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Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

latimes.com

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Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, come to Switzerland and earn > 10K usd/ month; and on top of that, you pay only a fraction of the Swedish taxes.

Maybe, but what's the cost of living in Switzerland? And is it easy to get a job for someone only speaking English? And don't you have to pay for your own healthcare?

The cost of living in Switzerland is high, that's true. But in IT the office language is English. And you have to pay your own healthcare insurance but afaik that's the case in most of Europe.

In my experience it is a bit more difficult to find a job here compared to the rest of Europe, and that's because there normally are more candidates for every job offering.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#262
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you read this article? I'm in Europe and run into a message saying "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." with the LA time…

Here you go: https://outline.com/vKj7vM Basically, whenever there's a website like this that annoys me, I just copy the URL and Outline it: outline.com/$url No clicking through annoying dialogs, or having to use a vpn.

Thanks for this, pretty useful for when I'm not on my own device.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly, wouldn't it make sense to tax wealth rather than income? As a general principle of incentives, you want to tax the thing you want less of.

> If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly . . . If the only goal was to spread wealth more evenly, then what we should do is simple appropriate all wealth beyond (num_wealth / num_people), and give it to all the people who don't have that much wealth. Then it would all be even stevens. :) But there is not just one goal. Another important goal is to still have a functioning economy after applying your policy choic…

There are certainly bad ways to move toward wealth equality. In terms of implementation, I was actually thinking more of either a George-ian land tax [0], or through some form of encouragement for the wealthy to spend their money into the physical economy rather than the financial abstraction economy. If I figure that part out, I'll run for office.

[0] https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2015/04/01/why-henry...

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#264
post #63
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work. The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the min…

> The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, There are always people who don't just want to live off the dole. Also a lot of the people who complain about crappy entry level wa…

As I read it, the whole point was that those normal hassles of a job aren't worth the (small) differential between the salary and the dole, and the suggested alternative was go on the dole.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#265
post #169

Expecting public companies to do anything except optimize for shareholder value, is pure folly. We can debate morality all day, but there's a more practical reason for this: shareholders hold all the power over management. Regardless of how unhappy you as a customer/employee are, you do not have the direct power to fire the directors/executives. You only have the indirect power of pressuring the shareholders, and hop…

Raising wages however should increase shareholder value by helping them lure better talent in a competitive market. It only proves that corporate America is an oligopoly.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#266
post #124
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://outline.com/vKj7vM Basically, whenever there's a website like this that annoys me, I just copy the URL and Outline it: outline.com/$url No clicking through annoying dialogs, or having to use a vpn.

Same here. It works for paywalls too! I wonder what their business model is though.

Disrupt some shit and duck? :)

If I were to guess; they will start inserting their own content into these filtered pages, after some time. Newly created ones will be nice and clean, but after some months perhaps, mysterious stuff will start creeping in when those URLs are viewed.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#267
post #169

Expecting public companies to do anything except optimize for shareholder value, is pure folly. We can debate morality all day, but there's a more practical reason for this: shareholders hold all the power over management. Regardless of how unhappy you as a customer/employee are, you do not have the direct power to fire the directors/executives. You only have the indirect power of pressuring the shareholders, and hop…

I agree with you, however it's not easy to force government to act in the common people's interests either. You can say voting, but it's getting harder and harder to find any honest representatives to do work in good faith.

Take this example, the people voted that DC tipped workers should get a higher minimum wage, but now it's being repealed by the DC city council:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-council-...

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly . . . If the only goal was to spread wealth more evenly, then what we should do is simple appropriate all wealth beyond (num_wealth / num_people), and give it to all the people who don't have that much wealth. Then it would all be even stevens. :) But there is not just one goal. Another important goal is to still have a functioning economy after applying your policy choic…

Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it. Saving capital so as to be wholly self-sufficient outside the functioning of a society is not in any sense a societal benefit. It's sort of the 'eat your own dogfood' issue: let's say you don't think retirement on Social Security is bearable, and you're alarmed by public hea…

> Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it.

Eh. I'd rather say that Bob diverted labor toward supporting his luxury consumption, whereas I made capital available for increased production (of cars, houses, food, etc.). The truth is somewhere in between. I think your read on this is a little too simplistic.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so true. Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. To make matters far worse, the industry in general pays lip service to on-the-job training and some employers also avoid junior/inexperienced developers, because they don't want to train anyone. And don't get me started on the absolute cancer that are HR/outsourcin…

>> Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. The real underlying problem is that most employers I've encountered think that they're doing their employees a favor by "giving" them a job. They don't truly perceive it as a value-for-value economic transaction. This becomes quite evident when they give you a pile of legal pap…

I've seen this a lot, a lot of employers seem to think they're doing their employee a favor and are insulted when they demand higher salary/better hours, but they are quick to mourn their loss and to say they can't find anyone when the employee decides to leave.
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