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A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

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

#211

Post by roughly »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #89
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.

Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing. Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment. Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids. So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing t…

> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn’t provide those things?

Because renting a room is cheaper than renting an apartment, because ramen for 2 meals a day will cause medical problems that show up later than hunger, because some medicine is better than no medicine, because there’s an entire gradation of misery between “paid a living wage” and dying tomorrow.

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

#212

Post by thruway516 »

vundercind wrote: post #119
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 ?

There’s a history in the US (in, like… the 1930s) of attempting to dismantle tipping culture on the grounds that it sets up a degrading servant/master relationship (you choose whether to tip, and how much) that’s inappropriate for a free people. They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason. [edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.

Every couple of years someone attempts to tackle this but it usually goes nowhere. Just a few years ago it was Danny Meyer (one of the most well known restauranteurs in the country) trying to revive the no-tipping movement by eliminating tips at his restaurants. There was a big todo about it at the time but it seems to have fizzled out as I havent heard anything about it recently. Seems the tipping lobby (aka Big Tipping ie the workers receiving the tips) is too powerful on this one lol.

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

#213

Post by willcipriano »

rtkwe wrote: post #83
imglorp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was 2017 - so an inflation correction might apply. (post title should reflect)

$10/hr was a bad wage in 2017 too unless you were in an exceptionally low COL area.

Would have to be outside the US for that to be a good wage in 2017. That isn't even a good wage internationally now.

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

#214

Post by BrandoElFollito »

getpost wrote: post #160

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…

Is joining a union in your country mandatory? (or can be made mandatory?). I am not talking about peer pressure but legal requirements.

This sounds quite crazy. What if there are 5 unions like we have in France?

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

#215

Post by bumby »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #192
bryanlarsen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $…

> 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. It's not an either / or. If the US were to invest more in education and developing the economy everywhere, there would be more jobs beyond low paid "unskilled" labour. That is, at the moment there's too much demand in low paid jobs, too little in e.g. college or uni level positions…

>It's not an either / or. If the US were to invest more in education and developing the economy everywhere, there would be more jobs beyond low paid "unskilled" labour.

I don't know how far this extends, though. I live in an area where nearly anyone who wants to can get an affordable college education (and, I'd venture to guess, very close to free in most cases). And yet the graduation rate is abysmal. The fact is the higher ed path is a round hole and many people are square pegs. We can't just turn everyone into a highly educated skilled worker. I agree with the other posters that a wealthy country should have a dignity threshold for the members of their society, but I'm come to realize education may not be the main pathway to get there.

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

#216

Post by Dylan16807 »

antisthenes wrote: post #56
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.

> 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. I have seen this meme repeated a lot, e.g. any full time job should automatically provide for a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it. Now the goalposts have moved to provide for…

> a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it.

Those two scenarios are pretty different.

Let's say a stay-at-home mom makes "a kid or two" reasonable. If I look up living wage charts for my state, that would require tripling the minimum wage.

We're nowhere near that level. The "two income" level is a lot lower and we're not even close to that one either.

A single parent with one child would fit right in between those stay-at-home numbers too, so that's not a goalpost move. Single with two children takes enough money that it would require a goalpost move, but single with one child does not.

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

#217

Post by GuB-42 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #72
CalRobert wrote: post #71

My summer as a dishwasher made it clear tipping, already deeply stupid, is wildly unfair even to service workers. A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.

I thought that tipping is mainly to enable the restaurant owner to avoid paying their workers properly.

From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-do-we-tip

> I think that there are five basic motives for tipping. Some people tip to show off. Some people tip to help the server, to supplement their income and make them happy. Some people tip to get future service. And then other people tip to avoid disapproval: You don’t want the server to think badly of you. And some people tip out of a sense of duty.

So, it is complicated. The part about the owner to avoid paying their workers properly is a consequence of the tipping culture, not a cause.

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

#218

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> 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

So you want a dying wage. How can a dying wage exist? Two ways:

1 - someone else is subsidising the business, I.e. parents are paying the rent/mortgage, and food of the teenager

2 - the person is literally slowly dying, living in a caravan or a tent as ‘working homeless’ unable to afford healthcare or racking up debt, and it’s only a matter of time until they literally kick the buckets and cease to function. Or they will become birdedfor the taxpayer, with food stamps and other kinds of aid.

A business needs to pay for its inputs, labour is one of them. The cost of labour is whatever is costs to take care of basic needs of a human, the exact number is debatable but it does exist.

If we are going to provide subsidies, why don’t we subsidise healthy food, or planting trees or solar panels for example, for both businesses and individuals? Why should my tax money subsidise cheap labour, often for corporation that avoid paying tax themselves?

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

#219

Post by golergka »

Y-bar wrote: post #23
infecto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That's a very weird assumption. Living on your own is not cheat, and having a kid, let alone two, certainly shouldn't be cheap. Why would you expect a person who works the easiest manual labour possible to be able to afford this?

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

#220

Post by rtkwe »

willcipriano wrote: post #213
rtkwe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10/hr was a bad wage in 2017 too unless you were in an exceptionally low COL area.

Would have to be outside the US for that to be a good wage in 2017. That isn't even a good wage internationally now.

There are still parts of the world where $10/hr is a good wage locally and would put someone in the upper rungs of workers in their local economy. They're just not places it's particularly nice to live if you're someone with internet access.
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