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Comment by spo81rty | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is if the pay or working conditions are so bad, why don't people just go find a new job?

If they can't get anyone to do the job, they will be forced to pay more or fix the conditions. If they have a terrible reputation, nobody will want to work for them.

It's simple supply and demand.

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It boggles me that anyone believes this. It's called leverage. Not everyone has equal ability, nor equal ability to change jobs for a variety of reasons.

So what do you think happens to those people if by a requirment on minimum income by instacart, they are barred from that job opportunity.

Because finding a low skill job is pretty hard. Not everyone has the luxury of choice.

I've never seen this to be the case that finding a low skill job is hard. In my area tons of people refuse to work but all kinds of places are constantly hiring like restaurants, etc. Many may require passing a drug screen though which it seems most people aren't able to do.

If you think a restaurant is a low-skill job, you're wrong. It takes an assload of memorization, dealing with highly specialized systems, and its hell on the body as well. You have an incredibly high expected output, and you're not given much guidance either. The pay isn't worth the effort in the least, because its seen as "low-skill" or similar.

In my pricey metro area, there are many such "low-skill" jobs advertised in restaurant windows. (Side note: can we use another qualifier? Restaurant jobs in fact require quite a bit of skill - social awareness, customer service, observational, strategic time management, etc. Maybe it's not programming, but it's not really data entry either.) These jobs, even while paying $15 an hour, remain unfilled because there's nowhere within a 2 hour commute that an adult can rent a room and have money left over for food & life on that wage.

Just strap on their job helmet and go down to jobland.

The answer is simple game theory. For a situation where corporations are forced to fix conditions, there has to be a significant large scale reduction in supply, which is an implementation nightmare. Unless that happens, one person quitting a job in protest is just an opportunity for another.

Maybe the average pay is $15/hour. We are not given enough data to estimate whether striking is rational.

Oh come on, you want people to be RESPONSIBLE? Inconceivable!

Most people have a herd mentality and it's very hard to get out of it, especially with the huge amount of propaganda telling everyone that everything is someone else's fault. Disgusting.

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