In the 1950s, the dropout rate was 30 to 50 percent. Common sense is generally uninformed. By comparison, present day dropout rates, although rising, are in single digits.
Huh? I don't understand. In the 50s and 60s, jobs were more than plentiful. If you weren't on a college track, you could get a head start on a career by dropping out and taking an entry level job. A lot chose fast food. My first job was as a kitchen helper, my second was at a cafeteria at the W.T. Grant chain. You couldn't support a family on the pay, but if you lived at home, you could get a used car.
McDonalds opened in 1940 and Ray Crock got involved in 1954. By the 60s it was a multi-million dollar franchise.
I understand that we are discussing a transition period where fast food became mainstream but it doesn't change my overall point. You want to talk about the 60s instead, then we can.
McDonald’s wasn’t McDonald’s until Ray Krok though. I think there was one that predated it. Something you wouldn’t expect like Carls Jr maybe?
Edit: It was White Castle in 1921!
While a majority of women still didn't work back then, more did than we often realize. Women were [30% of the labor force](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf%) in 1950. 18.4 million working women compared to 43.8 million working men. There were 54.2 million women over 16 in all (50.7 men), giving just over 33% of women who worked, including 43% of 16 to 24 year olds. Older women who were better established worked less.
Either way, I doubt that fast food workers were buying homes back then any more than they are today, unless they had GI benefits or something. The percentage of owner-occupied housing in 1950 was 68%. In 2020, it was 68%.
its really WW2 that changed how women were seen in the workforce. during ww2 most men had to go off to war and that left women doing basically everything else. afterwards some of them just didnt stop working.
There's three different arguments being conflated here. The short answer is no, not when you conflate all three. The long answer is all three have elements of the truth with complexities that aren't bite sized. The three separate arguments are:
1) Minimum wage was meant to be a livable wage. This is often supported by quotes from President Roosevelt, who advocated for and ultimately signed the first federal minimum wage laws, like, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living." However, even with quotes like that, the reality of the original minimum wage is more complicated, and this article has a good overview: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-mean-by-a-living-wage.htm
2) The real value of the minimum wage is currently lower than in the past. This argument compares the minimum wage over time when inflation is taken into consideration. This has not been a steady decrease over time, as minimum wage gets adjusted. We're currently at about the same real value for the minimum wage as 1956, and the value of the minimum wage peaked in 1968. https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-is-at-its-lowest-point-in-66-years/
3) It's harder to support a family on a single income now than in the 1950s. I'm not coming up with hard numbers for the 1950s, but Pew Research gives the husband as the sole provider in 49% of marriages in 1972 and 23% today. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/
However, dual or single income status has always varied greatly by race and class, the 1950s were a bit of an economic anomaly due to the post-WWII boom, and even the concept of households having external incomes, whether dual or single, is relatively recent. So a straight comparison can be made, but what that means is complicated.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply but with all that you didn’t answer the question mate. Was it possible to sustain a middle class family on a fast food workers salary in the 1950s or 60s?
It seems like the answer is no, based on your comment.
I think people today underrate that point about the anomaly of the post-war boom. The 1950s are always referenced as if they’re an economic default we should expect to easily achieve. We might not see that combination of factors again in a very long time.
I don’t think so. Union blue collar auto/manufacturing jobs use to be. Definitely more wage compared to fast food.
In 1950’s a good salary was $4K-$5K. I think minimum wage was $0.75/hr!
Houses were cheap. Population was much lower too.
The population part is the key to this whole thing. Less demand meant prices were lower. These days with mass migration there's too much demand and too little supply so prices skyrocketed.
EDIT: Downvoted by a bunch of mental children that don't understand basic economics. Typical Reddit.
Your grasp of basic economics is tenuous at best and your assessment that higher prices are due to an influx of "mass migrants" is clearly more political than based on any understanding of economics.
You're downvoted for drawing false conclusions based on flawed logic.
Doubling down on being stupid didn't help either.
Hardly. Got an A in that class. But then again, this was 15 years ago when colleges and universities actually taught things other than how to be a good leftist.
Three comments later and you still haven't figured out why you drew the wrong conclusion, pretty sad honestly - your Econ professor must have been terrible
Those would have skilled labour jobs though, maybe even highly skilled depending on exactly what we are talking about. I don't know much about cars but even on an assembly line, I would guess that you need alot more skills to assemble your part of the car than you need to assemble a cheeseburger (and have you seen the lacklustre burger prep that you usually get).
Lower population, less working adults, lower standard of living.
In the 1950’s there were no auto tech schools. It was all learned on the job. That’s why it is similar to journeyman jobs that get handed down to relatives per generation.
I thought you were exploring if a fast food worker, non-manager, could support a family in 1950?
I’m giving you an example of a union job in auto or manufacturing that could sustain a family on one income in the 1950-60s and that doesn’t exist anymore.
McD’s began here in 1940. They paid minimal wage cuz that’s always the capitalist pay structure. I would predict no one could support a family on McD’s pay.
It wasn’t all magical in the 1950s.
For context; People who work the line at the big 3 even today are considered “unskilled labor”.
Skilled labor are the trades people. Pipe fitters, electricians etc.
Source: I currently work the line for one of the big 3. Memos and announcements that are posted list hourly line workers as “unskilled labor”. Which makes sense because a lot of line jobs are just repetitive steps and you don’t need any real knowledge of how an entire car operates.
Valid point. I suppose I was trying to say you require slightly more knowledge to make part of a car than to make part of a burger. Or at the very least it's harder work with less people willing to do it, or perhaps it's an age thing - I doubt there are as many 15 year olds on a car line than the burger line.
Or the line workers are still minimum wage.
I'm just guessing, I know very little about the car industry. Car goes beep beep vroom, that's all I know.
Assembly lines even today are entirely unskilled workers ..
In fact assembly lines are harder today due to whatever is assembled being way more complicated than back then additionally we only learned later that you can't have one person do the very same step on the very same assembly line for 8 hours straight for years to come. Todays assembly line workers usually get trained in all the stations along their line because that way they can be positioned on every spot which fights boredom/boreout and the whole line is more flexible against a someone being sick/quitting what ever.
You'll likely have a handful of welders in a car assembly line when the shell for the car is built but those are often done in cheaper labour nations and then shiped.
Apart from that jobs on an assembly line are designed to be as simple as possible so that it's impossible to screw up - things only fitting one way around, devices made to insert stuff just the way it's supposed to be and so on and so on.
Very wrong about this. Born in 1977 in the rust belt. The boomers that worked at and retired from the ford or Gm plant were perceived to be some of the wealthier people in town. Getting a job at those plants wasn’t easy but had zero to do with skill set and had everything to do with who you knew. People with 2, 3+ family members working there would get hired on straight out of high school while someone else might apply every year for a decade and never get a an interview.
The ford plants gone. The Gm plants still there but new hires start at $14 but decent benefits. Grandfather told me he made $10 an hour the year I was born (77) as a normal employee. Not management or anything special. He hired on after he got back from the war in the pacific. No special skills.
$10 is about the equivalent of $50 today.
“Lackluster burger prep”, from the looks of your comments, you’ve never worked fast food before. Shit is stressful, and probably a lot more stressful now then it was back in the day with how many orders you have to pump out quickly or people get mad.
You may notice in my post I actually said that I had worked hospitality for a decade.
And my point is that it's hardly a requirement for things to be properly prepared and presented when it comes from McDonalds or the like. It's the natural consequence of fast food.
But try doing your assembly line job as sloppily as those burgers, let me know how long you last.
You did not? Also it is a requirement for things to be properly prepared and presented, if you do it too much you can get at least reprimanded. It’s a stressful job and people should be paid fairly for their work. Also, a lot of fast food workers are not high school / college students anymore.
It's the last line of my post. Skimming and missing something I can understand, denying it's there after I TOLD you it's there doesn't say great things about your reading comprehension.
50%-60% them are under 24. Most of them are young people without families who have other career plans that don't involve a fryer.
I did skim it twice but missed it because I was busy and didn’t see it. Just because you worked hospitality for a decade doesn’t mean you know what modern fast food jobs are like. 40% - 50% of fast food workers being above 24 should tell you that the amount of workers above college age in fast food is rather high if you consider most fast food workers to be college age and younger. Imagine if those 40% - 50% all magically got better paying jobs. The entire industry would collapse
Yes. They might have to start paying people more because the jobs are now in demand. You have discovered the magic of basic economics.
But as is, there's usually more people competing for the job than are needed. That's the danger of being unskilled - alot of people are unskilled. That's how they can get away with paying minimum wage, and why in many places where they DONT have the labour they need, they're forced to offer more money to entice them.
If we look at more complex economics, you may discover that things are not so simple. Even if we go just slightly more complex then supply and demand, your theory starts to get murky. The whole reason people stay working in fast food is because the opportunities for growth are hard to come by. Many “entry level jobs” aren’t so entry level anymore, and it’s difficult for even college graduates to get jobs in the fields they have a degree in. Not everyone can go to college either, for a variety of obvious reasons. Companies know this, and they know they will always have a labor force they can exploit. With the rising cost of living in America, life for low wage workers is becoming less and less affordable. Low wage does not mean low stress either, leading to burn out. When people no longer have the mental/physical willpower to work, and work no longer provides them the means to live by, people will quit in mass. This is a problem across many different industries; with companies running skeleton crews to boost quarter profits at the expense of workers. Mass homelessness and poverty leads to an increase in crime which leads to an increase in problems and social collapse. Not to mention if no one is buying products because they simply can’t afford to, whole industries will tank.
