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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#141

Post by blooalien »

daenz wrote: post #136
falcolas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skilled work is not the antonym of hard work. You can work hard doing skilled work. Knowledge work does look different from physical work, but you can work hard at both; you need to work hard at either to be successful. As for why hard physical work is so valued - only a century or two past, it was the only practical method to prevent the starvation for yourself and your family. Knowledge work being a viable means of…

True, hard work and skilled work are not opposites, but you can work less hard doing skilled work (it's almost the definition of skilled work), and still have a bigger impact than someone working very hard at unskilled work. I probably should have used the phrase "unskilled work" in my original post, but I was trying to convey the person's frustrations about "hard work." From an outsiders perspective, a skilled knowl…

Some "skilled work" intersects with "hard work". There's a ton of work in the construction industry that requires a very high level of specialized knowledge that sometimes takes years of college and practice in their industry to learn, just for example. Even more reason that it's strange that some people find one type of work somehow inherently superior to the other in generalized terms. I tend to think that the skill and care that one puts behind their craft is maybe what should be more important.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#143

Post by nostromo »

heywintermute wrote: post #45
nostromo wrote: post #6

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the government paying people to sit at home - something NPR forgot to mention in their article.

Except it literally does? >Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave. "I was working what I decided was going to be my last kitchen job," Cornett said.

Re-read my comment and then re-read that quote.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#144

Post by blooalien »

wyager wrote: post #58
maerF0x0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or automate 99% of the business and free these poor souls from a mundane existence. Also, I think we should support them w/ safety net (see basically andrew yang's platform). I don't see anyone screaming about ditch digging jobs or dishwashers saying we should "save those jobs!" . Backhoes and automatic dishwashers have freed people from meaningless work. We should do the same for everything we can. There's a stereot…

It’s not socially efficient to spend all our effort trying to automate things. This happens naturally as wages required to hire people for a given task increase and automation gets cheaper. The natural progression of the situation in the article is that wages go up, increasing the viability of automation, so you’ll get your wish (in this context) soon enough. If we “freed” people from work with welfare, 99.9% of reci…

If society actively encouraged the creation of more positive ways to contribute positive things, I bet we'd see an "organic" growth in numbers of people choosing to do so.

Example; There've been some pretty positive things happening around community gardens in some places (when they're not being attacked by self-appointed neighborhood Nannies that don't like to see people gathering together around something beneficial).

Example 2; I remember "maker" clubs and similar community groups doin' lots of really fun activities that benefited more than just the group itself (free community virus cleanups, operating system install parties, community LAN parties - everyone's welcome).

I'm sure that if enough positive activities were presented to society as a whole, you'd just naturally find a growing percentage of humanity doin' good things for each other that used to be considered "work" at some point in the past before whatever "safety net" made it unnecessary to do for survival's sake anymore. People might even still do some of those things at a higher level of quality than others and net themselves some personal gain out of it.

Problem is that humans aren't willing to cooperate with one another enough to even approach any sort of Utopian ideal, and they're often too ready to jump at all the reasons such a thing is "impossible" without being willing to even consider any ideas that might lead to it bein' a reality.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#145

Post by pphysch »

wutbrodo wrote: post #134
pphysch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wealth increase came from acute government intervention and was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices). Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.

> was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices). It was driven largely by real estate appreciation. How do you figure that this is ephemeral? Your second paragraph contradicts your first. America's policy in 2020 was decisively _not_ neoliberal, and was in fact one of the most generous in the world[1]. This is in part due to necessity borne of a smaller safety net than other OECD countries, but it's a…

Come on! Real estate appreciation only matters for people that own multiple properties and can therefore afford to sell without compromising the roof over their heads, i.e. landlords.

My sole property doubling in value, along with every other house in comparable neighborhoods, is 100% ephemeral, because there is no way to realize that value without liquidating my family's quality of life--a counterproductive maneuver.

**

Trump Admin was paradoxically nationalist at home and neoliberal abroad (probably because he's a professional clown with no understanding of governance); US foreign policy has not meaningfully changed since 1991/2001. It's all about securing the conditions for global neoliberalism, i.e. American military and financial imperialism, which ensures I can buy a jar of premium African tree nuts from Costco for a fraction of an hours labor, even though it required many hours of labor to produce.

Anyway, that pyramid scheme called neoliberalism is collapsing, and it's only going to get worse domestically in America as a sad but necessary result.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#146

Post by danaris »

daenz wrote: post #92
colinmhayes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurant work sucks, it's not tipping's fault. I don't work nearly as hard as a software developer compared to when I was a waiter or cook. Software development is lower stress most of the time too.

