31–40 of 73 posts
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
maybe the industry should pay young people more for their labor...
$18 dollars an hour for arguably the most dangerous job in the country. That doesn't seem like a great deal to you?
When even a left-wing outlet like The Guardian is willing to uncritically echo capital's BS about "labor shortages" when the real cause is a lack of willingness to pay real wages, you know we're in trouble. Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those people to get fucked.
This sounds like yet another market problem being blamed on "millennials". If you pay enough I'd imagine some people would take the job. If you can't pay enough, then I guess the market is speaking to you about the long term outlook for logging.
I don't blame people for not flocking to an extremely dangerous and grueling job only to be underpaid. There's plenty of other options. I get tired of older generations somehow trying to guilt trip us into continuing in their line of work when in reality those jobs weren't very good to begin with. Work smarter not harder. Maybe they never heard of that.
I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high sch…
The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.
(Source for all this is: The Box (https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...)
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
This is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low. There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.