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

#341

Post by bsagdiyev » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #336

karmajunkie wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a lot of factors we do not know here: I was an investor in a small restaurant as I wanted to keep it open after the owners quit. Upping anything on the menu $1 would've killed the business dead because all surrounding restaurants where already cheaper, but we had better cooks, however people are frugal or poor or both and they were not that much better to make the difference that much bigger. We still ran a…

Before we left San Diego I offered quite a few times to go in, unpaid, to help out. This man works 6 days a week, open to close. I don’t know what sort of upbringing people on this site seem to have but it doesn’t feel “working class” to me most of the time.

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

#342

Post by throwawaylinux » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

bsagdiyev wrote: post #218

smsm42 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting it as he has an infinite money supply and just of pure stupidity and greed doesn't want to pay $20 or $50 per hour. Maybe his supply is not unlimited, and maybe nobody would buy a taco for $50 and he knows it, and he made the calculation and decided there's no way to pay all his costs, charge the price that people would be willing to pay, and make a profit. Now, if you know how to do it, there's a b…

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…

Small businesses have notoriously high rates of failure, restaurants seem like a huge risk with pretty modest possible reward. My guess is you'd be more likely to get rich being a pro athlete than as a restaurant owner.

Yet they get treated like evil "fat cats" by a certain section of the intelligentsia. Many of whom simultaneously believe global mega corporations who profit from wars and dictatorships, avoid paying taxes, bust unions, use slave labor, and buy politicians and influence elections are noble justice warriors. It's really strange.

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

#343

Post by kevinventullo » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 11:48 AM UTC

matchagaucho wrote: post #191

atrus wrote: post #12

Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…

That same owner could be paying themselves $25 per hour. The average small restaurant owner makes ~$50K per year and has very little line of credit. So unfortunately it's a zero-sum game. Increasing cooks to $20hr means reducing their own comp to $20hr.

Does that $50k per year include the equity they are presumably building with that line of credit?

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

#344

Post by AngryData » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #69

I’m a little confused, wouldn’t this mean that there are people sitting around who seemingly prefer no job than a lower than they would like paying job? I don’t understand how all these unemployed people are surviving.

Food is cheap, it doesn't take a lot of work to not starve to death. Many of them can survive on odd jobs and hustles that aren't counted as employment. And many of them left their expensive city apartments and moved into friends of family's places where the entire mortgage payment is less than single room apartment rent. They severely reduced their expenses which means their pocket change turned into a sizable fund to live on.

And now if they do want to move back, rent prices have in many places doubled, so now they are demanding even higher wages to make up for it.

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

#345

Post by chunkyfunky » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #337

oxnrtr wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying people properly has very little impact on customer prices, see countries who enforce this.

I live(d) only in countries that enforce it and it definitely makes a huge difference in consumer prices. Places that are ran 'by the family' here have their family do all the work for free (usually their kids and the parents running it all); in exchange they get pocket money, a roof over their head and food. But they are very cheap employees. Now compare the food and drink prices to a place with official employees a…

I think that is a fair point and anecdotally at least it gels with what I have observed. I've worked in quite a few food service settings when I was younger and the margins (in general of course; Soup du Jour is like 5/600% margin at least) are very thin. However I wonder if this isn't just a symptom of the bigger problem; in order to pay better wages, consumer prices have to be raised because it's the only way to make enough margin to pay the employees BUT the real reason margins are so thin is because you are paying exorbitant rent to some faceless landlord who actually owns the building you operate out of; and it only ever goes up, never down; and your suppliers constantly raise their prices (or lower their quality) because they are in the same boat; and thus all that money that is generated by the tip of the spear (the restaurant, the retail store, the pub) is mostly being pushed back up to....the people who already have all the money...which is why they own all the buildings and rent them out to make more money....and so on. Just a thought :)

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

#346

Post by Dudeman112 » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 12:03 PM UTC

bsagdiyev wrote: post #341

tluyben2 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of factors we do not know here: I was an investor in a small restaurant as I wanted to keep it open after the owners quit. Upping anything on the menu $1 would've killed the business dead because all surrounding restaurants where already cheaper, but we had better cooks, however people are frugal or poor or both and they were not that much better to make the difference that much bigger. We still ran a…

Before we left San Diego I offered quite a few times to go in, unpaid, to help out. This man works 6 days a week, open to close. I don’t know what sort of upbringing people on this site seem to have but it doesn’t feel “working class” to me most of the time.

