It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage • Hacker News Board

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#261

Post by anonuser123456 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

karmajunkie wrote: post #227

bsagdiyev wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christ, people here and their taller than standard horses. My girlfriends dad owns a pizza place and walked away with $5k last year, after paying rent, supply and wages. Where do they magically pull this money from? They aren’t evil banker types with bags marked “$$$” full of money like people here seem to think and it is disgusting they’re considered cheap instead of just “people will absolutely not pay the increase…

it’s not magic. there are inputs and outputs. raise prices by a buck a pizza. people will absolutely pay it. problem solved.

Yeah, demand is totally inelastic to price.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#262

Post by prepend » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #54

prepend wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the temporary competition from government covid benefits. Businesses understand perfectly well, but it’s kind of pointless to compete with higher benefits for not working. In my state, benefits were $16/hour. So businesses have a hard time competing with that because jobs can’t compete much with unemployment benefits. It would be interesting to see what the trade off is for how much money it would take.…

Studies of states that extended the unemployment benefits vs ones that didn’t seem to show that the benefits accounted for a fairly small portion of the difference in employment. https://www.wxxinews.org/post/what-unemployment-insurance-te...

Benefits ended a few weeks ago, I don’t think these studies are very useful at this point. Let’s see how it goes in a year to see what happens.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#263

Post by prepend » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #39

prepend wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to understand. If your customers won’t buy Mexican food at a high enough price to pay $20/hour, it’s better to close than to stay open and lose money. Labor is the highest cost for a restaurant (higher than rent) so bumping wages from $15 to $20 may not be possible if you can’t also raise prices by 30%. This may be hard to understand for us rich programmers. But it’s quite simple for companies that have rea…

You dont need to increase prices by 30% to raise the hourly rate from $15 to $20. Pay is like a fixed cost. If your cook makes 100 items an hour and you profit 1$ off each item. Your profit for the hour only goes down by $5 not by 33 cents per item

It’s not just cooks, there are many other workers in a restaurant. I don’t think you raise prices 33%. But labor is about 40% of costs.

So a 33% change in labor increases prices quite a bit. And if everyone increases labor costs, then that drives up food and other materials.

So you will easily see price increases of 15-25%. If my local Mexican restaurant increases prices by that much, I and many other customers will not go as much.

This is super simple Econ101 stuff. Your example is flawed as there’s more than just cooks and there’s not a profit of $1/item.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#264

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #171

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

Not to mention your competitors may be switching to robots, greatly reducing their labors to the point it might not be competitive if you're using humans and don't have the capital for the robot.

Why is that everyone else's problem? No one is entitled to not be out competed by a more efficient business.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#265

Post by kennywinker » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #262

kennywinker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies of states that extended the unemployment benefits vs ones that didn’t seem to show that the benefits accounted for a fairly small portion of the difference in employment. https://www.wxxinews.org/post/what-unemployment-insurance-te...

Benefits ended a few weeks ago, I don’t think these studies are very useful at this point. Let’s see how it goes in a year to see what happens.

Benefits in some states expired last year, while other states renewed them - which makes for a perfect set of comparative data. Them ending completely now is going to change the landscape but it’s near impossible to say anything about how it changes the landscape since there’s no replication

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#266

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

karmajunkie wrote: post #233

smsm42 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about a multinational chain spanning continents with billions of dollars in revenue, tens of thosands of employees and a NYSE stock ticker - and not just any ticker but a part of S&P 500! Such a corporation has a lot of means to raise salaries a little without going under, they could borrow millions, they could issue stock, they could sell assets (which they have in millions), could restructure busi…

this is a ridiculously disingenuous argument. it doesn’t take a $50 taco to pay a living wage, no matter what the size of the business is.

"living wage" is an emotional political term - there's no objective definition of it and instead of appealing to rational argument it appeals to irrational notion that somehow you can live on $20/hr but would die if you received $19/hr, and so it's somehow a moral imperative to pay $20/hr (and in a year it turns out it's already $25 that is a moral imperative because somehow, out of nowhere, prices have risen!).

I'm not talking about literally $50.00 for a taco. I am talking about business owners who I'd assume know their business a bit better than a rando from the internet. And about the necessity of not thinking everybody but you missed a completely obvious solution like "just raise prices" because they don't understand anything about their business, but you do. It's usually not that simple.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#267

Post by atom_arranger » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

kodah wrote: post #186

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

> This is why a UBI is good for businesses -- customers have more money in their pockets. I'm a proponent of UBI and I think this claim needs a citation for the level of certainty that you expressed. I have always viewed that UBI will likely be bad for small businesses, but that by the time that we need UBI there won't be many small businesses left. There are two pilots of UBI worth paying attention to: Finland and O…

If UBI is implemented we may be able to do away with minimum wage, at which point small businesses could possibly offer better (more interesting, less stressful) working conditions for less money, it’s possible people might go for that.

Right now companies must make $X per employee per hour. If their business cannot do that it’s deemed that it’s not productive enough and should not exist.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#268

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #115

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…

This is a purely economic argument which if fine, but misses the vital non-economic side-effects. More money could lower the stress of the employees (given they now no longer have to worry about paying their bills) which may lead to higher quality products. Increased wages may attracts better talent or more exploitation conscious consumers. Hell, it may even more the owner more likely to listen to his staff, given th…

> which may lead to higher quality products.

Or a lower quality products, because what you'd do if I slack off, fire me? No problem, I'll live off UBI for a while, then go to somebody who didn't fire me yet, there are a lot of places around.

> may attracts better talent

A lot of minimum-wage positions won't benefit from better talent - once minimal level of competency is reached, it's enough. Surely, a waiter could be a rockstar, probably - but most people, and most businesses, expect just not forgetting the orders, not dropping the food on the floor and not cursing out the customers, once it's there, there's not much monetary upside for the business from the better talent (of course, there are tips but that's different story).

> given that they become a significant expense.

Payrolls are already a very significant expense, especially in restaurant, etc. business. I don't think making them more expensive would change much.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#269

Post by ljm » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #235

ljm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case you'd be justified in not paying the tip, surely? The effective price beforehand was $45, since you weren't really tippin, just subsidising the employer. They just bumped the price by 5 bucks and dispensed with the pricing trickery by paying proper wages.

So you're saying the proper response for the employer acting to raise pay to the line workers by raising prices is for you, as a customer, to act to lower pay to the line workers by stopping the tips? That'd show the greedy owner! Surely in some world that must make sense... but it's not our world.

I'm obviously not in the US, but this is a patently absurd perspective as it would then dictate that I am lowering pay to a lineworker by no longer being a customer. Where is the actual business's culpability in that twisted transaction?

I've just impoverished one barista at Starbucks because today I went to Cafe Nero instead! And I'm no longer a regular at my local Italian joint, so I've just deprived a few more people of an income.

For some reason you think this is about sticking it to the man but it's not. The staff get a stable, living wage and the business is charging prices much more in line with reality. I'm also no longer personally liable for the income of whoever served me, because the rightful responsibility for that lies on the employer.

Re: It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

#270

Post by aynyc » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

notanzaiiswear wrote: post #219

MattGaiser wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when said person whines that people are too lazy to work for them for that wage.

Obviously for that kind of person it would be a problem if nobody wants to work for that wage. He has to live with his unclean apartment. In any case, here we have an article whining about unfair employers. Are there really that many articles whining about lazy workers?

The entire foxnews channel is bitching about lazy people.