Posted on 01/14/2022 3:30:17 AM PST by hamburger hill
A few weeks after the end of World War II, New York City came to a standstill. Thousands of elevators hung without operators, doors stood without doormen, and buildings languished without repairmen. Business districts closed down; the Garment District emptied out. Almost all deliveries other than the mail stopped coming into Manhattan. America’s commercial center was shuttered. “Make yourselves comfortable,” one union officer publicly warned. It wasn’t a government shutdown; it was a strike—one that started with the elevator operators, doormen, and maintenance workers, and spread to other unionists across the city. (“Fur workers do not want any scabs to run elevators in fur buildings,” declared one sympathy striker.)
(Excerpt) Read more at motherjones.com ...
This is a pro-union article. Unsure why it belongs on a conservative website.
Wage growth—especially among those who switched jobs, and particularly among the bottom rung of workers—jumped. The average pay for those working in leisure and hospitality increased more than 12 percent.
And as a predicted result, inflation has jumped also. Hard economic facts meet fantasy wishes. “We demand a living wage!” Well, here it is..Expect to pay MORE.
So, you can’t open a door or use an elevator in NYC on your own?, you need to have someone else do those things for you?
That’s kinda stupid.
Have you ever seen a liberal on an escalator that stopped? They just stand there.
Fodder for FRs pro union stooges...
I was interested in where the article was going until I got to “dreadfully low rates of unionization.” *click*
With or without unions the lower wage employee is receiving better compensation.
Its the way supply and demand works.
“I was interested in where the article was going until I got to “dreadfully low rates of unionization.” *click*”
Its an article from Mother Jones so rehashing the Taft-Hartley Act can be expected.
I got through it. It had a few interesting points about the labor supply & management issues, with MJ’s usual bias & advocacy for unionization.
This person posts many articles, but doesn’t comment.
Odd.
I think we’re better than du. I like to see articles from the other side so we can comment on them. But that’s just my perspective.
It was a different time. And those people did priced themselves out of the economy.
And for those wages going up, they actually have less buying power.
There is a lot of leftist twaddle in the piece, but also some good observations.
The author claims that the the stimulus packages allowed many people to quit. That is probably true to some extent. It also probably allowed a lot of people to move to find a better job and my anecdotal experience is that the initial job losses and lockdowns also taught many people how to live with less, particularly working women who realized they were happier and only slightly less wealthy if the stayed at home and looked after the kids.
So the world of crap paying service jobs was upended.
Wage growth usually trails inflation, and you should be happy about higher wages, especially for the poorest part of the labor market, as it strengthens poor households and reduces social problems later on.
Yup. Those strikers led to self-service elevators among other things.
Someday, we’ll marvel about how places like McDonalds actually employed PEOPLE to flip burgers on the grill.
Automation doesn’t get paid by the hour.
That’s kinda stupid
_____________________________________________________________________________
Not at all (really had to curb my snark here)
The time period was late 40s. Elevators needed operators to control ascent and descent. Neither the car doors nor the shaft doors operated automatically.
If you called an elevator to your floor, how would it get there?
Some skyscrapers in NYC had elevator operators into the 70s.
When I was a kid, I worked in a store that still had one of the old elevators. It took me about a day or two to get it just right (just right meant that the elevator floor was about 2-3 inches for being level with the building floor). Oh yes, the speed of the elevator was dependent on load, so there was a difference in an empty elevator and a full elevator. So you can see, having a person who only operated the elevator would increase safety.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.