Mennonites and Slavery

[RZehr]

I don’t know either. Could be bonuses?

[Ken]

How many hours do they need to work a week to get 95K?

Dunno. I'm just going by the news reporting. I can't find the page where I got the $95,000 number, I must have changed the google search terms slightly. But this news report pops up which doesn't give the CURRENT figure, but gives a $102,000/yr figure for wages and $170,000/yr for total benefits by the end of the current 5-year contract

I was just wondering how you can get to those figures on $24 an hour without working 60 hours per week.

I got those two numbers from different web sites. I suspect one is wrong. Probably the $24 is the entry level starting salary, not the median salary for longer-term employees which is probably much higher and where the $95,000 number comes from. So apples to oranges.

Either way, the details of the current Teamsters contract as outlined above seems pretty good.

[Josh]

The UPS delivery drivers I see almost daily are some of the fittest and healthiest people I've seen. Over the road truck drivers can easily be a bit overweight. I've never seen an obese UPS driver. They are efficient and good at their job, and they are loyal. We have had the same primary delivery driver for years at this point.

Driving UPS trucks is a prime job with good benefits and a union. They earn about $24/hr. on average and with overtime average about $95,000 per year in salary and get generous health and retirement benefits. People tend not to walk away from those jobs.

There are plenty of exploitative low-paid blue collar manual labor type jobs in the US. Like working in meat packing plants. Driving for UPS isn't one of them.

Yes, I don't see the reason for UPS drivers to come up in a thread about slavery. And even some meat-packing jobs are moving to robotics. One of our chicken suppliers just told me at a show the other day that they are moving toward robots cutting up poultry. Take a look at some of the systems that are taking over the low-wage jobs where you cut up chickens for hours on end.

Having watched “Terminator”, I question the wisdom in designing advanced AIs to slaughter living things as efficiently as possible with minimal human input…

[mike]

Having watched “Terminator”, I question the wisdom in designing advanced AIs to slaughter living things as efficiently as possible with minimal human input…

You can't win for losing. You can't have "exploitative low-paid blue collar manual labor type jobs" and yet you can't replace them with robots.

[Josh]

Having watched “Terminator”, I question the wisdom in designing advanced AIs to slaughter living things as efficiently as possible with minimal human input…

You can't win for losing. You can't have "exploitative low-paid blue collar manual labor type jobs" and yet you can't replace them with robots.

It's actually possible to have meaningful work and to not have all of the wealth in society accrue with those who already have lots of capital - and in fact, America did this exact thing in the 1950s, when the gap between the very poorest and the wealthiest was much, much narrower than it is now.

[Ken]

Having watched “Terminator”, I question the wisdom in designing advanced AIs to slaughter living things as efficiently as possible with minimal human input…

You can't win for losing. You can't have "exploitative low-paid blue collar manual labor type jobs" and yet you can't replace them with robots.

It's actually possible to have meaningful work and to not have all of the wealth in society accrue with those who already have lots of capital - and in fact, America did this exact thing in the 1950s, when the gap between the very poorest and the wealthiest was much, much narrower than it is now.

Workers had FAR more leverage in the 1950s than they do today. Union membership peaked in the 1950s and income inequality was far lower than before or since. There is an inverse relationship between the two as shown below: (source: https://www.zippia.com/advice/union-statistics/)