Our economy cannot survive on basic economics alone; modern life is much too complex for that. In essence our current path is not sustainable, and we need new labor laws and regulations to help correct our path. Companies have proven time and time again that they do not regulate themselves either. Hell, the only reason something like minimum wage exists in the first place is because of labor laws. I’m not saying a fast food worker should be able to afford a two story house and support a family all on one 40 hour income, but they should be able to live a decent life supporting themself.
I was born in 1962 and my dad was a cabinet maker, so highly skilled trade. Mum stayed home with me and my younger brother until I was 10 - but - here is what it took.
800 square foot house, one bathroom, Dad grew all our vegetables in summer and Mum and Dad canned them. My brother and I got new clothes but all Mum’s clothes were either home sewn or from the thrift store. I remember getting a take-out pizza. Once. In my whole childhood. No car most of those years, we took the bus or walked. No take-out coffee,’no date nights for mum and dad - I remember, again only once, we had a babysitter so they could go out to dinner with Dad’s boss, who was paying for it.
We didn’t feel at all deprived but a lot of the things that people take for granted now didn’t happen.
750 sq ft home. 2 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths. Two window a/c units. Idk how we got heat. Stove and fridge and washing machine. No dryer. Purchased in 1957 (built in '55), cost my parents $12,000.00. The monthly mortgage was $90. Two parents, 3 kids. Daddy worked, and Mama stayed home til he died.
Damn, your father must have been loaded if y'all were living that frugal with the wages he was making as a skilled tradesman. Sure, y'all didn't splurge, but his savings were probably amazing.
Not really - there was always a risk of layoffs. He was one step above journeyman in that he had an “A ticket” - in good times that was a plus as the shop could take on an apprentice for him - but in bad times that meant he’d be the first to get a layoff as he cost the shop a bit more.
My point is that that level of frugality is what was considered *normal.* Some people these days are truly struggling but others are eating their weekly takeout pizza on Friday nights, listening to their teenagers argue about time in the bathroom getting ready for Friday nights and saying to them, hey, kids, stop arguing, one of you can use our ensuite. When those people say damn, one used to be able to raise a family on one income, they’re missing what that meant.
I'm a union plumber/pipefitter, and I do pretty well for myself, even with splurging. Your father was making good money in a time when you could survive on minimum wage. If he wasn't loaded, he may have had a second family.
When I was ten, my parents had enough money to sell their little starter home they had bought with a $400 down payment and buy a small farm. Mum went to work and dad had a market garden as well as being a tradesman.
They did wind up quite comfortable in their late middle age and were able to travel. I would say, though, that in my lifetime I’ve seen wages for tradesmen go up a lot relative to other jobs out there.
When every second man was in a trade I don’t think we valued them as highly as we do now when they’re harder to find.
Actually, when I was a first year apprentice, our journeyman rate was 33.78. That was 8 years ago. In 8 years, we have received less than a $4 raise in the check to keep up with inflation. This does not correlate well, though. I was able to save up so much more as a 5th year apprentice than I am able to as a 3rd year journeyman. Food is the biggest cost that we can not avoid. We used to only spend $200/week on food and toiletries, and now we're lucky to keep it under $300/week. Also, restaurants and basically everything everywhere cost 20% more than in 2015, but I'm not making 20% more.
Both of my parents came to the US as refugees in 1983. Both worked minimum wage jobs and we only had 1 car. Life was great back then because we didn't have internet, cable TV, streaming, cell phones, etc so that was money saved and put away. We all pretty much had the same Sunday routine. We all went to the Asian market, dad had coffee and cigarettes, mom would buy groceries and the kids each were given $3 in quarters to play video games. When we were done we ran around the mall and played with other kids. Mon-Sat there wasn't any going out except to the park.
Once in a while our Mexican neighbors would invite us over for food and to watch the game.
Not according what you or many others think “supporting a family” looks like. That did not include takeout or eating out multiple nights a week, 800 sq feet of housing space for every inhabitant, club level sports or dance or cheerleading with huge fees, faraway vacations and airline trips being the norm, a car for the teen, expensive driving school, $35 drinking vessels, movies or other outside entertainment on a weekly or near-weekly basis, and so on.
So “supporting a family” was a wildly different proposition compared to what people think “normal life” looks like now. You’d have to pare all that stuff away and get down to apples to apples comparisons before you could even begin to assess.
Yes. I've made several comments regarding the inflation of what counts as a "basic living standard". Most nuclear families, for example with two parents and two kids, must budget for at least 2, maybe 4 mobile phones, depending on the kids ages. And a mobile (cell phone) is something my ancestors never even conceived of, let alone depended on. My mother and her seven siblings all shared one landline with their parents.
You didn’t talk to people who lived out of town on a regular basis because it was expensive to call long distance. You wrote letters to family members. Just one small example.
Please remember, starter homes in the 50’s were 2 small bedrooms, 1 bath. The kitchen had a sink, oven/stove top and refrigerator. No dishwasher. No microwave. Room for a table that sat 4. No a/c. If you got a garage, it was for a single car. Under 1000 sq ft.
I would still consider that to be a starter home. In fact just a few weeks ago I lost out on an offer for a house matching that exact description, plus AC and a microwave, built in 1955.
Municipality and not HOA? In all my time doing inspections, I've never run into something that extreme unless it was multifloor. I've never heard of a garage requirement. What state if you don't mind sharing?
That just seems like a pretty normal home, except for the lack of a dishwasher and microwave. I mean, above average even as it has its own garage.
But, well, I'm city-dwelling european so standards are different here.
There’s a lot more Americans who need A/C than Europeans lol
It’s basically the opposite of “what if Brits didn’t have any way to heat their homes in winter” since we can’t burn anti-logs to cool a house down
Spain, Portugal, and Greece all sit roughly along the same lattitude as New Jersey, widely accepted as a northern state. Georgia, on the other hand, shares its lattitude with Northern Africa and Saudi Arabia. I feel some Europeans forget the scale of the US. Yes, you can live in NJ without air conditioning (source: I have lived in NJ without air conditioning) but I wouldn't want to live in the South without it.
A lot of the southern US is literally a desert. To my understanding, heat in other areas of NA is also a lot more dangerous than many places in Europe due to the high levels of relative humidity. Which means the human body can’t regulate its body temperature as well.
Even in Canada, heat related deaths are not that uncommon. Over 600 people died in BC in 2021 alone.
\*want
USA has been around longer than AC and you made do. You want AC by now.
There's a reason no one settled in Death Valley, cause that is in fact not livable without one so no one settled there when they weren't around and now the cost of keeping your home livable will prevent that.
It's widely understood that the proliferation of air conditioning is why the US South became a productive modern region that people and businesses wanted to move to.
People made due with sticks, stones, and whatever else they could gather long before the first civilization was created. You want medicine, cultivated food, permanent shelter, society, clean water, etc. by now.
What one has needed to function in society, and the means available for them to do so, has changed as society has grown more advanced. Not to mention, just because some people made a lack of resources work and got lucky, does not mean there weren’t a whole lot of other people who died trying.
Well there have been a shit ton of „lucky“ people then I guess considering the US population at the start of 1900.
You‘re also strawmaning. My point was specifically at AC being a necessity. All your other mentions? None of my business
I’m not strawmaning, I was making a point that I’m sure people said the same thing about other innovations we now consider necessities. Take this with a pinch of salt as I’m not an expert in the field. AC being a necessity in some places is in part due to modern homes not being designed in a way that suites their environment because it’s assumed people will have electric AC and other electronic gadgets. There are a host of other reasons homes are no longer designed efficiently, but that’s a different conversation. Overheating is not good for electronic devices either, and a lack of proper care of devices and people can lead to more costly fixes down the line.
In short, do some places need AC? Yes. Is it mostly because of poorly designed homes and fragile devices? Also yes
I mean, the warmer parts of the Southern US literally needed to enslave people to get people to work outside. Working people to death was not uncommon...
Right??
Why can't people just go back to dying of excessive heat like they used to.
Bunch of damn snowflakes not content to "make due" with watching their loved ones die. I mean, who needs these sick, disabled, and elderly anyways.
That house would be considered very tiny nowadays
Personally can’t even think of the last time I stepped into a house that small and I’m not rich or anything
The house I currently live in is 1100 sq ft and neighborhood comps are going for $400,000+
Also I don't have a dishwasher or insulation in my walls or floors lol
> Please remember, starter homes in the 50’s were 2 small bedrooms, 1 bath. The kitchen had a sink, oven/stove top and refrigerator. No dishwasher. No microwave. Room for a table that sat 4. No a/c. If you got a garage, it was for a single car. Under 1000 sq ft.
You can still find these small houses for sale in my area, usually in the $400,000 USD range.
$600,000 in mine. I wish I was exaggerating.
My roommate and the homeowner bought our house just ten years ago for a little under $100,000. This house is now over $750,000. I know Austin grew particularly fast but damn
Please read the last paragraph.
