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Comment by Multicomp | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: Because of a months-long labor shortage and being unable to staff operations even after multiple temp agencies were engaged, an employer somewhere in the universe raised wages to a floor of 15 per hour this past month. It used to start at minimum wage, then went to 8 in 2014, now here.

Everyone who was getting +1,2,3 dollars over that got bumped porportionally, so if you were at 15, you now got 17, if you were at 22 (only things like paramedics) you were at 25 etc.

Why? Amazon has a warehouse nearby. We've bled staff to them for years.

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A local union factory relatively recently started hiring like crazy a few years back. Their wages were higher than every other job in the area, and the same thing happened. Within a year a job that WAS offering $10.50 and saying that they were generous started offering #$12... then $13.50... then $14. Now they're also offering a few hundred dollar bonus as well.

Has there been any effect on downstream prices of the goods and services offered by those companies, or has it all been pure gain for the workers?

Making it obvious they could have afforded that before.

I don’t understand this argument. I could afford to pay more for most services but I don’t unless I have to.

Are you a company? You are an individual and paying for things comes from the money that you earned with your own labor.

A company's money comes purely from extracting value from its workers. It then tries to return as little value as possible to the people who created that value, in order to reward its owners.

"A company's money comes purely from extracting value from its workers"

This is really hard to believe because it's pretty observable that labor isn't the only input to production. If that was truly the case, why would anyone work for a company? Why not go work for yourself and skip the middle man?

The truth is because production not only needs labor, but it needs capital, land, and entrepreneurship as well. Labor is only one component, and a decreasing one relative to years gone by. (For instance, the US auto manufacturers make more cars now then ever with fewer employees tham ever)

> I don’t understand this argument.

It counters a common argument against minimum wage increases. The argument goes "Small businesses can't afford raises. If they are forced to pay their employees more, they will go bankrupt, leading to unemployment, and low wages are better than unemployment, so you shouldn't raise the minimum wage"

Makes sense. I feel like both of these arguments are oversimplifications.

I'm surprised paramedics would only make $22/hour.

Estheticians and hair stylists make more than that (including tips) at a senior level.

It's a gatekeeping job for a lot of medical stuff. Also if you're looking to become a firefighter or cop it's a very nice thing to already have on your resume.

Basically people put up with it because it's usually a stepping stone toward a job where you can print easy money.

What job (where you can print easy money) does experience working as a paramedic directly qualify you for?

Working as an EMT counts as "clinical experience" some amount of which is required or "encouraged but practically speaking required unless you know someone who can pull strings for you" for med school admission.

Physician Associate. To apply for PA school, one must have health care work experience.

https://www.aapa.org/career-central/become-a-pa/

There sure are a lot of roadblocks in our country to having enough medical professionals to keep wages from going down.

It’s shocking to me that this hasn’t been addressed in healthcare reform.

There's a powerful guild that spends a lot of money to maintain the status quo.

Including tips and senior level makes a big difference.

What do entry leaves hairstylists make?

Lol... back when I was a paramedic circa ~2014, paramedics started at $14/hour where I'm from. The nurses were starting at more like ~$40/hr. (Northern coastal CA, btw)

Crappy job, terrible pay. I only did it because I thought the skillset would be valuable while I got an engineering degree. Newly graduated engineers with a 4-year degree and an EIT cert. (in the civil field) started at around $18-$20 / hr.

A minor nitpick, it’s not so much a labour shortage as a wage shortage. Clearly the workers are there, shown clearly by them taking jobs when paid better.

A useful definition of labor shortage would be when there exists no one(s) that can perform a certain task in a certain area, such as not having a specific type of doctor in a rural setting.

The learning curve for warehouse work is very low, so if you cannot find someone that can do it, you are either in a geriatric community or you are not offering attractive wages (so wage shortage is more accurate than labor shortage).

Although wage shortages can lead to labor shortages years down for tasks that have high learning curves.

>you are not offering attractive wages

IOW, not competitive in a free market in labor.

Employers who talk about free markets have less enthusiasm when it hits the expense side of their P&L.

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