Why are American workers becoming harder to find?
economist.com
economist.com
Very few employers seem interested in hiring "part time" workers with higher priority commitments that may interfere with their desired schedule. This extends to "can't work on $holy_days" and things that have legal backing; hourly employees aren't likely to pursue the theoretical means of redress they have for those incidents.
Then add the other layers of suck jobs have now. Instead of being an expert in "what plumbing stuff our store has and where"; a clerk is now expected to meet credit card signup metrics, first, foremost, and only. A retired plumber who wanted to work at the home improvement store has what incentive to put up with this? Serving the community is great but those people have been eliminated as too old and crunchy and too hard for HR to deal with.
A number of years ago I heard Reid Hoffmann on a podcast discussing how algorithms would replace management. How could technology replace the human demands of management? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Now I see that this type of thing is what Hoffman meant. The human aspect would be removed.
A faceless, nameless algorithm would take over. Scheduling some of the most vulnerable workers in our society to ensure they don’t cross over the 40-hour per week threshold for work that would require benefits or overtime but also to ensure they don’t get paid to work an extra minute when there may be a bit of downtime.
I'm definitely a bit of a utopianist, but in my mind the power of consumers versus profit driven business people always is cyclical.
I find it much more likely that the technology to autonomously create houses, grow and harvest food, and generally automate a sane, healthy life for a person will advance significantly, and some philanthropist trillionaire will buy up vast swathes of currently uninhabited land and turn it into a utopia.
Believe me, if ownership thinks it can work "good enough," they will certainly try until it is. It won't be a robot like you think. Think Uber; an algorithm manages the drivers, they just aren't technically employees. Think Comcast technicians. They drive around all day and a computer tells them their next job and even how to get there.
>Lead people with basically skynet and suddenly faith in the system plummets unless it's flawless from the start.
What faith in the system are you referring to?
- Either Saturday or Sunday off
- No consecutive days are off
- two openings (start around 7 or 8 am, end by 3 or 4 pm)
- two closings (start around 2 pm, end by 10 pm or so)
- one normal day (start around 9:30 am)
This was how they used to 'enslave' their workers: by ruining their sleep patterns (two opening vs two closing); by not doing any productive work on their own (by not giving two successive days off); by preventing people from going to school (through different start times).
Your local big box store will regularly schedule people because it's a) free and b) improves employee productivity, reduces no-shows, etc, etc. They'd basically be giving up free money not to. Furthermore these kinds of employees often have complex transportation arrangements to giving them a regular schedule greatly improves their reliability.
The people who are new or the unreliable guy or whatever will still get crap hours because you've gotta have someone to absorb the week to week oddities in the schedule but generally speaking regular employees get regular hours.
A bunch of the big box stores tried this at one point or another. Pretty much all the local stores ignored or overrode it where possible (because it's so bad you don't even need to do it to know it's stupid). And then corporate realized it was stupid and stopped.
The people implying this is typical are only one step of whoever came up with it. Because it's simply and obviously not, and anyone who's ever had to manage employee schedules knows that this kind of scheduling is just not tenable, even less so for the kinds of McJobs where people always assert this is the case. Best case this kind of scheduling is a fast path to massive turnover which wastes money. You can't treat minimum wage employees you on-boarded over the course of a morning like this because the will just go somewhere else and be on-boarded over the course of a different morning. "Cog in the machine" policy and efficient on-boarding are two way streets.
Oops! I'd be unhirable. Or fired. Or slowly "let go". Suddenly poorer chances of advancement. Regardless of employment history. Regardless of turning up every previous allotted day on time. Doesn't matter.
Corporations are actively hostile. Then they complain about not being able to find workers.
They disallow consecutive days off so that no employees are going to have a situation where they feel comfortable leaving town on a trip, so that they will always be around the store. They screw with employee hours so that employees are unable to hold a comparable second job.
I suspect it's deliberate. If you can't plan your life, you are a slave to work.
First, scheduling was always hard. So they did everything they could to make it easier for themselves, including last-minute changes that they didn't even tell you about. You were expected to somehow check the physical schedule in the store right before the new week started, even if you weren't scheduled that day.
