Earlier quoted context omitted.
why?
Why would you hire a teenager for a relatively large amount of money?
Are they not producing the same amount of work as anyone else?
Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
351–360 of 582 posts
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I wonder what the USA would look like if minimum wage was defined as; two people being able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment within a 1 hour drive without traffic. A lot of stuff would be automated or simply not exist. I don't see how high minimum wage can "work" to solve social issues if companies can choose between not hiring people and paying a high minimum wage.
If automation was free it'd be here already. Automation creates high skilled jobs to manage the automation - it can be a significant labour save but the way healthy economies work that freed labour is going to find some other service to offer.
So how does taking low-wage jobs away affect or inprove "finding some other service to offer", or conversely, how is the presence of low-wage jobs preventing people from finding these services?
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
A universal basic income would have some advantages over a minimum wage. Minimum wage interferes with supply and demand in the labor market, which is why some economists dislike it. UBI moves the supply curve to a different place, but it allows those principles to function.
UBI won’t do anything I’m afraid, that experiment already failed during the pandemic and now we have massive inflation across all assets.
The covid checks weren't UBI, only people under a specific income range were eligible. Also keeping businesses afloat solved stagnation (worst) at the cost of inflation (bad, but not the worst).
I'm critical of UBI but using a global pandemic with millions of deaths as an example isn't what UBI is.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#354Hopefully this is the moment we realize that capitalism is really not serving us in any meaningful way. As long as we have enough people brave enough to quit and take to the streets the working class might have a fighting chance at ending their exploitation.
This isn't capitalism's fault, it's just human nature. Every economic system will have scumbags who try to exploit other people for personal gain.
Yes, and therefore governments and economics need to account for this to keep society running.
That's what governing IS.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Then the rents of those 1BR apartments would rise to capture that new minimum wage. This is commonly expressed as a consequence of raising the minimum wage, but in the most nuanced discussions of inflation that I've been exposed to, people are mindful of the fact that inflation ripples out into different segments of the economy in different ways. I think the most plausible outcome is that certain segments of the eco…
That's a real phenomena, of inflation rippling outwards and occasionally hitting buffers that cannot pass the price increase on and hence take the hit of inflation disproportionately. Unfortunately it rarely works the way any progressive would want it to. The "buffers" are firms in competitive markets - basically anyone who can't raise prices because there are dozens of other competitors doing the same thing and one…
I think the phenomenon you're talking about at the end of your comment is something that happens in spite of the beneficial effect of increased wages, rather than something that would count as evidence that people don't benefit from increased wages. Otherwise it would stand to reason that cutting wages would turn the equation inside out, so that buying power goes up with lower wages and economic gains go increasingly to the bottom of the more you lower wages. I don't think that it swings one way or the other, which is to say I don't think that they're so determinative of each other. Those two things just seem too remote from each other to be regarded as in immediate causal connection.
There are other contributing variables exerting their influence at the same time: investing, and lending, and spending, and taxing and policy choices are significant inputs that all happen in parallel with wage increases in particular policy and economic climates that have different outcomes from country to country.
It also seems to fly in the face of reason to suppose that efficient markets don't see market-wide increases in prices. Firms don't just compete against each other but against the existential question of solvency, and if we're really talking about competitive markets, then these pressures are experienced collectively.
So neither the evidence of the stock markets nor the theory about competitive markets never increasing their prices seem to do the work that they would need to do, to suggest that people seeing wage increases are not benefiting from them.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know the popular story is that: 1. pay workers extra (ie. above the market rate) 2. workers are richer now 3. they use that money to buy the stuff you make 4. ??? 5. profit! Has this actually been studied empirically? If you had to choose between paying your workers $1000 more and pocketing it, surely the latter option is the better one? Sure, they might use some of that money to buy your product, but they're not g…
Does it even need to be studied that heavily? What is India and China trying to do? They have massive billion people populations that are poor. Lift them into a lower middle class, voila, you have unmatched consuming class. We’re going to lose this fight to these countries because our country cannot for a second think outside of squeezing the living hell out of a stagnantly growing 350 million person population. That…
>Does it even need to be studied that heavily? What is India and China trying to do?
And how did they achieve it? By paying workers luxurious wages? The whole reason they're successful was that they industrialized and offered labor cheaper than the west, and the west outsourced labor to them. "Henry Ford, capitalist extraordinaire, famously paid his workers $5 a day, double the average automaker's wage at the time" has nothing to do with that's happening there.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you run a business, you choose a location. If the landlord does something that causes a noxious smell, it's on you to fix it. We don't say, "Well, that's the landlord's fault." Your business, your leasing arrangements. When you run a business, you choose employees. If an employee does something noxious, it's on you to fix it. We don't say, "Well, that's the employee's fault." Your business, your employee hiring,…
This is a stretch. The corporate office may or may not have the contractual ability to intervene; they can't just cancel franchisees because they feel like it. More importantly, it's up to journalists and even randos on HN to avoid trying to confuse the relationships involved. If some McD's manager said something stupid and offensive, we can't indict the whole chain. Individual humans have agency.