But yes I agree - lifestyles were alot more basic. If you lived a 50s MCL today, people would assume you are poor and struggling.
What? A single income, supporting 4 children and a stay at home wife, while owning a car, having retirement taken care of via pension, etc? Do you think people are poor when they don’t have air conditioning in the home that they own?
Small home, maybe one TV, probably one car? No mobiles or computers, limited home appliances. Yeah. It would look like you were poor.
And I live in Australia. If you don't have air con you might literally die in our heatwaves. Bad example.
No phone plan, no computers/tablets, one car, no dishwasher, possibly have a dryer, no big vacations, no paid sports teams for kids, maybe one TV, no streaming services, no AC, not really ever eating out
Yea I’d think that was fairly poor
I don't know about the 50s. But, I grew up in the 80s and my mom supported a family of 5 with her pay from working the jewelry counter at Kmart. Things were tight, but we had food on the table and a roof over our heads.
My grandfather was a shoe salesman in high school the 1950s and I asked him this question. His answer was:
HIs manager supported a family on a shoe salesmans salary -- not a fancy place, just like a low-end place.
But, he said:
\* They never ate out
\* The didn't have a TV
\* They havd 3 kids and 2 adults living in a 3 room apartment (not 3 bedroom, 3 room)
\* They didn't have a car, or if they did, it was a POS that barely ran
\* The kids did not sports, no camps, no enrichment activities
\* They didn't get magazines
\* They didn't get a newspaper
\* Computers didn't exist, so they didn't have one
\* No new furniture, ever
\* No piano
\* No vacations, ever
\* A bad radio
\* The obviously had no mobile phones, but they didn't have a landline
So could you survive? Yes, but the standard of living was 1000 times lower than what is considered minimally acceptable today. But also, it was very common to live at that much lower standard of living. So they weren't considered poverty cases, they were just a typical family.
For my grandfather, he always worked and gave his mom every penny he made, his mom worked (school secretary), and his dad worked as a blacksmith/iron worker (small business). They owned a home and got a newspaper and magazines, but no vacations, no travel. My grandfather was in Boy Scouts and that was about it. They had a TV because the dad won it in a raffle.
Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr.
"In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; **by workers I mean all workers**, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
Thats what the min wage is for.
more details here.
note: unemployment was very high about 25%. this and WW2 pulled the US out of the stagnant economy
[https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-nira](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-nira)
No. When people say that wages were higher and housing cheaper, they’re ignoring or are ignorant of three crucial factors.
1) The U.S. was basically the only industrialized nation left intact after World War II. The rest were still recovering so obviously the United States had a far higher share of the global wealth.
2) Redlining and other racist housing policies kept the number of potential buyers low. Low demand=lower prices
3) Women were barred from most jobs and U.S. immigration policies were very restrictive. We still had racial quotas. Low supply of labor= higher wages
I’m pretty sure no one really wants to go back to that time again
Your first point isn't *that* true. Indeed, the US was the only major power who didn't suffer (much) destruction from WWII, but this has no bearing on the ability of a single worker to house and feed a family.
A household could live on a single, lower than average income in my country too during the 50s, 60s and 70s despite said country being very harshly hit by WWII.
$1,560 annual salary vs an average house price of $7,354. That price is 4.7x the annual minimum wage of a single person, which is around the maximum recommended household income to house price ratio.
So a single person on minimum wage would have been able to (just) afford an *average* house, and obviously there would be cheaper houses than that available.
For some perspective if minimum wage had kept up with house prices in the US then today a full time minimum wage job would pay $90,000 annually.
In the 1950s, my parents and four older brothers lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. They heated with wood, and my mom cooked on a wood stove. In the winter, a glass of water by the bed overnight would be frozen in the morning. They were share croppers. Fast food work, which there was really, very little of was considered a teenagers job.
Well, minimum wage was never meant to be a liveable wage. Those who worked in fast food were usually teens or kids home from college, you weren't seeing adults working on the line or taking orders, the adults were the management. Minimum wage jobs were also meant to give people job experience so they could move onto a new job or up in the same company. Raising the minimum wage just raises costs, business owners will NOT absorb that increase, so raising the minimum wage means nothing in reality since costs will also increase.
And then they'll replace the people with kiosks.
Give it 10 years, maybe 20, and I'll bet most big fast food stores will just have one person on duty to keep the machines running. And everything else will be automated.
It seems like the more wealth families had they didn’t want their children to have these low lvl jobs.
The jobs then seem to be adults trying to support families.
I'm not even sure it was in the 80's when adults started taking over, that was a good time for the economy. Even then though, the adults who worked there did it to get some extra money, they weren't expecting to live on just the fast food money
In the 80’x their wax a mild recession.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession-of-1981-82
Teen labor reached its peak in 1979 that said even in 2000 about 50% of teens held jobs not necessarily fast food.
yes, teens have always made up a large part of low skill jobs, including fast food but this post was about how did adults make a living working fast food jobs in the 50's.
Of course they did. Teens were in school so adults would work the times outside of that. Most adults back then would rather have hired an adult than a teenager because they thought they were more responsible. Remember, we're talking about the 1950's
No. It's an absolute bullshit trope that a guy with an unskilled labor job in the 50s or 60s had it easy and could support his wife and seven kids with a house and a car. It's just another way to victimize oneself.... It used to be so easy...
People who say someone could support a large family with a low paying job in the 50s and 60s are delusional yes, but they could at least support themselves relatively well
[wtfhappenedin1971.com](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com) We would be much more prosperous if the Breton Woods system were still in place, 1971 was the year it ended.
Using [this website](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com) it says the equivalent today is $9.72 per hour. The average selling price of a house in 1950 was [$7354](https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/average-cost-american-home-decade-born) which is around $93k today, so I'd say it wasn't possible.
I'm not even talking about a like-for-like comparison or what that same labour is worth today, I'm just asking whether our grandfathers (or whatever) could have comfortably raised our parents in a middle class lifestyle as a McDonalds line cook.
Doesn't seem like it, despite how often people say it was possible.
Middle class? No. But you could sustain a family on it, including food, healthcare, transportation, and education.
It's also worth noting that the current average age of fast food employees is ~26.5 years old, it's not mostly teens and college kids.
The argument usually is used in reference to specifically middle class. You can have a lower class lifestyle on minimum wage, its just that people want these low value jobs with a higher value income. And my issue is that these jobs were NEVER high value.
Between 50% and 60% of fast food workers are under 24 (minimum working age is 13-14 depending on where you live) So half their workers, minimum, are in the first decade of their legal working life, and the other half is "literally everyone else". So I am quite comfortable saying they are, indeed, MOSTLY young people who have a different long term career plan that doesn't involve fries.
I couldn't find a source that advised which of the older workers also happened to be part time by choice (I'm thinking mature aged students, retirees or parents) or who are disabled/mentally impaired, or who managers, which are obviously not what we are talking about. I think a decent of adults working in these entry level jobs are either unwilling or unable to work "real" jobs. Not everyone cares about their career and others have limitations outside their control.
The average age is a pretty poor metric since at 26.5 years old it takes 5 16-year-old teens to make up for a single 80 year old.
You'll never see an average of 20 because the one manager or older coworker will bring up the average for the whole restaurant.
>And most fast food workers are currently teenagers or college age, ie unlikely to have families to support
This actually has been debunked. In fact, fast food either are more likely to have children and families to support on a single income.
50-60% of fast food workers are under 24. Meaning half the fast food workforce is between 14ish and 24, and the other half is (...checks notes...) literally everyone else. Some of whom yes, will have families to support.
Also, what does someone's family status have to do with their job? Will they work harder once they have a baby?Should we pay two employees with identical jobs and outputs, different amounts because one of them has kids and one doesn't? What if a worker's kid dies, should they take a pay cut? Aren't you unfairly penalising those with fertility problems?
Sounds ridiculous when you say it like that, doesn't it.
It's the implication. "This salary is not enough to raise a family on!" Is a common rallying cry.
Neither is underwater basket weaving business, yet somehow we realize people who make that their career of choice are making their own poor life choices.
Then change it. Train to be a manager. Switch to a different store that pays better. Go to night school or study online. Get student loans and get a degree. Learn a trade. See if one of your hobbies or side hustles could turn a profit. Do overtime or work casual menial jobs to get a bit of extra money. Get out of debt and change your bad spending habits. There's an endless array of options you could take to change things, if you want.
I have faith in MOST people that if they want to do better for themselves, then they CAN. Is it easy? Of course it's not.
Nothing. Worth. Having. Comes. Easy.
At what point did people forget that and start to think the path of least resistance would have pots of gold at the end?
What do people consider middle class, like one of my grandparents told me that Sweden (my country) was very poor in 1950s, like worse of than like what is considered poor today in like USA and they told me poverty in USA is really bad and I've relatives who been to USA from like 1980 and even back then they said poverty was really terrible so not something new. Material standard was supposedly much lower in the past compared to today.