Second, they'd get sick of the complainers, so the worst complainers would get preferential treatment. The best workers ended up with the worst shifts, too, because they were less likely to just call in sick or quit.
I feel like there were more lessons I learned about scheduling back then, but it's been quite a while now. It was always all about the managers avoiding personal hardship, and very little about the company itself.
I think parent's point is that employees care. Employers probably don't care that they're paying employees minimum wage, but if other places pay higher than that the the employees (who do care) would switch to the other jobs.
>I suspect it's deliberate. If you can't plan your life, you are a slave to work.
Are you suggesting they're deliberately doing this so "you are a slave to work"? How does the employer benefit from this?
Some employers do this on purpose because they don't want their employees getting second or even third jobs that might leave them exhausted by the time they arrive for their shifts at the first job.
I like your idea but for the vast majority of jobs, the number of times you can fail to show up is in the neighborhood of “1”. You will run out of jobs far more quickly than you can acquire new ones. Assuming there is a fixed number of employers in your area, you will go through them pretty quickly.
I like the idea for full-time remote tech work though, although I’d never have the stones to try it. Sign on to 10 different companies, do the minimum to not be fired, carefully accept the right set of Zoom meetings...
I requested a copy of a job background check from TransUnion and it was creepy the amount of info that had been collected on me.
There are big brother lists to track you.
You wake up and have no idea what job you are doing in the morning versus the afternoon, and you could see stats on what skills are making the most money to find training or shadowing opportunities.
From an economic perspective this is highly inefficient. The free market isn't about propping up nonviable business models, it's about getting rid of them. If you can just fire your employees for arbitrary reasons it tells a lot about your business, it means you actually don't need those employees and as soon as another business pops up that needs them you don't care about losing them. In other words: You don't deserve them.
Just think about it, where is productivity growth supposed to come from if you treat each employee like a slave? If you need to grow your business your strategy is to just get more slaves. You're never going to think about making sure your employees can perform to the best of their ability. You're also never going to use labor efficiently because all "business problems" can be solved by hiring another employee that doesn't complain.
None of this makes sense. Cheap labor was a mistake to begin with, just because corporations got addicted to cheap labor doesn't mean we have to continue that trend.
Unabashed capitalism at work.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor... At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford's turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.
When cost of everything is going up, you can't keep inflation at bay.
From personal experience, the hardest part of an office job is putting up with all the conformity and bureaucracy and politics. For a lot of people in lower skill jobs, they may just not be interested in that stuff (also a reason people didn't go to more education). And so if front line service jobs are getting dominated by all the corporate stuff we have to put up with, I can imagine that pushing more people out of the system. Even things as trivial as having to email or fill out a job application online probably exclude many people. Not to mention having to be monitored by an app, etc.
Anyway, just a theory, I'm really just curious to know if this could be a factor based on what people's experience is in these kind of jobs.
If you have a manual labor job, the opportunity to be paid to sit down while someone yammers on about something or other and maybe shows a movie is quite welcome.
It was 3 weeks before I graduated from college. I had to drive to another town and sit through 3 hours of presentations on how to do the basic things that I had been training other employees to do for years.
Sorry, but this is just a staggeringly awful FirstWorldProblems/Karen kind of thing. I mean, sure, maybe that's the worst part of your "office job" (which I'm guessing is, like many people here, a six figure development position in a career you genuinely enjoy), but you say that because you've never had to be on your feet for 8 hours straight bagging groceries or emptying trash cans or entering orders from cranky customers into a POS terminal.
Good grief. Bad training meetings are what you choose to complain about? Really?
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant.
You: > you've never had to be on your feet for 8 hours straight bagging groceries
You don’t know that, and the evidence we have implies you are quite possibly wrong.
Person you're replying to is the definition of a techie in his or her own bubble.
Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic.
Incredible. It's like people--including low wage people--understand there's a pandemic going on.
I wonder when economists will catch on.
The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important.
Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic."
Why are you going on a vaguely related rant about economists when the article (presumably written by an economist in the wider sense) agrees with you? And why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments section? What is with the quality of discussion these days?
My favorite is the owner of a liquor store in my area. I indirectly know the guy — they are printing money from the pandemic, expanded the business across storefronts to keep up with demand, operate 4 delivery trucks, etc.
