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

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

#331

Post by desmosxxx »

France_is_bacon wrote: post #309
bsagdiyev wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k total. That’s his salary. They make maybe $40k before tax on a good year, over the two of them, him and his wife who works as a preschool teacher. They’re both almost at retirement age at this point and are going to work until they die.

Then that dude should legit go out of business and get a job as a janitor for $16,000 per year.

exactly. we should strive to replace all businesses with chains and large corporations. /s

heck maybe by then they can just automate away the jobs too

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

#332

Post by desmosxxx »

France_is_bacon wrote: post #308
smsm42 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting it as he has an infinite money supply and just of pure stupidity and greed doesn't want to pay $20 or $50 per hour. Maybe his supply is not unlimited, and maybe nobody would buy a taco for $50 and he knows it, and he made the calculation and decided there's no way to pay all his costs, charge the price that people would be willing to pay, and make a profit. Now, if you know how to do it, there's a b…

Depends on how you look at it. If the owner has 10 restuarants, and is making $750,000 per year, let's say, then he or she does have an unlimited amount of money, compared to the workers, especially if the workers are making the federal minimum wage of $7.25. If they have a small mom and pop company that cannot pay workers at least $50,000, then they need to go out of business. Then, as more and more shops go out of…

> If they have a small mom and pop company that cannot pay workers at least $50,000, then they need to go out of business

why? if people choose to work there it's consensual, if they don't then sure but they don't need to. and what's wealth inequality look like when we're left with corporations and chains owning everything? when small mom & pops can't compete or even get off the ground.

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

#333

Post by Ekaros »

dudul wrote: post #94
tayo42 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States really needs to kill tipping culture off

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…

Why shouldn't all workers and corporations report all income and pay taxes on them?

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

#334

Post by desmosxxx »

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #192
listless wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

and a lot don't. this is all captured by simple supply/demand curves

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

#335

Post by lm28469 »

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…

I'd stay at home if going to a restaurant was like you just described it. Also, you, and many people, seem to forget that the role of the economy is to provide for the people, not the other way. If you automate everything without providing viable solutions you're just pushing people to shitier jobs over and over.

If going to a coffee shop meant going to some sort of self service machine, pushing a few button and getting a machine made Nespresso pod coffee I'd just stay at home and save the money....

What's the end goal of all this ? Automate everything, skip all human interactions, destroy every small restaurants/coffee shops ?

This "automate everything" attitude is so weird, almost like some people want to dehumanise humanity. You know what would be the absolute automation, providing the best experience for everyone, for the least amount of energy spent ? Being in a coma in some form of pod, fed artificial thoughts and food/oxygen through tubes.

Automation only make sense if it delivers us from work, not if it pushes people into worse positions.

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

#336

Post by tluyben2 »

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.

There are a lot of factors we do not know here: I was an investor in a small restaurant as I wanted to keep it open after the owners quit. Upping anything on the menu $1 would've killed the business dead because all surrounding restaurants where already cheaper, but we had better cooks, however people are frugal or poor or both and they were not that much better to make the difference that much bigger. We still ran at incredibly thin margins: amounts that seems weird to me as an IT guy. It depends: depending on your location (both country and inside that country) it can very well be that you cannot up your prices even a cent or people won't come back. We had that with beer: our neighbour's restaurant upped the price of a bottle of beer with 10cts and suddenly all the regulars came to drink at ours and eat at theirs (cheaper).

A pizza place in the center of a popular city with high ratings probably can up the prices.

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

#337

Post by tluyben2 »

oxnrtr wrote: post #256
smsm42 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting it as he has an infinite money supply and just of pure stupidity and greed doesn't want to pay $20 or $50 per hour. Maybe his supply is not unlimited, and maybe nobody would buy a taco for $50 and he knows it, and he made the calculation and decided there's no way to pay all his costs, charge the price that people would be willing to pay, and make a profit. Now, if you know how to do it, there's a b…

Paying people properly has very little impact on customer prices, see countries who enforce this.

I live(d) only in countries that enforce it and it definitely makes a huge difference in consumer prices. Places that are ran 'by the family' here have their family do all the work for free (usually their kids and the parents running it all); in exchange they get pocket money, a roof over their head and food. But they are very cheap employees. Now compare the food and drink prices to a place with official employees and matching wages. Even at minimum wage (which is the norm here for restaurants and hotels), the difference in consumer price is massive. It is between having a lunch for E5 or E25+.

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

#338

Post by gjhh244 »

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.

Most people spend that time doing a job they hate so they can afford someone else for services to meet basic needs.

Not a good deal IMO.

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

#339

Post by uzakov »

tmmx wrote: post #293
bsagdiyev wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k total. That’s his salary. They make maybe $40k before tax on a good year, over the two of them, him and his wife who works as a preschool teacher. They’re both almost at retirement age at this point and are going to work until they die.

5k is a lot in Kazakhstan. (Just noticed the username)

It is not actually, about $416 per month or 176k tenge (local currency) per month. A cook in Almaty, KZ can make between 170-350k according to the local job board https://almaty.hh.kz/search/vacancy?st=searchVacancy&L_profe...

EDIT:

Not saying its nothing, good money but to call it a lot would be an overstretch imho

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

#340

Post by readflaggedcomm »

Daishiman wrote: post #292
readflaggedcomm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dilemma. There is a state of being between subsistence farming and outsourced meals, and it's characterized by frugality and patience.

It's perfectly possible to have good meals on the go, as evidenced by the fact that Italians, Spaniards, French and Peruvians can get simple lunch fares with high-quality ingredients and affordable prices, and it's not necessarily about home-cooked meals either.

So can I, but I have frugality and patience.
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