Originally Posted by
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If only...if it were an accurate statement (it's not).
I found the Pan Am contract for various years some time ago. It was interesting going through it. At the absolute peak of their pay, the 747 CA was hitting $500k in todays dollars.
Thing is, that was the very absolute peak, it lasted for just a few years (at most) and there were very few of those jobs. In fact, the entire industry was significantly smaller pre-deregulation in general, and most of us wouldn't have jobs had it not been for the massive expansion the industry enjoyed.
That doesn't even touch on how much better the current job is, as we don't have to endure yearly layoffs in the low seasons anymore (that was SOP back then).
So top end senior UA Capts were to make $80,000 in ~1977, a current inflation adjusted amount of $440,000. I think we can all agree that that is only the lower end of NB pay these days, not a senior triple CA.
The 80's were a bloodbath, with de-regulation coming later in the 70's that saw the rise of discount carrier SWA and bankruptcies and liquidations galore.
A major thing missing from this inflation discussion is the rise in asset prices. It's one thing to compare the relative dollar amount of a wage, but focusing there masks what the value of your labor is actually worth. It's another discussion altogether when you compare today's wages and their ability to acquire important assets, like houses, for instance.
In the 80s, my dad was making in around $85K/yr and homes in SoCal would sell for around $140K. Those same houses now go for $1.5M+. So in other words, it would take an (asset) inflation adjusted wage of approximately $970K/yr to reach actual parity with a slightly upper-middle class worker from the 1980s. $440K/yr sounds like a lot of money, but it's not, given what has occurred in the housing market.
In other words, we make slightly less than half of what a 1980s middle class white-collar worker made.