Elon's Prediction

[Ghost Ryder]

Union in a more... human centric approach I guess, less in an individual industry approach. My intent being to stop arguing over what UAW is getting paid and start having the conversation on how we, as workers in general in whatever industry, ensure we aren't living in slum cities because 50% of jobs have been replaced by AI.

I don't think it's as near future as some do, as most of the existing AI is hilarious bad and its abilities are oversold significantly. But it will advance rapidly, which is why I said 20 years or so. But if we wait until 30% of positions are replaced to start having the conversation, it's only going to get messy.

Not sure what the answer to that issue is, to be clear, it's a large problem that will need to be attacked from a lot of sides.

AI only really started advancing 5 years ago. It's damn scary to think about how many jobs they will replace.

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[ArthurDOB]

The two-tier system is inherently unfair. But to end it, you assume that the only solution is the bring the lower tier up. How about meeting in the middle? The lower tier goes down halfway, and the lower tier goes up to meet them. Sounds fair? No? I didn't think you would agree to that.

Whatever, dude. Clearly, you're not interested in a real discussion about this.

 

[ArthurDOB]

Exactly, unfortunately we need to be working on these things now, and electing leaders that want to tackle the issue.


This take is always so self-defeating with any level of thought on where it leads. It's a bad idea to not pay your employees a wage to afford your products, which is where many jobs are headed. People talk like increasing union pay, or any worker pay, is just a drain on a company full stop. While paying an employee more isn't a guarantee they will buy your product, you better believe that a union employee making more money is more likely to buy an F-150 or Mach-e than the one in another country that maybe doesn't even have Ford vehicles.

I worked for Ford up until July of this year, and while not everyone owned Ford products, a good number of them do. If an employee gets an extra $20k/yr and goes from driving their 10 year old Fusion to a new F-150, Ford benefits.

The race to the bottom in employee wages is a foolish approach. I worked on the IT side at Ford, which hires a lot in AP (India) because it's "cheaper".

Here's a quick summary of the Ford vehicle selection they can then buy:
https://www.carwale.com/ford-cars/

Obviously it's complicated and again I am fully aware not everyone that works at any company buys their products. But at least with Ford being employed and getting A-Plan is a heck of an incentive, can see that from the two Ford vehicles in my user picture, expensive Ford vehicles too because Ford paid well enough for it.

Goes back to all the complaints of companies about younger generations not buying diamond engagement rings or eating out for dinner and that as much as they used to, if you underpay your employees and replace them with AI or whatever else you keep defending, suddenly nobody buys your stuff. Not saying every employee should have CEO pay, but there is clearly a better middle ground than the average company wants to provide on their own.

^^^
This.

 

[Vulnox]

Saving and investing in the future is a mentality. That's why so many first-generation immigrants succeed despite the odds. When the starting wage at McDonald's is $20/hour, a couple could easily clear $100k/year. It wouldn't take long to save to buy a house.

Anecdotal example: My aunt came to the US, and worked (not owned) in a nail salon. Saved every penny. Within 10 years she bought a house, free and clear.

As far as the phone goes, you don't need the latest iPhone or Android. a 5-year-old iPhone XR is still very capable.

The problem is that people never sit down and actually think about what they need, only what they want.

I'm all for people getting as much as they can, but just realize that it's a zero-sum game for the company. Pull too many eggs from the gold goose and the goose may get and leave. That's happened before with the offshoring of jobs, and it will happen again. Businesses were finally coming back, but it looks like things are reversing course. Starting with Ford canceling the EV plant.

Ford hasn't canceled any EV plants, they paused a Michigan one while they continue the discussions, but that isn't cancelling. Unless you are referring to something else.

An iPhone XR is very capable, and batteries can be replaced. I covered that in my response you quoted, and with the average iPhone age being 3 years, that means there are still a lot of XRs around.

It's fine to acknowledge that corporations don't have your best interests in mind... basically ever. Apple does not want you to use that XR, same goes for continuing to use an Android phone from whatever manufacturer for 5 years. They also work to make it difficult to do so through OS update lock outs that can expose you to security risks, or just the simple march of technological time as an iPhone XR can't make use of all the 5G bands a newer iPhone 13/14/15 can, making it less capable.

Sometimes you have to upgrade, and you should be able to afford to do so. Also, people shouldn't HAVE to live in a situation where they are just surviving. I think it's pure insanity that anyone would take pride in knowing someone that had to scrimp and save for potentially a 1/6th of their life to afford something as essential as a home while Jeff Bezos builds his third insane yacht and his delivery drivers are working themselves ragged.

It's fantastic to have a good work ethic. Both myself and my wife do and we have gone far from it, and I am absolutely of the opinion that union requests should be reasonable, and I agree that 40% raise even over four years plus the rest is maybe more than is needed, but again it's a starting point. We can talk more on that front once the final contract is ironed out, they definitely won't get everything. These contract negotiations happen, if I recall, every 4 years, and Ford has been through a lot of them and still makes profit. To pretend this one is going to be the end of them is silly.

