You're totally right on the action-reaction bit. And it's the same way at much bigger scales. This American Life did a story on NUMMI, a Toyota/GM joint venture. Toyota took one of GM's worst plants and made it well run and productive, in large part by treating the workers like people. It's very moving: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

The heartbreaking part is that even when GM saw it happen, they couldn't really get it. Manager-labor hostility was too baked in on the management side for them to really change.

>Manager-labor hostility was too baked in on the management side

Don't forget that it's baked in on the labor side as well. NUMMI was not a 'fix' of a GM plant. It was a new venture started where a previous GM plant had closed.

A new venture that rehired a lot of the same workers. If you listen to the TAL piece, you'll hear how they changed. It wasn't an overnight transformation, but ultimately the workers changed where GM managers couldn't.

The plant was open until GM went bankrupt. What do you mean the managers couldn't change?

I mean that the purpose of the joint venture was for GM to learn Toyota's methods. That one plant was fine, but the broader purpose was for GM to learn how to do it everywhere. They never did. If you'd like to know more, I suggest you listen to the story linked above, or read the transcript which is linked from that.

I'm aware of the story of that plant. You're trying to make generalizations and aren't being clear about which GM managers "failed to learn".

Back to my original point, GM couldn't adopt the changes everywhere despite what they "learned" without firing everyone at the existing plants to start with a clean slate like they did with NUMMI. Once the relationships are poisoned, both sides need severe restructuring (i.e. leadership changes) to fix it.

Buddy, I'm pointing to an existing article. It's not my job to explain the whole contents of it in my pointer to it; I was just giving a quick summary of the piece. But just to indulge your apparent inability to get what I meant: When I said GM, I meant GM, not the joint Toyota/GM venture. And I didn't say managers, I said management, meaning the the whole of the GM managerial structure.

I disagree with you that this (or anything) proves "both sides need severe restructuring". It's not like GM's managerial apparatus had a spiritual breakthrough, made deep internal changes, and then worked hard to change the worker-labor hostility that they had spent decades building up. I do agree that starting with a closed plant and bringing back workers made this easier for Toyota to sort things out, but there's no reason to think it would have been an impossible task if they'd started before the plant closed.

As the TAL piece explains, GM never really tried. They ultimately preferred their poisoned relationships and lower effectiveness, just like they had for the decades that Toyota kicked their asses. Toyota's higher per-worker productivity and greater quality goes back to at least the 1960s (per Rother's Toyota Kata), and this became a keen problem for the big 3 starting in the 1970s. GM's managerialist culture means that the managers had all the power to fix this. They never have, even though they were on the road to bankruptcy.

You can't take a system like managerialism, or any system whose purpose is the creation of a power imbalance, and then blame "both sides" its failures. With power comes responsibility.

I live near that plant. It got shut down 10 years ago after the financial meltdown. Now its a Tesla plant.

I grew up pretty close to NUMMI, and heard a lot about it in the news in both good times and the eventual bad times. My first car at 16 was a Pontiac Vibe, a GM rebrand of the Toyota Matrix (which in turn was a hatchback variant of the Corolla), all of which were built at NUMMI. It was kind of cool knowing that the car I was driving was built just a few freeway exits over.

10 years later, I totaled it and despite being a lot better off financially than I was at 16, I decided to buy another one. It's just such a solid car, maintenance is easy on it, etc. It's sad to me that there aren't more of the solid, low-tech, low-cost cars that NUMMI was so great at churning out.

Maybe one day Tesla can get electric cars to that type of economy of scale, but I think it's going to be a while.

> The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”.

The best way to get people who show up for work on time, don't steal from the register and don't call out sick is to pay them enough to have a life that isn't sent into a stress spiral by an electricity bill thats 10% higher.

Corporations especially in the service industry (Fast food, etc) have tested and to their bottom line workers stealing and missing shifts and calling out every 3 days isn't worth more to them than paying people less. Not because they're unprofitable, but because they can, and there's enough desperate people EVEN WITH FULL EMPLOYMENT to not raise wages as long as none of the other corporations do.

So now you have cargoculting amonst the business administrators that pay as low as possible is the only way to run a business. Except of course, when it comes to business administrators and those who interact with them.

>>there's enough desperate people EVEN WITH FULL EMPLOYMENT to not raise wages as long as none of the other corporations do.

There is evidence to the contrary, as these companies have infact (or did pre COVID) raise their wages beyond the minimum wage they were doing. Some of it is in response to Retail raise wages (i.e Walmart when to a $11/12 nation wide min wage) in response most fast food also had to raise their wages.