Yes houses was on paper cheaper, although normally worse quality like could be lacking things like plumbing and interest rate was different, but that could maybe help give a perception of it being easier to be middle class, but past middle class is not same today as today's version so not a fair comparison. Healthcare in USA may be much more expensive relative to salaries but also significantly better which is I think more important. Things like polution seems less of an issue today even though population being larger, life expectency have improved a lot since 1950s. College beeing more expensive I think is a much bigger issue as I've hard time to think how it gotten any better.
I suspect the biggest issue today is the job market, past one seems to have had significantly less competition, jobs with decent wages for the time required less education and less economic inequality overall. A reason for that is productivity growth have been tied to specific fields such as information technology the last number of decades which is why today in USA you can work in something like software developer in tech and make $200-300k as a software developer for 40h and get 30 paid vacation days so the fields that benefited the most from technological development and productivity growth are great to work in and I guess things like fast food is not such field. People seems to worked overall more hours in the past
But I also feel people are too negative about today as the potential standard of living today seems significantly higher than it was even when I grew up in the 1990s, even the poor today are in certain ways better off than past middle class, such as access to better quality healthcare and more entertainment options.
Probably not as a single income with a family, but two people earning 60k? Or even one earning 60k and one earning, say, 30k? Yeah, I think alot of people can. Obviously location is a major factor, but so are your lifestyle choices.
Two people who finished high school, who worked through college and didn't take much in student loans, who drove crummy cars til they saved up money to pay cash for a decent one to minimise their car loans, who waited until they were in a stable relationship before having children, who budget their spending and who only eat out/order in on occassion? Very very doable. And none of that advice is remotely unachievable.
If you're 60k single with NO kids, or you're both 60k DINKs, then you're in a great position.
Not necessarily. But we all make decisions. If you want low cost of living you can indeed live in Buttcrack, Alabama. Clearly, if you're making $60k in Los Angeles that's going to be very tight. You can make decisions about how much you're going to earn as well. What doesn't work is doing the same things in the same places over long periods of time that aren't earning you what you need in order to have the "middle class lifestyle" that you want and then looking externally to blame the system, the time, the other, etc. In the 1950s poorer people left the country for better opportunities in the cities. Now that the cities are grotesquely expensive, a lot of the jobs have gone, and with technological advances that make you far less isolated, Buttcrack, Alabama might even be a decent option.
Part time fast food jobs weren’t, until recent years, expected to be “career” type positions that justified a living wage for one person, let alone supporting a family. Not saying that was right or wrong, it just was. Starter jobs, high school kids, older folks staying busy, etc., not the end goal.
Also fast food places wanted to hire teenagers cuz it’s cheaper and they won’t demand more pay.
McD’s hasn’t changed its pay structure. Even a manager at barely $55K is struggling. They are overworked underpaid, but that’s the formula for fast food. I worked at fast food as a teen and was also a manager. It was depressing and the same ole circus treadmill. Have to keep the hourly pay low. Busier store will pay more.
No way did McD’s pay a livable wage in 1950s. That’s why you hire teens.
People didn’t expect many whistles and bells. Not a lot of “stuff”. I think now what looks like “paired down” is posh by old standards. Different priorities.
Our first Macdonalds opened when i was 15 in my town. Around 1970. Wouldn't have really been any in the 50s. Backthen, people cooked pretty much everything they ate
No the min wage has always been just for the one working person to get by, not for 1-5+ dependents to also be supported. This is a talking point manufactured to make boomers discredit a $20 min wage out of hand, as if people are talking about a $20 min wage because they want to be able to get by working 8 hours a week. They don't want to be confronted with the fact that their mmt, print as much money as you like policies have completely tanked the value of the dollar and $20 is what the cost of living now is.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/
I think the main thing that helped families succeed in this way were solid, unionized jobs in manufacturing and other big industries.
But I’ve also heard stories of people supporting families as a mailman, and other more mundane and simple jobs.
Lack of union presence has really done a number on us, and let our standard of living slide back as businesses have managed to get away with stagnating the hell out of almost people’s incomes. I hear about what some unionized workers make and it’s insane compared to anything I’ve been able to earn.
Fast food wasn't really popular, but with a lot of jobs, yeah you could. Sure maybe not exactly middle class but quite upper lower class, all off a single salary while still being able to send your kids to college.
The only issue with many people thinking along the lines of 'This job is for the young and unskilled' but no one ever wants to answer the question "What about when they're in school?" do we cut all business hours down to 4-10PM? Obviously not, because the businesses still need to run and too many people would whine if McDonalds was only open in the afternoons because 3/4 of the team are teenagers who work after school, and that responsibility tends to fall onto people who weren't so lucky and just need something to survive.
Fortunately the companies can very easily afford it, look at in-n-out, who just gave massive raises to their employees, and prices went up like $0.20, on top of already offering a *lot* of benefits which is wild for a fast food place anyway. I would happily pay even a dollar more for my *fast food* if it meant the dude making it on the 10th hour of his 12 hour shift can at least eat tomorrow.
How do you figure?
And as I said in another comment, the jobs aren't JUST for students. There are also retirees who want to earn a bit of extra cash. Parents who need to be off work when their kids are home and so want the flexibility. Mentally or physically disabled people who can't commit to a high stress or high expectation role but who can flip a burger. Tourists who are only staying in one place for a few weeks or months.
Or people who just don't care about having a "real" job and simply want enough money to buy the things they want.
Its very anacdotal but ok.
Was he the owner or related to the owners? Did he have a wife, did she work? Did he have kids? What counts as a MC income? Did he have any other income or inheritance? How many people lived in the town?
And I'm going to guess that he probably got paid slightly higher than minimum wage as he's not an assembly line burger flipper, he's responsible for several things that require some skills. It wouldn't be a highly paid job but it would pay more than the macdonalds equivalent.
Not the owner. He did have a wife, but I don't THINK he had kids. He lived in a SFH that I believe he built himself. It was a medium 'small town' in Ohio. No inheritance, or other income that I'm aware of. He was making more than minimum wage, I'm sure, but I don't know what he made.
I know that he opened (ie had keys) on Saturday.
Ok so he's a married guy, seemingly without kids, making slightly above minimum wage, probably not super high pay but we also don't know whether his wife worked, and if he worked weekends he's probably doing more than the 40 hours I count as full time.
It's not really applicable.
Ditch digging isn't a job with alot of demand (ie alot of people won't do it) and you have to be physically fit. Fitness and strength ARE marketable skills, and alot of people don't realize that.
My partner is a qualified plumber and happens to love digging (no I don't get why). And because he's actually good at it and doesn't lean on his shovel and chat all day, it's far more cost effective to hire him at his qualified tradesman rate than to hire labourers at their standard rate.
Fast food doesn't have that advantage. You could be very unhealthy or even disabled and you're still able to do your role more or less satisfactorily. That's by design and has pros and cons. But that's why the value of their labour is so minimal - because you can be replaced by anyone halfway competent even if you're exemplary.
No, they were jobs for teenagers like they should be now
Managers yes, but mass immigration and women in the workforce, flooded the market with cheap unskilled labor
Don't know why you're being down voted, it's just simple economics. Double the amount of people willing to do a job and the price of that labour will fall, cos someone will likely work for cheaper than you. Even more so for entry level positions cos basically anyone can do it, and the people competing for it are alot more desperate for work, any work.
Not very much 'fast food' in the '50s
Exactly. "Fast food workers" wasn't a category back then. In 1955 there were only *seven* McDonald's locations.
And mainly teenage employees.
No, minors were in school during the lunch rush, this is common sense.
In the 1950s, the dropout rate was 30 to 50 percent. Common sense is generally uninformed. By comparison, present day dropout rates, although rising, are in single digits.
How would that justify expecting people to work for a loss?
Huh? I don't understand. In the 50s and 60s, jobs were more than plentiful. If you weren't on a college track, you could get a head start on a career by dropping out and taking an entry level job. A lot chose fast food. My first job was as a kitchen helper, my second was at a cafeteria at the W.T. Grant chain. You couldn't support a family on the pay, but if you lived at home, you could get a used car.
There we go, even as good as things were, being able to raise just one kid is an expensive hobby.
McDonalds opened in 1940 and Ray Crock got involved in 1954. By the 60s it was a multi-million dollar franchise. I understand that we are discussing a transition period where fast food became mainstream but it doesn't change my overall point. You want to talk about the 60s instead, then we can.
Most people working at McDonald’s back in the day were teenagers and part timers, managers probably making bank
McDonald’s wasn’t McDonald’s until Ray Krok though. I think there was one that predated it. Something you wouldn’t expect like Carls Jr maybe? Edit: It was White Castle in 1921!
Still correct there was "not much" of it. Not many locations, not as many brands, and not nearly as many jobs as a result.
While a majority of women still didn't work back then, more did than we often realize. Women were [30% of the labor force](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf%) in 1950. 18.4 million working women compared to 43.8 million working men. There were 54.2 million women over 16 in all (50.7 men), giving just over 33% of women who worked, including 43% of 16 to 24 year olds. Older women who were better established worked less. Either way, I doubt that fast food workers were buying homes back then any more than they are today, unless they had GI benefits or something. The percentage of owner-occupied housing in 1950 was 68%. In 2020, it was 68%.
its really WW2 that changed how women were seen in the workforce. during ww2 most men had to go off to war and that left women doing basically everything else. afterwards some of them just didnt stop working.
