Forget the GDP.
We’ll get the report on Q2 GDP at 8:30 but I’ll be watching the Employment Cost Index to see if we are recovering. I know it seems like “commie talk” to my Conservative friends, but rising wages and benefits are signs of a healthy economy and you can plot the rise and fall of the stock market very neatly against how well the workers are treated.
It was Henry Ford who first “discovered” that, if you expect American consumers to buy your products, you have to pay American workers enough to afford them. In January of 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced they would pay $5 a day to its workers. The pay increase would also be accompanied by a shorter workday (from nine to eight hours). While this rate didn’t automatically apply to every worker, it more than doubled the average autoworker’s wage. Workers came from all over the nation and all over the world to work for Ford, who had their pick of the best and the brightest, which led to a 60-year legacy of dominance in American Industry.
Henry Ford had reasoned that since it was possible to build inexpensive cars in volume, more of them could be sold if employees could afford to buy them. The $5 day helped better the lot of all American workers and contributed to the emergence of the American middle class and that led to a massive economic boom in “the Roaring 20’s” until greedy Banksters and speculators crashed the market in 1929.
Unfortunately, earning $5 a day is still a dream for much of the workforce employed by US corporations as that is more money than is paid to their tens of millions of employees and suppliers in China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, etc. Not only have American corporations “unlearned” the lessons that made this country great but they are actively involved in tearing down what is left of the American Middle Class by undermining their ability to earn and save as they ship jobs out of the country and cut wages and benefits for those few workers (135M at last count) who are left.
IN PROGRESS