I knew someone who was mad at their partner because their partner was a software engineer and "didn't work as hard as they do" at a lower skill job, and yet made a lot more money. I'm not sure where this idea comes from that hard work is as valuable/more valuable than skilled work. But it seems to be a pervasive idea.

It comes from classism.

Historically, the people doing "hard work" were peasants, serfs, and other lower-class people.

The people doing "skilled work" were the educated sons of nobility, and later of wealthy merchants.

An awful lot of the unhealthy and destructive dynamic in our modern work can be traced to feudalism.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#147

Post by blooalien »

vishnugupta wrote: post #63
sethammons wrote: post #11

> rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often forced to tolerate Service workers in general, I'd love it if more managers and companies would support front line workers in refusing service. The customer is not always right. People should not have to put up with literal abuse. The Alamo Drafthouse theater is famously known for kicking someone out who was using their cell phone and other customers appreciat…

This . "Customer is king" mentality should die. Far too often it leads to disgruntled frontline workers and customers walking around as if they are doing a business favour just by being their customer. Even something seemingly as simple as "smiling" is tiring if done all day. In a business transaction all parties are equal. No one is doing anyone else a favour. I quite liked it when I saw signboards in Singapore that…

> "Customer is king" mentality should die.

Totally agree. My first computer store boss had a general rule that he repeated often to us: "The customer is always right until they're wrong; That's when you hand them over to me." When the day finally came that had to be tested, we watched him actually "86" (perma-ban) a customer from the store. That customer then tried to spread false rumors about the store that literally no other customer was willing to believe, because they all already knew our boss was a fair guy and wouldn't have banned someone without a mighty good reason. Still to this day wish that type of boss was more common rather than a total rarity.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#148

Post by pphysch »

handrous wrote: post #127
pphysch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wealth increase came from acute government intervention and was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices). Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.

> Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore. Interestingly, even America had its only explicitly-anti-neoliberal (in rhetoric, at the very least) President in the last 3+ decades in office at the time. Think what you will of him—I certainly have some thoughts —he was notable for that highly unusual, for a national-level US politician wi…

He got elected on a reactionary populist platform, and if he (or Bannon, rather) had any desire to shift American policy, he inevitably got discouraged from doing so by Washington's unelected bureaucracy. So he ended up using his largely ceremonial 4 years of power to enrich his family and friends.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#149

Post by lamontcg »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #52
namdnay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, as necessary as that is, it’s not a magic solution. People are quitting the restaurant industry in France too, despite having none of the tip silliness. It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen

Sure but this goes beyond restaurants in my opinion. Look at these states that had mass migration of people during the pandemic. You will find the (big) sky-rocketing cost of living where those who are moving in on a whim are also not seeking jobs in the state. However all these businesses need employees to handle the new increase in customers. The employers aren’t raising their wages either, which is also not attrac…

everything about that analysis of the situation is backwards.

the problem is the restaurants are seeing fewer customers due to the pandemic so they can't raise wages, while the upper 1/4 or so of the population hasn't been financially impacted by the pandemic and housing and rents have continued to climb. restaurants can't raise prices in this situation and they can't raise wage, which squeezes the workers who are now not putting up with it any more.

return to work means continued increase in housing prices and if restaurants fully open they're going to have to pay more and that means that those wage and rent increases for the businesses will have to get passed on as rising prices.

if there's a switch to remote work then that will make cities more livable again at current wage costs and menu pricing. you lose some disposable income from the seriously high wage earners that have left the city, but they'll mostly take the distortion of the housing market with them while the bulk of the population that makes less than $150k will have more left out of salaries to eat out at the restaurants.

short term the effect of popping housing bubbles would be recessionary, of course, but it'd act more like Volker's popping of the 70s stagflation bubble, give it 5 years and the "new normal" of consistent housing prices would take over.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#150

Post by moate »

dragontamer wrote: post #43
karlkatzke wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 career field that died of COVID during the pandemic is restaurant cooks.

Well, you don't usually interact with cooks, so that's a bit harder for me to gather information about :-) You can actually gain a hell of a lot of information with a brief 30-second talk with a cashier, someone stocking the shelves at a store, waiter, or barber. Keep it brief: they're still on the clock and you don't want to waste their time. Its also their job to respond to you (ex: talk about checkout, to point yo…

OP was pointing this out:

https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/02/10/covid-...

(IDK about you, but 3 seconds of googling is easier for me than conducting my own personal polling of people I see out and about)

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