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It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

thehill.com

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Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#91

Post by csomar »

atrus wrote: post #12

Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…

Restaurants, Fast-foods and bars are already quite expensive. That's why they are competitive: customers are very sensitive to price, and have limited budgets. It's like airlines.

Raising the prices would not work. If it did, some of them would have already done it.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#92

Post by BenjiWiebe »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #69

I’m a little confused, wouldn’t this mean that there are people sitting around who seemingly prefer no job than a lower than they would like paying job? I don’t understand how all these unemployed people are surviving.

They are drawing unemployment benefits.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#93

Post by Ericson2314 »

angelzen wrote: post #50
atrus wrote: post #12

Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…

The owner won't hire a couple of cooks at $20 an hour because he won't be able to pay off his mortgages anymore. The banker sits behind all this and collects his fat percentage cut while laughing at the plebs fighting with each other over scraps. We have a 3 tier system: minimum wage workers condemned to a perpetual state of precarity, middle class professional and small business types that toil away paying hefty mor…

> capital owners that lend around money at extortionate rates and run to the nanny state to print money and save their skin whenever their bets go sour. Guess which strata gets most of the flak.

Your heart is in the right place, but you are doing the devil's work by accident. "extortionate rates" and "printing money" do not happen at once! We have low interest rates, which are good for debtors. The banks now will get very little interest on those mortgages, so that can't be the sole piece of they are making a killing.

What also happens is low interest loans allow the value of land to go up, and land speculation works too well. Worse, there are laws and other things preventing density so the desire to have as many tenants as possible doesn't actually reduce the cost of floor area.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#94

Post by dudul »

tayo42 wrote: post #80
ljm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case you'd be justified in not paying the tip, surely? The effective price beforehand was $45, since you weren't really tippin, just subsidising the employer. They just bumped the price by 5 bucks and dispensed with the pricing trickery by paying proper wages.

The United States really needs to kill tipping culture off

Why? What would be different for the customer? The tip would just be rolled into the price of the service to amount to the same number, and quality of service would probably go down. Employees would also be taxed on the "tip" (which would now be included in their base salary). So what would really be the benefit?

And I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. Coming from Europe I also thought initially that tipping was really weird, but after living with it for a decade+ I got used to it and I'm really curious as to why we should stop doing it.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#95

Post by mynameishere »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
atrus wrote: post #12

Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…

Same with a bundle of Great Clips a friend manages for a franchisee. Can’t find staff, doesn’t believe staff are worth what the current effective minimum wage is. “Have you tried offering more?” “That’s too much for cosmetology work.” Getting slapped by the invisible hand of the market.

The government paying people to not work has nothing to do with this oft-misunderstood "invisible hand" metaphor.

I'm not sure why people think that a barber is somehow able to compete with the infinite resources of the government hellbent on idling labor capacity. Very few rational people will work for 25/hour if they can sit and watch TV for 20/hour. Saying "pay more" is not helpful in that situation. The labor pool is basically limited to those who have enough foresight to realize the gravy train might end.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

beej71 wrote: post #89
n8cpdx wrote: post #4

It's surprising businesses haven't turned to automation. At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready, and using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. A lot of these businesses just can't survive if they meet the wage demands of people who have be…

It's nice to have a server check on you even if seating and ordering are automated. It's worth something for the experience. The last place I went to like that, the owner was working probably due to lack of staff. He was wearing a Rolex Explorer II.

95% of the time, I prefer eating at restaurants with no waiter and where you pay up front for the food. So much time and money wasted on talking to someone for something that would take me 10 seconds to do.

Waited service is okay for special dates and business meals or something.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#97

Post by gruez »

tayo42 wrote: post #39
prepend wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to understand. If your customers won’t buy Mexican food at a high enough price to pay $20/hour, it’s better to close than to stay open and lose money. Labor is the highest cost for a restaurant (higher than rent) so bumping wages from $15 to $20 may not be possible if you can’t also raise prices by 30%. This may be hard to understand for us rich programmers. But it’s quite simple for companies that have rea…

You dont need to increase prices by 30% to raise the hourly rate from $15 to $20. Pay is like a fixed cost. If your cook makes 100 items an hour and you profit 1$ off each item. Your profit for the hour only goes down by $5 not by 33 cents per item

But you also need to factor in the demand curve. Raising the price by 25% also means there will be less customers, which means your fixed costs (eg. rent, equipment) go up for each unit of good sold.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#98

Post by holler »

ljm wrote: post #66
holler wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barber shop I went to for years used to charge $35 for a haircut pre-pandemic, which with a ~$10 tip ($45) already felt real high. Now a haircut is $50 and I no longer go, opting instead to cut my own hair w help from my girlfriend. Maybe people don’t want $50 haircuts.

In that case you'd be justified in not paying the tip, surely? The effective price beforehand was $45, since you weren't really tippin, just subsidising the employer. They just bumped the price by 5 bucks and dispensed with the pricing trickery by paying proper wages.

That may be true, but $45 already felt like the upper limit so even a $5 increment feels like too much (my hair is short afterall!)

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#99

Post by throwaway675309 »

rapnie wrote: post #71
n8cpdx wrote: post #4

It's surprising businesses haven't turned to automation. At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready, and using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. A lot of these businesses just can't survive if they meet the wage demands of people who have be…

> At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready Automation, automation, digital transformation, sure we can do it all. But in many cases it makes things suck a bit more, and life crappier overall. If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service.…

I think it really is highly dependent on the individual. For your example with restaurants I have the absolute opposite preference. When I go to a restaurant I'm usually dining with friends so the social aspect is already covered - I don't want/need to make small chat with a waiter.

Would be completely happy with an automated process there, for my mind that means more of my tip might go to the cook who is actually preparing my food in the first place.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#100

Post by pengaru »

rvense wrote: post #60
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with a bundle of Great Clips a friend manages for a franchisee. Can’t find staff, doesn’t believe staff are worth what the current effective minimum wage is. “Have you tried offering more?” “That’s too much for cosmetology work.” Getting slapped by the invisible hand of the market.

> “That’s too much for cosmetology work.” So it's not even an economic argument, "If I pay that I'll go out of business"? It's just a moral one, "They don't deserve that amount of money"? I can't say I'm surprised, TBH.

> It's just a moral one, "They don't deserve that amount of money"?

It's a denial/delayed acceptance of inflation/cost-of-living increases.

These people are struggling to accept that money is worth sufficiently less than it was before to make the status quo untenable.

Or if they have accepted it, they're determined to make the underlings eat the loss.

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