Kitchen worker becomes part-owner of top restaurant | Hacker News Reader

Kitchen worker becomes part-owner of top restaurant

bbc.co.uk

46 pointsstehat32 comments

Nice to hear. I would love to see more of this or at least low-skilled workers and high-skilled workers getting paid much more equally. I would ask for a pay raise if I had to switch from developing software to cleaning the office toilets, not accept a fraction of the money. Working full-time is working full-time, paying low-skilled workers small money just because they are easily replaceable is unethical. Ignoring some details for brevity like the time spend on education in which you do not earn money and for which you should of course be compensated with a higher salary.

There should be incentives to skill development and personal investment.

Why? If that worked out, there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work or those workers would at least be totally overqualified. There need to be incentives to fill jobs with a deficit in the available workforce, not incentives to obtain better qualifications for the sake of it. And even then, do these incentives have to be 1000% more instead of 50% or so?

This is also very unfair against people that are unable to obtain higher qualifications, they are punished for being what they are even if they are doing great work in a low-skilled job and work as hard as someone bringing home six-figure salary from a high-skilled job.

As long as we have an underclass that will sell their labor to the lowest bidder, that's incentive enough.

Because of the "there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work" part.

Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. When it does, people will either be highly paid to do these unpleasant tasks, or (more righteously IMHO) these tasks will be done by robots.

The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. There is a glut of people who can do only this type of work so there is a race to the bottom of the price ladder back-stopped only by minimum wage laws at this point.

We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible. For those we cannot, basic minimum income or something like it will fill the gaps.

Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise.

This presupposes that there is enough high-skilled work available and that all low-skilled workers are capable of obtaining higher qualifications. The later one is certainly not true and the former one seems at least questionable. And every time the demand in a high-skilled professions drops, those workers end up in the lower-skilled worker pools, at least temporary until they requalify for a different high-skilled professions.

The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training.

That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required. Besides, as mentioned in the initial comment, to compensate for the the additional training time.

We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible.

Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap, not a widening one. Also there are certainly people that are happy with the low-skilled work they are doing, besides the wage maybe, why do we have to force them out of it?

>That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required.

Unfortunately, supply and demand confounds this with alacrity. Things that are plentiful are cheap, even if we wish otherwise. We can make rules to "fix" it but it's so difficult and expensive I'm not even sure it's a break even proposition. It does feel good to try.

>Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap...

The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines).

This is a point of view I do not share. It is a common argument, capitalism made everyone better of. But I would argue the gap matters even if the lower is better of. The CEO making 10 million Dollar a year did not create that value, the 10,000 workers on the factory floor did this.

That are only 1000 Dollar per worker and it might not matter that much to each one of them whether they earn 1000 Dollar more or less. But he fact that the workers are the ones actually producing the value while the CEO is the one disproportionally profiting from that, that seems to me unfair and at least psychological more relevant than 1000 Dollars more or less.

I fully agree with all the arguments about taking risks when founding a company and so on and getting some compensation for this, but that should not be excessive. Taking a bit of money from many to become disproportionally wealthy is something I am not okay with.

And I make no distinction how it is done, whether you take it from your employees, or from your customers depositing money in your bank, or by investing your existing wealth and collecting dividends. Taking some money from many is no better then taking much money from a few.

Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide?

>Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide?

That is an extreme example, but it doesn't really make any points.

In general, society benefits from each member striving to fulfill their potential. That doesn't mean everybody needs to have PhDs; in fact, I think more the opposite, that more people should be doing apprenticeships and attending trade schools. But in general, a society that has higher skill development will be more competitive in a global economy. That helps society as a whole, even more so in societies with less extreme wealth disparity.

I honestly don't know what you're advocating.

Are you saying some people shouldn't be allowed to get a PhD? Or that somebody with a PhD shouldn't be able to change their mind and switch careers? Or that it's a waste of time for people to pursue a PhD unless there's a direct and immediate benefit to society?

And maybe your hypothetical taxi driver's PhD dissertation actually did make a breakthrough contribution to society, but then she decided she didn't care for academia and has taken some time off to plan her next step and is moonlighting as an Uber driver in the interim. Is that enough benefit for you?

That question feels like it's making an awful lot of silly assumptions – though maybe I'm the one misinterpreting and making bad assumptions.

Let me bring this a bit back to were we - or I - started. My point is that I consider it unfair that wages are hugely different between low-skilled work and high-skilled work even if both require similar amounts of work. This only works because the market exploits an imbalance between supply and demanded low-skilled work and is empirically unable to correct this imbalance, for whatever reasons.

We of course need some differences in wages to steer the market to match supply and demand and to encourage better education. I certainly have no desire for a society where everyone is happy flipping burgers because it pays good money. But as long as there is low-skilled work to be done, I want those workers to be compensate for the work they are doing, not punished because of an excess in available work power.

I also hope that people doing low-skilled work would still strive for better education for the sake of it and to become a »better« human, no matter if it is required for the job or not. And they could do this more easily if they did not have to work three jobs to survive. Finally higher wages for low-skilled workers would also encourage automation and therefore reduce the amount of work humans have to do while not reducing the wealth.

