Workers at an appliance manufacturing facility in Louisville Kentucky start at $12 an hour. The typical Tesla Assembly Line Worker makes $19 per hour in Freemont California where the average rent for an apartment is $2,500 a month. That leaves the worker an extra $800 a month for health care, transportation, food…..and so on.
The minimum wage in the USA is $7.25 per hour. It’s been this amount since 2009. Barack Obama was president from 2009-2017. Somehow he was unable to raise the minimum wage again in those eight years and to date, Trump has not been willing to raise it either.
There was a time when the minimum wage kept pace with the productivity of the American labor force. This ended in 1968. Had it kept pace with the productivity of the American worker, the minimum wage wold be $24 per hour.
At $24 per hour, the worker at Tesla manufacturing would have an extra $1,660, more than double, to pay for other things.
The only reason that manufacturing jobs of the past paid well was that the workers in those jobs had political power.
Manufacturing has nothing to do with it.