“Still don’t work”? Just a few years earlier the majority of woman were working. So we should say “a majority of women didn’t have to work anymore”
I think this was a reply to a different comment!
It's not, they're referring to the first sentence of your comment.
The fact I used the word "often" and "majority" and "#notall" when discussing women in the 50s workforce would imply I know that.
There's three different arguments being conflated here. The short answer is no, not when you conflate all three. The long answer is all three have elements of the truth with complexities that aren't bite sized. The three separate arguments are: 1) Minimum wage was meant to be a livable wage. This is often supported by quotes from President Roosevelt, who advocated for and ultimately signed the first federal minimum wage laws, like, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living." However, even with quotes like that, the reality of the original minimum wage is more complicated, and this article has a good overview: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-mean-by-a-living-wage.htm 2) The real value of the minimum wage is currently lower than in the past. This argument compares the minimum wage over time when inflation is taken into consideration. This has not been a steady decrease over time, as minimum wage gets adjusted. We're currently at about the same real value for the minimum wage as 1956, and the value of the minimum wage peaked in 1968. https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-is-at-its-lowest-point-in-66-years/ 3) It's harder to support a family on a single income now than in the 1950s. I'm not coming up with hard numbers for the 1950s, but Pew Research gives the husband as the sole provider in 49% of marriages in 1972 and 23% today. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/ However, dual or single income status has always varied greatly by race and class, the 1950s were a bit of an economic anomaly due to the post-WWII boom, and even the concept of households having external incomes, whether dual or single, is relatively recent. So a straight comparison can be made, but what that means is complicated.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply but with all that you didn’t answer the question mate. Was it possible to sustain a middle class family on a fast food workers salary in the 1950s or 60s? It seems like the answer is no, based on your comment.
I answered your question in my second sentence. The one that begins, "The short answer."
I think people today underrate that point about the anomaly of the post-war boom. The 1950s are always referenced as if they’re an economic default we should expect to easily achieve. We might not see that combination of factors again in a very long time.
I don’t think so. Union blue collar auto/manufacturing jobs use to be. Definitely more wage compared to fast food. In 1950’s a good salary was $4K-$5K. I think minimum wage was $0.75/hr! Houses were cheap. Population was much lower too.
The population part is the key to this whole thing. Less demand meant prices were lower. These days with mass migration there's too much demand and too little supply so prices skyrocketed. EDIT: Downvoted by a bunch of mental children that don't understand basic economics. Typical Reddit.
Your grasp of basic economics is tenuous at best and your assessment that higher prices are due to an influx of "mass migrants" is clearly more political than based on any understanding of economics. You're downvoted for drawing false conclusions based on flawed logic. Doubling down on being stupid didn't help either.
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I guess not, clearly you were a bad student
Hardly. Got an A in that class. But then again, this was 15 years ago when colleges and universities actually taught things other than how to be a good leftist.
Got an A in Econ 101 undergrad and brags about it on reddit, still managed to draw a broken analysis - you should be real proud
Only broken to someone like you who refuses to face actual facts. Go peddle your shit elsewhere.
Three comments later and you still haven't figured out why you drew the wrong conclusion, pretty sad honestly - your Econ professor must have been terrible
Those would have skilled labour jobs though, maybe even highly skilled depending on exactly what we are talking about. I don't know much about cars but even on an assembly line, I would guess that you need alot more skills to assemble your part of the car than you need to assemble a cheeseburger (and have you seen the lacklustre burger prep that you usually get). Lower population, less working adults, lower standard of living.
In the 1950’s there were no auto tech schools. It was all learned on the job. That’s why it is similar to journeyman jobs that get handed down to relatives per generation. I thought you were exploring if a fast food worker, non-manager, could support a family in 1950?
I am. YOU brought up auto techs and are now asking why we are discussing auto techs. Excuse me for having a conversation, I shan't do it again.
I’m giving you an example of a union job in auto or manufacturing that could sustain a family on one income in the 1950-60s and that doesn’t exist anymore. McD’s began here in 1940. They paid minimal wage cuz that’s always the capitalist pay structure. I would predict no one could support a family on McD’s pay. It wasn’t all magical in the 1950s.
Are you incapable of reading comprehension or something?
For context; People who work the line at the big 3 even today are considered “unskilled labor”. Skilled labor are the trades people. Pipe fitters, electricians etc. Source: I currently work the line for one of the big 3. Memos and announcements that are posted list hourly line workers as “unskilled labor”. Which makes sense because a lot of line jobs are just repetitive steps and you don’t need any real knowledge of how an entire car operates.
Valid point. I suppose I was trying to say you require slightly more knowledge to make part of a car than to make part of a burger. Or at the very least it's harder work with less people willing to do it, or perhaps it's an age thing - I doubt there are as many 15 year olds on a car line than the burger line. Or the line workers are still minimum wage. I'm just guessing, I know very little about the car industry. Car goes beep beep vroom, that's all I know.
Assembly lines even today are entirely unskilled workers .. In fact assembly lines are harder today due to whatever is assembled being way more complicated than back then additionally we only learned later that you can't have one person do the very same step on the very same assembly line for 8 hours straight for years to come. Todays assembly line workers usually get trained in all the stations along their line because that way they can be positioned on every spot which fights boredom/boreout and the whole line is more flexible against a someone being sick/quitting what ever. You'll likely have a handful of welders in a car assembly line when the shell for the car is built but those are often done in cheaper labour nations and then shiped. Apart from that jobs on an assembly line are designed to be as simple as possible so that it's impossible to screw up - things only fitting one way around, devices made to insert stuff just the way it's supposed to be and so on and so on.
Very wrong about this. Born in 1977 in the rust belt. The boomers that worked at and retired from the ford or Gm plant were perceived to be some of the wealthier people in town. Getting a job at those plants wasn’t easy but had zero to do with skill set and had everything to do with who you knew. People with 2, 3+ family members working there would get hired on straight out of high school while someone else might apply every year for a decade and never get a an interview. The ford plants gone. The Gm plants still there but new hires start at $14 but decent benefits. Grandfather told me he made $10 an hour the year I was born (77) as a normal employee. Not management or anything special. He hired on after he got back from the war in the pacific. No special skills. $10 is about the equivalent of $50 today.
“Lackluster burger prep”, from the looks of your comments, you’ve never worked fast food before. Shit is stressful, and probably a lot more stressful now then it was back in the day with how many orders you have to pump out quickly or people get mad.
You may notice in my post I actually said that I had worked hospitality for a decade. And my point is that it's hardly a requirement for things to be properly prepared and presented when it comes from McDonalds or the like. It's the natural consequence of fast food. But try doing your assembly line job as sloppily as those burgers, let me know how long you last.
You did not? Also it is a requirement for things to be properly prepared and presented, if you do it too much you can get at least reprimanded. It’s a stressful job and people should be paid fairly for their work. Also, a lot of fast food workers are not high school / college students anymore.
It's the last line of my post. Skimming and missing something I can understand, denying it's there after I TOLD you it's there doesn't say great things about your reading comprehension. 50%-60% them are under 24. Most of them are young people without families who have other career plans that don't involve a fryer.
I did skim it twice but missed it because I was busy and didn’t see it. Just because you worked hospitality for a decade doesn’t mean you know what modern fast food jobs are like. 40% - 50% of fast food workers being above 24 should tell you that the amount of workers above college age in fast food is rather high if you consider most fast food workers to be college age and younger. Imagine if those 40% - 50% all magically got better paying jobs. The entire industry would collapse
Yes. They might have to start paying people more because the jobs are now in demand. You have discovered the magic of basic economics. But as is, there's usually more people competing for the job than are needed. That's the danger of being unskilled - alot of people are unskilled. That's how they can get away with paying minimum wage, and why in many places where they DONT have the labour they need, they're forced to offer more money to entice them.
If we look at more complex economics, you may discover that things are not so simple. Even if we go just slightly more complex then supply and demand, your theory starts to get murky. The whole reason people stay working in fast food is because the opportunities for growth are hard to come by. Many “entry level jobs” aren’t so entry level anymore, and it’s difficult for even college graduates to get jobs in the fields they have a degree in. Not everyone can go to college either, for a variety of obvious reasons. Companies know this, and they know they will always have a labor force they can exploit. With the rising cost of living in America, life for low wage workers is becoming less and less affordable. Low wage does not mean low stress either, leading to burn out. When people no longer have the mental/physical willpower to work, and work no longer provides them the means to live by, people will quit in mass. This is a problem across many different industries; with companies running skeleton crews to boost quarter profits at the expense of workers. Mass homelessness and poverty leads to an increase in crime which leads to an increase in problems and social collapse. Not to mention if no one is buying products because they simply can’t afford to, whole industries will tank. Our economy cannot survive on basic economics alone; modern life is much too complex for that. In essence our current path is not sustainable, and we need new labor laws and regulations to help correct our path. Companies have proven time and time again that they do not regulate themselves either. Hell, the only reason something like minimum wage exists in the first place is because of labor laws. I’m not saying a fast food worker should be able to afford a two story house and support a family all on one 40 hour income, but they should be able to live a decent life supporting themself.
