Class Reunion Notices

Letter to the Editor: GOP establishment’s rejection of Donald Trump would backfire

The entities that are agitating for a $10 or even $15 an hour minimum wage are both right and wrong. They are right because nobody in a modern industrialized society should have to work for less than $15 or $20 an hour, but they are wrong because it is economically impossible to raise wages unless the jobs produce enough value to support them.We cannot, like Shakespeare&#8217;s Jack Cade, decree that seven half-penny loaves of bread shall sell for a penny and expect bakers to produce any bread at all, unless we first discover how to produce bread 250 percent more efficiently in terms of both labor and material. Did Gov. Tom Wolf somehow figure out how to make state employees&#8217; jobs 39 percent more productive when he issued an executive order to raise their minimum wage 39 percent? A private business&#8217; customers can simply walk away if the business raises prices to cover its inefficiencies, but a government can raise taxes on anybody who is not willing to leave the state. Our personal income tax is already 53.5 percent higher than it was during the 1970s, and it is past time to say that enough is enough.A college degree in industrial, employment and labor relations can easily cost up to $200,000, but Henry Ford taught us almost everything we need to know about this subject in a single sentence: &#8220;It ought to be the employer&#8217;s ambition, as leader, to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman&#8217;s ambition to make this possible.&#8221;A simple example from the early 20th century illustrates this principle. Suppose you are a brick layer who is proud of your mastery of one of the world&#8217;s oldest skilled trades. You work eight or more hours a day by bending over to pick up 125 bricks per hour, apply mortar and put them into a wall. You go home with aching muscles and only modest pay to show for your efforts. The union tells you your greedy boss is exploiting you, but your boss doesn&#8217;t earn enough profit for much more than a middle-class lifestyle. The customers, meanwhile, complain that they are being overcharged, so who benefits from your low wages and the business&#8217;s high prices?As stated by radio personality Paul Harvey, &#8220;Now for the rest of the story.&#8221;Frank Gilbreth, the father of motion efficiency, introduces a non-stooping scaffold that eliminates the need to bend over for each brick. Now you find yourself laying 350 bricks an hour, and with much less effort. The problem wasn&#8217;t lazy workers, greedy and exploitative bosses, or stingy customers; it was a job design that wasted 64 percent of your labor.Elimination of waste is the only way we can have higher wages, lower prices and higher profits simultaneously, and Henry Ford created the American middle class by taking this principle to its utmost extension. Ford&#8217;s hourly workers were, in fact, responsible for many productivity improvements in his factories, and Ford reciprocated with unprecedented hourly wages.The next time you go into a fast-food restaurant, pay attention to how much time the workers spend walking (Ford said explicitly that you cannot pay somebody to walk), fumbling with packaging and doing other things that add no value for the customer. The issue is not &#8220;low pay for low skills&#8221; because the franchise owner could not pay somebody like Wolfgang Puck much more than minimum wage to do those jobs as they are currently designed. I am confident that these jobs could pay $15 or more an hour if the employer and employees figured out how to remove the waste, and automated hamburger-making machines and order-taking kiosks are already realities.Gilbreth wrote that he got his ideas from military drills that were designed explicitly to eliminate all wasted motions and efforts. This means that every soldier who handled a firearm or was part of a cannon&#8217;s gun crew during the previous 400 or so years had literally held the secret of almost limitless wealth in his hands, but neither the soldiers nor the drill instructors who taught them ever realized that the same principles could be applied to civilian trades.Sherlock Holmes said, &#8220;You see, but you do not observe.&#8221; Frank Gilbreth, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford were the few who observed as well as saw the enormous waste that is built into most jobs, and it is to them that we owe our modern affluent society.<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta>William A. LevinsonGuest columnist</bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta>William A. Levinson, of Wilkes-Barre, is the author of &#8220;The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work: Henry Ford&#8217;s Universal Code for World-Class Success&#8221; and other books on Ford&#8217;s productivity methods.</shirttailMeta></div>

William A. Levinson: Governor artificially inflates minimum wage rather than find ways to increase productivity