> more people should be doing apprenticeships and attending trade schools

Wholeheartedly agree. Not everyone needs or should go get a college degree; it's oversold. Yet if you put them as an apprentice to a blacksmith they could get excited and productive in their trade quickly.

> paying low-skilled workers small money just because they are easily replaceable is unethical.

Sounds like you would feel right at home in socialist Scandinavia. Here the salary of a dishwasher is roughly equal to that of a RN, but the RN has student debts to pay off. And the unemployeed refugee makes almost as much on the dole. All this good for a mere 25%VAT and 35-65% income tax. Welcome.

> And the unemployeed refugee makes almost as much on the dole.

For how long are they eligible to stay on the dole? Exactly how much are they receiving?

Oh, right, they are getting ~$250/month. [1] They are living like kings at your expense! Curse the 65% income tax. [2]

Except that it's an, uh, 56% income tax. But what's another 9% when it comes to complaining about taxes...

[1] http://www.thelocal.se/20160104/why-do-refugees-prefer-swede...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden#Income_tax

Is RN a nurse? Is there such a thing as student debt in most of Europe, even, unless you want to go abroad or attend super expensive private universities (and a nurse would do neither, I suppose)?

Certainly not the same order of magnitude as US student debt (IIRC median is 20,000 and average is higher).

As far as I understand residence, being a RN means working like a dog for essentially no pay - in any country, be it Sweeden, Canada, the United States, or China.

Pointing at a RN to make an economic point is like pointing at the Wall Street interns pulling 130 hour weeks for lunch money as an example of how the poor financial industry is overworked, and underpaid.

In Denmark its not strictly necessary but many do so they can afford an apartment instead living in a dorm and/or more expensive lifestyle. Its cheap money though. After education its only the the states lending rate + 1%.

The _entry_ salary for a RN in Sweden is about 25k SEK per month . The _median_ salary for a dishwasher is 17k. The rest of your statements are about as factual as that one.

If low skilled employees were paid above market wages, how would you determine who to hire?

For instance, you need someone to perform a menial task. You offer to pay above market such that the number of equally qualified applicants greatly exceeds the number of positions.

How do you decide? Lottery would be ideal but hardly fair IMO. If someone is willing to work harder for the same money, I don't see why she should not be allowed to work the same for less money.

There is a large pool of low-skilled workers, for whatever reasons, maybe because we are doing a bad job qualifying people, maybe because there are many people that are unable to obtain higher qualifications, maybe just because everybody is automatically in the low-skilled worker pool but not everybody is automatically in the high-skilled worker pool, may because everyone starts in the low-skilled worker pool. Or something entirely different, it does not matter.

The market exploits this situation because a large pool of workers is competing for a smaller pool of job driving wages down. At the same time the market is empirically unable to correct this, otherwise there would be no such imbalance. Maybe it is not the market's fault but that of society or policies or whatever. In the end the market wage is not where it is supposed to be, the market is not supposed to keep people poor.

So any argument referring to market wages falls short in my opinion. I would call this a market failure in some sense, the market overemphasizes the available worker pool devaluing low-skilled but honest and possibly hard work. Whom to hire? The most qualified one for the job, this should be independent of what you are willing to pay.

> paying low-skilled workers small money just because they are easily replaceable is unethical

They are not being paid 'small money' because they are easily replaceable, they are being paid small amounts because they bring very little value to the organization. Replacing the people that provide little value with other people that provide little value is a small task and inexpensive to do.

Compensation being related to value provided is not unethical.

They are not being paid 'small money' because they are easily replaceable, they are being paid small amounts because they bring very little value to the organization.

The value is created by all the people together. Without development sales had nothing to sell, without sales development could code the most beautiful piece of software and still not earn a bug. Without someone maintaining and cleaning the office it would not take too long until human resources had a hard time recruiting new workers because of the bad working conditions. Someone cleaning the office toilets is involved in keeping the company running, just asserting that they provide little or no value is totally flawed, at least in my opinion.

Sure. But it's a supply and demand problem. It's hard to find a competent programmer, so you have to pay more to attract one, or they are going to work somewhere else. But it's easy to find someone to clean the floors, so even if you offer very low wage that is going to discourage some people, there will be others who will take it. It has nothing to do with value they provide.

Exactly, this exploits an imbalance between supply and demand. You pay low wages for getting your office cleaned because you can get away with it, not because cleaning the office provides no value. This is what I want fixed and the market is empirically unable to it itself.

> they are being paid small amounts because they bring very little value to the organization.

This is entirely incorrect. They bring nearly the entire value to the organization. They bring very little marginal value to the organization, because they can be replaced by other desperate people.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it. 12 children is too many.

Without a percentage number this just smells of a PR stunt. Sorry... I have noticed that the Noma guys are quite good at PR. They do know stuff like this gets attention.

/Signed: a current like 0.05% owner of a software company I worked at 20 years ago - lots of dilution since, but I think this illustrates my point. I'd say this small company has a comparable revenue to Noma.

Clickbait, it was a human dishwasher.

I don't care. It's a happy story and with all the sad news going on re. immigrants, it made my day.

I think you missed the joke, but I could be wrong.

EDIT: After all, I'm just a lowly word processor.

This is the most hilariously HN comment I've ever seen.

Thanks for making my day.

Just by reading the headline, I thought robots are starting to rule to world.

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