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Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#62Timeline of Stupidity A: "we should give everyone free money!" B: "no, that'll make everyone lazy..." A: "no, people will work on things they love instead!" [everyone gets free money] [nobody works, everyone plays video games all day] A: "see, this proves that everyone was being exploited!" B: [smh] Plato's Five Regimes. We're entering the fourth regime.
Ok, but at some level of automation the number of low-skill jobs will be much less than the number of candidates. When this occurs, what's a viable career path for someone without a College education? Or even someone with a College education that's no longer relevant/in demand? We already have more than enough bullshit jobs...
Perhaps the answer is to start shortening the work week.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#63Occasionally, Twitter provides some nice insights in digestible forms (of course, nuance gets stripped). I saw a post recently that said something like "We watch Star Trek and marvel at their post-scarcity world. We are living in a post-scarcity world now, but all the benefits are being funneled by wage slaves up to the 0.1%." Paraphrased. I was talking with a friend who mentioned that a local pizza place is offering…
> Is it because the high-schoolers who would normally do that aren't looking for jobs due to pandemic? The concept that entry-level food service is mostly staffed by high-schoolers who don't really "need" the money is the weirdest trope. Basically every restaurant is open during school hours. Who is handling the lunch rush?
Almost as if the trope were a pretext for why it's ok to pay shit wages.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#64Well, there's a straightforward (I don't say easy) way to fix this: you require a high enough minimum wage (and healthcare, and sick leave, and etc.). It's not like the restaurant owner has the option of just deciding to pay twice or three times the labor costs, and trust that their customers will be happy to cover the difference, if their competitors don't have to do the same. Because, those restaurant (and retail a…
>It's not like the restaurant owner has the option of just deciding to pay twice or three times the labor costs, and trust that their customers will be happy to cover the difference, if their competitors don't have to do the same.
This feels a bit backwards. We don’t know that their competitors aren’t already paying more, we only know that some people can’t seem to get labor at the price they were paying before. I think the numbers here are currently inconclusive, but I conjecture that what we’re seeing is small business owners losing labor monopsonies that they had come to rely on, and consequently a more competitive labor market. Of course competition causes upward pressure on prices, that’s the whole point.
This is tangential but I think America has been too scared of inflation for too long. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of inflation, especially if it means we can get closer to full employment. We haven’t even been meeting the fed’s (very low) target for quite a while.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#65If this is happening it is truly a good thing. I have always felt that the best way to have improvements for entry-level labor is if they just refused to take the shitty jobs and the market turned on employers. What employers refer to as shortages aren't really that at all. The truth is that the labor market is just not in their favor as it typically is.
I do not think it is ideal that the alternative option being utilized is government handouts. I'd rather people have the mindset to, for example, run their own hot dog stand on the street instead working for a fast food chain. But entrepreneurship is not easy for everyone.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#66Business should always have to compete for labour. That way there is an incentive to replace labour with machines and better processes - which is where increased standard of living comes from.
However there is a problem. The 'standard job' is now gardening leave with a wage, which any other job has to compete with. And what that leads to is a 'dead zone gap' in the wage structure between the 'standard job' and the next reasonable job (say working 9-5 Mon-Fri with full benefits, close to home). A private employer has to pay a much higher wage than the payment for the 'standard job' to get people to work for their 'reasonable job'.
(You get the same between unemployment benefit and the 'minimum wage' in many countries).
However we could have everybody earning the living wage working for a publicly provided 'reasonable job' at a living wage, which would mean the that the private employer would only have to pay a penny more per hour to get the labour they need.
The most efficient construction is when the 'standard job' and the 'reasonable job' are the same. That eliminates the 'dead zone wage gap', and allows people to smoothly move between public and private jobs, increasing the efficiency of the use of labour - all without exploitation.
And those business that can't deliver a profit with this system? Well they get to close to make room for better businesses that can.
Business is there to serve people, not the other way around.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Employers might want to consider hiring more people in smaller shifts. Maybe an extra person and put everyone on 3-4 day shifts rather than 5-6. I thought that doing this to avoid providing healthcare was the problem. Many jobs that can't be filled are for part time hours at terrible pay with no benefits.
I'm not really understanding your point.
The laws in the US only require companies to provide health insurance and other benefits to full-time workers, usually defined as something over 30/hours a week. If a company hires a bunch of people to work 20-25 hours, they don't have to pay benefits.
The solution, obviously, is to change the law so that any employee, regardless of hours, must get benefits. The other solution, in the US, is to get rid of the antiquated employer-provided private health insurance market and just give everyone health care, the way every other wealthy (and not-so-wealthy) country does.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#68If a business can’t pay a living wage, automate the role.
I disagree. Not everyone needs a livable wage (e.g. teenagers) and by removing entry level positions we eliminate the lowest rung of the ladder. This is not a good outcome.
...but imagine the economic benefits of giving teenagers a living wage. People who have loads of extra money to spend on unnecessary items (because presumably they're not paying for the bare necessities like food and housing).
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#69Occasionally, Twitter provides some nice insights in digestible forms (of course, nuance gets stripped). I saw a post recently that said something like "We watch Star Trek and marvel at their post-scarcity world. We are living in a post-scarcity world now, but all the benefits are being funneled by wage slaves up to the 0.1%." Paraphrased. I was talking with a friend who mentioned that a local pizza place is offering…
The bottom 99.9% in America enjoy healthcare, communications, caloric intake, political freedom, public services, education and safety from violence unprecedented in human history. By almost every metric society is better off now than it was in the 1950's, 1800's, etc. The over-focus on the negative propels us toward greater collective good - up to a point. We would do better as a society to revert to a mean that exp…
Worse than 20 years ago but sure, better than the 1800s.
Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
#70Personally, the pandemic has taught me how little I really need physical stores. Only a few items, like bicycles, shoes, and backpacking backpacks, do I really prefer buying them in a physical store. So for me at least, it would be okay if all these retail jobs went away, and all these retail stores just went out of business, and you just bought everything online. It seems like it could really be a disaster for peopl…
How do you handle buying clothes?