A raise.

[country gent]

Back around 1976 I started in my first job shop ( it was a small 2 man shop) I dont remember the wage but the Boss brought out the second check and tolkd me therees a .20 raise on this one. Eddie recommended it and I agreed. That winter when they went to Florida I was working the shop myself. When Bob and Eddie came back they saw what was done and another raise was given.
For several years before this I bailed for a neighbor custom bailing. I worked wagons. .01 a bail talk about hard work for little pay. But on the other hand the neighbor and farmers we bailed for all gave me recommendations. The other that stood out was I was going to vocational school machine trades the fall after hiring in.

A lot dont understand that even a hard rough job has benefits latter on that dont show, or stand out until later. I didnt make a lot on the first job but I learned a lot more than the pay was ever worth.

I was so proud of that .20 raise after just 2 weeks.

[john.k]

As a kid I picked strawberries and beans for a few cents an hour .........I was able to buy guns and old motorbikes with that .........first real job was IIRC about $40 a week ..$1 an hour.

[Remmy4477]

We really need a "like button"! some real great responses.

At 15 my first job was baling hay and farm upkeep. Rough, hard and at times filthy. Three hours a day after school and all day Saterday, made $50 a week. I thought I was rolling in dough then.

Sure miss those days.

[fatelk]

One thing that's really been interesting to me in recent years has been really understanding the power of inflation.

We all think back to how much things cost or how much we earned back in the day, most often without realizing the effect of inflation. For example, as a teenager back in the 1980's, I got a copy of an old gun book at a garage sale for a dime or some such, printed in 1950. In the back it had page after page of all the current guns, with photos and retail price. The one that really caught my eye was the Ruger Standard .22 pistol, with a 1950 price of $37.50. It was cool and I really wanted one. Of course that book was nearly 40 years old at that time and they cost a lot more then.

Using one of the inflation calculators available online, like this one: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ you can see that $37.50 in 1950 wasn't really as cheap as it seems, actually comparable to $485 now. I was just talking to my retired former boss a few days ago and in the course of conversation it came out that I had crossed a certain income mark recently. He said congrats, he worked decades to hit that mark and only crossed it himself 6 or 7 years ago. I punched a couple numbers into the inflation calculator and informed him that just six years ago, that was equivalent to almost 25% more today, so I have a long ways to go to catch up to where he was when I was working for him.

Inflation really is the most powerful form of taxation. If you buried a $100 bill in a can in your back yard twenty years ago, and dug it up now, nobody has touched it, right? Yet it's lost nearly half of its value. Where did that value go; who took it? Well, when the Fed prints fiat money, where does the value of that money come from? Yep, that's where it went.

So, when we talk about money back in the day, for example: I started my career making $16/hr, we really need to have a year reference to know what kind of dollar we're talking about. It's like foreign currency, are we talking rubles, pesos, francs, yen, rupees? A 1962 U.S. dollar is as foreign to a 2024 dollar as an Italian lira, without a conversion factor. It makes me feel good to remember that I started out a long time ago at $16/hr, and I make a lot more than that now, until I convert that $16 into 2024 dollars, and realize that I don't really make that much more.

[Winger Ed.]

Minimum wage sort of keeps up with inflation.

In 1970, min. wage was $1.15. At 16, I was washing dishes for $1.25 a hour.
Gas was right at the mid 30 cents a gallon.
Of what I got to keep of that $1.25, I could buy almost 3 gallons of gas.

I don't know what minimum wage is around here now days, but a entry level job at the local burger biggie
pays about $10. or there abouts per hour. Gas is floating around $3.30-ish a gallon around here now.
With that minimum sort of wage, in a hour you can still buy almost 3 gallons of gas.

However; the typical car you put it in now gets better gas mileage, has less frequent oil changes,
and doesn't need to be tuned up or worked on nearly as much as our old ones did.

[MaLar]

I remember when a buck and a quarter was what I made an hour!

[Thundarstick]

Chopping cotton with my Granddaddy as a boy, I remember him talking about working a lot of long days for a dollar a day. My first real jobs where farm work where I made $2.50 -$3.00 an hour. I went to school and started working my first trained job at $5.40 hrs. It's been long years, God blessed me. I've been working at the same job, in the same building for 43 years now, and I'm happy. I make roughly 6 times the dollar amount today, and live the relatively same lifestyle as I started. I've been told if I retire from this job, I'll be an anomaly in today's world, having worked for the same place my whole career!

On another note. Tyson foods has been catching a lot of flack for closing some old outdated processing plants, building new ones in different areas, and saying they will gladly employ legal documentation immigrants. They also offered the jobs to former employees, but of course they will have to pick up and move to a new area.

