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

#181

Post by sdgawrgdsfds » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

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.

Barbers, like tattoo artists, strippers, and relief veterinarians, freelance.

The house gets a percentage per head. You're really tipping.

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

#182

Post by adwn » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

tafox wrote: post #169

zthrowaway wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice framing. Or it’s to get paid for bearing all of the risk of starting and running the business, and being financially on the hook for when it fails and gets to deal with years of being sued.

Exactly. Just like the financial crisis. All those big CEOs getting caught on the hook.

Those CEOs weren't business owners, and especially not SMB owners.

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

#183

Post by mrosett » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

Just a reminder to people like me: if you chose to read the comments on a post like this, you got what was coming to you.

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

#184

Post by zozbot234 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

crazy_horse wrote: post #128

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

Claims like this about UBI are simply unknown. You can't say it with any certainty, not even close. To begin to have UBI you'd have to increase taxes substantially, and you'd have to prove that doing that would actually lead to better results for businesses and the people.

> To begin to have UBI you'd have to increase taxes substantially

These would be far less of a burden than the implied taxes arising due to existing means-tested welfare. The incentive distorting effect from that sort of means-testing is extremely high, and the whole point of the UBI/NIT is to dispense with that.

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

#185

Post by Robotbeat » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #119

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about being a business owner, is that you are the last one on the payroll (if you are a good owner). All the bills get paid (including wages), then you get what's left over. If you had a good week, then you get a nice stack of Benjamins. If you had a bad week; maybe not so much. In fact, you may even need to chip in, to keep the lights on. I have seen, many, many SMB owners start living "high on the hog," a…

You might say the business owners feel entitled to live off other peoples work.

Yes, that's basically true.

I don't see small business owners as morally superior to workers. We're all just humans.

(And yes, starting a small business where you are able to leverage a bunch of other people's labor is still the most reliable way to become a millionaire in the US.... well, besides buying a decent house a few decades ago in California and becoming a NIMBY.)

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

#186

Post by kodah » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

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…

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

> This is why a UBI is good for businesses -- customers have more money in their pockets.

I'm a proponent of UBI and I think this claim needs a citation for the level of certainty that you expressed. I have always viewed that UBI will likely be bad for small businesses, but that by the time that we need UBI there won't be many small businesses left.

There are two pilots of UBI worth paying attention to: Finland and Ontario. Finland proposes paying the unemployed (this differs slightly from unemployment benefits in the US) while Ontario proposes paying anyone below the poverty line.

Source: https://hiring.workopolis.com/article/universal-basic-income...

UBI-like concepts, like what was implemented by the US and other countries during COVID, do help recover us from a recession.

Source: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/9649-universal-basic-incom...

That said, it was not enough to impact small businesses in a positive way. Over 50% of small businesses reported having a large negative impact. There's lots of questions to be answered there, like the availability of non-extractive technology for small businesses to use to compete, and where the income levels where UBI-like income disbursements were centered actually spend their money.

> Estimates from the weekly U.S. Census Small Business Pulse Survey indicate that roughly 50% of businesses report having a large negative effect from the COVID‐19 pandemic and that only 15%–20% of businesses have enough cash on hand to cover 3 months of operations (Bohn, Mejia, & Lafortune, 2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7461311/

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

#187

Post by angelzen » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #148

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

The dirty open secret about development is that in highly developed countries with low inequality, human labor is just horrendously expensive, and since dining out has costs dominated by human labor, even relatively wealthy people dine out rarely. Ask the Swiss or Danes. Cooks can have a living wage, but fancy meals are comparatively much more expensive than their equivalents in the US, given their lack access to und…

Speaking of dirty secrets. There was a time not so long ago when there was not so much demand for dining out. Healthy food was generally prepared at home from fresh raw ingredients. Perhaps there was a small veggie garden in the back yard. There was plenty of time for shopping and cooking, and people didn't have to somehow squeeze these activities between the long commute back home from the second job and sleep time, while balancing an infant on their knees.

Thankfully we progressed out of those dark times and we are empowered today to enjoy the bounty of rice, factory farmed meat, salt and sugar slapped together by strangers on minimum wage.

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

#188

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

crazy_horse wrote: post #128

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

Claims like this about UBI are simply unknown. You can't say it with any certainty, not even close. To begin to have UBI you'd have to increase taxes substantially, and you'd have to prove that doing that would actually lead to better results for businesses and the people.

You don't have to pay for UBI. You can just print more money. There are many things in between. Getting rid of reserve requirements and zero interest rates loans vs UBI can be viewed as points in a larger continuous space.

We know there are aggregate demand issues, and we now know that simply issuing more credit "the normal way" seems to cause asset bubbles before boosting demand for labor, so we should be open to trying other things even if we don't know exactly what will happen.

Or read Kaleki in 1943 https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf, who predicted all of this (UBI resistance, direct gov investment resistance, The keynesian collapse in the 1970s, trying to boost employment by boosting private investment alone not working....). Incredible and saddening.

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

#189

Post by rjsw » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #45

rebuilder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not my experience. Watching Starbucks and my other local coffee places implement app/cashier less ordering it seems like more customers and more purchases. Ordering on my phone while I’m the way is easier than talking with a human. And easier to add stuff on. I’ve never considered buying an espresso machine and bypassing my local coffee place. Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless. The cashier is t…

> Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless.

Seems to work fine for McDonald's.

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

#190

Post by kennywinker » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #114

kennywinker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies of states that extended the unemployment benefits vs ones that didn’t seem to show that the benefits accounted for a fairly small portion of the difference in employment. https://www.wxxinews.org/post/what-unemployment-insurance-te...

From skimming the study, it looks like the study only looks at the employment rate change in 5-6 weeks after benefits were dropped? That seems like way too short of a period to draw any conclusions. I suspect many had savings built up, and that they expected the benefits to come back, therefore they didn't immediately go out looking for a job.

Good thing the researcher is continuing to track this:

https://arindube.com/2021/08/20/early-withdrawal-of-pandemic...

Per his findings, at very best the early end to ui lead to 160,000 jobs in june+july this year (6% over states that retained ui). And that’s without adding any of the complicating factors like how most of those jobs may have just been taken from new entrants to the job market. I don’t think that’s enough to explain the overall ”labour shortage” trend.