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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

> Our industry is very much in need of a temporary visa program for the low-skilled, essential workers

I think this is interesting because I hear a lot about a shortage of tech workers and the consensus I hear is that there really isn't a shortage, employers need to pay more. Or they need to offer training.

But here is another industry facing labor shortages. Is it really a shortage? My impression of restaurant work is that the kitchen staff get paid less and work more than the wait staff and there is little room for advancement, other than starting your own restaurant.

> I think millennials are really focused on quality of life

Ha! As opposed to what? Working really hard for some reason?

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In general a lot of these cities in the US have a tacit agreement with these kinds of businesses that they are allowed to violate labor regulations, health regulations, immigration regulations, wage regulations, so that they are able to provide lots of labor intensive services in high cost regions.

If the municipal government wants to shut down any restaurant in the city, they can under a panoply of pretexts. If the Federal government is allowed to enforce the various Federal laws and regulations being ignored, it can also.

A vibrant restaurant culture is a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

These municipal leaders cannot talk out of one side of their mouths about the wonders of a well-regulated economy and then out of the other side demand the privilege to apply those regulations inconsistently in a corrupt fashion.

Considering that there are too many restaurants in many of these cities with failure rates in the stratosphere and profits questionable except at the most hyper-successful locations, this is not a bad thing for such an industry to contract to correct the oversupply.

Notice in the article itself that it talks about restaurants turning to 'unconventional' labor pools like ex-addicts, ex-cons, underemployed veterans, and people they have fired before because it is no longer so easy to violate labor and immigration regulations with impunity. Is that so bad? Does this not solve more general problems internal to our society rather than trying to paper over them by importing more people?

You cut off your quote too early!

> He has also tried to clean up the kitchen in other ways. “You can’t come to work and scream at people,” he said. “When I was a younger chef, that was how I interacted with my team.

My god, imagine the horror of not being able to come into work and just scream at your employees.

The labor market is tight, near full employment. In very constrained locations (like SF) wages for kitchen staff have gone up significantly. Other places it's just hard to find people to do the job for what the market will bear.

We're reaching the point where we seriously need to think about assisting internal migration in the country, but before that can kick in we'll end up with a recession to fight off inflation.

The founder of BET is saying that this tight labor market has enabled people who previously were chronically unemployed to become employable in this economy.

It's not that we don't have able bodies available, we do, what we don't have is people already trained in a skill set available for cheap. We have people who could be trained, and we're seeing that, and we're seeing a reduction in undocumented labor undercutting legal labor. This is good for the American worker, even as the price of goods may rise marginally.

Also often the more marginal workers who do want to work have no cheap way to get to where the work is. In a world of Uber buses get eliminated, and the poor cannot get to work.

With the VC and profit margins of the headliners, asking a tech firm to pay more "feels normal".

My understanding is that most restaurants aren't in a position to pay much more; are the urban demographics different enough to support such a thing?

The article describes growth in the number of restaurants (and thus customer demand, more people dining out), so restaurants could increase prices.

If you can't afford to pay enough to retain labor, you need to charge more for your products or give labor equity. If you can't make money doing this (ROI not good enough if equity is diluted or people won't pay more for what you're selling) then you should not be in business.

The issue I have with restaurants saying they cant pay more is that FOH staff often bring in close to 10x of BOH. So there's actually plenty of money to go around, it just comes in the form of a mandatory 20% tip to a single person. Eliminate tipping, raise your prices, pay all your employees on an equivalent scale, give them healthcare and vacation time, and watch the "shortage" go away.

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