Why do you think they took us off the gold standard?

[john.k]

The only thing Ive ever made any money from is land .......I recently sold my junkyard for over a million,I bought the land in 1980 for $12,000 and included in that was tons of scrap metal and an old semi trailer I used for years.......The only people benefit from inflation is the government .

[country gent]

The buried 100 dollar bill hasnt lost value it has lost buying power. It takes more to buy the same

[justindad]

Year after year, annual raises across the country do not reach the magnitude of inflation. If you get promotions at your job, you can beat inflation over the course of your career. However, starting pay rarely increases, so the next generation effective gets paid half of what you did. I train people 15-20 years younger than me and I feel bad for them. My children will not be taking salaried desk jobs or low wage hourly jobs. My kids will not be part of this system where we are happy to just keep working, even though we get poorer and poorer every year. Pretty soon, we’ll own nothing and be happy about it (to quote C. Schwab).

[fatelk]

I've been encouraging my kids to make something of themselves, always learn and be looking for something better. I was stupid when I was young, waited for things to come to me instead of being smart about making things happen. If an employer isn't treating you right, then it's doubtful that any amount of complaining will make it much better.

Year after year, annual raises across the country do not reach the magnitude of inflation. If you get promotions at your job, you can beat inflation over the course of your career. However, starting pay rarely increases, so the next generation effective gets paid half of what you did.

There is some truth in that, especially in large corporations. I've been thinking about this lately, and typed my starting wage in my current job a dozen years ago into an inflation calculator; in real after-inflation dollars, I'm only up 5% over what I made when I was completely green. I would think I'm far more valuable now than I was back then. I also make substantially more than new hires now. On top of that, I talked to my retired former boss, who did my exact job 25 years ago. He was making substantially more (after inflation) back then. So yes, wages for my job have decreased significantly over time. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.

What to do about it? Well, no point in complaining, that's for sure. I'm not really in a position where I can do much at all right now, but it sure is an eye-opener. For the time being I'll just keep doing my job as best I can, with an eye out for better opportunities in the future.

[35 Rem]

I grew up on a farm so all my early work didn't pay anything. Got to eat lots of good beef though since we raised angus cattle!

I see a lot of the inflation calculators and they seem to be fairly accurate for some items but not so much for others. One that doesn't seem to fit at all is what my parent's house cost. It is a ranch-style brick about 2,400 total sq ft including 2 car garage. Cost in 1967 was $12,000. Putting that into an inflation calculator generates a 2024 cost of $112,215. I'm in the early stages of building a house and I don't think you could even come close to building that house for that now.

[Big Tom]

Entitlement and being self-centered is one of the major flaws of the "younger generation". I remember 20 years ago, I worked in a smaller company with 150 employees and because of the bad economy, every single employee gave up their 3% raise to save a few colleagues from being fired because of the bad economy. I highly doubt that would happen in today's world. It is all about "me, me, me" without even trying to understand economics that drive a company to a certain raise/no raise. Solely looking at cost of living getting more expensive and expecting more money than that is what I have seen in the last 5+ years...

[georgerkahn]

The company I work for (LTL Carrier) gave us our annual May raise. $1.25 this year.

With everything going on in the world I'm just happy to be working, so the raise is welcomed.
Yet quite a few senior drivers and many of the newbies are having a fit about it. Most are saying it's not enough or we deserve better.

I've been with this company for just over 20 years now. When I started here it was $16 something.
Took me twenty years to break over $36 an hour.

I think there was six years we did not get anything raise wise. And most of the crew was ok with that, they were working. But now nothing but complaining about a buck and a quarter raise.

Most of these guys have maybe 5-8 years in the industry, I just breached 37 years in it. When I started driving in LTL the non union outfits were $5-6 an hour at best, the unions at the time were paying $12 an hour. Times have changed wage wise.

I just don't understand the complaints about a raise, the company treats us good, lots of perks and decent benefits. Since Captain Tripp's the LTL industry has been struggling to recover from all the setbacks and low freight volume. Our company mustered through it and made and are still making a profit.

Still all the complaints I've heard this last week, WOW! I just don't get it? Maybe it's just me?

Just an old guy talking! Need more coffee I guess?

I started "work" at age 13, my job cleaning dropping boards in a poultry farm, where I'd get three dollars for filling three pickup truck beds -- heaping -- with the stuff I dumped in, using bushel baskets from the dropping boards to the '49 Ford pick-up, outside. I then "graduated" to a supermarket, working my way up to be dairy department manager, and I went from 85 cents an hour up to one dollar. A few jobs and years later... I had the true privilege to retire!

