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Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

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Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#991

Post by Jcowell »

varispeed wrote: post #852
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how it works in many european countries, especially the ones without a legal minimum wage (Austria for example), so people working "slave" gig jobs (cleaners, delivery, construction and hospitality workers, etc.) where if they earn below a certain "livable' threshold, get various tax credits, subsidies and benefits from the government to reach that "livable" threshold, which, while it sounds good, it c…

What strikes me as weird is that parties that call themselves left-wing opt for this kind of hand outs without realising they are in fact subsidising the rich with workers' money. How this can fly?

Well not helping people in order to stick it to the rich is neither productive nor effective. There’s a reason for these handouts and it’s not as if left-wing parties don’t advocate for higher minimum wage. A problem can always be attacked from multiple sides.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#992

Post by Jcowell »

leetcrew wrote: post #878
Kluny wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, kids from unstable homes where the parents need them to earn money will sometimes drop out of school to help their family. It's best not to incentivize that.

very specific problems have very specific solutions. if this is the main concern, make it illegal to schedule school-aged children for shifts during school hours.

And then that creates other sorts of specific problems. What of mine conventional schools? Seniors who make their own schedule ? Home school kids ? Are now drop-outs dropped from making an income ?

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#993

Post by Jcowell »

DavidButter wrote: post #432
enjoyyourlife wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That incentivizes companies to hire teenagers instead of adults

Could that possibly be a bad sounding thing that turns out to be a good thing? I am not familiar with Australian labor issues.

For adults who depend on these kind of jobs to pay the bills, I cannot see this as a good thing in anyway.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#994

Post by throwaway292893 »

wildrhythms wrote: post #829
throwaway292893 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not. Now there's two anecdotes to work with. I worked a shitty job to get through college, it's a stepping stone. These jobs aren't meant to live on. They should be used as part time jobs for people transitioning in their careers, like students. When you give handouts to people who don't want to work you are not doing them any favors. They become reliant and trapped in that loop. That's not to say there shou…

We hear this same diatribe every time this topic comes up. "Fast food work is a stepping stone to a better job!" Have you been to a McDonalds or Wendys recently? Most of the workers are in their 30s-40s+. The concept of a low-wage "stepping stone" job is a fallacy that people have subscribed to to justify paying unlivable wages.

That's not my experience, I mostly see teens and sometimes one or two adults. Do you have a source backing up that claim?

> We should be spending money creating new, better paying jobs, not new social programs.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#995

Post by conanbatt »

heavyset_go wrote: post #629
conanbatt wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not the same risk. If a business goes bust the owners lose capital, the employees lose opportunity cost at worst.

If a business goes bust, those losses can be written of at tax time. A worker losing their job faces homelessness, the inability to see a doctor or pay for their medications, and hunger.

What does write off mean to you? If you lose money the government is not giving you money for that loss.

The vast majority of businesses are small businesses, if they go broke the owner is just as broke as the employees.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#996

Post by andrei_says_ »

syshum wrote: post #414
andrei_says_ wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Maintaining laws which force working employees into poverty in order to support inadequate business models is not the solution. Employees outnumber business owners - more people having spending power is vital for the economy.

>>which force working employees into poverty I think you have a widely unorthodox defination of "force" as no one is forced to take any job at any wage. Force in the equation would come from the government using the threat of government violence to force a wage on a business owner. A person that voluntary accepts a job for X wage is not "forced" to do so.

Literally everyone who is taking jobs paying less than a living wage is forced to - by the lack of better options.

You know this and are making a bad faith argument.

What is your goal?

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#997

Post by banannaise »

deburo wrote: post #618
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…

>If they honestly can't afford to pay a living wage It's not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising the minimum wage. Do you think the people they employ are better off not working at all? These people may not have a decent enough salary, but they get to work as opposed to staying at home and degenerate (mentally and physically). I always thought the better solution is to help them financially in other way…

It's also not logical to kill businesses by arbitrarily raising rent, but that happens anyway, and wouldn't you know, that squeezes the businesses on their ability to pay higher wages.

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#998

Post by conanbatt »

dmitriid wrote: post #744
conanbatt wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or unemployment..oh wait...

Unemployment varies from country to country. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate... 5.8% to 16% Comparable to the U.S. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273909/seasonally-adjust... 4.4% to 14.7% Something tells me though that you really don't want to be unemployed in the US... And that a huge number of those jobs in the US are indentured servitude in all but name.

Spain has a youth unemployment of 30% in 2019, vs 9% in the US.

Spain is worst case, but also one of the EU founding countries. Even sweden has 20%+ of youth unemployment.

It is not the land of opportunity!

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#999

Post by pizzazzaro »

barry-cotter wrote: post #626
anthony_romeo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s another aspect: there’s a horrible lack of common decency and respect by supervisors and managers of low-wage workers. Having worked menial data entry, warehouse, grocery store, fast food jobs, I’ve interacted with far too many stressed-out and abusive/abused bosses who cannot cope with the razor-thin timelines with minimal workforce (which seems to be the norm) and ultimately exhaust this irritating heat ont…

> there’s a horrible lack of common decency and respect by supervisors and managers of low-wage workers. Yeah, if the entire culture creating class/media/academia is agreed that people who don’t have college degrees are worthless failures or at best need other people to make their decisions for them there’s not going to be much respect going round. The Anglo West is not Japan.

Speak for yourself. Too many of our fast food workers have advanced degrees, but nowhere will take us.

I cant tell if that one barista with a Mechanical Engineering degree unknowingly got hers from a diploma mill, or if the 2008-crunch just left her permanently out of the industry.

Ive met trained, degree-holding coders, engineers, graphic designers, paralegals, mathematicians, even teachers that could simply not break into their chosen field, but had to simply subsist on fast food wages.

Hell, there was one man who ran film crews at major Hollywood studios! But when his mother got sick, he took time off. And he simply couldnt get back in.

So here we are, being asked to subsidize our ability to show up to work... where the customers are demeaning enough to become a meme named "Karen."

Re: Labor shortage or terrible jobs?

#1000

Post by pizzazzaro »

etrabroline wrote: post #964
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being single more workable (it’s easy to control spending) than having dependents (kids). Once you have a kid or two, your expenses become less predictable and things begin to pile up (literally, a larger house becomes a necessity rather than just a luxury). I see many people putting off kids or just opting out completely because COL increases have just made them too risky.

Have you heard of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin?

Ah, here we are, pretending the movie "Idiocracy" is prescient. Thats cute.

Unfortunately, the pressures creating this disparity are far from natural.

And lets not pretend that some global, universal "intelligence" is some inborn genetic trait, as Eugenicists would have you believe.

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