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Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

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Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#261

No it won't last, because as soon as the wages start coming up then the fed will say "inflation is heating up" and raise interest rates, causing businesses to spend more on debt service and less on employees.

The US has a long-term severe labor shortage that has already begun. There isn't anything that can stop that, including robotics / automation and artificial intelligence. There's nothing that can happen in the next 20 years, except for a protracted recession-like economy (or big crash), that can significantly ease up that labor shortage.

It's a matter of facts. The population growth rate is too low. The rate of retirement is too high (boomers exiting). Immigration is at modest levels versus the total population base. Almost any consistent GDP growth with those factors in play, will generate an extreme labor demand squeeze. It's particularly bad for blue collar jobs; the boomer generation is loaded with blue collar skills / trade persons, and they're exiting in droves.

Major economies with low population growth like Germany are able to maintain perpetually low unemployment with very modest growth. The US routinely grows 3x to 4x faster than Germany, including presently. It's obvious what the consequences of sustained 1.5%-2% (much less higher) GDP growth must have on the US when it comes to labor shortages from this point forward, when all the labor factors are taken into account.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#262
post #4
post #2

Plumbers can't telecommute.

I imagine there's an opportunity for a startup that let's someone who wants to do a simple job themselves Facetime with a plumber to talk them through the work. No idea if there's any profit in it though.

I worked at a startup doing exactly this last year[1], [2], [3]. Unfortunately, the parent company shut us down after we ran out of runway but it was starting to gain traction. One issue we had was ultimately a lot of people wanted someone to come out anyway and to make sure we had the right quality (and so gain customer/brand trust) we had to do this in-house - i.e. hire actual plumbers and handymen to be on call as well as building logistics software to support all of this entirely outside of the video call aspect.

It was more than a bit depressing the parent company pulled the plug because it really did feel like it was about take off. Maybe we could've instead integrated into a set of preferred suppliers cross country as a lead gen service. Though if you read the TrustPilot reviews it was the fact we were the whole package that customers loved.

We started by first charging for calls but in order to grow switched that to free calls with the assumption that people would then book a home visit if needs be. Nobody wanted to pay £10 on a call and find out they needed a plumber to come out. It felt like something that with Uber-style levels of investment (i.e. tons) could be pretty profitable if you owned the sector. To expand on our offerings we would do things like allow people to simply book a handyman for an hour to do whatever - put up a curtain rail, fix that loose light fitting and so on.

People were using the video aspect as a precursor to someone actually coming to do the work so the video bit was never the end of the transaction. As soon as you start needing a team of people to field customer calls, do support and manage your countrywide team of tradesmen it gets expensive.

[1] https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/dad.co?page=2

[2] http://www.eu-startups.com/2016/05/london-based-dad-secures-...

[3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/poly-screenshots.angel.co/enhanced_...

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. You've probably been seen and healed by a great doctor that smokes or has smoked weed recently. There is a good chance your financial advisor, lawyer and/or boss smokes or has smoked weed recently. Most professionals who do certainly don't boast about it with the witch hunting Puritan culture in the US, but there are a lot of them out there, and you've probably never noticed because it's not noticeable.

Yes it is. If your great doctor had to pass a drug test, he would be perfectly capable of abstaining long enough to pass it.

So if there was a test that could tell if you've eaten chocolate in the last 30 days, then you required applicants to not eat chocolate ever, passing that would be an indicator of a good employee?

Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tenured engineering managers"? http://thestartupconference.com/2017/03/25/the-350k-google-s...

That's an even more specific case, because again, most software developers aren't working at Google/FB/Airbnb/Uber/Snap. And those are figures for experienced workers to boot, and "Staff Engineer" is typically a managerial role IMO, if not directly by delegation/HR-type stuff, then in a technical sense. The total comp is in practice also generally a bit lower because most of those companies backload the vesting

"That's an even more specific case, because again, most software developers aren't working at Google/FB/Airbnb/Uber/Snap."

That's why you said:

"when it's usually 10-20+ year tenured engineering managers at a few specific companies"

right?

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#265
post #9

I worked with small / medium manufacturers in the prosperous part of the Southeast. Hiring is brutal currently. Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows. Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test. Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of sho…

I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time? The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast. And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why? It would…

> How is that relevant?

You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.

Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?

We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#266
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it a bit strange when people talk about shortages of non-price-controlled goods and services. When you say that the industry is "short on construction workers", there's an implicit "who will work for what we used to pay them." It seems to me like it's someone who hires in that industry trying to entice more talent to come help lower the price again, rather than an accurate description of the state of th…

You can't just create 100,000 new construction workers in San Diego because you raise wages from $45 to $60 per hour. Labor availability + skill + time + market awareness = it takes a helluva lot longer than months or 2-3 years to meaningfully boost a skill trade. Labor availabity means: how many people - heavily influenced by the unemployment rate - are interested in putting in the time to go retrain themselves to d…

I believe the trick is the following: if wages increase from 45 to $60/hr, a lot of the planned constructions no longer make sense financially, and are abandoned.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours. Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before…

Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?

You would have to ask a lawyer that specializes in corporate ass-covering. I'm more interested in practical solutions that result in actual safety improvements.

I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.

If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.

A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to be at work at 9am on the dot, if my boss is happy for me to leave at 5pm on the dot, and not read any email or slack until 9am next morning. In my experience it is basically impossible in modern tech jobs to do that.

Seriously. Some companies want it both ways- constant access via email/slack/on call rotations, but a strict clock-out time of 5pm? "You aren't a team player."

Yep, I was accused of this multiple times because I didn't want to work more than 40hrs a week and basically be on-call 24/7/365

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#269

>> "Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all)" Don't kid yourself. Those new hires are at other jobs making more money. I am booked for a roofer in feb 2018 (fingers crossed - friend of a friend). Blue skills are in extremely high demand. And those guys are working extremely hard making really high incomes (400k+). These guys are highly paid and are not…

I always read these ridiculously high salaries and laugh. Your average HVAC worker is not making $400k. I do know people in construction/HVAC/plumbers/electricians and it's the bosses making that money, not the grunt workers. The people on the front lines still make good money, for some easily approaching $100k/year, so there's not really a need for embellishment. That isn't to say that it's unattainable, but it's ak…

$400k is what senior executives of major multinational companies get paid. It's also what top surgeons get paid.

I highly doubt that blue collar workers get anywhere near that much. If they did, everyone would try to work in that industry because the barrier to entry is comparatively very low.

Re: Blue-collar wages are surging. Can it last?

#270
post #79
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what over 40 years of gutting education and social safety nets bought us. Idiocracy is coming!

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, especially on divisive topics? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly and we've had to ask you before.

Bans on this site? Full of people who roll their own VPNs and so on? I’m sure that’s highly productive.
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