The guy gets on TV complaining that he has to pay $17 to hire drivers.
I think USA is still in a very good position compared to other countries as it is still seen as one of the best places to emigrate to. Other countries have it much worse and declining demographics will kill them faster.
I fail to understand why any business should pay more than market rate for anything. I get that you want the market rate to be higher, but I have yet to ever have encountered a business that completely disregards market rate and just blows their wad on the first employee they hire.
Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.
Firms should have to compete for labour. Not getting labour and the existential risk that poses to firms drives automation and innovation. They are capitalists supposedly. Deploy some capital, or close and get out the way so somebody else will.
Venerating individual businesses stops capitalism working. It’s time to give up believing firms have a right to exist and that they are doing anybody a favour by existing. Let competition do its job of getting rid of the bad and encouraging the good.
No one is in a capitalist system. Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters.
As a result there will always be tariffs, subsidies or tax breaks to support different types of commercial work.
Is it just a rhetorical tool? Some times it reads as if people are actually arguing based on a pure capitalist model and it’s confusing.
Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market.
The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.
The market won't solve this.
On one side there is inflation which ruins the economic recovery (too generous benefits) and on the other side you have mass suffering (too stingy benefits). As the primary driver of the shortage (the fear of COVID) goes down, we also need to scale back benefits while maintaining that delicate balance between too generous and too stingy. And we can't stop decreasing benefits until people begin to accept those less desirable jobs again. Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.
The article didn't have anything to say about those who work multiple part time jobs, which I suspect is important. Getting paid 50% more to work half as much will leave many low income workers in a precarious position. Worse yet, the threat of job loss (either due to mandated closures or a business failing) introduces the risk of being denied benefits should they be needed again.
It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did.
I have seen them being dismissive of mathematicians as well. I think only physicists are spared their scorn.
Even within software engineers they consider themselves the smartest. They are also simultaneously dismissive of Google's interview process, if they fail it; while respecting Googles engineering prowess.
No wonder this is the most upvoted response.
There are times when perspectives from the outside should be considered and be given the dignity of a credible response. Even though that appears to be happening more often now that a microscopic virus has thrust a grand social experiment upon us, it has been all too rare in the past. It is also worth noting that software engineers are far from the only ones going unheard when speaking up. Many outside the discipline have done so when the reality of economics didn't reflect their reality.
The only exception is the commenter who implied you were an out of touch ivory-tower academic because you called the pandemic benefits overgenerous. It’s the only reply whose author seems to have actually read your comment and it doesn’t even make an argument, only calls you names.
To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because the right was representing coal miners who felt like their jobs were at risk and the left was representing environmentalists who appreciated having a rock-solid justification for why we needed to switch to forms of energy production that emit less carbon (which usually means they pollute less). This got converted in the cultural conciseness to the left “following the science” and the right distrusting it and thinking they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than people whose job it is to study the topic at hand. But that want why, it was just because the obvious prescription coming from science was bad for the population the right represented and good for the population the left represented. (If you still feel the reason the left supported climate change is because they believe what scientists tell them, why does the left broadly oppose nuclear?)
Now, the cultural battleground is moving from climate change and social issues like gay marriage where the science is either neutral or on the side of the left, to economic issues where it’s not so clear cut. For example, there’s wide agreement among economists that the corporate tax is one of the most distortionary and least efficient taxes, and should ideally be reduced to very low rates if not zero. Yet this is broadly ignored on the left, who want to instead make “corporations pay their fair share”, as of whatever you intuitively feel is a corporation’s fair share is the economically optimal corporate tax rate.
Economists are also not united in supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. (Actually if I remember correctly the majority opposite it.) If the left was truly pro-science, they’d ask economists what they thought the minimum wage should be, possibly fund studies to help determine the socially optimal amount, then implement whatever number they say. But that’s not how the number was chosen and now since there’s disagreement among economists about whether it’s a good idea, the left needs to justify why they suddenly know better than the people whose job it is to study this stuff, and that manifests as calling all economists stupid or in the pocket of big business whenever the topic comes up.
