Firstly, wages grew much more rapidly until 1970. Secondly, even since then in the US wages have not fallen in real terms, they have just been level with inflation.
The phenomenon where labour gets more costly despite no gains in productivity because on average society has become wealthier is called Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease). While a servant is not much more efficient than they were 100 years ago, they cost a lot more because there is now better alternative uses for their labour that bid up their price.
Blue collar labour is about to get very expensive. Observers in the trades are all saying the same thing: it's beyond bleak. The aptitude is gone.
Employers everywhere are saying the same thing - we can't find anybody competent at this form of labour. The normal response on HN will be "raise wages" - which we do and we tell them we can pay a lot more if they can perform ... except we still can't find anybody who has their shit together to the point they're capable of earning themselves a minimum wage. The opportunity costs of hiring create a situation where hiring anybody is a losing proposition - making employers very conservative despite the market braying for new workers. We want to hire because we want to make money, we'd do it if we could.
We can get people 'available to work' but they're so inept they can't be employed productively or even trained up because the snobbery of poverty is real and - a value judgement I know but it has to be said - prospective employees are also typically unusually unreliable people with smartphone, videogame or drug addictions, distracted, zero attention span.
I despise that arrogant middle class perspective of those who believe you just need to throw warm bodies at blue collar work. It does not work. It hasn't been true for a long time. "The world needs ditch diggers too" doesn't operate in a world where the ditch digger is using a mechanical excavator and is paid $60+ per hour is competing with an idiot using the excavator who will cost tens of thousands if he busts a pipe or hits something valuable. Literal shovel ready jobs do not exist! Tyler Cowen describes this in his book, Average is Over - the situation is not what politicians and most people think it is.
There's was a natural aptitude or blue collar culture that went unappreciated that is simply missing today. Now people are going to pay for that expertise in a way nobody had to before. Most blue collar workers operate together with a collection of machinery to augment their effort which is very expensive - a joinery guy installing a kitchen I saw last month had 20k of Festool tools laying around him, that's not even his workshop - the barrier to entry is getting higher all the time.
People have been saying labour compensation would occur (migration, middle class adaption, upskilling, machine replacment, houses built in factories) would occur for over a decade now and it hasn't happened in a meaningful way at scale and now the average age of a plumber in some states is near 60.
If you want to send in the Androids to do work, now would be a good time Silicon Valley... I suspect it's not really happening.
In a nutshell - just as infrastructure has been physically neglected in the West - so too has the skillset of the workers that maintain it. Where are the AR Platforms that teach a framer how to toenail studs into place? Has anybody here heard of companies producing such modules?
In ten years things are going to look very dire for the typical white collar worker, probably a good portion of the population is going to go bankrupt and lose their property - potholes and lots of anger.
As you've mentioned when the middle class lost all their servants to the factories and farms because the wages were higher - suddenly women who never had to clean or cook had to learn those skills - this was one of the drivers behind electrical home tools for cleaning and cooking (most cooking books were invented around this time says the Gastropod food podcast) and the feminist political movements. I think this will happen again and automation will occur but it's on the scale of decades, not years.
But they have, and then some. The datum you're referencing misses out on compensation as a whole. Compensation includes a wide array of factors such as insurance, paid time off, sick leave, and various other perks and benefits. This [1] is the graph you should be considering. That is Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour. And just to be completely clear "real" means that that graph is indeed inflation adjusted.
"Nonfarm Business Sector" is defined as "a subset of the domestic economy and excludes the economic activities of the following: general government, private households, nonprofit organizations serving individuals, and farms. The nonfarm business sector accounted for about 77 percent of the value of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000."
The billed rate is not just for the mechanics time. It also has to cover the non billable support staff and other fixed costs. The dealership is not taking home $80 an hour.
