DC or West Bugpoop, OK.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

 

wait so BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, Siemens are now sweatshop manufacturers ?
then claiming the european minimum wage ... ingoring the little fact that germany hasn't got a federal minimum wage

despite that: the main point that giving employees decent wages to spur conspumption, is still valid
during the last 10-15 years wages adjusted to inflation actually have stagnated in much of europe (in some even dropped), and hardly surprising little of the economic success is arriving on the worker/employee level and thus consumption isn't really taking off

also the amount of "working poor" is rising and rising

 

Paul Krugman: U.S. Manufacturing May Be Coming Back

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/opinion/20krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

At least we know why.

 

More BS. It's been shown dozens of times in this forum that UAW workers make about the same as auto workers in non union shops.

Of course the government has a higher percentage of $100K jobs than the private sector. That is just a BS statistic. The government doesn't have low wage jobs lime the private sector does.

 

The base pay is the same but there is a cost of living tacked on to your base pay depending on where you live.

 

They have one of the strongest union societies in the world to compensate for that.

 

No it isn't. A COLA is added to different regions. San Francisco and New York, for example, have something close to a 23% adjustment made to their GS scale.

The Federal government has a lot of 6-figure employees these days because a lot of what it does these days requires highly trained workers. Do you want nuclear inspectors, prosecutors, physicians, and engineers who don't qualify to make 6-figures?

With with the ratio of 100k+ salaries, most jobs in the Federal government pay far less than the private sector since the GS scale is maxed out at the VP's salary.

 

This is correct. Which is why there are many links for locality pay rates here and not just one "uniform across the nation" pay scale.

Again, spot on. Close inspection will show that there are very few federal jobs based on minimum-wage level skills, so it stands to reason that they make more than people, say, serving fast food. AAFES being the exception, maybe.