That kind of behaviour on the part of management is just idiotic. Seen it many times. If you'll take what they'll pay you, they'll keep it static and pay new hires more. Now regional differences I can see depending on the job. For example, in LA we paid roll off drivers with a few years of experience $120,000 a year in 2003 when I was with XX. Super competitive market. But that was freaking awesome money for driving a garbage truck back then.
Magnified and All,
The steady good paying jobs in manufacturing that Americans enjoyed beginning in WW II, and for almost three decades afterwards, I see as a historical abnormality that is in a protracted correction mode. From 1941 to about 1975 our companies sold goods and services to a rebuilding world. We loaned Europe money with the Marshall Plan. Our cities and factories were intact, most of the world's was in ruins. We had natural resources, including oil. We had an economic system which enabled creation of wealth and workers eager to share in it.
All those advantages gradually eroded as other countries, and their workers (to one degree or another) began to compete and build wealth. We became the consumers of cheaply made electronics and cars instead of exporters. The problem for US workers, and managements, is that the cost basis to manufacture competitive products here became a lot higher than relocating factories elsewhere. Globalization policies offered - dictated really - the stark economic reality that to stay in business this cost basis imbalance had to be corrected.
There are only two ways to do this, unless you're willing to create trade barriers like tariffs and embargoes which too often backfire, and even set the stage for more wars. The one I've always wanted to see is the rest of the world adopting worker protections like we have enacted here that would raise the cost basis overseas. Compensation here is a blend of pay and benefits that doesn't exist in most emerging nations. Tax policies are a blend of incentives - carrots and sticks - to support what has come to be called American Capitalism. Benefits like unemployment insurance, worker's compensation for injuries on the job, pensions (now being replaced with 401k plans), paid vacation time, sick leave and medical insurance - even the 40 hour work week and paid holidays - have all put a human face on unfettered capitalism's uncaring bottom line. We need only look back 100 to 150 years ago to see how grim life was for the average hourly worker. It is a fact that American trade policies in the form of NAFTA did not better protect our workers and fully embraced the economic reality that our factories would relocate.
The other factor at play in addressing the cost basis imbalance is what we're seeing happening. American wages and standard of living gradually erodes - falls back to better compare with those costs overseas. The factories and jobs come back to within our physical borders only when the cost of making them here becomes competitive with the cost of making them there (including transportation costs, etc). This is why manufacturing wages here have stagnated for so long - except in the areas where we maintained a technological advantage. Even that is changing with China putting a rover on Mars a few months ago.
That's the backdrop - the biggest factor in the loss of jobs and the erosion of benefits for the lowest paid workers where it has occurred in the last 40 years - but even more recently job losses and the downward pressure on compensation everywhere is complicated by innovations in robotics, and now increasingly by AI. The response during the pandemic by managements is to look for ways to do the job without humans. Many jobs will never come back.
I started this thread because I found it surprising that a major car dealership can't hire enough workers to make appointments for service. How bare bones an operation is that? I appreciate the comments by owners of businesses and those personally feeling the pinch of how managements are trying to attract new hires with better wages. Inflation is around the corner, if not already here.
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