Obviously this post wasn’t about minimum wage, but what I’m trying to communicate is that economists are now seen by the left (mostly the young online left) as agents of the enemy, and many see it as their prerogative to make sure nobody has a good impression of them. In their circles everyone knows that, while you should follow the science, these economists either don’t really know what they’re talking about or are being actively deceptive and so their opinions can be safely disregarded. How else can you explain why the GP comment felt the need to call economists stupid before even reading the article to figure out what they had to say?
First, there was no need for the political rant… the answer to the above question is simple: people just read the headline, not the article.
Second, economics isn’t “science” any more than any other “social science”, so the left being “pro-science” or “anti-science” doesn’t really apply.
Economists are not seen as “agents of the enemy” by the left. That’s absurd. There are many economist across the left spectrum: from Stieglitz to Picketty and Kelton.
Stop it. You can’t try to make a point about “sides” having an agenda and then write… this. It looks foolish.
It didn't start with climate change, that was just a sequel to asbestos and smoking denialism.
- from the ivory tower
It's not about feeding and clothing everyone who needs it. It's about seeing if there are any jobs out there that people feel are beneath them and if you find any, lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad.
Profit > People
I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else.
I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings.
It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.
Yes, these “jobs” are fine as long as everything goes to plan, but is it really that much to ask to not have to live under the sword of Damocles?
Probably the hardest part was how depressed I was, even as my body was recovering, I simply wasn’t prepared to start hustling to get my sales income back up, pay for physical therapy, deal with the hospital & insurance company, etc.
Like many folks here, I worked full-time minimum wage for years before eventually entering the professional world, and I can say given the choice now, I'd absolutely prefer the make-your-own-hours contract model to obligation of a fixed-hour in-person position. Of course there are drawbacks, like the lack of health coverage (though I'm Canadian so I'm not sure how this would work in the states exactly), but given the option, I'd still choose the former.
Or are you talking about workmen's comp coverage?
I'm not implying we should all afford a living in San Francisco, but an anecdote that represents the average case would be more relevant. The prospect of having a family with a couple of kids to take care of is quite the norm (still)
So two to six month's savings. Painful but not career-ending.
So your idea makes sense.
I don't think it will. I know plenty of people who've worked retail and still treat others like trash.
That being said, I still agree that empathy in general seems to be trending downward and my assumption is that online life makes it a lot easier to dehumanize other people which makes it easier to treat people like shit.
I'm trying to translate it into the Australian work context, but we don't tie healthcare to employment so I'm a bit confused.
Prior to Obama, low wage workers might be scheduled to work full time without health insurance. If they're poor enough, they might get Medicaid from the state; otherwise they get to ruin their credit and claim bankruptcy if they show up at the emergency room.
Obama passed ACA, which required employers with full time workers to provide health insurance or pay a fine per worker. Full time is defined as 30 hours per week or more by ACA. So in low wage jobs, employers responded by scheduling people for 29 hours.
So if you work multiple jobs or a job+doordash/uber/etc... you may work full time, and not have any health insurance because no one employer is going over 29 hours.
ACA also expanded Medicaid, but some states decided to decline that expansion. So whether that covers a low wage worker depends on where they are, the size of their household, and their total household earnings.
For many of these workers, it's not just the risk of unexpected medical bills that they can't pay... they rarely have savings, so if they miss a few days of work (say because they contracted COVID), that can spiral into a series of missed bills. And with the eviction moratorium coming to an end, that now includes losing their home.
* American healthcare is too expensive. The problem is long known and nobody wants to solve it. That problem is administrative inefficiency. Solving that problem means terminating the a large segment of a massive industry (destroying a massive number of jobs). Drugs are expensive too, but drug pricing problems impacts specific persons that when averaged across the entirety of the population become only a tiny part of the industry wide problem.
Since medicine is expensive everybody is reliant upon insurance. The options are private insurance (expensive), employer offered insurance, and government insurance (designed for low income people and poor choices/service).
The exceptions are Obama care and military. Military has a wonderful health insurance plan called Tricare. Tricare is great for the patient because they cover just about everything but they are really hard about releasing funds to medical providers so some medical providers refuse to take Tricare.
Obama care is a new private insurance option from the government that provides an affordable insurance option partially subsidized by government funding.
