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Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

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Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#281

Post by jogjayr »

ghastmaster wrote: post #201
LorenPechtel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business.…

> civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what you were talking about.

"Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allowed to continue discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 changed the law to require all businesses with 15 or more employees to adhere to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."[1]

I'm still shocked that discrimination is allowed for any business at all. But you weren't entirely correct.

Also, the Act's other benefits have to be weighed against allowing discrimination in small businesses. Small businesses that were racist and discriminatory before the Civil Rights Act could continue to be so after it, but could only grow up to a certain size. That's still an improvement on what existed previously, which was that they could be racist and discriminatory forever and always.

If I was a minority in the 60s I'd consider federally guaranteed right to vote, equal education, stay at any hotel, use any public water fountain or bus, and be considered on an equal basis for federal jobs, private sector jobs in 15/25+ employee firms, loans, assistance programs and the rest to be a massive gain over the status quo. You're entitled to your opinion on the CRA of 1964, but to most people it's going to sound bizarre. Sorry.

> The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

I don't know what "ta boot" means so the meaning of this statement is unclear.

1. https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#282

Post by contingencies »

rayiner wrote: post #279

The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.

Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#283

Post by tempsy »

rayiner wrote: post #279

The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.

Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#284

Post by TheBobinator »

throwawaw wrote: post #265
TheBobinator wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-population-rati... Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard. The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, a…

> Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions. Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.

I know people who work there out in Chicago. They distribute pamphlets and have it cooked into their health insurance policy. It's mostly a city and urban problem for the company, and done on a community-by-community basis; the stores they do not drug test at are the stores they impliment the program in. All you have to do for yourself is walk into a wal-mart in a bad neighborhood and ask.

Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.

If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.

Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#285

Post by deiznof »

ikeboy wrote: post #117
jiofih wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re taking that sentence as an absolute, not in the context of low-wage jobs. And it it is a liberal fantasy, right next to meritocracy. That wealth stays put exactly where it is, at the top of the chain. All studies on labor show productivity gains far outpacing salaries in the past century. A well-paid knowledge worker today can barely meet the lifestyle of his factory worker grandparents.

https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07... This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely, although it only goes back a quarter century.

This is only because America has incredibly bloated healthcare costs - that "compensation" mostly isn't all that valuable.

A $1000 slice of pizza is still only 1 slice of pizza.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#286

Post by funklute »

dfilppi wrote: post #94
funklute wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually you approach (modern) slavery though, and the transition is not black to white, but a continuous one. So your argument, without any qualifications, actually implies that (modern) slavery is not a problem. I hope it is obvious to you why that is a highly unreasonable argument.

No. Slavery isnt voluntary by definition, and that is it's most essential feature.

I don't quite see your point. I agree that both traditional and modern slavery is not voluntary. But if there are no other options, other than taking an extremely low-paying job, then modern slavery is exactly what you get.

None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary, and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#287

Post by _0uto »

dang wrote: post #258
_0uto wrote: post #31

I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system. In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and no…

> I see a lot of protestant mentality here Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't mean to start religious discussion, rather used this term as in writings of Mark Weber (value of hard work etc.). This is more about set of principles that shaped Western and American societies, not really being related to religion anymore.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#288

Post by jandrewrogers »

ar0 wrote: post #231
jandrewrogers wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it. The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.

> The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world The US isn’t bad in that respect, but according to Wikipedia, this statement isn’t even true for the subset of countries on their list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality...

That only looks at three cancers. The oncology literature tracks survival rates across all cancer incidence, in which the US consistently comes out on top. Only a few other countries, such as Switzerland, are close.

It is attributable almost entirely to more aggressive (and expensive) diagnostics combined with many new cancer therapies being available in the US years before they trickle down to the rest of the world.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#289

Post by sokoloff »

sneak wrote: post #260
sokoloff wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe . I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.

You also didn’t make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s phones should be theirs because reasons.

Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

#290

Post by orangecat »

kaitai wrote: post #268
orangecat wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills? A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.

The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability. Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/…

The point is there are a lot of people in this position.

Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.

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