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

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

#241

Post by atoav » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

5040 wrote: post #225

atoav wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if you require the living wage or not — there will always be people who don't strictly need it in any society. Just like there will be people on the beach who won't ever need a life guard. Everybody needing a thing is not a precondition for it making sense to exist. If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploita…

>If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study. What if you are a lonely oldster who'd love to slowly sweep away dust and cigarette butts in front of the local store for 5$ an hour. It doesn't seem obvious that outlawing this is good for society.

If you find a person that is offended by earning too much I am pretty sure you'll find volunteers to help.

But next time add sarcasm tags if you making that point.

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

#242

Post by viccis » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:58 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #202

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…

I think that the give-away that the union wasn't beneficial is that you were forced to join. If there is value add to parties, it would have to be voluntary. For instance, in financial industry, there is a certified financial analyst (CFA) designation that some choose to get. Employers normally pay those with a CFA higher wages and people sign up to get this certification and pay dues, all without anyone being forced…

All effective unions are mandatory. They represent the interests of the mass of workers there, and they wield that collective power against two groups who would be happy to take food out of their mouths if they could get away with it: their employer and new employees who need a job enough that they are willing to work for less money or worse conditions.

So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.

It seems like you don't really understand the meaning of "rent seeking". For something to be rent seeking, it must not provide any additional value. Unions do generally provide value, and in fact one of those values is a protection against actual "rent seeking" from employers, such as pay and benefit cuts (one of the easiest ways to earn more money with no extra value produced).

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

#243

Post by gregors » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:02 PM UTC

pakitan wrote: post #74

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…

> how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? We don't. It's the market's job to determine the wage. If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.

You're making an assumption there that the educational/opportunity systems in the country aren't designed specifically to feed these jobs in particular.

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

#244

Post by nradov » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

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…

How would you propose to increase the supply of higher-paid and diverse jobs? The USA already spends enormous amounts on education subsidies and Keynesian economic stimulus. And what is a "diverse" job anyway?

The USA and many other countries already have a surplus of people with college degrees that have no real value from a job skills perspective (elite overproduction). Future job growth is likely to be concentrated in skilled labor fields as we re-industrialize. We should probably shift some funding away from universities, and towards community colleges and trade schools.

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

#245

Post by viccis » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

>your dishwasher is definitely not tipped

I posted this elsewhere in here, but this is not true. They are often tipped out of a tip pool, especially in pricey ($100+ a head) restaurants with a lot of tip money to go around. People I know have made $40/hr this way, and I even know a guy who dish washed at age 17 at a counter service place and still made $20-35 an hour this way just off the tips that the little payment machine asked for when you picked up your food yourself.

It is a complicated topic though, as it is actually illegal to include BOH people in tip pools in some states. This is because it is often a sneaky way for owners to steal tips by underpaying BOH compared to how they would have to pay them without a tip pool. So you might live in such a state.

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

#246

Post by kjs3 » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:05 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 am all for fair wages

No, you're very obviously not. This line of argument is the very poster child of "if you're not doing something I think is important (and, apparently having clean dishes at a restaurant is by your own words "fairly low value") like being 'innovative' or 'creative', you are of little value and don't deserve adequate pay". Were you twisting your Mises Institute wristband fondly while writing it?

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

#247

Post by kjs3 » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

pakitan wrote: post #74

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…

> how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? We don't. It's the market's job to determine the wage. If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.

If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.

Or complain that "no one is willing to work".

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

#248

Post by bigstrat2003 » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #42

darby_nine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get paid six figures to fart in a chair and occasionally type. The idea that I'm more deserving than a dishwasher is insane. Of course I won't turn down the paycheck, but the idea that $10 is anywhere in the ballpark of what the dishwasher deserves is delusional. Certainly they deserve the paycheck more than the vast majority of the people on this forum who get paid orders of magnitude more while doing barely any w…

Where do you get this idea? What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it. In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to p…

I disagree with the idea that a job should pay in proportion to the value it generates. In a just world, the dishwasher would be paid way more than me because his job sucks, but mine is something that I literally do for fun in my free time. I accept that we do not live in a just world, nor do I know what sort of economic system could achieve my desired outcome. So maybe the current paradigm is the best we can do. But it's not very fair.

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

#249

Post by massysett » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #175

IncreasePosts wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because any job is better than no job; if nobody will hire you for whatever reason, your standards for income will drop until someone does. That said, in my country (Netherlands), a lot of service industry jobs (waiting, dishwashing, store restocking, etc) are jobs that people have temporarily or part-time during their studies. But it's a crooked comparison as tipping culture is still very much optional over here and…

> nobody has to work to make ends meet

Which means that other people who do go to work support those who sit around and do nothing. As someone who works, I have no desire to support people who don't work because they don't have to.

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

#250

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #97

colechristensen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god, get owners out of the kitchen. Unless they're experienced chefs starting their own restaurants (I know some people like this, they're awesome!) owners are much better off away from the food as much as possible.

I agree, I just meant that there is something of a disconnect between "working hard and getting the respect of the team" and "being rewarded by management with more money/benefits/etc.", probably because the owners tend to not even be familiar with the workers. It's a different dynamic than a typical white-collar job where you're interacting with your manager (who can ultimately give you a raise) on a daily basis.

> It's a different dynamic than a typical white-collar job where you're interacting with your manager (who can ultimately give you a raise) on a daily basis.

In my experience, in a typical white collar job, your manager might advocate for a raise for you, but rarely has the power to approve it.