I have known people who are not insured and refused to get insurance then just never go to the doctor. Wonderful medical insurance is a primary reason I remained employed by the military for a number of years.
No.
> Or is this casual work where you get a higher hourly loading to compensate?
No.
It is precisely as horrific as you would imagine for those low-wage workers who want full-time jobs to obtain those healthcare benefits, but keep running into this issue in job after job. The official tax-oriented definition of "full-time" [1] is a bit more nuanced than what you will colloquially hear in discussions, but in broad terms, once you are put into the HR system for more than 30 hours in a week of work, the threshold to full-time is triggered. It is a binary switch, no spectrum, no gradient.
This doesn't even begin to get into how capital-inefficient and service-poor so many of the healthcare plans are once you do get access to them as a low-wage worker. Nor how so many of these workers are so completely unequipped and unprepared to comprehend the fiscal realities of engaging these plans.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
And so of course 90%+ of the companies that can short on this, do. It's as awful as you think.
https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl...
The reality is that they're being paid to stay home. A lot of people (myself included) would have loved the opportunity to take one of those $12/hr greeting jobs when I was 16. Instead, I managed to get $9/hr setting up a companies internal network.
You're correct, this is America. You can work hard and build something. America is intentionally setup NOT to give you anything, but to make as many opportunities as possible open to you. That's why people brave deserts to come here.
There aren't any static classes (although the education system is quickly becoming one), that's what makes america great. Honestly, health care isn't what most of the poor care most about (having been there, it is a concern, just not #1); medicaid and medicare cover you if you're poor enough, hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.
How did you come to this conclusion? Is it the lack of social safety net that opens opportunities? Does the lack of parental leave open up opportunities for mothers to breastfeed? Or having to work multiple jobs open up opportunities to spend time with one’s family and participate in the community?
Every time I've been in that category, it's been my #1 concern. Medical bills are also the #1 reason for bankruptcies in the United States.
> hospitals will drop 80-90% of your bill if you're over that, etc. etc.
My experience is... different. Not only are adjustments more modest, not only are they harder to get than you're implying in the first place, I've found that hospitals will hound you for a $100 copay they think they didn't receive because when you paid it they accidentally credited it to the wrong account (glad I could dig up the receipt).
There's things to value about America's enterprising spirit and some of its policies, but health care is pretty far from it. Overall it's a drag on the rest of the economy, and the incentives are wrong for there to be private solutions.
Socioeconomic mobility in the US is amongst the lowest of developed countries.
If a lack of static classes is what makes a country great, then can we assume that a great many other developed countries with much more socioeconomic mobility are greater?
If what makes America great is all these opportunities, as you say, then something must have gone very wrong since so few people are using these opportunities to move up.
The majority of people don't want to move to America. This is simple math. There are about 7 billion people on Earth. 300 million are already in America. Approximately an additional million people move to America every year legally, and some number enter illegally. Even if twice as many people enter illegally, that's only 3 million people, which is just 0.045% of the people on Earth.
Many Americans believe that everyone is desperate to leave where they live and move to the USA and chase the American Dream. This belief is wrong.
I don’t follow the jump from that to “people must work in a grueling fashion just to survive unless they’re lucky”. That is inhumane, and what makes America’s form of capitalism especially sinister. Have some damn compassion.
I think it's because people stopped spending as much discretionary money as they did before. People couldn't go out or travel because everything was closed. "Dinner and a movie" turned into "Netflix and a pizza", which is allowed people to save money for a year.
Some people are spending that saved money on real estate or crypto. Others, I believe, are giving up part time work that they used to do for extra income. A spouse can afford to quit their part time job and stay home to take care of children. Someone can get by on a stipend that wouldn't have been enough when people were spending more money.
If this is true, we should see a rapid return to low wage jobs as the country starts to re-open in the coming months. The federal unemployment increase runs out in September (I believe). If people don't start going work after that then this could be a larger societal shift.
you seriously think former mcdonalds workers - now unemployed - have taken their year of unemployment and bought either of those things? Really?
Crypto? Sure maybe like 20 bucks once, but the rest of that money is for food and rent and maybe a small hobby.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020/10/how-ha...
a good chunk did go to savings but for budgets this small that usually means a savings account or cash at home.
i expect unemployment was spent similarly.
