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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

#241

Post by antisthenes »

matchagaucho wrote: post #191
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.

It could very well be worse than that.

A cultural shift may mean that people collectively decided that they will, for example, spend 8% of their income on eating out rather than 12%. That represents an aggregate decrease in demand and would indicate a negative sum game (something most of HN seems incapable of comprehending)

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

#242

Post by delusional »

zthrowaway wrote: post #132
delusional wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

You did indeed find the point. Think about the "framing" the next time you hear people talk about "entitled free-loaders" refusing to work because they get the government cheese.

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

#243

Post by 88913527 »

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…

Economics is the junction of mathematics and human behavior. I'm not going to travel half a mile to a different taco shop if the closest to me increases burrito prices $1-2 (in an area that reliably has at least 1 taco shop every half mile). In some sense, I'm a captive audience. I'm hungry and I don't want to walk an additional 15 minutes to save a few dollars.

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

#245

Post by anonuser123456 »

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…

Restaurant margins are very thin. The extra 20-50$/hr is literally the owners salary for running the business. Why do you think they will continue to run the business making 0$ ?

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

#246

Post by 88913527 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #48
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…

There are a lot of businesses on the brink. My regular Italian spot went out of business in the depths of the pandemic. They re-capitalized and opened again but with higher prices. Their clientele is upper middle class (i.e. relatively price insensitive). But they still wrote a long letter explaining why prices increased (more benefits, more salary) and asking that people support their increased overhead by becoming…

It's one approach. A bit carrot-and-stick, but what I have seen in restaurants in upper class neighborhoods is chastising changes to public policy. Each menu page has a footnote mentioning there's a X% charge (that isn't the tip) applied to each menu item due to a rise in minimum wage.

Since they re-printed the menus anyways to add the footnote, they could have simply been more transparent and increased each menu item's cost. Most people regularly dining at fancy ocean-view restaurants (which I rarely frequent) can afford the higher cost.

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

#247

Post by boolemancer »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #162
dragonwriter wrote: post #152

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. 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 underserv…

It's definitely a welcome development, but it still costs more than cooking your own meals and cleaning up by a whole lot, so something is amiss. (As I wrote before, I don't mean to say it is all the restaurant's fault , it could be rents are simply too high.)

When you say it costs more to eat out, are you factoring in the cost of your time?

If I spend an hour and a half prepping and cooking dinner, but I managed to buy that ingredients for $10 less than what I would spend at a restaurant, it's still cheaper to eat at the restaurant if I factor in the time I spent.

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

#248

Post by b3morales »

tchaffee wrote: post #214
b3morales wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employees would also be taxed on the "tip" (which would now be included in their base salary) Tips are income already, and are taxed as such. You can get away with not reporting it if it's a few extra bucks from a jar on a counter. But if you're a "tipped employee" (and thus eligible to be paid sub-minimum wage) you report them to your employer, who then reports them to the IRS, and does tax withholding same as for…

That's a naive understanding of what's really happening at most restaurants. Cash tips are almost always significantly under-reported. It's nowhere near as low as "tip jar on the counter" amounts.

Yes, of course there is underreporting; nothing in my comment says otherwise.

I'm not following your point. Since some people cheat on their taxes, they shouldn't be paid wages instead, because then they wouldn't be able to underreport as easily?

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

#249

Post by danaris »

jzb wrote: post #131
dudul wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you ever worked a job that depends on tips? Try serving a table of 20 and working your butt off and then getting no tip from the table because they "don't believe in tipping." The correlation between "great service" and getting a good tip is nowhere near a 1:1. It sucks to go to work and not know whether you're going to come home with enough money to pay your bills this week, because you might get lucky or you m…

> Now it's crept up to 15-20% and spread to a lot of jobs that you didn't think of for tips

...And, importantly, there's no way to actually know this because it's all informal.

I keep hearing that some places are now expecting 25% tips, while others are still repeating the older 15-20% figure. Some transportation workers (cab drivers, hotel courtesy van drivers) expect tips—others, in exactly the same job but a different company, don't expect them or even refuse them.

The informality of it all is one of the biggest reasons why tipping culture needs to die, and be replaced with actually paying workers a fair amount to start with.

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

#250

Post by boolemancer »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #145
luckylion wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't the only options. You can have small street-food vendors. The costs are much lower because there's no waiter etc. But it's more of a functional thing ("get food, go home fed"), not a pleasure thing where you sit around with friends or your partner and talk while someone serves you food.

Yeah that is good. Bums me out that we force them to use gas generators and not have running water mainly to avoid extractive rents, but that can be fixed. Mandating you bring your own container as I swear take-out contributes a huge portion of urban trash would also be a doable improvement.

Making it less convenient (e.g. by requiring customers to have a container on hand) is a great way to have fewer customers.

Why not instead mandate compostable containers?

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