Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 427 posts

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

#191

Post by matchagaucho »

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…

That same owner could be paying themselves $25 per hour.

The average small restaurant owner makes ~$50K per year and has very little line of credit. So unfortunately it's a zero-sum game.

Increasing cooks to $20hr means reducing their own comp to $20hr.

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

#192

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

listless wrote: post #137
delusional wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a purely economic argument which if fine, but misses the vital non-economic side-effects. More money could lower the stress of the employees (given they now no longer have to worry about paying their bills) which may lead to higher quality products. Increased wages may attracts better talent or more exploitation conscious consumers. Hell, it may even more the owner more likely to listen to his staff, given th…

The problem is that it IS a purely economic problem. It's just math - supply, demand and competition. Small business in particular is captured by these forces. It cannot increase prices because people will go to the competition. And it has no margin to absorb people's desire to earn enough to live a middle-class life doing a job that you can hire anyone to do. All of that said, what you could reasonably hope would ha…

A lot of people just have habits or preferences for particular shops, regardless of a price premium when prices get raised

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

#193

Post by pengaru »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #168
pengaru wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Automobiles replaced horses, did I miss the memo on something replacing hair growth?

Trimmers replaced scissors for simple cuts. Horses and barns still exist as a luxury, and that could be the fate of fancy cuts too.

There will always be a demand for grooming by experienced third-party groomers.

All we're seeing is a population struggling to accept their dollar is rather suddenly worth much less, there's a significant latency to such things sinking in. It can even be generational, some people never learn.

Case in point: When I bought some land in 2018 I paid the asking price, which I thought was perfectly reasonable vs. FMV. When some neighbors came by and welcomed me to the neighborhood, they asked what I paid. When I told them they were shocked and said I overpayed by a lot. This was in 2018, pre-pandemic prices, and the neighbors were an elderly couple who had once owned multiple properties on the block. Their perception of FMV was completely out of touch with reality, and just months later nearby properties similar to mine were selling for 20-50% more than I had paid, still pre-pandemic. Now that the pandemic has completely shocked everything from increasing demand for rural property accessible to city centers, to printing what, trillions of dollars? My place would sell for over double what I paid in 2018, and my elderly neighbors would still be believing it's worth less USD than I paid in 2018, if they were still alive.

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

#194

Post by notanzaiiswear »

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…

I am not in the Restaurant business, so I don't know how many meals they typically sell, or how much they charge.

Let's say he pays his cooks 30$ more. How long are they open, how many people work in the kitchen? Two people, 12 hours? So that would be 720$ more per day.

How much do they earn per meal? In my country in most restaurants charge around 10$ for a meal. Even assuming no costs for the food resources, that would mean 72 more meals to sell, per day.

To me that sounds like quite a challenge.

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

#195

Post by Ericson2314 »

14 wrote: post #133
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…

I have always hated the idea of UBI in any for it has been presented so far. Money means nothing if the price of everything shoots through the roof. Just yesterday I paid $9.50 for bacon where a year ago it was closer to $5. Let’s not even get started on shrinkflation of items. Back to my point though we don’t need a ubi but a right to food shelter and water. Anyone who has been poor knows something will eat up this…

UBI doesn't linear scale all incomes and wealths, so we shouldn't expect it to linearly scale all prices either.

The flip curse of the curse of high dimensionality is that adjusting interest rates or UBI has so wide and rich a space of possible effects, good or bad. We really need to try these things before jumping to conclusions.

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

#196

Post by notanzaiiswear »

I am so tired of this attitude. If you don't like the conditions of a job, don't take it. But don't accuse the person offering the job of greed or whatever.

A simple example: suppose you are an old person who has trouble keeping their apartment clean as of late. Say you could offer somebody else 5$ to clean your room, because your pension is so low.

By the standards of modern activists, you have now become an evil exploiter of wage slaves.

In reality, you have created a new job. If nobody needs it, fine. If somebody needs it, great.

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

#198

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kodah wrote: post #186
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…

> 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 O…

> Finland proposes paying the unemployed (this differs slightly from unemployment benefits in the US) while Ontario proposes paying anyone below the poverty line.

Neither of these is a UBI. Paying only people who are unemployed is in particular quite the opposite of what you want, because it discourages people from taking a job since they'll lose the money. Moreover, you need more of the middle class to be receiving some of the money (they'll pay some but not all of it back in taxes), because that's what increases consumer demand.

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

#199

Post by notanzaiiswear »

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…

Have you looked at interest rates lately? The times of "extortionate rates" are long gone.

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

#200

Post by jodrellblank »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #74
FredPret wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small biz owners here described here aren’t the Masters-of-the-Universe “owner class” types. They don’t even really own businesses, they own lower management jobs.

Sure. And slave overseers are not plantation owners. We have this bipartisan love affair with small business, and the fact is many of them are unproductive institutions abusing tons of poor immigrants to stay afloat. They also provide ideological cover for the more labor-intensive actual big corps. It's about time the rose-collard glasses came off.

> "rose-collard glasses"

glasses made of red cabbage? :)

(Rose-coloured, looking through them makes everything look rosy (cheerful, promising, pleasant))

Post reply on HN