The marginal employee is the last one in a list ordered by a particular characteristic.
The marginal unit of production is the last one you can produced, or the theoretical one that you could produce next.
It is like the least significant bit of a large number. Flipping it doesn't have a very large impact.
I presume ancestor post meant "the minimally skilled laborer", which is an unskilled laborer plus the minimal amount of training. Since companies rarely train on their own dime anymore, I presume those businesses are hiring folks with a CNC machine maintenance and repair certificate from ITT Tech. That person is easily replaced.
The point is that "skilled machinist" or "machine operator" used to be a job that would give a room filled with people a middle class lifestyle. A machine shop channeled disposable income to 50 median guys, plus the owner, whereas the CNC shop now supports 9 cheap schmucks, one median dude, and 0.1 of an expensive nerd, plus the owner. The character of the business has changed to reduce labor costs, and has increased barrier to entry (CNC costs more than manual lathe, for instance) to reduce competition.
The Ford maxim still applies. You have to pay your workforce enough to buy the products that they make for you. Trade always balances. If you spend less money, there is less out there in the world for you to earn back.
The Ford maxim only applies when switching costs exceed a certain threshold. This was not done out of some Utopian sense of destiny ( although you wouldn't heard Ford tell you that ) but because turnover was killing them.
> The Ford maxim still applies. You have to pay your workforce enough to buy the products that they make for you.
Which is why it's very hard to get access to high-quality manufactured goods at any price point. By directly screwing the bottom third of the workforce, the economy crappyfied itself and screwed all but the very, very top of their members.
Now wonder the retro fashion is all over the place now.
Really? I believe that the top 25% "quality" products in most market segments are better than they've ever been (and usually cheaper as well).
A 2016 Toyota Camry is higher quality than a 1986 Mercedes was in 1986. A 2016 Macbook is higher quality than any 2006 laptop was in 2006. I can buy a high-quality dishwasher from Bosch, a high-quality washing machine from LG, a high-quality mini-split from any number of suppliers. And all of those things are more affordable than they've ever been.
I agree that fewer things are lifetime user-serviceable (for most users), but that's a different thing than inherent quality (which is roughly proxied by: how long do I expect it to reliably work without repair?). If my TV is beyond economic repair the first time it breaks, but it doesn't break for 10 years, I'm way ahead of the game as compared to the old days when I took vacuum tubes to the town radio repair shop for testing to determine which one I should replace.
> Really? I believe that the top 25% "quality" products in most market segments are better than they've ever been (and usually cheaper as well).
Agree. We can get quality things that are pretty inexpensive. But housing became very unaffordable. A big part of our income goes to housing. That means, we spend less money buying things. Furthermore, we don't have enough money to go out. (bars, restaurants, generally services)
