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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

#411

Post by matchagaucho »

kevinventullo wrote: post #343
matchagaucho wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that $50k per year include the equity they are presumably building with that line of credit?

There's no equity in the LOC. The bank is first in line to reclaim that in the event of a chapter event.

The equity is almost always in the real estate. McDonalds basically just keeps the cash flowing while the land increases in value.

Small restaurant owners are more likely to rent.

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

#412

Post by rualca »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #342
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…

Small businesses have notoriously high rates of failure, restaurants seem like a huge risk with pretty modest possible reward. My guess is you'd be more likely to get rich being a pro athlete than as a restaurant owner. Yet they get treated like evil "fat cats" by a certain section of the intelligentsia. Many of whom simultaneously believe global mega corporations who profit from wars and dictatorships, avoid paying…

> Small businesses have notoriously high rates of failure (...) Yet they get treated like evil "fat cats" (...)

A small business can still be exploiting workers with abusive labour and business practices.

If your business model relies on working your employees to death while paying close to nothing then, regardless it's a golden goose or a money pit, then you have no right to complain that you're being held accountable for exploiting and abusing workers. Moreso, you have absolutely no right to complain that the job market rejects your exploitation.

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

#413

Post by rualca »

smsm42 wrote: post #313
karmajunkie wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> If it worked this way, why not have a $1000 pizza?

This blend of slippery slope argument is all fine and dandy, but the key point of this discussion is that there are operational expenses and revenue and if your business plan depends on a never-ending inflow of cheap labor from people willing to work for below-poverty wages to drive down your operational expense then not only is your business model completely unrealistic but you also have to take a step back and seriously considering your net contribution to society.

I mean, think about it: why is a 1000$ pizza supposed to be a ridiculous idea but 8$/hour to make said pizza is not shocking? Is it reasonable to assume that the person making the pizza should be forced to work about 3 hours making pizzas before he could afford one of his own?

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

#414

Post by rualca »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #387
France_is_bacon wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But if I see that they have 10 restaurants and make $750,000 per year, well, f the f out of them. But, business owenrs, show me your financials. You don't want to? Fine. Do it yourself. But I'm not going to work for $18,000 with zero benefits, while you're making $750,000. You say your contributions is worth more? Good. Do it yourself. I, and everyone else, don't accept that wage anymore, so do it yourself and go o…

> How did the owner get 10 restaurants? They likely started with one and carefully scaled up over time as they could afford to, each time taking on risk that they fail and wind up with less than what they started despite all the effort.

I don't know what point you tried to make, but it's completely irrelevant if the business owner scaled things very carefully, blew all his YouTube money on restaurants all at once, or inherited his family business. How the business came to be is totally irrelevant.

The only relevant point is how employees are treated, and if it is fair or not. If not, and this is the key point, why should anyone continue working for a business that abuses and exploits them?

Are they paid fairly or a slave wage? Can employees live on their paycheck or do they need food stamps to get by? And are employees expected to endure hardship just to finance their bosses' careful or reckless expansion strategy?

What we're seeing is people answering those questions with a resounding "no". There are far better things in life than work yourself to death to feed a "very carefully scaled business" that earns the owner a small fortune.

People exist for reasons other than validate someone else's business model, and there is more to life than working shifts for peanuts at a "carefully scaled business".

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

#415

Post by rualca »

smsm42 wrote: post #266
karmajunkie wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a ridiculously disingenuous argument. it doesn’t take a $50 taco to pay a living wage, no matter what the size of the business is.

"living wage" is an emotional political term - there's no objective definition of it and instead of appealing to rational argument it appeals to irrational notion that somehow you can live on $20/hr but would die if you received $19/hr, and so it's somehow a moral imperative to pay $20/hr (and in a year it turns out it's already $25 that is a moral imperative because somehow, out of nowhere, prices have risen!). I'm…

> "living wage" is an emotional political term (...)

It really isn't. Either your wage is enough to allow you to cover the cost of living, or it doesn't.

By definition, any job which depends on supplemental income such as tipping to allow a worker to make ends meet is quite obviously not a living wage.

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

#416

Post by rualca »

tluyben2 wrote: post #336
karmajunkie wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> Upping anything on the menu $1 would've killed the business dead (...)

You could have a point if you didn't picked an example from an industry where you count on customers to expense additional charges to subsidize employees' wages in the form of tipping.

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

#417

Post by jpindar »

tlogan wrote: post #166

I believe majority of businesses are just waiting for extended unemployment benefits to end and eviction moratorium to be lifted. I think that unemployment benefits ends today. The eviction moratorium ends in Oct. So we will see… if they still cannot hire they will try to increase wages + increase prices.

The eviction moratorium ended already in most of the country, and Covid-based unemployment benefits ended already in some states.

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

#418

Post by throwawaylinux »

rualca wrote: post #412
throwawaylinux wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small businesses have notoriously high rates of failure, restaurants seem like a huge risk with pretty modest possible reward. My guess is you'd be more likely to get rich being a pro athlete than as a restaurant owner. Yet they get treated like evil "fat cats" by a certain section of the intelligentsia. Many of whom simultaneously believe global mega corporations who profit from wars and dictatorships, avoid paying…

> Small businesses have notoriously high rates of failure (...) Yet they get treated like evil "fat cats" (...) A small business can still be exploiting workers with abusive labour and business practices. If your business model relies on working your employees to death while paying close to nothing then, regardless it's a golden goose or a money pit, then you have no right to complain that you're being held accountab…

I didn't imply it couldn't.

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

#419

Post by n8cpdx »

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…

Your comment betrays a lack of imagination when considering what a coffee robot entails.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w

As far as humanity is concerned, perhaps it is uniquely human to bitch about low paid service jobs (even when they aren't all that low pay) while also bitching about those jobs no longer being necessary. If the labor I interacted with regularly took their jobs seriously and had good customer service skills, I wouldn't be so quick to cut them out of the picture. Unfortunately my experience is that at least in the US, the culture of work varies wildly by region, and most of them aren't all that good for the consumer.

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

#420

Post by [deleted] »

luckylion wrote: post #157
jzb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the crux of it in a lot of cases. People have come to view a certain class of work as "not worth" paying a living wage. What's worse, the jobs they view as "not worth" a living wage are the ones that do the work we need (or at least really really want) done. If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs...…

> If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs... everything would suck real quickly. I think you're mixing jobs together that really aren't of similar importance. If all the restaurants shut down, nothing much happens. People buy food at the super market for lunch and dinner. If all the landscaping crews stop w…

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