You wrote vis a $1.25 hourly increase. Assuming you work but 40 hours a week, that's a $50.00 weekly pay increase. Figuring the 4 1/3 average weeks per month -- that's a $216.67 monthly increase!

Once again, I'm privileged to be retired -- a lot of friends now residing in cemeteries didn't make it -- BUT if I add my Social Security retirement 2024 increase; subtract their Medicare deduction; add my other "retirement cheque"; and, finally subtract my health insurance deduction -- this gives me a MONTHLY $80.18 increase.

My $80.18 versus YOUR $216.67? Put a few pennies from your increase away... When you retire (as I did) the basic cost of living -- utilities, taxes, taxers, taxes, and fuel, insurances, etc. -- in no way keep pace.

geo

[john.k]

House prices here are insane ..(not that Im complaining) .....an old house with a fallen in roof and derelict for 15 years sells at auction for $2.4 million........A house with converted chicken sheds at the back is sold as 'rental income of $1500 a week" sells for $2.7 million...house prices around here have increased 50% since the plandemic.......nothing under $1.5 million.

[justindad]

Entitlement and being self-centered is one of the major flaws of the "younger generation". I remember 20 years ago, I worked in a smaller company with 150 employees and because of the bad economy, every single employee gave up their 3% raise to save a few colleagues from being fired because of the bad economy. I highly doubt that would happen in today's world. It is all about "me, me, me" without even trying to understand economics that drive a company to a certain raise/no raise. Solely looking at cost of living getting more expensive and expecting more money than that is what I have seen in the last 5+ years...

The younger generation will put that in the context of the exponentially increasing pay rates for corporate officers, and then consider that it can be demonstrated that there is no correlation between CEO pay and company performance. Corporate officers are chosen based on social connections more so than competence. Corruption is severe in this world, and much more so for this younger generation.
*
I once received a 10% pay cut to forgo a layoff. Everyone had 10% of their hourly pay cut, except bonuses were not touched. Later, we found out that half of the CEO’s pay was a bonus. 40% of VP pay was bonus. So they lied - the lower you were in pay, the more of a pay cut you received. Corruption is severe in this world.

[justindad]

<snip>
What to do about it? Well, no point in complaining, that's for sure. I'm not really in a position where I can do much at all right now, but it sure is an eye-opener. For the time being I'll just keep doing my job as best I can, with an eye out for better opportunities in the future.

The answer is small business. Engage in and support small business.

[Winger Ed.]

So they lied - the lower you were in pay, the more of a pay cut you received. Corruption is severe in this world.

I used to troll people when they tried to relate their pay to a high level executive's.
The way a business is structured, they aren't exactly comparable.
It's more about who is worth more to the business, and who is more replaceable.
And corruption is more related to criminal acts than business practices and realities.

Anyway-- When the young kids I worked with went on a tear about how unfair executive pay was, I'd tell 'em:
"Isn't America great? With hard work and education, you too can rise to be a evil, rich CEO. The only thing
holding you back is yourself".

Years ago, Coca-Cola was about a inch away from going broke.
They hired in a new CEO that got paid a commission on how well the company did in the future.
He was on a TV interview when the reporter asked if he thought getting paid $40,000,000.oo that year was unfair.

He told her, "No. If they could have found somebody to do what I did cheaper---- they would have".

[justindad]

If I started a business built it up to be worth millions, I would hand it off to my children. I would not look for the lowest paid CTO to take it over. Friends and cousins would also get well paid jobs. Keeping cushy jobs inside social circles is a real thing.
*
I once worked under a CTO would not promote someone to a Director level or above if they didn’t go to private school in K - 12th grade.
*
I know a very young VP who ?coincidentally? has the same last name as an older Group President in another business unit.
*
I was once told to hire someone before anyone interviewed them, because this person’s mother knew a VP in my company, from an unrelated department.
*
You might think I’m complaining, but I truly have everything I want. I know that I have exactly what GOD wants me to have. I have never met anyone who’s children exhibited more beautiful hearts than mine. I know for fact that there is more than just competition at play here. Blissful ignorance on our part will cause more and more pain for future generations.

[john.k]

I was critical to the continued functioning of the business I worked for ......both the partners knew it well,but being skinflints was so ingrained with them ,they refused to secure my further services when I told them I was quitting...........They said silly things like 'You'll be back,they always come back'.......The business folded six months after I left ,unfortunately putting 40 people out of work..........And the industry customers who relied on them had to send their work to another place 20 miles away.