A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#151

Post by ruined » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

throwaway199129 wrote: post #75

atoav wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, divide and conquer is the prerequisite to allow the non-working-class to exploit actual labor. I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work. If you are unable (or worse: unwilling ) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society th…

This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage since I either lived with my parents or with roommates (admittedly funded by a combination of work and student loans). During that phase of my life, I didn't require a living wage. I just needed some extra money, and so I was willing to accept lower paying jobs that…

so work part time

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#152

Post by atoav » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #143

atoav wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, divide and conquer is the prerequisite to allow the non-working-class to exploit actual labor. I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work. If you are unable (or worse: unwilling ) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society th…

So the solution is to throw many of the people who currently make $10/hour out of a job and onto welfare? That's what you're proposing. If we raised the minimum wage to $20/hour, some businesses would raise their wages, and some will fire those workers. And once on welfare it is extremely hard to get off welfare because of claw-backs and because once you have a gap in your resume it's really hard to get a full time $…

No that is not what I am proposing. I have lived through the introduction of minimum wage in 2015 in Germany. Maybe you lived through more such transitions, but I did not observe what you (maliciously?) claimed to be for.

Sure the US is always different (and solution working elsewhere can't possibly be applied to it), but granted: a UBI might be a better choice ultimately. But the question is if that is really within the set of realistic choices. A UBI is a hard sell even in comparably "socialist" countries in Europe. In the US it would be dead on arrival. Consider that maybe this is the idea.

You know, a bit like what the Hyperloop did for intercontinental trains, proposed by a guy who wanted to sell more cars.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#153

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:29 PM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #105

Gormo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Most of those people are self-employed, so you are usually already paying 100% of the compensation directly to them in the first place. Tipping is for when someone is doing work directly for you, but as an employee of another party.

Why is there a difference between somebody carrying a plate from the kitchen to my table and somebody preparing that plate just for me?

[deleted]

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#154

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #127

liotier wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?

if you ask professional wait staff in the US you'll find that tips are more popular than set wages. They wind up making more from tips than they would via salary. Occasionally you'll read about a restaurant trying to eliminate tips and they lose good servers to their competition. Was just reading about this somewhere else.

Seems like the problem here would be that employers tried to pay too little.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#155

Post by matthewaveryusa » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

brainwad wrote: post #49

Y-bar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little. Edit: Check out https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for examples based on real-world data.

What standard of housing, food, etc? The linked MIT project uses a bunch of median- or near-median costs; it's obviously not reasonable to call 40th-percentile housing costs the basic standard of living, when 40% of the population in fact manage to get by paying less. There are similar objections for other components of their index, such as transportation costs and "civic participation", which appear to take median e…

This is pretty spot-on for where I live (suffolk MA.) Note that there's no saving category, so the 190k/year with 3 kids dual income is to get by comfortably but never retire.

Food is based off https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan...

Housing 40th percentile is a pretty good metric for living wage. What would your metric be, 20th percentile, 10th percentile, something else?

Transportation is the true cost of mobility, including insurance, gas, motor oil, basic maintenance of vehicle.

Civic Engagement category isn't what you think it is and the methodology spells it out:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1400 (Entertainment: fees and admissions; Audio and visual equipment and services; Pets; Toys, hobbies, and playground equipment; Entertainment: other supplies, equip., & services; Reading; and Education)

I mean sure, cross that category out completely, but humans can't live on bread alone and this is exactly what this is measuring: living wage, not depression wage.

You can argue about whether median is a good measure, but the fact that this living wage allocates 0 dollars towards retirement and holidays, for me, is still not truly living wage. Any adjustment to the categories you take umbrage to is washed out by a basic savings plan for retirement.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#156

Post by FredPret » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

darby_nine wrote: post #73

FredPret wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite disappointed that you're willing to lift your ideas wholesale from a French communist [0] unless of course by "Capital" you mean "Das Kapital" in which case it's the original, German one [1]. Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and read up on the theory of people who disagree with you. Specifically: > The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless witho…

> Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized. Not if the benefits of this marginal productivity increase are hoarded by a small subset of society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... You don't need to listen to communists to figure this out—you can just read Schumpeter.

I agree there's an issue with wages vs productivity. However:

- The decoupling is not equal for all the countries examined. For the US, wages as a fraction of GDP has been roughly steady, declining from 49% in 1942 to 43% today [0]

- We're going through major demographic changes - we have two huge cohorts in the boomers and the millennials entering different life stages in huge numbers. We're also living much longer. This will mess with asset prices and wages in weird ways. Lots of old people holding on to their assets much longer than before, and lots more young people entering the workforce all at once.

- Some of the above issues are getting straightened out. Millennials were behind in wealth creation for a very long time, but for the first time are ahead and are now on our way to become the richest generation in history. [1]

- Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded. Scrooge McDuck may have a hoard of gold coins, but real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.

A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.

As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa

[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#157

Post by bluedino » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

A day in the life of a dishwasher in NYC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyHPuYpetbg

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#158

Post by bluGill » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #127

liotier wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?

if you ask professional wait staff in the US you'll find that tips are more popular than set wages. They wind up making more from tips than they would via salary. Occasionally you'll read about a restaurant trying to eliminate tips and they lose good servers to their competition. Was just reading about this somewhere else.

Good wait staff make more. Bad it isn't clear. Do you give a bad tip for bad service - you should

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#159

Post by luqtas » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #21

tennisflyi wrote: post #6

The "heart," but the only mention of pay is $10/hour, and advancement leads to more long nights as a chef in the volatile restaurant industry? Such respect Edit: also, the lip service of the title "porter" - the electric company will surely except that as payment

Honest question, what should they be paid? Its purely manual labor, there is not much if anything to innovate or be creative. The output is fairly binary, clean or not clean. I am all for fair wages but how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself…

i dunno where this idea of manual labor being treated as something so simple it shouldn't deserve a decent pay... i worked as a dishy also as a bicycle courier & i bet i'm ballparks more efficient than anyone who never had to these jobs

we have a heck of a hard time emulating or creating navigational system for robots, specially if we don't train them million of times for extremely simple tasks like grabbing boxes in a controlled enviroment. let not mention energy usage these things need; point is: maybe reaching a plato of being a dishy is easier than coding/programming C for embedded systems, but we can't deny that a lot of people in tech don't learn or get into different fields projects all the time, so there isn't a "keep learning/tinkering hard all the time" type of thing...

is it easier to build a website for a client with an open-source framework that you used for the 100th time or being at a almost 40 °C kitchen washing dishes in a speed way faster than one would do @ their houses?

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#160

Post by getpost » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

I had a summer job as a dishwasher, which paid minimum wage. I was required to join the union, so after union dues, I was paid less than the minimum wage! Being a union member provided no benefits whatsoever for temporary employees such as myself.

This reminds me, the artist Gregory Blackstock retired with a union pension at 55 after 25 years' service as a dishwasher[0]. His art provided another source of income, but apparently he was swindled out of his estate.

[0] https://www.historylink.org/File/22894