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Notes -
Western working classes aren’t really wage surprised outside of, to some extent, Germany and the Netherlands (which has much more to do with the euro than with China). Inequality is higher than the 1970s, but real incomes haven’t fallen significantly and productivity, while somewhat higher, has lagged asset price growth. Factory workers in Northern Europe are still paid very well, they’re often still in countries like Germany and Switzerland a kind of Marxian labor aristocracy. The working class suffering are those who work service jobs.
How do you figure that? I would suggest that due to immigration and the exportation of manufacturing to other countries, there’s an extremely hard ceiling on what the productive blue collar workers can hope to make — which is exactly the wages at which it becomes cheaper to either replace them with imported domestic workers (immigrants) or outsource the work to some other country. The ceiling seems to be around $16-18 for work that doesn’t require either apprenticeships or college. And this is despite any changes to COL. even in construction in the USA, you’re going to be seeing a lot of Mexicans putting on roofs and laying floors because they work dirt cheap.
Hahaha. Productive blue collar workers, even without apprenticeships or college, make more than that regularly.
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