I was born in 1962 and my dad was a cabinet maker, so highly skilled trade. Mum stayed home with me and my younger brother until I was 10 - but - here is what it took. 800 square foot house, one bathroom, Dad grew all our vegetables in summer and Mum and Dad canned them. My brother and I got new clothes but all Mum’s clothes were either home sewn or from the thrift store. I remember getting a take-out pizza. Once. In my whole childhood. No car most of those years, we took the bus or walked. No take-out coffee,’no date nights for mum and dad - I remember, again only once, we had a babysitter so they could go out to dinner with Dad’s boss, who was paying for it. We didn’t feel at all deprived but a lot of the things that people take for granted now didn’t happen.
My father was raised on boiled cabbage. Older than you of course. If you assume people had practically nothing, you would be correct.
750 sq ft home. 2 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths. Two window a/c units. Idk how we got heat. Stove and fridge and washing machine. No dryer. Purchased in 1957 (built in '55), cost my parents $12,000.00. The monthly mortgage was $90. Two parents, 3 kids. Daddy worked, and Mama stayed home til he died.
I think this is the part most of us struggle to understand. A LOT of things we take for granted now just didn't exist or were rare af.
They existed but only the actual well to do did them!
Damn, your father must have been loaded if y'all were living that frugal with the wages he was making as a skilled tradesman. Sure, y'all didn't splurge, but his savings were probably amazing.
Not really - there was always a risk of layoffs. He was one step above journeyman in that he had an “A ticket” - in good times that was a plus as the shop could take on an apprentice for him - but in bad times that meant he’d be the first to get a layoff as he cost the shop a bit more. My point is that that level of frugality is what was considered *normal.* Some people these days are truly struggling but others are eating their weekly takeout pizza on Friday nights, listening to their teenagers argue about time in the bathroom getting ready for Friday nights and saying to them, hey, kids, stop arguing, one of you can use our ensuite. When those people say damn, one used to be able to raise a family on one income, they’re missing what that meant.
I'm a union plumber/pipefitter, and I do pretty well for myself, even with splurging. Your father was making good money in a time when you could survive on minimum wage. If he wasn't loaded, he may have had a second family.
When I was ten, my parents had enough money to sell their little starter home they had bought with a $400 down payment and buy a small farm. Mum went to work and dad had a market garden as well as being a tradesman. They did wind up quite comfortable in their late middle age and were able to travel. I would say, though, that in my lifetime I’ve seen wages for tradesmen go up a lot relative to other jobs out there. When every second man was in a trade I don’t think we valued them as highly as we do now when they’re harder to find.
Actually, when I was a first year apprentice, our journeyman rate was 33.78. That was 8 years ago. In 8 years, we have received less than a $4 raise in the check to keep up with inflation. This does not correlate well, though. I was able to save up so much more as a 5th year apprentice than I am able to as a 3rd year journeyman. Food is the biggest cost that we can not avoid. We used to only spend $200/week on food and toiletries, and now we're lucky to keep it under $300/week. Also, restaurants and basically everything everywhere cost 20% more than in 2015, but I'm not making 20% more.
Both of my parents came to the US as refugees in 1983. Both worked minimum wage jobs and we only had 1 car. Life was great back then because we didn't have internet, cable TV, streaming, cell phones, etc so that was money saved and put away. We all pretty much had the same Sunday routine. We all went to the Asian market, dad had coffee and cigarettes, mom would buy groceries and the kids each were given $3 in quarters to play video games. When we were done we ran around the mall and played with other kids. Mon-Sat there wasn't any going out except to the park. Once in a while our Mexican neighbors would invite us over for food and to watch the game.
Not according what you or many others think “supporting a family” looks like. That did not include takeout or eating out multiple nights a week, 800 sq feet of housing space for every inhabitant, club level sports or dance or cheerleading with huge fees, faraway vacations and airline trips being the norm, a car for the teen, expensive driving school, $35 drinking vessels, movies or other outside entertainment on a weekly or near-weekly basis, and so on. So “supporting a family” was a wildly different proposition compared to what people think “normal life” looks like now. You’d have to pare all that stuff away and get down to apples to apples comparisons before you could even begin to assess.
Yes. I've made several comments regarding the inflation of what counts as a "basic living standard". Most nuclear families, for example with two parents and two kids, must budget for at least 2, maybe 4 mobile phones, depending on the kids ages. And a mobile (cell phone) is something my ancestors never even conceived of, let alone depended on. My mother and her seven siblings all shared one landline with their parents.
You didn’t talk to people who lived out of town on a regular basis because it was expensive to call long distance. You wrote letters to family members. Just one small example.
Please remember, starter homes in the 50’s were 2 small bedrooms, 1 bath. The kitchen had a sink, oven/stove top and refrigerator. No dishwasher. No microwave. Room for a table that sat 4. No a/c. If you got a garage, it was for a single car. Under 1000 sq ft.
I would still consider that to be a starter home. In fact just a few weeks ago I lost out on an offer for a house matching that exact description, plus AC and a microwave, built in 1955.
Right tbat sounds like.... a starter home.
A lot of us would be quite happy with that, is the thing. If there were smaller homes available, we'd buy them.
I've never visited a city or town that didn't have 2bd condos or houses.
Build a smaller home. Thats what everyone was doing in the 50's.
Our municipality won't allow it. Here, all newly-built houses are required to be at least 2500 ft^2 (232 m^2 ) and have a two-car garage.
Municipality and not HOA? In all my time doing inspections, I've never run into something that extreme unless it was multifloor. I've never heard of a garage requirement. What state if you don't mind sharing?
Municipality. I'm in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia.
That just seems like a pretty normal home, except for the lack of a dishwasher and microwave. I mean, above average even as it has its own garage. But, well, I'm city-dwelling european so standards are different here.
There’s a lot more Americans who need A/C than Europeans lol It’s basically the opposite of “what if Brits didn’t have any way to heat their homes in winter” since we can’t burn anti-logs to cool a house down
I'm not sure the majority of spanish, portuguese or greek people have AC, and the weather can be really hot in these countries
Spain, Portugal, and Greece all sit roughly along the same lattitude as New Jersey, widely accepted as a northern state. Georgia, on the other hand, shares its lattitude with Northern Africa and Saudi Arabia. I feel some Europeans forget the scale of the US. Yes, you can live in NJ without air conditioning (source: I have lived in NJ without air conditioning) but I wouldn't want to live in the South without it.
A lot of the southern US is literally a desert. To my understanding, heat in other areas of NA is also a lot more dangerous than many places in Europe due to the high levels of relative humidity. Which means the human body can’t regulate its body temperature as well. Even in Canada, heat related deaths are not that uncommon. Over 600 people died in BC in 2021 alone.
Yep, plus Texas for example is almost 10 degrees closer to the equator than Spain. 31 N vs. 40 N
1-5 people die from heat every year in Chicago. More from the cold.
\*want USA has been around longer than AC and you made do. You want AC by now. There's a reason no one settled in Death Valley, cause that is in fact not livable without one so no one settled there when they weren't around and now the cost of keeping your home livable will prevent that.
It's widely understood that the proliferation of air conditioning is why the US South became a productive modern region that people and businesses wanted to move to.
People made due with sticks, stones, and whatever else they could gather long before the first civilization was created. You want medicine, cultivated food, permanent shelter, society, clean water, etc. by now. What one has needed to function in society, and the means available for them to do so, has changed as society has grown more advanced. Not to mention, just because some people made a lack of resources work and got lucky, does not mean there weren’t a whole lot of other people who died trying.
Well there have been a shit ton of „lucky“ people then I guess considering the US population at the start of 1900. You‘re also strawmaning. My point was specifically at AC being a necessity. All your other mentions? None of my business
I’m not strawmaning, I was making a point that I’m sure people said the same thing about other innovations we now consider necessities. Take this with a pinch of salt as I’m not an expert in the field. AC being a necessity in some places is in part due to modern homes not being designed in a way that suites their environment because it’s assumed people will have electric AC and other electronic gadgets. There are a host of other reasons homes are no longer designed efficiently, but that’s a different conversation. Overheating is not good for electronic devices either, and a lack of proper care of devices and people can lead to more costly fixes down the line. In short, do some places need AC? Yes. Is it mostly because of poorly designed homes and fragile devices? Also yes
I mean, the warmer parts of the Southern US literally needed to enslave people to get people to work outside. Working people to death was not uncommon...
Right?? Why can't people just go back to dying of excessive heat like they used to. Bunch of damn snowflakes not content to "make due" with watching their loved ones die. I mean, who needs these sick, disabled, and elderly anyways.
That house would be considered very tiny nowadays Personally can’t even think of the last time I stepped into a house that small and I’m not rich or anything
My flat is 90m2 and I literally rented out a room because I found the home to be too big for no reason for myself alone haha
The house I currently live in is 1100 sq ft and neighborhood comps are going for $400,000+ Also I don't have a dishwasher or insulation in my walls or floors lol
> Please remember, starter homes in the 50’s were 2 small bedrooms, 1 bath. The kitchen had a sink, oven/stove top and refrigerator. No dishwasher. No microwave. Room for a table that sat 4. No a/c. If you got a garage, it was for a single car. Under 1000 sq ft. You can still find these small houses for sale in my area, usually in the $400,000 USD range.