I don't disagree that there is some wage pressure - its the fact that wage increases only started to outdistance inflation only have 3 sustained years of basically no unemployment, which is likely a once in a century event, that there are more factors at play holding wages down.

Of course there is more than just the unemployment rate the effects wages but Fast food will always be the lowest paid job in the economy and the idea that work is entitled to a high wage simply because it exists is not something I can get behind

Fast food requires almost no skills, and most likely as wages increase it will simply be automated out of existence completely, given that literally almost any human that is breathing can fill the job there is not going to be much that will push those wages up.

These jobs are not intended to be long term employment where a person would support a family on, hell they are not even jobs that should be filled by people supporting themselves, they are tailored to people for their first jobs normally while they are a dependent of another person

> These jobs are not intended to be long term employment where a person would support a family on

There's no intention provided by these jobs - I'm not sure where that would actually come up. 50% of fast food workers have more than one job. That alone indicates that at least half of those workers aren't dependent on another person. Average fast food worker is 29, 50% are over 25. 26% of fast food workers are parents with children.

I just wanted to say that to establish that there are many people who work fast food jobs that depend on it to live. Given that - and that there is no functional safety net to prevent someone from becoming homeless were they to lose their income, and that the minimum wage isn't a living wage, I'm advocating for it to pay a living wage. Its sort of strange to me that people prioritize the needs of dependents and children over unskilled people who are working as much as possible to keep a roof over their head.

If you need to work 2 jobs to make rent, you are not spending much time at all gaining skills to get a better paying "real" job, assuming they're available at all. You're trapped. A living wage would allow people to actually have the time to develop skills rather than trapping them in subsistence poverty. Because one person in 5 doesn't need the money, the other 4 should suffer? Should they not be treated for a flu that could kill them? Does their life have any value at all?

And if that means robots are suddenly economical? Why are they not economical elsewhere, where workers are paid a living wage? https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/li...

> Fast food will always be the lowest paid job in the economy and the idea that work is entitled to a high wage simply because it exists

I'm not making this argument. It is not a high wage, by any first world measure. That most people making that wage are both below the poverty line and get food stamps tells you its not a high wage.

Now, is it most efficient for the economy to be flooded with no-skill workers? Probably not, if there's some sort of floor on human dignity. In any system there will be leeches, people who game a system, etc. I'm concerned about them, but we should start by tracking actual outcomes. This is one of the reasons why the US is one of the least socially/economically mobile countries in the first world. We're closer to Russia than we are to the UK.

And I think it's important to realize that this is all under a managerialist culture, where companies construct internal class distinctions. It's pretty obvious from history that a significant fraction of humanity really likes to have people to look down on, to control, to mistreat. To feel better than.

> The best way to get people who show up for work on time, don't steal from the register and don't call out sick is to pay them enough to have a life that isn't sent into a stress spiral by an electricity bill thats 10% higher.

Are you speaking from experience here? There is plenty of poverty that doesn't lead to theft of money and time to disprove this as a general claim.

There's more to it than paying people enough.

> People don’t default to cheating the system.

Some people don't. I think you may be underestimating the degree to which A) your parents were good judges of people, and B) having ownership close to the metal can make things work well.

And being a small business. Things run very differently when there are ten people and you know everyone vs when there are ten thousand people and you only vaguely know what 1/10th of the departments actually do.

If it means that more employer-employee relationships are as strong as the one described, I'm more than happy to give small businesses a leg up over major corporations.

In my experience, it very much does. It's usually not as profitable though, and even laws & taxes are often set up to reward large corporations.

> People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly...

One of my HR friends was dismayed at the treatment of warehouse workers at Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217969

That URL to search "Ring" on r/privacy is broken. This will work, for now: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/search?q=ring&restrict_sr=1

No one who runs a business that hires multiple employees can reasonably call themselves lower middle class.

Showing my work:

> My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1]

>His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.

Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage.

Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).

This comment was edited without saying so, which explains why some of the replies don't make sense.

If you're going to make an edit that changes the meaning of what other people have already replied to, please say that you're doing that. The best way is to make the edit append-only.

How feasible would it be to actually enforce that in the code? Would be great if edits were append-only after some period of time. So you could correct a typo immediately after posting still, but after a few minutes you'd just be able to append. (Replying to your own comment doesn't serve the same function, since it could be lost under other replies.)

There is a 2 hour edit window, after which you can't edit the comment. Editing a comment to change the meaning is usually noticed so I think social convention takes care of this (relatively uncommon) problem as it is.

It would probably be better to just disallow editing to any comment with replies.

Or have an auditable edit history.

