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Comment by haram_masala | Hacker News Reader

The alarming thing about this is that there are millions of people for whom an extra $600/week is “flush.”

$600/week is $30K/year annualized. Minimum wage ranges as low as $240/week depending on the State, so for many coming from those jobs this has been a bumper couple of months.

We had a dispute between employees of a coffee shop and the owners spill over onto our neighborhood mailing list.

The owners wanted all employees to be available to work 8-10 hours/week. Employees were understandably not thrilled about a few hours of work (even at $13.25, Portland minimum wage as of 7/1/20) knocking out the $600/week federal plus whatever state unemployment they were getting.

Employee who posted said that the owners would report anyone who wouldn't work as having quit. Much discussion followed.

Cherry Street Coffee in Seattle (local chain) did the same but a bit more brash.

They sent out texts to all employees after having no contact with them saying you must come back to work now or we will report it as refusal and also never allow those people to be eligible for employment again. No concern for people who may have already found new employment since the company abruptly laid them all off, you don't come back and you can never come back. Forced loyalists is a weird strat

For what it's worth, the employer is in the wrong; the employee need not go back to a materially worse job (as a demotion from 40 hours to 8-10 hours would be) and can continue receiving unemployment and looking for a comparable job.

They can also work less than they used to and still collect unemployment.

Personally know a business owner whose employees refuse to come back full time. They are still (were) getting the $600 booster despite earning 80-90% of their previous take home. And getting a small “normal” unemployment benefit from the state. Business owner reports as required and tells the employees that what they are doing may not be the best idea.

The worst situation I’ve seen are workers that work primarily on commissions and were not laid off. They’re stuck at their State minimums without any “Covid bonus” while seeing others get $1000/week sitting at home. It’s very perverse.

Yeah. This would have been a good time to introduce UBI, but instead we doubled down on the perverse incentives of existing welfare systems.

UI audit is based on samples, and most labor departments process more claims in March-July than they did in the last 5 years. It’s a smart move for the employee to stay away, especially if the job pays that shitty.

I wasn’t clear. The employees have returned to work. They are working less than full time hours in order to show diminished earnings and receive the $600 unemployment boost. They are receiving 80-90% of their normal wages from their employer and receiving unemployment benefits in addition to that.

That's working as designed. There's less work so people should work fewer hours and share the work.

That’s not the situation I am describing. There is no shortage of work for this particular business. The business owner wants all of the employees to return to full time hours. As a group they are unwilling to work full time hours because they would lose the $600 booster.

While I applaud congress for moving fast in March and April to get money out to people, there were bound to be holes in the act, and paying people more while on unemployment than they were previously making is one of them. It's not that I see it as a disincentive to work, but something feels very unfair about it, making for bad optics. I'm surprised the Democrats are pushing so hard for $600 without the caveat that unemployment won't pay more than you were previously making. Seems like a pretty easy compromise.

depends on one's priorities. that "extra" cash likely prevented an even worse pandemic outcome in the US, as paying people to say home (which is what this amounted to, essentially) was among the best public health outcomes that the US could have had engineered. a rare bug-turned-feature outcome.

As far as I understand the $600 was for people who were on unemployment, so they had no job to go to.

It's an election year. $600/week is a great motivator to encourage first time voters (and potential life long voters). I'm not surprised they want to be seen as fighting hard for down on their luck workers more than they want to compromise to help down on their luck workers.

Most people I've seen have simply been using that mismatch to push a higher minimum wage (of, say, $15, which a lot of people have been pushing for for a while, and is the same as $600 a week).

If people are making more by NOT working than they would otherwise make working, isn't that a signal that wages are significantly too low?

Have any PPP recipients profited from the stimulus?

$600/week is roughly the median personal income, so we should expect it to be an improvement for half of all Americans.

Right. If you're living in NYC/SF/LA/Boston it's easy to have a skewed perspective on income and cost of living. Take a "typical" city like Columbus, Ohio: the average rent for a 2-bedroom apartment is around $1200 (https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-columbus-oh-rent-...), which is quite affordable if you and your partner or roommate are each making $30k/year.

NYC/SF may also give you a skewed perspective about 2-bedroom apartments being reasonable places to live. Where single family house ownership is readily available to the middle class, multifamily rental stock is decidedly not middle class.

With $60k in steady household income, you can get a mortgage for a nice house in Columbus.

There are also your state benefits. Which in texas aren't that great but combined it would come to ~1150 a week for me. And on average it was about ~800/wk here from what I've read which is ~40k a year. Normally it'd be 9,800/yr for that group.

State benefit in Hawaii is $5 per week.

$5 as in 20 quarters? wow when was that law written 1947?

This would make a great one-liner for the Silicon Valley series.

"Hey, I'm getting an extra $30k per year!"

"That's it? That's nothing."

Don't quit your day job.

600 + state unemployment can easily crack $1000 a week, that is double what most retail workers are making. It is boggling to me that grocery clerks are even showing up. Constant exposure to corona for 2k a month or sit at home for 4K? I would definitely be figuring out any way I could to get fired.

Not sure if this is true in all states, but in mine getting fired for cause disqualifies you from receiving unemployment. You have to be laid off/terminated by no fault of your own.

It easily is.

I spend more than that on rent, but between my wife and I, we could easily cover all expenses on $600/week each. If I left the California coast, I wouldn't want for anything material on this budget, and I think I could maintain 2k/month of savings beyween the two of us while covering all other expenses.

And as I understand it, the 600/WK is on top of other normal payments.

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