$600,000 in mine. I wish I was exaggerating. My roommate and the homeowner bought our house just ten years ago for a little under $100,000. This house is now over $750,000. I know Austin grew particularly fast but damn
Please read the last paragraph. But yes I agree - lifestyles were alot more basic. If you lived a 50s MCL today, people would assume you are poor and struggling.
What? A single income, supporting 4 children and a stay at home wife, while owning a car, having retirement taken care of via pension, etc? Do you think people are poor when they don’t have air conditioning in the home that they own?
Small home, maybe one TV, probably one car? No mobiles or computers, limited home appliances. Yeah. It would look like you were poor. And I live in Australia. If you don't have air con you might literally die in our heatwaves. Bad example.
If the inside of your home is 90° in the summer you're probably poor
I don't know where you live, but in my area when there's a family with 4 kids, they're usually poor and the mother doesn't work.
No phone plan, no computers/tablets, one car, no dishwasher, possibly have a dryer, no big vacations, no paid sports teams for kids, maybe one TV, no streaming services, no AC, not really ever eating out Yea I’d think that was fairly poor
I don't know about the 50s. But, I grew up in the 80s and my mom supported a family of 5 with her pay from working the jewelry counter at Kmart. Things were tight, but we had food on the table and a roof over our heads.
Im going to wager that there was a fair chunk of govt assistance, as there should be.
My grandfather was a shoe salesman in high school the 1950s and I asked him this question. His answer was: HIs manager supported a family on a shoe salesmans salary -- not a fancy place, just like a low-end place. But, he said: \* They never ate out \* The didn't have a TV \* They havd 3 kids and 2 adults living in a 3 room apartment (not 3 bedroom, 3 room) \* They didn't have a car, or if they did, it was a POS that barely ran \* The kids did not sports, no camps, no enrichment activities \* They didn't get magazines \* They didn't get a newspaper \* Computers didn't exist, so they didn't have one \* No new furniture, ever \* No piano \* No vacations, ever \* A bad radio \* The obviously had no mobile phones, but they didn't have a landline So could you survive? Yes, but the standard of living was 1000 times lower than what is considered minimally acceptable today. But also, it was very common to live at that much lower standard of living. So they weren't considered poverty cases, they were just a typical family. For my grandfather, he always worked and gave his mom every penny he made, his mom worked (school secretary), and his dad worked as a blacksmith/iron worker (small business). They owned a home and got a newspaper and magazines, but no vacations, no travel. My grandfather was in Boy Scouts and that was about it. They had a TV because the dad won it in a raffle.
No, not really, those jobs were pretty much for HS kids. some college aged kids but high turnover was part of the business.
Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr. "In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; **by workers I mean all workers**, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living." Thats what the min wage is for.
more details here. note: unemployment was very high about 25%. this and WW2 pulled the US out of the stagnant economy [https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-nira](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-nira)
No. When people say that wages were higher and housing cheaper, they’re ignoring or are ignorant of three crucial factors. 1) The U.S. was basically the only industrialized nation left intact after World War II. The rest were still recovering so obviously the United States had a far higher share of the global wealth. 2) Redlining and other racist housing policies kept the number of potential buyers low. Low demand=lower prices 3) Women were barred from most jobs and U.S. immigration policies were very restrictive. We still had racial quotas. Low supply of labor= higher wages I’m pretty sure no one really wants to go back to that time again
Your first point isn't *that* true. Indeed, the US was the only major power who didn't suffer (much) destruction from WWII, but this has no bearing on the ability of a single worker to house and feed a family. A household could live on a single, lower than average income in my country too during the 50s, 60s and 70s despite said country being very harshly hit by WWII.
Why don't you pop over to post-war Italy or England and talk to folks about the quality of life there?
You don't think people live on a single income anymore?
An average household with a single one *less than average* income ? No, they don't. Not in decent conditions, at least.
They didn't live in decent conditions in the 50s either on less than average single income either.
No it wasn't. It never has been, except for maybe a manager or gm.
$1,560 annual salary vs an average house price of $7,354. That price is 4.7x the annual minimum wage of a single person, which is around the maximum recommended household income to house price ratio. So a single person on minimum wage would have been able to (just) afford an *average* house, and obviously there would be cheaper houses than that available. For some perspective if minimum wage had kept up with house prices in the US then today a full time minimum wage job would pay $90,000 annually.
In the 1950s, my parents and four older brothers lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. They heated with wood, and my mom cooked on a wood stove. In the winter, a glass of water by the bed overnight would be frozen in the morning. They were share croppers. Fast food work, which there was really, very little of was considered a teenagers job.
Well, minimum wage was never meant to be a liveable wage. Those who worked in fast food were usually teens or kids home from college, you weren't seeing adults working on the line or taking orders, the adults were the management. Minimum wage jobs were also meant to give people job experience so they could move onto a new job or up in the same company. Raising the minimum wage just raises costs, business owners will NOT absorb that increase, so raising the minimum wage means nothing in reality since costs will also increase.
And then they'll replace the people with kiosks. Give it 10 years, maybe 20, and I'll bet most big fast food stores will just have one person on duty to keep the machines running. And everything else will be automated.
oh I agree, a lot of jobs will end up being taken by robots or AI in the future. We're definitely going to have to restructure our job market
It seems like the more wealth families had they didn’t want their children to have these low lvl jobs. The jobs then seem to be adults trying to support families.
do you mean now or back in the 50's?
More like after the 50’s starting in the 80’s Prior those fast good jobs were mostly students.
I'm not even sure it was in the 80's when adults started taking over, that was a good time for the economy. Even then though, the adults who worked there did it to get some extra money, they weren't expecting to live on just the fast food money
In the 80’x their wax a mild recession. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession-of-1981-82 Teen labor reached its peak in 1979 that said even in 2000 about 50% of teens held jobs not necessarily fast food.
yes, teens have always made up a large part of low skill jobs, including fast food but this post was about how did adults make a living working fast food jobs in the 50's.
They didn’t work those jobs which was the point.
Of course they did. Teens were in school so adults would work the times outside of that. Most adults back then would rather have hired an adult than a teenager because they thought they were more responsible. Remember, we're talking about the 1950's
Your data to support that
No. It's an absolute bullshit trope that a guy with an unskilled labor job in the 50s or 60s had it easy and could support his wife and seven kids with a house and a car. It's just another way to victimize oneself.... It used to be so easy...
People who say someone could support a large family with a low paying job in the 50s and 60s are delusional yes, but they could at least support themselves relatively well
Yeah, they’re basically saying “poverty didn’t exist in the 50s”, which is complete and total horseshit.
[wtfhappenedin1971.com](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com) We would be much more prosperous if the Breton Woods system were still in place, 1971 was the year it ended.
Isn't 71 also the first oil crisis?
Go away, crypto bro.
Using [this website](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com) it says the equivalent today is $9.72 per hour. The average selling price of a house in 1950 was [$7354](https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/average-cost-american-home-decade-born) which is around $93k today, so I'd say it wasn't possible.
I'm not even talking about a like-for-like comparison or what that same labour is worth today, I'm just asking whether our grandfathers (or whatever) could have comfortably raised our parents in a middle class lifestyle as a McDonalds line cook. Doesn't seem like it, despite how often people say it was possible.
Middle class? No. But you could sustain a family on it, including food, healthcare, transportation, and education. It's also worth noting that the current average age of fast food employees is ~26.5 years old, it's not mostly teens and college kids.
The argument usually is used in reference to specifically middle class. You can have a lower class lifestyle on minimum wage, its just that people want these low value jobs with a higher value income. And my issue is that these jobs were NEVER high value. Between 50% and 60% of fast food workers are under 24 (minimum working age is 13-14 depending on where you live) So half their workers, minimum, are in the first decade of their legal working life, and the other half is "literally everyone else". So I am quite comfortable saying they are, indeed, MOSTLY young people who have a different long term career plan that doesn't involve fries. I couldn't find a source that advised which of the older workers also happened to be part time by choice (I'm thinking mature aged students, retirees or parents) or who are disabled/mentally impaired, or who managers, which are obviously not what we are talking about. I think a decent of adults working in these entry level jobs are either unwilling or unable to work "real" jobs. Not everyone cares about their career and others have limitations outside their control.
The average age is a pretty poor metric since at 26.5 years old it takes 5 16-year-old teens to make up for a single 80 year old. You'll never see an average of 20 because the one manager or older coworker will bring up the average for the whole restaurant.
>And most fast food workers are currently teenagers or college age, ie unlikely to have families to support This actually has been debunked. In fact, fast food either are more likely to have children and families to support on a single income.
50-60% of fast food workers are under 24. Meaning half the fast food workforce is between 14ish and 24, and the other half is (...checks notes...) literally everyone else. Some of whom yes, will have families to support. Also, what does someone's family status have to do with their job? Will they work harder once they have a baby?Should we pay two employees with identical jobs and outputs, different amounts because one of them has kids and one doesn't? What if a worker's kid dies, should they take a pay cut? Aren't you unfairly penalising those with fertility problems? Sounds ridiculous when you say it like that, doesn't it.
Wow you ran with the ball there didn't you, he didn't remotely say that.
