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Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#731

Post by Joeri »

barry-cotter wrote: post #621
pessimizer wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fast food job isn't an apprenticeship. It's just a shitty job. Management of a fast food restaurant takes a bit of generalizable, transferable skill, but there are always going to be an order of magnitude more workers than managers. A job where only 10% of the workers can move up is a dead end job for 90% of them. Every apprentice carpenter can become a carpenter.

If you have kept a fast food job for six months you have shown that you will actually show up on time regularly, not steal (much) and do an at least adequate job. More generally most jobs don’t lead to a qualification but do teach skills. The more responsible the job you’ve had in the past the more likely you are to do a good job with a new one. McDonald’s does teach skills. If you want to go from a teenage hire to a…

Not everyone working there can be promoted, because there aren’t enough of the good jobs to go around. Saying it boils down to personal responsibility ignores the fact that in many ways it is a game of musical chairs and there aren’t enough good jobs.

Granted, jobs can be created and the more skilled the labor force the better the jobs, so the number of chairs in the game can be increased, but on the other hand those aren’t the kind of skills you’re going to pick up serving burgers at mcdonalds.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#732

Post by ativzzz »

sdf131 wrote: post #698
Sebb767 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article unfortunately doesn't address the business side of the problem. She actually addressees this in the very last paragraph: > if a business can’t pay a living wage, should it be a business?

You get paid what you're worth, not what you need.

So shouldn't likewise a business pays for what it needs, so if it doesn't find enough employees at a lower pay it needs to increase pay?

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#733

Post by Frondo »

parineum wrote: post #407
rbg246 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is saying that these sorts of companies have lots of money. These business have a model that relies on poverty wages changing the minimum wage will disrupt these businesses greatly and I don't see a problem with that. You can't keep a broken thing going because of the businesses that will have to change their model. But sorry I also see your point there needs to be help to business to change thei…

A lot of people who support minimum wage increases don't think that way though. They _do_ think the local McDonald's is raking in cash and not sharing the profits. Conceptually, I agree with what you're saying (I also feel very strongly about off shore manufacturing for the same reasons) but, practically, when you increase the minimum wage, the poverty jobs will disappear and _eventually_ be replaced. The problem is…

Do you have anything to back that assertion up, that the poverty jobs will disappear?

The only articles I've ever found that say that come from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, and neither of those is anywhere near an unbiased source.

All the research (excluding the pieces from those two think tanks) suggests that the job markets remain stable through minimum wage increases, and in some cases the labor markets actually gain jobs -- possibly because more money in the hands of poorer people is going to go right back out into the community, as a matter of need.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#734

Post by throwawayboise »

ehnto wrote: post #717
caymanjim wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxpayers already subsidize the employment costs, by supplementing low salaries and lack of benefits via welfare programs, tax rebates, lower tax rates, subsidized healthcare, and countless other benefits. Walmart et al have externalized almost all of the true cost of labor to taxpayers.

Right, and raising the minimum wage is an attempt to control that by putting the costs back on the employer.

Who will simply either pass the costs along to the consumer, or shut down.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#735

Post by throwawayboise »

closeparen wrote: post #705
blihp wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 10% margin also often doesn't tell the whole story of how they make their money. Nearly since its inception, a substantial portion of McDonald's long term profit came from the appreciation of the real estate the stores were built on. Operating a business on it just made it cash flow positive during the holding period. So it was essentially a REIT that happened to operate a fast food chain. Even for many mom-and-pop…

McDonalds is a franchise, isn’t it? Corporate doesn’t own the stores.

Some stores are corporate owned and operated.

Most are franchise owned and operated, but corporate owns the real-estate the store is sitting on.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#736

Post by luckylion »

bradlys wrote: post #393
luckylion wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If every startup started compensating like FAANG, they’d have no trouble finding talent. That can't work. Current talent is a zero-sum game. You offer more, you get someone to switch over to you, somebody else offers more still and takes that person from you. You might attract more future talent to the industry by offering more, but since software developers already make 2-10 times the average, I doubt that people…

A lot of people I know who stop being software engineers do it because they found something more profitable. (Management, executive track, founding their own company, etc.) Part of the reason is that salary progression after the first 10 years is generally flat for IC level. Yet, it continues almost indefinitely for other tracks or roles related to software.

That's a different issue though, isn't it? The money in software development is still much better than in most industries.

I don't think millions of people are thinking "well, I could make lots of money in software ... but management pays much better if I get one of those jobs ... so I better go into [unrelated, lower paying field]".