Probably depends on the franchise. I know the one I worked for in high school seemed unusually obsessed with the notion that a secret shopper from corporate would catch us on a bad day and they never went into what the consequences of such a thing were.
As some franchises also involve loans, if they don't like how you're running your store they can call in your loans. I'm not saying you have to close, but unless you know where a sunken treasure is, good luck avoiding bankruptcy.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the only way to guarantee that people have less than an hour of commute to their job is to create extremely dense population center which means extremely small living spaces which are almost universally hated. And most jobs cannot be done remotely, so to guarantee that each individual has space, he must accept to be some distance ways from the hub where people concentrate to perform their daily tasks. Think o…
> Because the only way to guarantee that people have less than an hour of commute to their job is to create extremely dense population center the other alternative is work from home no? EDIT: in the context of applebees, i suppose there isnt an alternative hmmmm....
The vast majority of jobs cannot be done remotely. The HN crowd is heavily skewed toward programming / engineering jobs that can sometimes be done remotely. But overall, most jobs do require a physical presence.
Think "people care" (and all the ramifications or that: babies, children, sick, elders + everything around that). All people working in stores (unless we exclusively want online shops). Transportation of goods. Building, sanitation, construction. Any job that requires specialised equipment (like factories), ... .
The whole idea that we can transition to a society where people don't have to move to get to work is an illusion. COVID gave us a false glimpse because most activities were closed or significantly reduced, so it felt like people didn't need to get to work anymore but that's just because they simply did not work. And it was not sustainable on the long run. We made the - right IMHO - choice to subsidise their income, wether directly via stimulas checks, or indirectly by helping their employers, but all that was based on the bet/assumption that we would be able to resume "normal society" and we would be able repay the debt we incurred over the next years.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original suggestion was to tie the minimum wage to housing costs, so I guess this should cancel out the up-bidding.
At the end of the day there are less houses than people, so somebody's going to be priced out of a house. However, the law stipulates that wages must be raised so that everyone can afford a house. Immovable object, meet unstoppable force.
I think it is more likely that some types of industry would become non-viable in really high property value areas (of course this is already the case). This might reduce demand for housing in an area (who's going to live in a town without a decent coffee shop?), so I guess some equilibrium would eventually be established.
Re: Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inflation, probably followed by corruption. Minimum wage would rise to the point where a person could afford a 1BR apartment within a 1 hour drive without traffic. Then the rents of those 1BR apartments would rise to capture that new minimum wage. Then minimum wage would rise to afford the new rent, and so on. Eventually someone's going to say "Hey, I own an apartment block downtown, I'm supposed to rent it out to th…
Zoning. You link the "zones which employ people" and "zones which house people" to balance so you don't have significantly more jobs than homes. Next you zone for type of housing, where you only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built, and require those to be above certain size thresholds so that a variety of life situations can actually live in your city. You don't need to "incen…
The problem with this sort of balancing act is that most zoning isn't centrally planned enough that you can actually balance this. Most of the time you are planning one small section of a larger urban/suburban complex, not the entire country. So you have to consider inflows and outflows of both commercial and residential demand.
If more people want to live in your city than you currently have housing for, then it's not simply a matter of "balancing zones" anymore. Your plans no longer match reality, and one of four things can happen:
- Your zoning remains static and housing prices rise according to demand, pricing people out of the market
- You hope businesses leave so that you can convert some of the commercial space to residential
- You decide to allocate existing zones on some criteria other than willing price paid
- You zone for higher density and allow existing homeowners to make money by making room
The first option is gentrification. The do-nothing option. The one that we're trying to avoid because we find it distasteful. If we don't fit more people in the city then it becomes a playground for bored rich people as the market will kick everyone else out.
The second option usually doesn't happen - residential demand drives commercial demand because most businesses want to be close to people. If businesses are leaving, that usually means that people are leaving, too. This also means that balancing zones isn't really a thing you need to actually do. The problem isn't that the space is being used inefficiently; the problem is that there isn't enough space to go around.
The third option is rationing. This takes many forms, and is politically popular with basically everyone. But it doesn't actually solve the problem: there are still more people who want to live in your city than houses to put them in. You're just choosing a different way to allocate those houses, and invariably it tends to be a metric that's easier to corrupt, because suppliers now have an incentive to charge rich people more to bypass the system.
The fourth option will actually fix the problem; and in fact is the only way to fix the problem. But it's also the easiest to politically oppose, because we've set the standard here in America that land is supposed to be divided entirely between large shopping centers and low-density suburbs; and that living in anything else is a symbol of urban poverty. This actually isn't true anymore - the areas worst hit by gentrification are also the ones zoned for high density or mixed use, and this is precisely because of people making it difficult to upzone property.
If we didn't have zoning, or at least had less of it[0], then the market could actually work to incentivize resupply rather than just redevelopment. Then we could talk about social housing or housing subsidies on the demand end, knowing that we have a market that actually responds to supply rather than just pocketing the wealth.
[0] e.g. Tie the planners' hands a bit and just have mixed commercial/residential zones of varying densities, with industrial land use separated out for safety/noise reasons. Japan does this.