By Blue Turtle
I just thought that I would share with you this story. Although it is a work of fiction, perhaps you may see the lesson it reveals.
Joe and Mary were a typical young family in the early forties. Joe worked as a welder at the local car manufactory earning a decent wage of $1.55 an hour. They had just purchased a new home on twenty acres for $6000 and they had one child and were expecting another. Now Joe had purchased a new car back in thirty-eight but now he had aspirations of getting one of those new station wagons to accommodate his growing family. For one of Joe and Mary’s favorite pastimes was the weekend drive and picnicking.
Thinking about this, Joe set down and calculated how much he would have to adjust his budget in order to finance this new vehicle. Given he was working 40 hours a week earning a gross of $62 and netting approximately $56.50 after taxes and all, his figuring went on like this.
House finance: payment $65 a month, or approx. $17 a week.
Utilities: Electric and gas $12 a month, or approx. $3.00 a week.
Savings: Insurance and bonds: $40 a month, or approx. $10 a week.
Which left him $26.50 a week for groceries and necessities.
Now he figured that the new station wagon would probably cost him at least $1150, and figuring the 6% interest the bank would charge the payments would probably run him at least $50 a month for two years. That would be another $12.50 a week from his pay. Now he could cut some from his savings, but at the most that would only be about $4 a week. Perhaps he could get in another four hours work in on Saturday even though it would cut in on the time he would be able to spend with his family, but then that would only gross him another $6.20 a week and probably put him in a higher tax bracket. No! If he must go into a higher tax bracket then he’d just have to ask the boss for a ten-cent raise.
The next day he did just that, but the boss turned him down saying that he was already making the highest union rate for the job. Now Joe, being a union steward, complained to the union that it was a shame that a worker at a car plant couldn’t afford to buy one of the cars that he was making and the union agreed. So the union demanded that the company give their workers a ten-cent raise. After much haggling and the threat of a walkout the company came out with a counter proposal, they offered a nickel raise and an extra days work on Saturday at time and a half.
Joe and the other workers were overjoyed with this, although they would now be sacrificing one their precious weekend days.
Joe now figured that counting the time and a half for Saturday, he would have 52 hours at $1.60, a gross of $83.20 a week, an extra $21 a week. Now he could afford that station wagon.
But then something strange happened. The car company, figuring that it now had to pay several hundred workers an extra nickel plus the overtime, plus a raise to the office workers and sales staff, decided that they would have to raise the selling price of their vehicles to compensate.
And the distributors, seeing that the autoworkers got a raise, had to get their raise also, so they too raised their costs to the auto sales to compensate.
Unfortunately the car company also made large trucks and the trucking companies began to raise their transit prices to compensate for the increased costs of the vehicles and to cover the costs of pay raises their drivers had insisted on. And the storeowners were forced to increase the prices of their produce to compensate. This led to higher prices on food and clothes which then led to an increase in utility costs etc..
A snowball had been started down hill.
Joe soon found that the increase in prices still prevented him from getting the new station wagon and so purchased a used one. But now having to work six days a week he had little time to spend with his family. His wife got her license and drove the old car to do the necessary shopping and soon Joe found that he was forced to take on welding jobs after work just to help defray the cost of living.
During this time war had broken out and although Joe had been draft deferred as a family man in the beginning, in 1943 he found that he was drafted.
While he served in the Army, his wife Mary went to work at the automotive plant as a welder. Their two children spending time at a nursery while she worked. The garden that she had loved to tend on their twenty acres went to weeds and the children’s swings and slides went to rust.
When Joe got back home in 1945 he found that the automotive factory had installed automated spot welders to cut down on the necessity of skilled welders and therefore his old job was no longer available. And although he was forced to work at a lesser paying job, the costs of living were again rising and he was forced to find another job to compensate. This meant that he had even less time with his family. His wife Mary, who was used to working during his absence, went to work at a rubber plant to supplement their income, for their children were now growing up and they wanted to provide for their college education. But this meant even less time spent with their children who spent most of their time now at Mary’s parents.
And on it went, the snowball kept rolling and wages and prices kept pace with its growth. The house and its twenty acres were sold because of rising taxes and gas prices and a smaller house was purchased closer to their work as the children graduated and went to college. Mary passed away while still in her early forties and Joe, now alone in his seventies, found himself in a retirement home. His children seldom coming to see him, for the family bonding of youth had been denied them.
He looks out the window at the Exxon gas station, seeing the gas prices listed at $1.59 a gallon and shakes his head, remembering when they were fifteen cents. His eyes are drawn to the newspaper laying on the stand next to the window and he sees the price of a minivan displayed there at the price of $32,000, and he grimaces remembering the station wagon and murmurs to no one in particular, “Damn that old station wagon!”
And still the snowball grows!
May peace, love, harmony and understanding be with you all.
Blue Turtle
