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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

#351

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

88913527 wrote: post #243
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…

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.

My girlfriend will walk 30 minutes to save 50c on bananas. She is financially well now, but grew up without much, so those habits still stick. I would pay 5 dollars more to not move from my couch and get bananas on my doorstep.

The thing is, a lot more people are like my gf than me (I grew up middle-upper class and am 'financially' well upper class for my country).

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

#352

Post by EliRivers »

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…

Speaking purely about food service roles, as I recall, the minimum wage for tipped food services roles in some places is 2.13 USD per hour, made up to actual minimum wage if tipping doesn't reach that level.

Labour costs are, in many cases, really small; the capital and running costs of automation could well be comparable already.

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

#353

Post by shinjitsu »

josephcsible wrote: post #275
88913527 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People on HN tend to be way less price sensitive than average. People living paycheck-to-paycheck would totally walk an extra 0.5 mile to save $2 per meal.

Especially families with children- now we are talking $8+ a meal at a time in life when people are very price sensitive.

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

#354

Post by Dudeman112 »

boolemancer wrote: post #247
Ericson2314 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Just an addendum: if that time would have been spent, say, watching TV (and you are a healthy adult that doesn't have any psychological or physiological benefit from watching TV) then the time cost is possibly negligible.

Full time salaried workers can't easily convert additional time into money.

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

#355

Post by shinjitsu »

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.

wow, this site really does skew toward coastal cities in the US doesn't it? $50k a year is a high end white collar salary enough to buy a (often significantly) better than median home on a single salary and enough to be considered in the upper 25% income for most of the places I have lived.

I think one of the biggest problems in politics in the US is that we have such a diversity of experience and needs in this country and most politicians (and perhaps voters) think that the solutions that are best for their local area are actually good for the whole country - when in most cases the experience across millions of people and thousands of miles from rural to dense urban is so different that almost no nation wide solution is very good.

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

#356

Post by Ericson2314 »

imtringued wrote: post #318
Ericson2314 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prof…

It's selfish, but the funny thing is it probably isn't corruption by western definitions!

If you own a business and extract as much profits as possible --- not corruption. If you own a business and install your kid as middle manager to extract more money to your family -- corruption!

There's a quip that corruption is a term to penalize regions with larger extended families and kinship groups --- because the most galling corruption to the west is helping that 3rd cousin or clan member or whatever. But that is a real cop-out when in the west few know their 3rd cousin or are in a clan --- easy avoid nepotism when you don't know of the person!

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

#357

Post by ironmagma »

lm28469 wrote: post #335
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 gett…

The economy doesn’t exist to serve “the people” (referring to a specific class), it exists to serve “people.” That number of people being served can very well grow or shrink over time. The existence of automation doesn’t guarantee it is strictly decreasing; consider the automobile industry for example, which created millions of jobs.

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

#358

Post by bobbytit »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #253
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call a "five-alarm fire" is people getting nice large raises.

I went to get lunch with my brother. We had to go to four restaurants before we found one with an open dining room. I went to the grocery store a couple of days ago. They one register and a bank of self-checkout open at 5 PM. The lines were 20 carts deep. My daughters school is doing rotating classroom closings, not because of covid but because they can’t hire teachers. My Amazon shipments have ballooned from 1-2 to…

>My Amazon shipments have ballooned from 1-2 to 5 days.

The horror

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

#359

Post by edgedetector »

josephcsible wrote: post #275
88913527 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People on HN tend to be way less price sensitive than average. People living paycheck-to-paycheck would totally walk an extra 0.5 mile to save $2 per meal.

Yeah, I regularly do this.

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

#360

Post by angelzen »

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.

> “To sum up, I may say that if the taste of our people [in France] for possessing land, and our habit of cultivation on a small scale, have singularly facilitated our progress towards equality, it is probable that the excess of opposing causes will drive the English in the same direction”

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1861, cited in https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_12_02_01_choi.pdf

That the French (still) have access to good meals (not sure what you have in mind specifically) might have quite a bit to do with a history of small scale farming. That and a climate conducive to small scale farming. It remains to be seen how long this will last. The forces of globalization are rapidly eroding local culture everywhere around the world.

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