Further, housing for GIs in the 40s and 50s was subsidized, thus changing the entire housing equation, and, further, women had not entered the workforce in large numbers, and, further, we require many more safety features on cars.
These factors all are major portions of the story when comparing against your prototypical factory worker story, and mean that a simple narrative of Unions => Better Life doesn't work. Although unions do need to become much stronger in American life, they won't unspool us back to the prior era.
and, tacking a paragraph on in my edit: probably want to talk to some black people about how great those years were. It's entirely plausible that some of the White American prosperity was due to heavily underpaying the Black Americans and treating them very poorly.
Vast land was easy to steal when 9/10 natives died from disease. The others lacked equivalent technology and weaponry.
Slavery ensured the newly established federal government made good on its debts. A good credit score means a SHITTON for the success of any state.
Abundant (stolen) land with loads of natural resources settled at the time industrialization ramped up. Lucky.
Literal boatloads of immigrants from all over the world prop up the population, increase production, and suppress wages. Great for industrial growth (like china recently).
And that's all before the 20th century.
That said:
one factor is that computers started really becoming available to businesses, so you really had an automation boom.
one factor is the cold war ended, which changed... a lot of things, including capital flows. That capital shuffling may have helped prosperity.
one factor is the boomers hit their financially most productive years.
Even if this person happened to be female or non-white?
> it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth.
By blocking access to good jobs to lowest tier - people without union connections, without union seniority, without ability to complete complicated licensing requirements, etc. - you are doing exactly this. You are making harder to gain footing on the job market for people that do not have a base to complete complicated licensing requirements, that can not deliver enough productivity to be hired at the above-market rates set by unions, who may not fit the job descriptions and requirements set by unions, etc. You benefit a narrow sliver of the population (1/3 at the highest times, much less now) at the expense of everybody else.
Simple economics is right. In _real_ economics, things are a lot more complex and unions don't "kill jobs".
Software salaries are higher in SF and lower in Jackson, Mississippi. Do you believe there are more programmers per capita in Mississippi?
So, if a unionized company in SF with higher salaries would be consistently hiring more people than essentially similar company with no unions and lower salaries, in the same environment - that might be a counter-example or at least a beginning of one (one still needs to consider the confounders - maybe CEO of the former one is a genius and of the second one is an idiot and had run the company into the ground, and that explains hiring differences).
Of course in SF and Jackson salaries are different - those are different markets. That has nothing to do with my argument.
> things are a lot more complex and unions don't "kill jobs".
Making a claim is not proving it. I've provided an argument why I think they do. If you want to argue against it, the least you could do is providing your own counter-argument. And no, "it's complicated" does not count as one. You have to point out which part of the complication, in your opinion at least, makes the conclusion wrong.
> Since workers for most gig economy companies are considered independent contractors, not employees, they do not qualify for basic protections like overtime pay and minimum wages. This helped Uber, which started in 2009, quickly grow to 700,000 active drivers in the United States, nearly three times the number of taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the country in 2014.
In other words, Uber could overtake taxi & chauffeur industry and provide jobs to 700K people because they weren't saddled with onerous regulations and union rules. That's not my words, that's NYT's words.
Progress is determined by your viewpoint.
This is not to say there hasn't been wonderful progress in social justice. But from an economic justice perspective the modern economy is a disaster.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-t...
Union jobs raised wages for everyone: even though only a third of private-sector jobs were unionized, the threat of unionization pushed most employers to pay well.
In the 1960s, one person could get a blue-collar job and keep a family going in a suburban house, with a car. This was all due to unions.
We have been subjected to thirty years of propaganda about how unions kill jobs, how regulation is bad for jobs, how you should have "freedom to invest your money" (ie a 401-k rather than a company pension). This propaganda is now taken as gospel, and we don't realize it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth.
BTW, that's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, he's a narcissistic windbag, but people who voted for him had real grievances.