One job, 30 years later

Thirty years ago, my husband got an entry-level job in coal mining. It was a Consol mine, unionized, and was the way to make a good living in this area if you didn't have a great education or if you didn't want a desk job. He made, if I remember, around $8 an hour--with overtime it came to around $20,000 a year and health insurance was included. Back then, this was enough money to support a stay-at-home wife (me) and children. Eventually, he went on to other things, but it was a great entry-level job that provided a good living.

Thirty years later, my youngest son has an entry-level job at a mine owned by the same company. The job is no longer unionized. In fact, the job is no longer with Consol. The job is through a company that provides contract labor to Consol. It pays $10 an hour and health insurance just for him is about $40 a month. If he wanted to insure a family, it would cost $588 a month. He's still living at home.

In thirty years, an entry-level job in coal mining has gone from a unionized job that could support a family to a job that can support a single young man who lives with his parents.

Go Corporatism! Yay GOP! They really have our best interests at heart, don't they? :sarcasm:

i watched that segment on TV and still don't comprehend what that was about...

And that segment was an illustration of how fundamentalism stops a thinking mind and closes it to any ideas or opinions but those of the Bible or one's Church. Such a tiny, scary world to live in, really.

:)

(which isn't even mentioning capital)

"What went wrong"
Paul Krugman, economist
rtsp://real.dialnsa.edu/REAL_BEARD/spring2003_events/schwartz.rm (realplayer)

(...)

.. If we are polarized country politically it might well be at least in part is because we are polarized country economically. What has been happening is a extraordinary pulling apart of the income distribution. Traditionally people look at income distribution by "quintiles", by blocks of 20%. But that is not where the action is. It is not in the top 10%, it is not even in the top 5%.

To really see what is going on you need to look at the top 1%, the top 0.1% and the top 0.01%. Then you discover that there has been an explosion of income on the very top of the scale:

top 1%
1970 9%
2000 22%

top 0.1%
1970 2.8%
2000 11%

top 0.01%
1970 1%
2000 5%

We are by these numbers fully back to and by some measures above the level of concentration of income that we had in the 1920's.


(i've understood minimum wage is now at a 50 year low)

That value is indexed against today's dollars, v. the CoL for a family of three in which one (a child) cannot have a job. If both parents are working at minimum wage, the Std. of Lvng. is lower than at any time since 1951. That's actually 54 years.
The Professor

and had to pay $588 a month for insurance he would be working just to pay taxes and insurance with barely anything left over. This country is headed for disaster if something isn't done soon.

How many kids in their early 20s nowadays make enough to support a family?

to just make it. Health insurance alone is a back breaker. The middle class as we knew it is vanishing and something has to be done about it.

Hear it all the time from those in the 20's, and 30's. Even many in their 40's have moved back-in with Mom or Dad.

Not because they don't work or are lazy. Rather, because they can not afford just about "anything" in the last 5 1/2 years!

Meet many in their 40's, 50's, and 60's with Bachelor's degrees working at very low-end jobs & they're "not" happy campers one bit!

things that is wrong with this country.

This is a prime example of why the gap is getting bigger between the rich and the ordinary person.

First, I should make it clear that I'm talking about entry-level jobs--what the pay comparisons are for experienced miners, I don't know. My son tells me he'll be making $15 an hour after he's there for a year.

Second, my son has friends who are working for much less than $10 an hour and would also like to work in the mines but can't get in. The reason they can't get in has nothing to do with the availability of jobs--the coal mines are hiring like mad--it has to do with the logistics of getting the job. To get a job in a mine, you need to pay for a safety training course and spend a week in safety training. Afterwards, if you get hired right away, it takes a week to get to work. When you arrive, you're expected to have a couple of hundred dollars of safety equipment--boots, helmet, etc.--which you have to buy. Then, because the company that provides the contract miners has a long pay cycle, you don't your first pay for three weeks. Oh, and you need to have a bank account because they only do direct deposit and you need a reliable car because the mines are out in the sticks.

In short, to get the job that pays a little more, you need to invest several hundred dollars, be able to do without a paycheck for several weeks, AND have a reliable car to get you to the mine. Many people can't afford that.

insurance company in 1984..11 months later I was promoted to claims examiner. In November 1984, the starting wage for a claims examiner position was $7.75 an hour, not bad for that time.

Fast forward to 2005, claims examiners are now called claims processors and seen as no more than "mere data entry clerks". The starting pay at the same company in 2005 for claims processors is $10 an hour.

You can be assured that the CEOs salary has increased by more than $3 an our over 21 years.

my grandfather, uncles ...all were coal miners.

My grandfather was a union man before it was popular...was even blacklisted from some mines.

Eventually he reached his goal of being a well paid coal miner...but it was dangerous work and he forbid my father from doing it...sent him to work in the "safer" steel mills... :sarcasm: given that he didn't know that they too were dangerous.

Sadly the corporatists painted the union coal miners as overpaid manual laborers and worked to breed resentment within communities.

It sickens me that we are seeing labor backtrack like this...

makes today. Add that info to this & you have a great LTTE that will hit home with many, many Americans.

as I'm sure most DU folks are aware.

Some of my 20-something co-workers couldn't make it if they didn't live with their parents. It's a lot harder for a young person to get started out in life than it was 30 years ago.

And if you're over 40, much less over 50, and lose a good-paying job due to whatever reason--for most of them, there is no chance in Hades of them ever getting another decent paying job with benefits.

if you adjusted for inflation, that in the 1950s the average wage job paid $18 an hour.

This was 50 freaking years ago!!!!

Makes me sick!!!

30 years ago a young person could go to work on an assembly line at three different auto manufacturing plants. Or at any number of other manufacturing facilities. Or at a steel plant. And those jobs paid well. And had great benefits. When we finished high school, we had choices. If we didn't want to go to college, we could work in manufacturing.

Now there is no more steel plant, very few manufacturing jobs and only two auto assembly plants that hire sparingly and rarely. Kids out of high school work fast food or retail.