It's the implication. "This salary is not enough to raise a family on!" Is a common rallying cry. Neither is underwater basket weaving business, yet somehow we realize people who make that their career of choice are making their own poor life choices.
This is deliberately obtuse. Pretty sure the majority of fast food workers wouldn't describe it as their 'career of choice'.
Then change it. Train to be a manager. Switch to a different store that pays better. Go to night school or study online. Get student loans and get a degree. Learn a trade. See if one of your hobbies or side hustles could turn a profit. Do overtime or work casual menial jobs to get a bit of extra money. Get out of debt and change your bad spending habits. There's an endless array of options you could take to change things, if you want. I have faith in MOST people that if they want to do better for themselves, then they CAN. Is it easy? Of course it's not. Nothing. Worth. Having. Comes. Easy. At what point did people forget that and start to think the path of least resistance would have pots of gold at the end?
What do people consider middle class, like one of my grandparents told me that Sweden (my country) was very poor in 1950s, like worse of than like what is considered poor today in like USA and they told me poverty in USA is really bad and I've relatives who been to USA from like 1980 and even back then they said poverty was really terrible so not something new. Material standard was supposedly much lower in the past compared to today. Yes houses was on paper cheaper, although normally worse quality like could be lacking things like plumbing and interest rate was different, but that could maybe help give a perception of it being easier to be middle class, but past middle class is not same today as today's version so not a fair comparison. Healthcare in USA may be much more expensive relative to salaries but also significantly better which is I think more important. Things like polution seems less of an issue today even though population being larger, life expectency have improved a lot since 1950s. College beeing more expensive I think is a much bigger issue as I've hard time to think how it gotten any better. I suspect the biggest issue today is the job market, past one seems to have had significantly less competition, jobs with decent wages for the time required less education and less economic inequality overall. A reason for that is productivity growth have been tied to specific fields such as information technology the last number of decades which is why today in USA you can work in something like software developer in tech and make $200-300k as a software developer for 40h and get 30 paid vacation days so the fields that benefited the most from technological development and productivity growth are great to work in and I guess things like fast food is not such field. People seems to worked overall more hours in the past But I also feel people are too negative about today as the potential standard of living today seems significantly higher than it was even when I grew up in the 1990s, even the poor today are in certain ways better off than past middle class, such as access to better quality healthcare and more entertainment options.
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Probably not as a single income with a family, but two people earning 60k? Or even one earning 60k and one earning, say, 30k? Yeah, I think alot of people can. Obviously location is a major factor, but so are your lifestyle choices. Two people who finished high school, who worked through college and didn't take much in student loans, who drove crummy cars til they saved up money to pay cash for a decent one to minimise their car loans, who waited until they were in a stable relationship before having children, who budget their spending and who only eat out/order in on occassion? Very very doable. And none of that advice is remotely unachievable. If you're 60k single with NO kids, or you're both 60k DINKs, then you're in a great position.
Not necessarily. But we all make decisions. If you want low cost of living you can indeed live in Buttcrack, Alabama. Clearly, if you're making $60k in Los Angeles that's going to be very tight. You can make decisions about how much you're going to earn as well. What doesn't work is doing the same things in the same places over long periods of time that aren't earning you what you need in order to have the "middle class lifestyle" that you want and then looking externally to blame the system, the time, the other, etc. In the 1950s poorer people left the country for better opportunities in the cities. Now that the cities are grotesquely expensive, a lot of the jobs have gone, and with technological advances that make you far less isolated, Buttcrack, Alabama might even be a decent option.
Fast food wasn't much of a thing in 50s, they were mostly restaurants and diners
Drive ins were very popular.
The 60s then
Part time fast food jobs weren’t, until recent years, expected to be “career” type positions that justified a living wage for one person, let alone supporting a family. Not saying that was right or wrong, it just was. Starter jobs, high school kids, older folks staying busy, etc., not the end goal.
Also fast food places wanted to hire teenagers cuz it’s cheaper and they won’t demand more pay. McD’s hasn’t changed its pay structure. Even a manager at barely $55K is struggling. They are overworked underpaid, but that’s the formula for fast food. I worked at fast food as a teen and was also a manager. It was depressing and the same ole circus treadmill. Have to keep the hourly pay low. Busier store will pay more. No way did McD’s pay a livable wage in 1950s. That’s why you hire teens.
Look at Al Bundy… He supported a wife and 2 kids on and a house a retail who sales job!
The cost of Peggys hairspray alone would bankrupt the average family...
Haha! And the BonBon budget…
No.
People didn’t expect many whistles and bells. Not a lot of “stuff”. I think now what looks like “paired down” is posh by old standards. Different priorities.
Of course not. That was never meant to be a career that would sustain yourself in the long run, let alone an entire family
No
Our first Macdonalds opened when i was 15 in my town. Around 1970. Wouldn't have really been any in the 50s. Backthen, people cooked pretty much everything they ate
No the min wage has always been just for the one working person to get by, not for 1-5+ dependents to also be supported. This is a talking point manufactured to make boomers discredit a $20 min wage out of hand, as if people are talking about a $20 min wage because they want to be able to get by working 8 hours a week. They don't want to be confronted with the fact that their mmt, print as much money as you like policies have completely tanked the value of the dollar and $20 is what the cost of living now is. https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Most fast food jobs used to be teens working them except owners and higher lvl managers.
I think the main thing that helped families succeed in this way were solid, unionized jobs in manufacturing and other big industries. But I’ve also heard stories of people supporting families as a mailman, and other more mundane and simple jobs. Lack of union presence has really done a number on us, and let our standard of living slide back as businesses have managed to get away with stagnating the hell out of almost people’s incomes. I hear about what some unionized workers make and it’s insane compared to anything I’ve been able to earn.
Fast food wasn't really popular, but with a lot of jobs, yeah you could. Sure maybe not exactly middle class but quite upper lower class, all off a single salary while still being able to send your kids to college. The only issue with many people thinking along the lines of 'This job is for the young and unskilled' but no one ever wants to answer the question "What about when they're in school?" do we cut all business hours down to 4-10PM? Obviously not, because the businesses still need to run and too many people would whine if McDonalds was only open in the afternoons because 3/4 of the team are teenagers who work after school, and that responsibility tends to fall onto people who weren't so lucky and just need something to survive. Fortunately the companies can very easily afford it, look at in-n-out, who just gave massive raises to their employees, and prices went up like $0.20, on top of already offering a *lot* of benefits which is wild for a fast food place anyway. I would happily pay even a dollar more for my *fast food* if it meant the dude making it on the 10th hour of his 12 hour shift can at least eat tomorrow.
How do you figure? And as I said in another comment, the jobs aren't JUST for students. There are also retirees who want to earn a bit of extra cash. Parents who need to be off work when their kids are home and so want the flexibility. Mentally or physically disabled people who can't commit to a high stress or high expectation role but who can flip a burger. Tourists who are only staying in one place for a few weeks or months. Or people who just don't care about having a "real" job and simply want enough money to buy the things they want.
dont have to go back to the 50s\\ my mom bought house single with my and brother working at Swiss chalet (Canadian restaurant) in the 90s
Fast food workers in the 50's, 60's, and 70's were teenagers. They didn't sustain a family.
No
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... what on earth are you talking about?
The ice cream / soda counter guy in my mom's hometown was in his 30s. He had a comfortable MC lifestyle on only his income.
Its very anacdotal but ok. Was he the owner or related to the owners? Did he have a wife, did she work? Did he have kids? What counts as a MC income? Did he have any other income or inheritance? How many people lived in the town? And I'm going to guess that he probably got paid slightly higher than minimum wage as he's not an assembly line burger flipper, he's responsible for several things that require some skills. It wouldn't be a highly paid job but it would pay more than the macdonalds equivalent.
Not the owner. He did have a wife, but I don't THINK he had kids. He lived in a SFH that I believe he built himself. It was a medium 'small town' in Ohio. No inheritance, or other income that I'm aware of. He was making more than minimum wage, I'm sure, but I don't know what he made. I know that he opened (ie had keys) on Saturday.
Ok so he's a married guy, seemingly without kids, making slightly above minimum wage, probably not super high pay but we also don't know whether his wife worked, and if he worked weekends he's probably doing more than the 40 hours I count as full time. It's not really applicable.
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Ditch digging isn't a job with alot of demand (ie alot of people won't do it) and you have to be physically fit. Fitness and strength ARE marketable skills, and alot of people don't realize that. My partner is a qualified plumber and happens to love digging (no I don't get why). And because he's actually good at it and doesn't lean on his shovel and chat all day, it's far more cost effective to hire him at his qualified tradesman rate than to hire labourers at their standard rate. Fast food doesn't have that advantage. You could be very unhealthy or even disabled and you're still able to do your role more or less satisfactorily. That's by design and has pros and cons. But that's why the value of their labour is so minimal - because you can be replaced by anyone halfway competent even if you're exemplary.
No, they were jobs for teenagers like they should be now Managers yes, but mass immigration and women in the workforce, flooded the market with cheap unskilled labor
Don't know why you're being down voted, it's just simple economics. Double the amount of people willing to do a job and the price of that labour will fall, cos someone will likely work for cheaper than you. Even more so for entry level positions cos basically anyone can do it, and the people competing for it are alot more desperate for work, any work.