What I'm trying to say is that software is very attractive compared to other jobs, but still we don't see everyone rushing into it. I believe that's because money isn't the factor.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#737

Post by pyuser583 »

ehnto wrote: post #724
pyuser583 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t you essentially saying that because the government spends lots of money on welfare/social support, it gets to control private business too? If the state chooses to offer benefits, great! But the state shouldn’t blame businesses having to offer those benefits. If the state wants people to have more money than the market provides, the state can simply increase benefits to that level. Wage subsidies are supported…

I think you are right in a way, but all we are doing is setting a minimum market rate for employees so that they can't be exploited. If a business can't afford that employee at that rate then it can't afford to do business without being exploitive and so it needs to reconfigure itself until it can. I am not saying it's a net good or bad for the economy by the way, I don't think I am qualified for that. But I can tell…

Whether or not someone’s being exploited isn’t determined by a wage.

For example, my wife is an administrative assistant for an NGO. She makes about average for an administrative assistant, but that makes her one of the highest paid employees.

Some of the employees are true believers and donate much of their salary back. Others are broke, and can hardly make it by.

Most are women with husbands who make the real money.

I know for a fact that the “higher ups” get paid less than the lower end. But many are retired lawyers and bankers. They also have seats on the board.

Some of the people who work there do so at great personal cost. The kids just out of college can barely eat.

Is this exploitive?

If my wife was the primary breadwinner, it sure as heck would be.

But everyone there could easily make much, much more in a heartbeat.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#738

Post by throwawayboise »

rbg246 wrote: post #434
kukx wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, define what is a poverty wage, it is important. How much stuff one should afford to avoid being called poor. What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant? I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots. But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different c…

There are definitions and I believe another commenter in this thread has defined it very solidly about poverty. There will always be service sector jobs, this is the argument luddites were having in 1815 (I don't want to get into this as it is distracting from my main point). We should be ensuring that anyone putting in 40 hours a week should be able to support a family. The wealth is there to be able to create this…

Support a family? How many kids should I be able to support on my unskilled 40 hours/week?

Look, I might be convinced that minimum wage is too low, though I'm much more inclined to leave that as a matter for the employee and employer to reach agreement on.

But if you have no marketable skills and the only work you can get is entry-level minimum wage, you have no business starting a family as the sole income-earner. None.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#739

Post by spamizbad »

pyuser583 wrote: post #715
ehnto wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please think about the holistic nature of your argument. The sum of it's parts essentially suggests that taxpayers should subsidize the employment costs of businesses, which is ridiculous.

Aren’t you essentially saying that because the government spends lots of money on welfare/social support, it gets to control private business too? If the state chooses to offer benefits, great! But the state shouldn’t blame businesses having to offer those benefits. If the state wants people to have more money than the market provides, the state can simply increase benefits to that level. Wage subsidies are supported…

I'm not an economist, but isn't it bad for overall economic health to have huge swaths of your country's workforce tied up in failing firms indirectly propped up by the government?

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#740

Post by mannerheim »

ruined wrote: post #723
mannerheim wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the case, then why did restaurants that switched to no-tipping models see the departure of much of their staff? [0] I would have expected servers to flock to those, but by the sound of it, tipping is reliable enough that servers can leave and go to a restaurant with tips and earn more money. > “Andrew was very disappointed,” says an employee of Tarlow’s restaurant group, Marlow Collective, who asked to r…

of course you'll see staff leave if you cut pay. that's a deliberate choice by management, and not a question about tipped or untipped work. i doubt there is real effect on the orders that customers place, but nobody's publishing their books, so who can say. in a systemic change in which every restaurant transitions to an untipped system, there would be no concern about losing out to a restaurant that continues to lo…

Is it a deliberate choice by management, or an economic reality? Perhaps they could have kept kitchen staff wages low and used the extra money to pay waitstaff more, but since it seems like other restaurants that adopted no-tipping eventually switched back to tips, it sounds like there just isn't the money to go around.

Sure, if every restaurant switched to no-tipping, then waitstaff couldn't simply switch to a restaurant that did tips. But I would suspect they would make less money overall.

Are restaurants without tipping losing out to a restaurant that is 'exploiting' servers if servers are choosing switch to that restaurant rather than stick with the restaurant with the 'non-exploitative' no-tipping model? I cannot see the logic in that. Are you saying servers who leave a no-tipping restaurant for a tipping restaurant are choosing to be exploited?

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