Blue-Collar Workers Deserve Six-Figure Salaries Too
The recent longshore workers’ strike provoked pearl-clutching in the media about runaway salaries. But the notion of six-figure pay for blue-collar workers becomes less scandalous when we compare worker pay and purchasing power today to those in 1960.
A striking dockworker outside the Port of Newark on October 1, 2024, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. (Spencer Platt /Getty Images)
During the recent East and Gulf Coast longshore workers’ strike, several news outlets published finger-wagging headlines like “Striking Dockworkers Are Top Earners—When They Work” and “Many Dockworkers Make $150,000 or More. Why They’re Going on Strike.” The implication was that the strike centered on the grievances of a very privileged cohort of workers willing to damage the economy to raise their already inflated salaries.
Throughout the strike, the media and the shipping companies routinely invoked the specter of a six-figure blue-collar salary, assuming it would naturally send chills down the spine of every employer and instill disgust in the heart of every American.
The simple truth is that in 2024, a six-figure blue-collar salary should be a regularity, not an aberration. The notion becomes less scandalous when we compare workers’ salaries and purchasing power today to those in 1960.
Not Far-Fetched
In 1960, General Motors spent 29 percent of its revenue on its employees. In 2023, Amazon’s revenue was $574.78 billion, and it had 1,525,000 employees. If 29 percent of that revenue had been similarly devoted to its employees, it would have spent on average $109,302.43 per employee in 2023.
After subtracting health care and other expenses from this number to figure out an average salary, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more senior Amazon employees (and not just the white-collar ones in Seattle) or those who put in significant overtime (as many longshore workers do) making six figures.
A keen observer might point out that the average GM worker’s salary at the time was $6,382.48 per year, which would roughly translate to $68,000 today given inflation. But if we tie that to purchasing power around a significant expense — say, housing prices — that number is significantly higher.
In 1960, the median salary in the United States was $5,600 per year, while the median home price was $11,900. In the second quarter of 2023, the median home price was $416,100, while the median income in 2023 was $80,610. If the home-price-to-income ratio were the same as it was in 1960, the median income today would be $195,811.75 per year, and that average GM worker would be making $223,172.25 per year.
There are many metrics by which GM workers in 1960 would have been making the modern-day equivalent of six-figure salaries. We could do the same exercise with college tuition, for example, which has risen by 3.08 times since 1963, accounting for inflation.
Corporate Ragebait
We should always be skeptical of the “privileged workers” narrative, which union busters commonly use to undermine legitimate efforts to improve pay and working conditions. The trope’s deployment in the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike rang especially hollow given that the “privilege” invoked looks like the reasonable expectation of a blue-collar worker in the postwar era.
Additionally, as we argued recently in Jacobin, this narrative is particularly egregious when applied to striking longshore workers, as a glance at the finances of the carriers (shipping companies that are members of the United States Maritime Alliance, or USMX) shows that they easily can afford the 62 percent wage increase over six years won by the ILA. In fact, the entire cost of the increase could have been covered out of the profits of a single year from Maersk — which is just one member of the coalition — while still allowing Maersk to post record profits for that year.
The USMX is an extreme case of pandemic profit hoarding, but the broad point holds across traditional blue-collar sectors like transport and manufacturing: the money is there.
There is a growing understanding that the declining fortunes of the American worker over the past fifty years have had disastrous social costs that need correction. Simultaneously, we also see this hand-wringing over higher blue-collar pay, which is the most obvious remedy to the first problem. The contradiction speaks to professionals’ ongoing ambivalence over the merits of certain kinds of labor — an ambivalence that unites the professional class across partisan lines.
When they act galled by the idea of six-figure working-class jobs, both parties contradict themselves. Republicans increasingly profess a “pro-worker conservatism,” exemplified by J. D. Vance, who’s made it onto the presidential ticket by presenting himself as a right-wing economic populist. Democrats, meanwhile, have woven traces of Bernie Sanders into the Kamala Harris campaign’s “Opportunity Economy,” however Clinton-esque the name. But how firm are those commitments when the professional leadership of each party is asked to set the maximum allowable salary for a worker in a reflective vest?
The longer-term fortunes of both political parties in the United States will depend on which one falls for the “blue-collar workers making six-figure salaries” bait and which one can convincingly add the rider “. . . and you should be making that much too.”