>what sort of upbringing people on this site seem to have but it doesn’t feel “working class” to me most of the time

Some people around these parts have ardently defended that 100k USD is poverty wage and that having a net worth of 1 million doesn't make you rich.

So I'm inclined to definitely not believe "working class".

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

#347

Post by yobbo » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 12:07 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #93

angelzen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner won't hire a couple of cooks at $20 an hour because he won't be able to pay off his mortgages anymore. The banker sits behind all this and collects his fat percentage cut while laughing at the plebs fighting with each other over scraps. We have a 3 tier system: minimum wage workers condemned to a perpetual state of precarity, middle class professional and small business types that toil away paying hefty mor…

> capital owners that lend around money at extortionate rates and run to the nanny state to print money and save their skin whenever their bets go sour. Guess which strata gets most of the flak. Your heart is in the right place, but you are doing the devil's work by accident. "extortionate rates" and "printing money" do not happen at once! We have low interest rates, which are good for debtors . The banks now will ge…

> The banks now will get very little interest on those mortgages

Banks make relative profit on rates. Lower rates usually means the relative profit increases. Then, because as rates fall and prices increase, the volume of mortgages increases.

As long as rates fall, banks win.

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

#348

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 12:10 PM UTC

bsagdiyev wrote: post #341

tluyben2 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of factors we do not know here: I was an investor in a small restaurant as I wanted to keep it open after the owners quit. Upping anything on the menu $1 would've killed the business dead because all surrounding restaurants where already cheaper, but we had better cooks, however people are frugal or poor or both and they were not that much better to make the difference that much bigger. We still ran a…

Before we left San Diego I offered quite a few times to go in, unpaid, to help out. This man works 6 days a week, open to close. I don’t know what sort of upbringing people on this site seem to have but it doesn’t feel “working class” to me most of the time.

Actually helping run this place showed me how skewed this world is. I met many hospitality service owners, small ones mostly and most of them are lucky to take 5-10k profit in a year in total: that while most people I know in software and management get angry when they cannot go on multiple 10k vacations a year...

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

#349

Post by Hdbdbdhu » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 12:19 PM UTC

France_is_bacon wrote: post #308

smsm42 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting it as he has an infinite money supply and just of pure stupidity and greed doesn't want to pay $20 or $50 per hour. Maybe his supply is not unlimited, and maybe nobody would buy a taco for $50 and he knows it, and he made the calculation and decided there's no way to pay all his costs, charge the price that people would be willing to pay, and make a profit. Now, if you know how to do it, there's a b…

Depends on how you look at it. If the owner has 10 restuarants, and is making $750,000 per year, let's say, then he or she does have an unlimited amount of money, compared to the workers, especially if the workers are making the federal minimum wage of $7.25. If they have a small mom and pop company that cannot pay workers at least $50,000, then they need to go out of business. Then, as more and more shops go out of…

10 restaurants would be 100 employees. $50,000 for 100 employees is sustainable according to you? The owner would be in the red by over $4 million every year

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

#350

Post by zajio1am » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #324

fallingfrog wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal healthcare actually saves money . It’s a mistaken assumption that conservatives always pick the cheapest or most efficient option. They pick the one that’s cheapest for people with a lot of assets . Individual insurance is paid for mostly by the middle class; universal healthcare is paid by taxes, which means rich people contribute more than they benefit.

I agree. Public healthcare has a strong incentive to cure you because your health problems are a liability to the tax collecting part of the government. Meanwhile private healthcare charges you for being ill. There is no profit incentive for a cure.

That is a minor issue. Most public healthcare systems are not british-style NHS, and healthcare providers (doctors, hospitals) are independent of healthcare payers (public health insurance orgs) and are often private.

The main advantage of public heathcare is that being single-payer it can use its monopolistic buyer power to push prices down. It leads to lower overall costs, but also to underinvestments and lower wages in healthcare.