It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by novok » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

kdmccormick wrote: post #106

erikpukinskis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underrated comment. A lot of “growth” is tricks. I have seen so many software companies sacrifice the fundamental health of the product in order to hit certain “growth” numbers, on the assumption that they’ll just be able to keep doing it. But the more realistic outcome is either acquisition (pass the buck and reset the clock) or catastrophic failure.

See: * Strongarming new user account creation even though most new users will immediately bounce. * Removing features from the free tier to "drive conversions" to premium, whilst ruining the quality of the free tier that drew users in the first place. * Filling the product with re-engagement nagware and notification bloat. etc.

To be fair although, the entire existence of a free tier is to draw in people to premium, usually funded by VCs demanding an exponential growth curve. If they were bootstrapped, the free tier is pretty much non-existant in practice.

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

#152

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #85

maxlybbert wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. Restaurants run on notoriously thin margins ( https://upserve.com/restaurant-insider/profit-margins/ ). There's a reason resta…

Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy. Everyone cooking is a massive inefficiency, and yet paying for conventional restaurants is also uneconomical. Eating shelf-stable food is cheaper than cooking for most people, but only until the bad health effects…

> Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy.

Aside from buffet-style, casual, fast-casual, fast-food, and street food outlets fit in the “prepared food without, or without as much of, the frivolity that simulates aristocracy”. It’s not exactly an underserved space.

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

#153

Post by jclulow » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #88

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…

> 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. I think the root problem is that most restaurant dining experiences are not worth the $30+ per person for enough people compared to cooking and eating at home. I would like to see more places where you order at a register and bus your own food with minimal…

This is what happens in countries with higher labour costs, and it's basically just fine -- provided your core cultural experience doesn't drive you to expect a separate staff person to fill your water cup every time you set it down of course.

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

#154

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #126

Ericson2314 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, then. We shouldn't assume a certain service or job is productive enough to exist because it used to be in the past. If barbershops need to go the way of horse liveries, that's OK.

Somehow people are going to need to get their hair cut, so this isn't going to be a horse liveries situation. More people may sacrifice quality or preference for a specific style & do it themselves. Some people might get shorter haircuts so they don't need one as often, maybe trim thing around the edges in between paid haircuts. Some people will be price elastic and pay higher prices. The economics and behaviors may…

You answered your own points! Prol buzz cuts, and luxury hair salons. Eventually automation might step in.

If Khrushchyovkas are ugly but efficient apartments, then let's call the hair style a "Khru cut" hee hee hee.

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

#155

Post by jzb » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #97

tayo42 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe? Maybe not. I'm not certain that restaurant owners know to the penny what people will or won't pay for this or that on a menu. It depends a lot on how cost conscious the customers are and other factors.

Try bumping up the wages and advertising the fact that you do pay a living wage, that might have some impact. My fiance and I try to choose restaurants that are locally owned and are known to treat staff well. (We have friends in food service, locally. Word gets around.) I doubt we're unique in this.

It does depend a lot on location and other factors - you're going to find more people willing to spend more in some areas than others. Other people are perfectly happy to go to restaurant X knowing they fuck over workers but have the cheapest menu.

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

#156

Post by ineedasername » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #95

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.

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 poo…

Another way to put the same observation is that, given the choice, people will sacrifice a little bit of income in order to avoid working a crappy job.

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

#157

Post by luckylion » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

jzb wrote: post #110

rvense wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.

That's the crux of it in a lot of cases. People have come to view a certain class of work as "not worth" paying a living wage. What's worse, the jobs they view as "not worth" a living wage are the ones that do the work we need (or at least really really want) done. If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs...…

> If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs... everything would suck real quickly.

I think you're mixing jobs together that really aren't of similar importance. If all the restaurants shut down, nothing much happens. People buy food at the super market for lunch and dinner. If all the landscaping crews stop working, you'll get more natural growth and some trees will at some point reach into the street / path and become annoying. If the cosmetologists go on strike, you get some annoyed women who need to fill their afternoon time with another activity.

If ware house workers, delivery drivers or garbage collectors strike, shit goes south pretty quickly. I've lived in a major Northern European city during a garbage collector strike, and it was silly to look at because it was pretty obvious who'd win when the trash bags started spilling into the road after people kept piling them up.

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

#158

Post by codegeek » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

rebuilder wrote: post #25

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…

The problem with this is, if the barista gets automated, the customers buy better coffee machines and stop going to the cafe. An exaggeration, but you see my point perhaps. Unless your service is really purely about bang for buck, trying to automate it in ways that are visible to the customer can have downsides. McDonald’s could probably go full robotic. Starbucks? Not sure, maybe. It would be a little offputting. Yo…

Depends. I don't go to a coffee place to hang out with the Barista. I go to hang out. may be with friends/family. I couldn't care who made my coffee and how as long as it is good. I love automation as much as possible.

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

#159

Post by tssva » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

holler wrote: post #38

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.

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.

There are plenty of barbershops in my area which charge $50 for a haircut but there are many more that charge $18. Having been to a selection of both the difference is mostly the level of interior decoration and not the quality of the haircut. The choice being between a $50 haircut and having your girlfriend do it at home is a false one.

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

#160

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #144

Ericson2314 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy. Everyone cooking is a massive inefficiency, and yet paying for conventional restaurants is also uneconomical. Eating shelf-stable food is cheaper than cooking for most people, but only until the bad health effects…

Yes and no. There's really not a whole lot of margin in the food. You get margin from buying a soda, beer, or wine in wholesale and selling it with barely any labour at a 5x markup. My parents tried a buffet thing once, didn't work. You need a certain amount of scale that wasn't present in their area. I have seen some proper huge buffet places though, seems pretty good though rent is an issue.

I'm not arguing the economics work out given today's prices and all sorts of disequilibria. I'm just saying everyone cooking is ipso facto inefficient, so they has to be some context in which communal eating is economic.

If that is buffet-style and a hefty land value tax to stop landlords from milking the restaurant, so be it.