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An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

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Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#171

Post by euroderf »

danieltillett wrote: post #140
phkahler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; ma.... That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!

Or pay people less to do the pleasant jobs.

Or if not pleasant, then at least the jobs that people are intrinsically motivated to do.

This is how America treats its teachers. Teachers want to do the job, so skimp on their pay and call it a budgetary victory.

Other countries will choose to value teachers, and pay them well, and generate more competition for positions, and reach a higher general level of qualifications & abilities.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#172

Post by samus »

luckylion wrote: post #134
samus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It provides no incentives to step out of it though. As soon as you start working again, the basics and the modest lifestyle is not covered anymore.

If you work a minijob, you get welfare (housing, utilities, health insurance, cash) + the first 100€ you earn are yours to keep. On the next ~350€ you'll pay 20% for social insurance and get to keep some of it, the rest is deducted from your benefits, so you'll keep 100% of your welfare + 184€. There's no way you're worse off than on benefits if you're working. If you work more, your benefits will be reduced until yo…

So I work, but still get roughly the same as if I didn't work. 200€ per month more doesn't seem to be a great incentive to start working again if it's, let's say, one of the less desirable jobs.

Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#173

Post by nlitened »

my_city wrote: post #109

An experimental program I propose: give the proletariat the means of production.

Most people have a phone and/or a desktop computer, that’s enough for production of many valuable things.

Problem solved, right? Now people don’t have an excuse to not work anymore.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#174

Post by euroderf »

pfisherman wrote: post #29
cocacola1 wrote: post #3

These two paragraphs in particular stuck out to me: > Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job…

> Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.

I thought society was supposed to have learned its lesson during the pandemic, that the "low-end" jobs are often the most critical. But it seems that John Q Public has the memory of a goddamned fruit fly.

So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.

If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#175

Post by euroderf »

unity1001 wrote: post #108
hef19898 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, too expensive as long as there are poor and desperate people that can be abused.

Just a little standardization of things like bathrooms, kitchens would enable robots, leave aside automated bathrooms, kitchens themselves.

The 2000$ robot that cleans bathroom floors, walls, sinks, and toilet bowls will sell like hotcakes.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#176

Post by euroderf »

pjmorris wrote: post #157
blue039 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full employment never works. Famous example is the soviets. Neither can UBI be penciled into an actual economy. UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described. I am never surprised. When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. It's hard to take any of these academic exercises seriously. Especially when they spawn…

> UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described. > When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. Being overeducated, I'll take a shot: 6 million US unemployed x $15/hour x 2000 hours/year x 2 to cover benefits, SSI, Medicare, etc works out to 360 Billion. Which is about 1/4 of the defense department budget. A lot…

Just an aside here, that if that UBI was in exchange for ten or twelve hours a week of mostly-unskilled work from the unemployed on whatever the city or town decides is valuable, it might make a very visible improvement to community life.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#178

Post by samus »

majewsky wrote: post #125
samus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nurse is probably receiving very little of these $49. It's probably an inflated price charged by the hospital that is usually negotiated down to something reasonable by the health insurance provider. Similar to the discussion I had with my product manager recently: she can't expect that consultant to work according to the 100$ per hour that his company charges, because he is likely receiving a lot less.

But that's the point, no? If you double the consultant's salary, you won't have to pay double because most of it is just pure margin.

That assumes that the employer is willing to lose part of their margin and doesn't charge it back to their customers. Maybe not on the current contract, but future ones.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#179

Post by rsj_hn »

j7ake wrote: post #177

“Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs” Maybe make those jobs less poorly paid ?

That's just another way of saying that those jobs should disappear, as usually people aren't willing to pay a lot for those jobs as they don't get that much perceived value from them.

You can look at high skilled workforces like in Sweden, where there just aren't a lot of the entry level jobs you see in the U.S. So there aren't so many people working in landscaping or providing personal services, and people do more things for themselves. It's unusual to hire house cleaners, nannies, etc. If you are painting your house, you are going to have a hard time hiring people to help you, or hiring someone to come by and wash your windows. If there is a factory that requires lots of low skilled work, it doesn't open in Sweden -- only the highly automated factories open there.

So that's fine, it's a high-wage, high skilled economy in which all workers are expected to be productive -- and Swedish workers are highly productive. People are expected to have strong skill levels and a high educational level, so they can provide a lot of value and get paid well (here, we are ignoring the issue of taxes, because it's still a high wage earned by the workers even if they only get half of it after tax).

Which is great, until you admit a large number of immigrants without skills. Now, you can't absorb them into your labor force. Or until you realize you have a lot of structural unemployment and it takes much longer for laid off workers to re-enter the labor force. In the U.S., we absorb migrants easily and have much lower rates of long term unemployment - but then people complain about migrants doing low skilled jobs and some workers being taken advantage of since they don't earn high salaries.

Bottom line, there are trade offs, and while you can't please everyone, you can at least make them aware of the trade offs. All I can think of is that it's good to have both places like Sweden that tend to require high skills and places that have low skill/low pay jobs mixed in with the high pay/high skill jobs, so that low skilled workers can still find employment. The whole world can't work like Sweden, but it's also good that places like Sweden exist.

Re: An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed

#180

Post by unity1001 »

euroderf wrote: post #175
unity1001 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little standardization of things like bathrooms, kitchens would enable robots, leave aside automated bathrooms, kitchens themselves.

The 2000$ robot that cleans bathroom floors, walls, sinks, and toilet bowls will sell like hotcakes.

Actually, yes. Hell yes. If you could perpetually hand over those tasks to a robot, $2000 is a reasonable price for it.
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