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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)

#271
post #66

I was a dishy for years in a few different restaurants and hotels. It's hard work but if you do your best to help out the kitchen and wait staff wherever you can (picking up ingredients, helping mise en place, fetching dish carts yourself, stocking bar) then you can really make a difference in the day to day. Sometimes I miss the camaraderie. It's an easy industry to get stuck in though, and there's usually a lot of…

> Sometimes I miss the camaraderie.

I also worked as a dishpig and kitchen hand in my early 20s before I got a job programming. The feeling of the kitchen humming during service is something I’ve never come close to in office jobs. The flip side of course when everything collapses, getting screamed at, shit pay and horrible hours.

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

#272

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…

> That said, in an idealized, socialist country, people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody has to work to make ends meet.

The idea that socialism or whatever government system would mean that nobody has to do any work is only appealing to downwardly-mobile elite children, which America has a lot of, and who mainly like to live in Brooklyn, start political podcasts and do drugs.

People really actually have to grow food and clean the bathroom - the point of economic systems is to get them to do it, not to get them to not do it.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite surprised the majority of people are fine with drinking that stuff. Not just because it noticeably changes the taste of beverages but because it's covered in chemicals and people are fine with it mixing together with their beverage. Our rinse aid is disabled on our dishwasher.

It doesn't noticeably change the taste of beverages to me. As to the chemical argument, that doesn't matter to me. I'm willing to trust that people have done the homework and that it's safe to drink.

Given the history of how we consume stuff like forever chemicals, BPA, roundup pesticides, carcinogenic makeup, and the negligence involved in the Ohio chemical spill and perhaps Boeing, you are very trusting.

It's evident that some of those trusting people are willing to make or save a buck while putting you at risk.

At the end of it, people should probably make their own assessment as to whether they should put themselves at risk. And I don't mind drying a handful of dishes if the alternative is to lace them all with surfactant.

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

#274

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

Dishwasher at my bar here in Sonoma County CA...make 25$ plus tips...which usually is at least another 10 per hour up to 30....

We can't survive without a strong happy disher

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

#275
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 $…

> The solution isn't to raise minimum wage, it's to eliminate minimum wage and put in an equitable UBI/welfare system. It'll raise wages naturally, because if they have a decent safety net, most people will feel comfortable quitting / not accepting an unjustly low salary.

This is not an accurate description of the empirical evidence for either minimum wage or UBI.

The evidence is that minimum wages do not reduce employment up to 60% of local median wage and can increase employment - so there's no reason to get rid of it. And UBI doesn't have much effect in either direction - so it's not really that important and the main reason to do it is that it's much simpler than welfare alternatives.

Anyway, UBI isn't an alternative to minimum wage because the point of UBI and other welfare systems is to support non-workers, namely children and the elderly.

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

#276
post #210

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 $…

I have a slightly different take: if your business is only profitable by the taxpayer subsidizing a relatively large number of employees wages with welfare benefits, you should be capped on how profitable your business is. In other words, you can be as profitable as you want but as soon as your business model relies on taxpayers to be viable, those taxpayers have a say in just how much profit is considered reasonable…

> if your business is only profitable by the taxpayer subsidizing a relatively large number of employees wages with welfare benefits

Welfare does not subsidize employers, it is a subsidy /against/ employers. Giving employees welfare increases their wages because it increases their negotiating power.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please notice that you are responding to a position the GP did not take. He said

> people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody _has_ to work to make ends meet.

Parents who leave paid employment to raise children are far from "sit[ing] around and do[ing] nothing". If we value future conditions (even restricting that calculation only to economic productivity, though I'd argue other considerations also matter) then investing resources in raising and educating children is rational, even for those of us who don't have them ourselves.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you assume that people who don't have full time work sit around and do nothing?

I'm the breadwinner for someone who stays at home and she's immensely valuable. A fact I'm quite aware of as she just left for a few weeks on a trip and now I'm working and doing what she does. She does all the house chores, picks up medications/runs errands, is trying to get a business of her own off the ground (is making ~500/mo with potential to scale if she's allowed time to actually do it), etc. She also contributes a lot to making sure our household is embedded in our community, which in turn enables us to both more efficiently help others (when we can) and to receive help when we need it without relying more on the government/taxpayers. She does the work required to do things like help our parents when needed (we're siblings), which would otherwise be paid caregiving paid by, you guessed it, the taxpayers! She also makes me a way better worker because I'm the one person on my team who actually can focus on work all day and doesn't have to frequently step out for life things.

And this is without children in the home.

Not to mention students, people with disabilities (some of whom may end up being a greater boon to society if they're allowed to reskill or be pickier about jobs rather than being forced to work themselves to the bone until they can contribute nothing + their medical needs end up being worse than they would have been if they were accommodated in the beginning), etc.

The idea that the only way people can contribute to society is via paid employment is a sign of a lack of creativity.

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

#279

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…

> When those opened up again, they found themselves with a shortage of staff, leading to the ones that still worked in the industry to be in a strong negotiating position and have their wages increased significantly.

No need to compare, that happened in the US.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

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

#280
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…

We could establish UBI, and then we wouldn't need a minimum wage. We could decide as a society that we want everyone to have a baseline level of support, rather than doing it indirectly (and less effectively) by forcing the nonexistence of low-paying jobs.

Minimum wages are good on their own and do not appear to have downsides in practice. You don't need to "not need" them.

Basically think of it as banning wasting people's time by offering them really bad jobs. (This is the "search theory" explanation, but there's also the "monopsony theory" explanation, which is that they can increase employment!)

Of course, wage boards and sectoral bargaining systems are probably better since they're more flexible.

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