Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Labors’ share of the national income is the lowest it has been since this has been measured.
We live in a world based on giant firms that are efficient and can do a lot of things with few workers. Needing less workers means workers have less bargaining power and therefore get paid less. Globalization also weakens bargaining power as companies can move some of the work overseas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgcNgo6IIpM
Korea’s labor laws make firing employees very difficult. These strict laws drew out of the horrible working conditions during Korea’s economic rise under a dictatorship. Making it that hard to fire employees leads to: bad employees lowering companies’ efficiency, companies hiring fewer employees, companies keeping workers as contract employees or independent contractors and the employees therefore not getting basic benefits, brain drain as good employees can more easily move up the ranks and make more money in other countries, and discourages foreign companies from investing in Korea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjjhrwVYPE8
Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD makes everything in-house, which makes it more efficient. China also has much cheaper labor than the US, and heavy governmental subsidies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTtLAf0f2HU
“In 2023, California passed a law requiring a $20 per hour minimum wage for all fast-food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide.
…
New research suggests that the mandate has also resulted in fewer jobs for struggling entry-level workers.
The law went into effect in April 2024 and increased the hourly pay of an estimated half a million workers across the state. But without the law in place, thousands more workers would likely have been employed.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/11/californias-minimum-wage-law-cost-18000-jobs/?nab=1
“New York’s experiment with delivery driver wage mandates hasn’t gone well. Pay went up after the 2023 rule kicked in, but so did prices—and many drivers left the market altogether. The city saw an 8 percent drop in its delivery workforce, while food delivery costs rose 10 percent, including a 12 percent jump in restaurant prices and a staggering 58 percent spike in app fees. Tips, meanwhile, plunged 47 percent. Platforms even started capping drivers
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Seattle followed suit in 2024 with a $26-an-hour minimum wage for delivery drivers—and immediately watched the system collapse. Apps tacked on a new $5 delivery fee, and with taxes added, customers were soon paying bills with nearly 30 percent of the cost unrelated to the food itself. DoorDash saw 33,000 fewer orders in just the first two weeks, wiping out about $1 million in restaurant sales.
Counter to the law’s intention, many Seattle delivery drivers saw their earnings slashed by over half. “Demand was dead,” according to one such driver. A recent report from gig companies found that, following the ordinance taking effect, delivery orders dropped 25 percent, and driver pay fell 28 percent per hour logged on.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/11/new-york-doubles-down-on-delivery-wage-disaster/?nab=1
One reason BLS statistic revisions are so large is because it is underfunded. Trump funding it even less isn’t going to help this.
Another problem is that businesses are not responding to surveys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdANjLeny8
“The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. “I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,” Huerta joked.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/02/dolores-huerta-farm-raids-immigration-labor-interview-00489203
“Americans today are vastly better off than they were 50 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes have risen by about 50 percent—more than double what raw census data suggest. Unemployment remains near historic lows. Over the past three decades, the private service sector has created about 40.5 million net new jobs, many in high-wage, high-skill fields like health care, finance, and professional services.
Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has surged. It’s now at its all-time high but with fewer workers thanks to stunning productivity gains. As economist David Autor notes, the so-called hollowing out of the middle class involves many workers moving up into higher-skill, higher-paying occupations.
None of this means that the labor-force detachment problem should be ignored. It does mean that the story is more complicated than Trump’s “China stole our jobs” narrative suggests.”
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“The deeper problem exposed by the China shock wasn’t trade—it was America’s fading economic dynamism. In past generations, when industries declined, workers moved. They retrained. They found new opportunities. Today, many displaced workers simply stay put even as jobs emerge elsewhere.
Government policy plays an enormous role. Over time, policymakers have built a dense thicket of regulations and disincentives that trap people where they are and discourage adaptation.
Restrictive zoning and land-use legislations have sent housing costs in high-wage cities through the roof, pricing out workers who would otherwise migrate toward opportunity. Economists estimate that even modest housing deregulation would allow more Americans to live and work where their skills are most valued.
Another culprit is occupational licensing. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. workers must obtain some kind of government license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. These barriers disproportionately affect low-income workers and create huge hurdles to interstate mobility, effectively locking people into stagnant local economies.
Then there’s Social Security Disability Insurance. Reforms in the 1980s expanded eligibility with broader, more subjective criteria. Today, many prime-age men outside the labor force report being disabled even as overall health has improved and physically demanding jobs have declined. The effect is less labor-force reentry—and, thus, worse long-term prospects—for workers on the margin.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/01/tariffs-wont-fix-whats-ailing-american-men-in-the-work-force/
“Health plans, and the companies that administer them, have excluded key behavioral treatments, such as therapies for substance use and autism, and offered inadequate networks of mental health providers, according to a 142-page report released Jan. 17 in conjunction with the Treasury and Health and Human Services departments.
The report, which the agencies are required to file regularly to Congress, also detailed the results of secret shopper surveys of more than 4,300 mental health providers listed in insurance directories and found an “alarming proportion” were “unresponsive or unreachable.” Such error-ridden plans, commonly known as ghost networks, make it harder for patients to get the treatment they need, ProPublica has previously found.
Since 2021, the Labor Department has addressed violations in health plans that serve more than 7 million people, according to the report. The agency has worked to remedy the problems by seeking changes to plan provisions, policies and procedures, as well as working to ensure wrongly denied claims were paid.
But the report acknowledged that while plans and insurers have made some progress, they continue to fall short.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/department-labor-investigation-health-insurance-doctors-healthcare
We should allow the skilled people that come over on H1-B visas to come and work, but we should also give them citizenship and the full labor rights of an American citizen so they cannot be exploited.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mQHG9Cdfc