The UAW Strike Settlement & Egalitarianism
Top paid workers will be earning--only by 2028!--far less than what a family of four needs to get by today
Read the article containing this photo here, from which I took the strike gain information I discuss below.
It’s a “Is the glass half-full or half-empty?” story.
First the “half-full” version.
As far as I can tell from the outside, the UAW workers won some important things with their recent strike. They gained wage and benefit increases, and they eliminated “many” of the solidarity-destroying wage tiers that paid, for example, young and old workers differently for doing exactly the same work. Good! Bravo for the UAW workers!
Now the “half-empty” version.
The top paid UAW workers will—only by 2028, mind you!—be paid “roughly” $42 per hour. At 8 hours per day, 5 days per week and 52 weeks per year that come to a gross annual pay of $87,360. Let’s put this in perspective.
Firstly, consider that a family of four—two parents and two children—ought to be able to live decently on the income of one full-time wage-earner so that the other parent can raise the children full time and also have time to be involved in the community in various important ways, right?
So, what does it take for a family of four to just “get by”? Read the details from this cnbc.com article here:
In some U.S. states, a family of four needs to earn at least $100,000 to get by, a new analysis reveals.
In Hawaii, the living wage for a married couple with two children is $182,900 — the highest in the country — according to a study by personal finance website GOBankingRates.com.
A living wage is defined as the minimum income a family of four would need to follow the 50/30/20 budget, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A family of four is defined as a married couple with two children, the oldest aged 6 to 17.
With a 50/30/20 budget, 50% of your budget is spent on necessities, like housing or utilities, 30% goes toward discretionary spending, and 20% is left for savings or investments.
Based on this outline, Hawaii is by far the most expensive state for a family of four, but there are 12 states where a household would need to earn over $100,000 to get by:
Hawaii: $182,900
Massachusetts: $142,341
California: $130,239
New York: $118,127
Alaska: $113,079
Maryland: $110,244
Oregon: $106,779
Vermont: $106,692
Washington: $105,080
New Jersey: $104,770
Connecticut: $101,030
New Hampshire: $100,436
The top-paid UAW worker, in 2028, will only earn $87,360 when TODAY that amount is far less than what his or her family of four would need to “get by.” This is OUTRAGEOUS!
It is especially outrageous when one considers that this UAW worker is doing real honest-to-god work, often hard work, unpleasant work.
But some non-UAW families of four do get by. In fact they “get by” FABULOUSLY. Who are they?
Here they are in the chart below, hiding in the top 99th percentile of U.S. income, earning $591,550 in 2023 and who knows how much by 2028 when our top-paid UAW worker will be earning only $87,360. The UAW worker who is not top-paid will, of course, be worse off. How hard to you think these 99th percentile folks work? Do you think—if they work at all—that they work on an assembly line, or rather by “doing lunch” to make deals in luxury restaurants?
Notice, by the way, that in the above chart on the far right side there appears the average household income. The average (as opposed to the median) is the income that all households would have if every household had the same income and the total income remained the same, in other words perfect equality (assuming equal-sized households). If household incomes were perfectly equal our UAW worker’s family income would be—today in 2023, probably more in 2028—$106,270, far higher than what it will actually be in 2028. UAW workers, despite having just won an important strike with wage gains, and despite doing hard and unpleasant work, receive far less than the average income. There is no excuse for this.
Bottom line: the UAW workers are being SCREWED! Unjustly screwed!
HOW MUCH SHOULD UAW WORKERS BE PAID?
Every single UAW worker who works reasonably according to ability, and (if there are such people) their spouse who works reasonably raising the children, and their children who are considered to be working reasonably just because they are children, should be paid with membership in good standing in the sharing economy. What does that mean? It means that they can take for free from the economy (goods and services) what they need or reasonably desire and have equal status will everybody when it comes to scarce things that are equitably rationed according to need. Simple. Fair. Practical (read here about that.) It’s called egalitarianism.
Without doubt, this is what the vast majority of UAW workers, just like the vast majority of people in general, would love. Read the evidence for this here.
IF THE UAW EXPLICITLY FOUGHT FOR EGALITARIANISM THEN IT WOULD GAIN ENORMOUSLY MORE SUPPORT FROM BOTH ITS MEMBERS AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC
The reason why UAW workers want better wages and working conditions is because those reforms make our society be a little bit closer to being fully egalitarian, which is what people want most of all.
Until the UAW declares that its aim is to make our society fully egalitarian, with no rich and no poor and with real, not fake, democracy, the general public (the have-nots) will not have a reason to be wildly enthusiastic and committed to supporting the UAW; they will be merely passively in support of it.
But if and when the UAW tells the public that its aim is the wonderful one of egalitarian revolution, it will gain enormously enthusiastic and committed support even from people who don't have any particular concern for the wages and working conditions of UAW workers.
Here's a video (2nd half) of me asking random people on the streets of Boston if they would support an organization more, or less, if it advocated removing the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. Almost all said they'd support it MORE! As seen in this similar video, the huge majority of random people on the street say they think it is a GOOD, not bad, idea to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
To make society be how it ought to be this way requires removing from power the rich who don’t want it to be that way. Here’s how we can build a movement to make that happen.