I used to have a cleaner come once every 2 weeks pre covid. That's stopped now and I don't pay them anymore. Should I keep paying them to not come in?
Cons: Totally arbitrary. Have a generous employer? Great! Stingy employer? Sucks for you. I'd also imagine that whether you'd get this kind of "relief" depends on your job, kind of like how waiters get tipped but fast food workers don't.
We usually think of wages as payment for work produced, and generally, if the cost of producing a thing isn't exceeded by the value created, you won't pay that cost.
But the true cost of labour is its upkeep, sustenance, that of its family, the training, risk, and uncertainty associated with the employment, as detailed 245 years ago by Adam Smith (Book 1, Chapter X, Wealth of Nations).
And that means, in a time when work is impossible, paying a maintenance wage to ensure future productive capacity.
But virtually no states offer unemployment insurance as a routine basis for self-employed individuals, which would include individuals with small businesses, gig workers, or independent contractors, which largely describes housecleaning services workers.
The US did pass emergency national legislation (the CARES Act) which allows (but does not AFAIU require) states to extend unemployment insurance to those workers. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20200617001228/https://money.usn...
Mind: I agree with your point from an ought perspective, unfortunately the is is at odds here. For the US, this means individuals have to step in.
My comment above only means to illustrate the economic rationale by which one might choose to do so. Unfortunately given market mechanics, most people will like decide not to. That's the cause of much of the economic disruption and dislocation of the past year, in the US and elsewhere.
is a convenient abstraction. in reality we're talking about people.
it's so miserably brutal to come into the comments of any article on hn where wealthy people (engineers) bandy about about working class people. i don't have much else to say because i'm not going to debate whether ___ tech company, at some (even nontrivial) cost to their equity holders, should help support people that make minimum wage. i'm only leaving this comment so that some can reflect on their position.
We fix the thing needing fixing right now with the tools we have.
Companies shouldn't have to do the "right thing" - they're concern is to make money for their owners. They should follow the rules of society, but should not be expected to offer charity whenever something calamitous happens.
Why give the illusion of choice between the right thing and the profitable thing?
The level of economic struggle in the US is unnecessary.
At what point do we people stand in solidarity to remedy this state of affairs?
We did that for gay people, black people, women, etc...
Should we not do that same thing on this quality of life matter?
If you seized all the wealth of every US billionaire and gave it equally to all US citizens 18 or older, each citizen would receive less than $20K. Not per year, but once ever.
There’s a lot of people demanding a lot of goods and services and most of that work is an actual grind.
There’s a difference between saying (obviously correctly) that gay people, black people, women should all be equally able to participate in the economic engine. It’s another thing entirely to eliminate the heat, friction, and struggle in that engine.
In that scenario, we would be talking about a small number of people, and the word unnecessary would be much harder to support.
That real grind matters. Without it, even more of us are worse off.
I agree it is a math problem, but disagree on framing it in immediate terms and in mere dollar terms.
Just insuring everyone can see the doctor costs the nation less and makes more of the dollars earned liquid.
There are a lot of things we can do to improve on the struggle. That does not have to mean dollars paid directly to people.
how much would you like to bet that not a single engineer here makes minimum wage?
I think that has more to do with Walmart than being a greeter. There are plenty of high end luxury shops where there is a well groomed man or woman at the front door who does nothing but greet you and open the door.
It's the idea of a bullshit job + jobs as an ends rather than a means + the additional distasteful nature of being waited upon like that.
Ironically, as soon as they began to ask where to find something I was required to point at another employee and tell them "He can help you!" so that I stay at the door doing the same thing over and over again.
Comic stuff.
> Ironically, as soon as they began to ask where to find something I was required to point at another employee
If that were me, I would have substituted "Can I help you find anything?" with something more like "Do you need any help?"
But another part of it is that Japan used to have a lot of pedestrian deaths by cars, like far more than US ever had. They remember this and it's why construction sites and parking garages have 5 apparently useless security guards watching everything.
Back in the early 1980s, I used to see a book in Tokyo bookstores called Japan’s Wasted Workers by Jon Woronoff. I assumed it was about those bank welcomers and the like. Peeking into it now at the Open Library [1], though, I see that it focuses on white-collar workers.
[1] https://openlibrary.org/search?q=Japan%27s+Wasted+Workers&mo...
Practically, you already are paying them indirectly through your tax dollars going towards the stimulus and unemployment programs.
Personally, I kept paying my cleaners, because my bottom line isn't that important to me. But it is (and should be) for companies.
/s