I like that suggestion even more than mine. Could be a link beside the timestamp, like "4 hours ago (edited)" and clicking the edited stamp would give you a history. I edit my comments all the time and wouldn't want to lose the ability to improve my wording or fix typos or whatever, but I don't see any harm in that transparency. The ability to completely delete a comment (along with any history) should probably be preserved though.

That might work if you could link individual comments to a version of their parent, otherwise confusing over comments not making sense in the current context would still occur, since most people aren't going to read an edit history first.

The very least they could do is add some visual cue that a comment has been edited, like showing the header in italics or adding an asterisk.

I think a visual indication that a comment was edited, then diffs of all their edits, would be very nice to have. I have run into (and caught) people that make provocative comments and then edit them to make the people responding to them look foolish.

What's the best way to escalate this? Or rather, how do we make this recommendation to moderators and/or devs?

[email protected] is the way.

The names of the classes are not economic; they're political†. They have to do with one's ability to influence politics.

The "middle class", i.e., the borgeoisie, are the class of business owners (and/or people who have the ability to start a business, i.e. who have a professional skill that could be sold freelance or with a one-person company "wrapped" around it.) What do you call a lowest-income-bracket-for-business-owners business owner, other than "lower middle class"?

Meanwhile, a laborer—even a rich laborer (e.g. a waiter who makes a lot in tips; or a unionized dock-worker; or a soldier)—is, definitionally, in the lower class. If your professional skills are only in demand in the context of a capitalist organizing and value-adding on top of them, then you're in the lower class. (For example: dentist? Middle class. Dental hygienist? Lower class. The dentist can start their own dental clinic, whereas the hygienist cannot. Even if they both took home the same salary from said clinic, one has access to corporate profits—capital—while the other does not.)

People don't say "upper lower class", but the French equivalent "prolétariat riche" does make sense. (There are whole sectors of the economy that cater mostly to the prolétariat riche. Anything referred to as "bling" is marketed mainly to the prolétariat riche. Nightclubs cater mostly to the prolétariat riche.)

† In English, the terms are mapped to positions on a city's height map (lower/middle/upper), because cities used to be basins of smoke and filth, and the people who could, would move to the outlying hills to be away from it. But this is still a political distinction, not an economic one. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't get away from city life entirely until you no longer need to work for a living at all. Once you don't need to work at all, you unlock the time+energy+liquid assets required to influence politics. It's all part-and-parcel.

well said. well said. boss, you seem like the only one who understands the dynamics of capitalism in this thread. political power is determined by money. & political power also determines money. seems a lot of people miss the historical context with these issues etc.

$50k/year where? And where did you get that number? I know someone who made $23k last year, less than any of their several employees. If not for his partner's job, he'd be flat-out poor.

> Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).

That's terrible math that proves nothing, besides that the owners as a couple is making more (including by a tiny margin) than a couple of workers

This is definitely not true.

Literally drive down the street and look at those little no-name shops and stores: each of them have owners who employ other people.

The lady who owns the salon and has 10 other ladies + receptionist working there is not wealthy, and is probably taking on a lot of risk.

'Small business owner' is one of the most precarious positions to be in - it's like all the low pay and crap of 'working class' life - but with all the risk and stress of capital class.

I don't know why people do it.

I wonder maybe if this class just 'gave up on it' it'd be interesting to see how we would all cope.

As you point out, the risk is what people often forget.

My parent's have run a small business for over 20 years. Between 10 and 20 employees depending on the season and the economic situation.

When everything goes great, they can sometimes clear a few hundred thousand in the year. They are doing well and appear wealth.

But then a bad job comes around, and they can lose their shirts. 3-4 times over the last 20 years, a big job has gone south and they have actually personally lost money for the year. One year in particular, they had to remortgage their house to meet payroll because conditions out of their control lost them a big contract. All the employees still get paid, but my parents have to go into debt and deal with the repercussions.

The stress they deal with is immense. I've worked some high-stress corporate jobs, and it still has no compare to what I watched my parents deal with.

> I don't know why people do it.

I can't answer this myself, but I've gotten some hints at it over my lifetime of hearing my dad's stories (repeated over and over...)

One is that it's part of the American dream. As immigrants, being able to say that you made it and are self-made can mean a lot.

Second and probably more importantly, successfully running a business, along with all the financial risks included like loans, can give you a leg up in one crucial area that is very hard to acquire as a poor immigrant - high credit score. This let's you get far better loans, mortgages, etc. Having that history where you can prove that "yeah, I make good on my debts" goes a very long way. Especially if you're as savvy as my dad.

