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

#311

Post by France_is_bacon » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #220

gpsx wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is market forces at work. There is not necessarily someone to blame, generally speaking. I expect we'll see prices going up, wages going up and margins going down. I think that is good since I think we have gone too far in the other direction. What frustrates me about economics (with my one intro class level experience) is that they could only talk about equilibrium. The dynamics of things changing like this is…

Equilibrium is a theoretical construct. Life is dynamic, there's never anything fixed, there's always disruption and change. The theory needs artificial constructs to be workable - and some models get close enough to reality to be usable and give useful predictions and tools - but the life would always be more complex.

That is correct. Which is why people are refusing to go back to work. The wealthy get wealthier and those at the bottom are getting left behind, with no insurance, hugely expensive housing prices. The dynamics are saying "F you". Perfectly realistic and playing out right now.

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

#312

Post by totony » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #215

docflabby wrote: post #124

The real problem is inflation and excessive rent seeking. Rents are currently at the highest level on record in the US. Hard to get someone to take a job that won't even pay the rent. The wealth trickle up has changed into a torrent since covid, something is going to break.

What are you saying? That someone would rather earn $0 to pay their rent than earn $15/hr to pay their rent?

It really does not matter if neither can afford the rent

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

#313

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:51 AM UTC

karmajunkie wrote: post #227

bsagdiyev wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christ, people here and their taller than standard horses. My girlfriends dad owns a pizza place and walked away with $5k last year, after paying rent, supply and wages. Where do they magically pull this money from? They aren’t evil banker types with bags marked “$$$” full of money like people here seem to think and it is disgusting they’re considered cheap instead of just “people will absolutely not pay the increase…

it’s not magic. there are inputs and outputs. raise prices by a buck a pizza. people will absolutely pay it. problem solved.

If it worked this way, why not have a $1000 pizza? Raise it a thousand times and... Obviously, it doesn't - at some point, raising it a dollar will start losing customers, it's obvious. Now, where is that point? Do you know? Does business owner know? Who would be the better expert in determining this point - they guy who runs a pizza place or a random guy on the internet whose experience is more like ordering pizza online?

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

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Post by Ballas » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 6:02 AM UTC

tssva wrote: post #159

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.

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.

I'd easily pay $50 for the convenience of having it done at home - easily worth it just for the time saved.

If your girlfriend can do it for you, that's worth a lot more than the money saved. So in my view once you have established that your girlfriend can do it, that is the better choice regardless of price.

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

#315

Post by notanzaiiswear » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

nomaxx117 wrote: post #277

notanzaiiswear wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously for that kind of person it would be a problem if nobody wants to work for that wage. He has to live with his unclean apartment. In any case, here we have an article whining about unfair employers. Are there really that many articles whining about lazy workers?

I know a lot of small business owners who do nothing but whine about this in my hometown. However, I think that their issue really is not offering wages as high as the competition. An old friend of mine is doing pretty well with his recently established restaurant, as he has one of the only dinners at full staff in the area. He is paying about $25 per hour, and it seems to be working quite well, as he not only has a…

It will work for some businesses, but not for others. I'd wager a guess that your friend's restaurant is also not a cheap option for dinner. Which is fine, but if only more expensive restaurants survive, it also means poorer people will have to cook at home more.

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

#316

Post by notanzaiiswear » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 7:24 AM UTC

aynyc wrote: post #270

notanzaiiswear wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously for that kind of person it would be a problem if nobody wants to work for that wage. He has to live with his unclean apartment. In any case, here we have an article whining about unfair employers. Are there really that many articles whining about lazy workers?

The entire foxnews channel is bitching about lazy people.

I don't have US TV. It sounds rather funny to me, though. The bitching about lazy people won't change anything. In contrast, bitching about greedy businesses may lead to harmful legislation.

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

#317

Post by imtringued » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #201

angelzen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Healthy food was generally prepared at home from fresh raw ingredients. Perhaps there was a small veggie garden in the back yard. Yup, that's called a subsistence economy. It's a very good thing that we can spend our time doing something better than back-breaking agricultural work and general housekeeping. That's what progress is all about.

I cannot feed myself off a probability that a veggie garden exists. It clearly is not a "subsistence economy" whatever that even means.

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

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Post by imtringued » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #188

crazy_horse wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

"It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire; and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders."

That is is just plain corruption. Leaders (whether in governments or businesses) would rather have power for themselves than well-being for the country. Honestly, I had a hunch that developed nations didn't have less corruption, rather, the impact of corruption has been softened. Each individual industry leader might be corrupt but given enough competing industries their power diminishes. This is why government corruption is primarily associated with oil countries (or other resources) because controlling that single industry is the same as controlling the entire country.

You can clearly see it in Germany as well. Merkel and her party have close connections with specific industries commonly associated with Germany, the most prominent examples are car manufacturing because it is an export industry and the coal industry because Germany is resource poor (coal is all we have). If you work at VW CDU is the party you vote for...

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

#319

Post by imtringued » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

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.

The problem is that they do not want to be financially on the hook. They keep the good years and spread the costs of the bad years onto their employees.

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

#320

Post by imtringued » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 8:38 AM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #93

angelzen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

It's actually quite interesting. Keynes figured out that government stimulus works but it only solves the money problem. When you solve the money problem people simply flee into a different asset that maintains its value. That asset is land. So the business cycle also results in a real estate cycle. "Solving" the dot com bubble encouraged land speculation and ultimately ended in 2008.

The problem isn't the stimulus although there are alternative proposals to reduce the amount of government intervention. Land is simply unique in the fact that it is already there and private land ownership is merely the right to exclude people from the land. There simply isn't any good argument for why money earned off the land itself should go to a private individual. It should go to the government because it is protecting the land with its army and building infrastructure to maintain its value.