 

[ArthurDOB]

100% agree. Union greed will cause them to fail faster than anything else they could do. It's that mentality and union greed that caused the U.S. to lose its incredible advantage in the automotive market, and now so many other countries are eating our lunch by being able to better engineer and undercut our price points. Unions no longer just support the working conditions for overworked/underpaid employees (which was an admirable and necessary thing to be doing "back then." Now they are like parasites...feeding off the host until they eventually kill it.

Oh, please...

 

[ArthurDOB]

Hypothetical situation. If the CEO pay did not go up or even gone down. Will the workers be happy with their pay and not ask for any increase?

I'm going to guess no. Because the CEO pay is just a red herring. It sounds good to the uninformed public, but it has very little to do with the company's bottom line.

This hypothetical is a straw man. The fact is their salaries did go up 40%.

 

[RXTbone]

I actually think it’s great to start the conversation on a 32 hour work week. What made a 40 hour work week the magical answer?

Only because there's various incorrect answers to the this question... neither the labor market nor unions created the 40 hour work week. This was created by Henry Ford after it was determined that production increased only fractionally in the additional 8 hours of a 48 hour work week. Other manufactures late adopted the schedule.

 

[ArthurDOB]

Only because there's various incorrect answers to the this question... neither the labor market nor unions created the 40 hour work week. This was created by Henry Ford after it was determined that production increased only fractionally in the additional 8 hours of a 48 hour work week. Other manufactures late adopted the schedule.

He also paid higher wages because he wanted his workers to be able to afford the cars they were building.

 

[RXTbone]

He also paid higher wages because he wanted his workers to be able to afford the cars they were building.

Interesting concept Maybe we should set a global minimum wage - and tariff against it?

 

[curtisfinney]

The labor market.

But what the labor market hasn’t made the answer for is getting paid weekly for work you don’t do.

A couple weeks a year vacation and some more sick time? Sure.

But to ask for a paid personal day every week in addition to that?

There are plenty of people who would line up to take the union jobs from you……and work the full 40 hours.

And outside the US? They’ll work even more hours for less pay.

That is the competition. It’s a bad idea to price yourself out of a job.

How much vacation do you take a year? A couple of weeks - I

In the 19th Century, the idea was floated for 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of family time, a day off for rest, a day off for worship (the weekend). That was their answer to 12+ hours a day for six days and a day off for worship.

Hey, I'm not trying to get in a fight. This isn't about political correctness. I'm just saying that people need to be treated like human beings and given the same consideration as everyone else. Likening current auto workers to robots because robots replaced other auto workers in the past makes no sense and is offensive. These are people. They need to be able to build a decent life for themselves. It is in everyone's interest to make sure everyone has the opportunity for meaningful work and a liveable wage. When I got my first high school job in 1977, the minimum wage was the equivalent of $11.41 in 2023 dollars. It's been $7.25 since 2009, and people are melting down when fast food workers ask for $15/hour! People are underpaid and are tired of it.

The slippery slope of robots and AI replacing us all is, how is anyone going to earn money to buy anything at all? What happens to profits then? Elon Musk tried to automate everything possible in his Tesla plants at the beginning but then found that people performed certain tasks more efficiently than machines, and had to de-automate some aspects of Tesla's assembly line. Automation is not always the answer.

Treating being replaced by machines as inevitable is fatalism at its worst. It doesn't have to be that way if we decide we don't want that outcome.

this is where a shortened work week comes in. Everyone still works and earns a living, but can work less hours due to all the productivity improvements from AI and robots

 

[DevSecOps]

Can we stop with the Farley makes more money than you BS. Who cares? The obsession with people who make millions is astounding. A lot of people make more than me and I'm happy for them. Crying like a child because Bobby has more toys is, well, childish.

Farley was born in Argentina, attended Georgetown and UCLA. He started working at Toyota in the 90's, worked his way up the ladder, moved over to Ford and continued working his way up the ladder. He held 7 positions at Ford before he became CEO. He proved his worth along the way and I'm sure he worked his ass off to get there.

If you want to get paid like Farley, start a business, make something, work somewhere and prove yourself. Sitting on your couch complaining that someone else got paid a lot because they worked hard is pure jealousy.

The more we deincentivize hard work and education the quicker we fall.

 

[corradoborg]

I have less of a problem with someone like Musk who risked everything and who started his company from scratch.

Can we stop with the Farley makes more money than you BS. Who cares? The obsession with people who make millions is astounding. A lot of people make more than me and I'm happy for them. Crying like a child because Bobby has more toys is, well, childish.

Farley was born in Argentina, attended Georgetown and UCLA. He started working at Toyota in the 90's, worked his way up the ladder, moved over to Ford and continued working his way up the ladder. He held 7 positions at Ford before he became CEO. He proved his worth along the way and I'm sure he worked his ass off to get there.