> I don't know why people do it.

Because it's the most common and consistent gateway to actual wealth, which is also non-coincidentally the gateway to independence (at least from a singular boss, there's always some dependence on the system in some way).

This is slightly upended by startups and getting shares for signing on early, but that's really not all that different of a situation (partial ownership for partial risk), it just happens that at this particular point in history it's also applying towards people with a lot of prospects and/or resources so there's less on the line for them if it fails.

You should speak to a few more cafe and restaurant owners if you believe that.

In general, you are correct but it is very location dependent. Low income in SF is anything below $82k according to HUD

>I'm being angrily downvoted...

Your claim regarding others' emotional states sounds like speculation based on insufficient information.

I disagree. Lower middle class people can open businesses propped up on loans, in which their drive to hit their margin is even higher.

I guess it depends on where you live. I'm going by the definition based on the income ranges in the city/state where we grew up where "middle class" is significantly higher than the rest of the US. If you prefer to average across the entire US, then sure, I'll be happy to edit that to say "middle class". However, I don't see how this is anything but a nitpick without addressing any of the content I wrote in my comment.

Also, others have pointed out many examples where it's possible to hire many workers but still not be in a high income bracket.

Interestingly, esoterica replied and then deleted before I could respond, but since this is actually bothering me (I know it's the internet, it shouldn't), I'm going to post this reply with the quote anyway.

>> My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1],

>>His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.

> Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage.

> Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).

Like I said, I'd be happy to edit it (can't because of the time limit). However, you're nitpicking on a single part of the comment that honestly means very little. You're also doing that without even using any numbers or locations.

My question to you is, do you have anything constructive to say in response to the spirit and content of my comment with regards to the discussion thread?

Edit: Also, remember that the "fair wage" is based on what the union negotiated (including raises). We paid on the higher end compared to others in our industry. "Fair wage" does not automatically mean that the workers are middle or even lower middle class. So your calculation is already making a huge mistake there.

Bad math. Two people making a "fair wage" in a single household does not make it suddenly unfair... unless your point is that people shouldn't be allowed to live together.

I've owned a cafe and was able to pay myself and the head cook roughly $1000/week (each) when things were great. If that's not middle class, I'm not sure what is.

$1000/week is higher than the median American personal income. That's by definition not lower middle class.

First, they said "when things were great". Considering they stated that ownership as past tense, I would assume things didn't stay great, and just because you make $1000 a week sometimes doesn't mean you make anywhere near that consistently.

Secondly, it's much more important to look at local median income and local cost of living. $1000 a week in many areas won't get you far if most of it is taken up by taxes and housing. And before someone pulls out the "well, move to somewhere cheaper", there's no guarantee that a cheaper to live location would necessarily still support $1000/week to the owner, or if there was a commute, that it wouldn't eat significantly into that income (fuel + toll + car payment which may not be required if you live locally could be well over a $1000/month).

If wikipedia is any indication, the definition of middle class is nebulous.

My hunch is most people don't base it on dividing the population in to equal fractions, which is kind of how I read your comments.

I think your hunch is right, but economists' definitions do tend to be tied to numbers. Pew Research and others -- although I doubt this is a universal definition—usually treat "middle class" as being two-thirds to double the median income in an area. That seems like an unusually high range -- I would have assumed two-thirds to four-thirds would make more sense, but I suspect it's to account for how sharply incomes rise at the high end of the scale (e.g., the median salary in the top quintile compared to that of the middle quintile is many times greater than the median salary in the middle quintile is compared to the lowest).

Even with that there's an awful lot of caveats, though; as folks have noted, regional differences can be huge. The median income in Silicon Valley as of last year is just under $100K (despite the picture that Hacker News can sometimes paint!), but in Tampa Bay, Florida, it was just under $60K.

Depends on the area. The national median doesn't really give you insight into whether someone is middle class or not.

I'd also point out it's 15% higher than the median. How small do you feel the middle class is? You mentioned "lower middle class"; I only see them mention "middle class".

But even for the lower middle class, it rather depends on how you choose to count it, no? I've seen some economists define middle class as the middle 60%. Given that range (~$46k - $140k), they're in the lower end, if you want to hold them to that statement (that they never made).

I never said "lower middle class". From this article [0], ~$50k doesn't seem like a stretch for middle class.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-income-us-city-...

It is in SFO.

Food service, maintenance, landscaping, small tetail.. plenty of possible examples come to mind.

You are not "angrily" downvoted, you are downvoted because your statement is completely wrong.

I once had two employees and was definitely not in a high income bracket.

Lower middle class in America is 30 to 50k.