Because people have had enough. We saw the way companies treated employees during the pandemic—that is to say, like firewood that they could burn for profit, replacing them as they went through them—and many people are no longer interested in allowing themselves to be exploited for a pittance.
It's not a terribly uncommon phenomenon for people to be in a bad situation that seems, or has been treated as, normal for a long time, but when the situation changes temporarily, find that this sort of opens their eyes to how bad it had been all along.
Quarantine has given people a chance to decide if that's what they want to do, at the previous wages.
Especially after adjusting to life without restaurants, bars, hotels etc. I don’t see consumers suddenly paying the prices that would support significantly nicer lifestyles for all the workers involved in these things.
Not until this month, there are lots of bets on what's going to happen to the housing market but I'm glad I don't own a house.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/05/25/have_u...
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/09/2...
Its not a stretch at all to say that median incomes have been stagnant since the late 90s.
In your scenario, who will work in these low skill jobs?
What effect do you think reducing peoples options will have on their lives?
Some people dont like change, the jobs earlier were good enough so they didnt bother making that change.
After Covid people had plenty of time to think and implement that change.
> In your scenario, who will work in these low skill jobs?
Undocumented workers, maybe?
I wanna know who the clown was that came up with this term, because there's a ton of stuff in the world that is scarce, you know, like homes.
There are no post-scarcity economies currently in existence, but with increasing automation such a thing may become possible in the future, and the transition may take a long time. There's no physical reason why homes must remain scarce forever, for example. That said, I don't think what paulpauper describes sounds like post-scarcity, as it's just about money; I think of things more like Iain M Banks's Culture.
The wait time to get a new refrigerator is as high as 6 months right now for some people.
America isn't in any danger of transitioning to poat-scarcity anything anytime soon, and I mean that with “soon” on a geological time scale.
Also, “post-scarcity” and “economy” are mutually exclusive; “economy” is the mechanism by which scarce resources are distributed. If you don’t have scarcity, you don’t have (or have any reason for) an economy.
No, because the wealth is concentrated among a few people.
Those Uber drivers either have confused unrealized gains with wealth, or have realized those gains by leaving someone else holding the bag. Probably someone else just like them.
What's the evidence that this is happening, or is going to happen? The top 3 categories in the CPI are housing, food, and transport. I can't imagine any of these transitioning to "post scarcity" any time soon. The only thing that can plausibly head toward post scarcity are education and recreation, which can be delivered digitally, but those only make up 3.0% and 5.8% of the CPI respectively.
My wife was just driving through Kentucky and West Virginia to visit some relatives. She is seeing a radically different world there. Job postings and labor shortages are everywhere and most of the people she is visiting are unemployed and don’t do anything.
According to the BLS current population survey (CPS), the unemployment rate for Kentucky fell 0.3 percentage points in April 2021 to 4.7%. The state unemployment rate was 1.4 percentage points lower than the national rate for the month.
So much for your anecdote. Unemployment in Texas is way higher than in Kentucky.
The other piece is this: Population of Texas in 2020: 29,360,759 Population of Kentucky in 2020: 4,477,251
A few days later in either Arkansas or Missouri I was inside a McDonalds offering $200 signing bonus, $100 after 30 days, $100 after another 30 days.
Yesterday I was at the Walmart distribution center in Houston (I'm a truck driver) and they had a banner stretched across a street-visible building for starting warehouse wages of $17.50/hour.
No idea whether any of those jobs get you more than 29 hours/week.
Help wanted signs are everywhere. Metal working. "Labor." Truck stop cashiers. There are signs as well as audio in the truck stops, and they brag about "flexible scheduling." Maybe that means you can schedule around school, or maybe that means "it's slow today, go home."
The big three truck stop chains (TA/Petro, Pilot/FlyingJ, Loves/Speedco) used to always be clean and serviced. Recently that's become spotty, all over the country.
Once it goes back to pre-pandemic then the issues are still pay sucks, job sucks, no retirement options, no to little healthcare etc...
The one thing we have been seeing and will only get worse is the skill gap. Many skills you cannot learn overnight and many people are assuming 'other' jobs will be there for them.
Short term govt. checks. Short/Long term skill gap.