If you want to get paid like Farley, start a business, make something, work somewhere and prove yourself. Sitting on your couch complaining that someone else got paid a lot because they worked hard is pure jealousy.

The more we deincentivize hard work and education the quicker we fall.

This toxic "work hard and you too can be paid like a CEO" BS is ridiculous. Many CEOs started out wealthy to begin with. Some were just lucky. For the average person - even one with a really great, novel idea - the odds of making it big aren't much different than winning the lottery or trying to become a pro sports star. No matter how hard a person works, they have about a .0001% chance of getting to that level. The vast majority of people who bust their ass trying to get there... do not make it.

Talking about wealth inequality is not crying or whining or jealousy. It's discussing a genuinely inequitable system that favors those who are already wealthy - and just enough of those who aren't to further the myth that "anyone can do it." The reality is that it's not at all based on merit. It's based on being at the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and it REALLY helps if you're already "one of them."

Meanwhile, literally NOBODY is saying CEOs and other executives shouldn't make a lot of money. Just not 400+ times what their average worker makes. But when reasonable people say exactly that, wealth worshippers come out of the woodwork to claim that somehow the CEOs earned it and we should all be grateful for them because without them job creators none of us would have paying jobs in the first place. And it's astonishingly shameless hogwash.

 

[Jimrpa]

FWIW, this is why I appreciate working for a company that’s a large partnership. No passive investors, no corporate BS, no shareholders demanding profits. And the general partners that run the company? They have unlimited liability.

Really changes how things are done.

I used to work for a big 4. Some of the partners were great. Some were total a-holes. ALL were quite clear that the firm was THEIRs and existed for THEiR benefit. The pressure on the younger staff to advance and someday make Partner was pretty intense. I enjoyed my time there but I don’t think I would have wanted to stay longer. I suspect tech companies like Oracle, Facebook, and Amazon (places where there’s an “owner” ) are much worse.

I’ll also add that I knew, in passing, an individual who grew up in a single parent household that had very little. They went to a “hidden ivy” on scholarships and financial aid. They then joined the firm, quickly figured out “how things worked”, and rocketed to Partner. Oh, and don’t think their background, upbringing, or anything, made him a “good person”. They were a total jerk and treated everyone who worked for them like crap. They just knew how to do it discreetly, and when to smile and bat their eyes (metaphorically).

 

[Jimrpa]

Can we stop with the Farley makes more money than you BS. Who cares? The obsession with people who make millions is astounding. A lot of people make more than me and I'm happy for them. Crying like a child because Bobby has more toys is, well, childish.

Farley was born in Argentina, attended Georgetown and UCLA. He started working at Toyota in the 90's, worked his way up the ladder, moved over to Ford and continued working his way up the ladder. He held 7 positions at Ford before he became CEO. He proved his worth along the way and I'm sure he worked his ass off to get there.

If you want to get paid like Farley, start a business, make something, work somewhere and prove yourself. Sitting on your couch complaining that someone else got paid a lot because they worked hard is pure jealousy.

The more we deincentivize hard work and education the quicker we fall.

I agree, but I believe you’ve left out an important factor - luck. In addition to always pushing, pushing, pushing to get to the next level, there’s a degree of luck (or being at the right place at the right time) involved. I saw it myself numerous times throughout my career.

 

[DevSecOps]

This toxic "work hard and you too can be paid like a CEO" BS is ridiculous. Many CEOs started out wealthy to begin with. Some were just lucky. For the average person - even one with a really great, novel idea - the odds of making it big aren't much different than winning the lottery or trying to become a pro sports star. No matter how hard a person works, they have about a .0001% chance of getting to that level. The vast majority of people who bust their ass trying to get there... do not make it.

Talking about wealth inequality is not crying or whining or jealousy. It's discussing a genuinely inequitable system that favors those who are already wealthy - and just enough of those who aren't to further the myth that "anyone can do it." The reality is that it's not at all based on merit. It's based on being at the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and it REALLY helps if you're already "one of them."

Meanwhile, literally NOBODY is saying CEOs and other executives shouldn't make a lot of money. Just not 400+ times what their average worker makes. But when reasonable people say exactly that, wealth worshippers come out of the woodwork to claim that somehow the CEOs earned it and we should all be grateful for them because without them job creators none of us would have paying jobs in the first place. And it's astonishingly shameless hogwash.

I respectfully disagree. I made it to where I am, previous CEO of a company that went through investment rounds and eventually acquired, through a lot of hard work. There was no luck involved. No one helped me financially in my ventures until I proved to investors that I had something worth investing in. I fell many times but I never gave up.

My grandfather came to the USA as an immigrant at the age of 3 from Italy. Lived under bridges as a young adult in poverty. He founded, what is now, one of the top 100 largest construction companies in the USA. He will forever be my idol.

Most people are happy with their jobs and never try for more. Others don't have the desire to take risk. I don't believe that you can stop a dedicated individual. You may never be a millionaire, but self worth, drive and dedication at any income is all that matters. Anyone who has that doesn't complain about what others make.

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