The company I work at has no trouble finding employees, but I have a well-paying swe position.
I haven't heard any of these complaints from two of America's largest retailers that are known for providing full-time work with relatively good Healthcare and time off benefits (amazon and costco).
I agree that the current situation doesn’t need much explanation. Things are not exactly where they were pre-covid but the employment situation seems pretty darn healthy considering the year we just had.
+ Total Unemployed, Plus Discouraged Workers, Plus All Other Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force, as a Percent of the Civilian Labor Force Plus All Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force
++ U5 plus Total Employed Part Time for Economic Reasons (i.e. involuntary part time)
Also, hard to find a job where you can leave at 2 or 3pm to pick up those kids from school. And after-school care isn't cheap ($20-40/day). Tough if your making $10-15/hr.
Jobs in health care, recreation and hospitality report the highest level of job openings, relative to employment. Many of these involve plenty of person-to-person contact, making their workers especially vulnerable to infection (a study from California earlier this year found that cooks were most at risk from dying of covid-19). By contrast, in industries where maintaining social distancing or being outside is often easier, labour shortages are less of an issue. The number of job openings per employee in the construction industry is lower today than it was before the pandemic.
It's very strange.
In any case, this is a good thing. When unemployment rates are high, the least employable people tend to be unemployed. When unemployment is low, the least attractive jobs are unfilled.
You might say this is obvious because TINSTAAFL (or "paid interview" rather than "free lunch") but the target demographic is less likely to be aware of contractual nuances like this.
This hasn't been for just McDonald's either. I seem to recall seeing a similar setup at a Jack in the Box location before McDonalds started implementing the kiosks. They ended up tearing out the automated kiosks because nobody used them and put back in another manned register because people ignored them.
I really wonder what drives people to prefer placing their order with a human being at the register instead of an automated machine. Personally I prefer the kiosks as a well done one sometimes shows options I didn't even know existed and its far simpler to review my order before sending it off. I've yet to have a bad experience with a kiosk, other than one completely crashing halfway through accepting the credit card making me wonder if the order was placed or not.
Also last time I was at McDonalds the kiosks were displaying a Windows BSOD.
OTOH, I use the Starbucks online ordering all the time to have my order ready the moment I walk in. It let me feel like I was "getting out" during 2020 with minimal risk.
Plenty of McDonald's cashiers aren't great at using the POS, I don't know what we're expecting out of the average customer. 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
Like, Starbuckses are usually out of more than half the things on their app. And lower end places are just going to ignore your requests.
For delivery that doesn’t even include the surprisingly high rate of the driver just giving you someone else’s order - I wonder who loses on the refund in that situation.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
(1) Lack of workers with the required skills (a matter of making such education accessible, possibly at-work, and prioritizing that sector)
(2) Pay below what's livable / better options (a matter of increasing pay and making sure certain employees can't just hire illegal immigrants which they pay less by taking advantage of their illegal status and lower expectations)
* No job security - if your boss decides they want to fire you, you are SOL figuring out how to pay this month's rent
* No healthcare
* No paid time off - not that the standard 2 weeks for higher wage earners is much better
* Having to deal with abuse from management and customers with no recourse
* Scheduling hours so you effectively have no free time outside work
* The legal minimum wage, being expected to be propped up by tips, so you can actually survive
* The only incentive to work better is from the fear that what you do have could be taken away at any moment
When I was younger I worked a grocery store and it had none of these issues. There were full time employees there who were pretty happy (the wage was low, but you could live a meager life without struggling). Is it really a suprise that it's hard to find employees if you treat then like they are worthless?
Sure the second part could be luck but the first part has become a statistic. These low wage jobs are absolutely flooded with applicants.
Wages will temporarily increase, but once things return to normal and we no longer subsidize unemployment as we presently are, I would assume the glut of job supply will go down. This will likely spur further investment in automation or other ways to reduce business reliance on labor, especially at very large scale.
Just increase wages a lot and there will be no shortage of labour. And if employees cannot afford higher cost of labour they could just drop out of the market.
As a result of the labour shortage, wages went up and workers became more mobile, which created the need for surnames that weren't strictly profession-related. The King even passed a law to try and limit wages with mixed results.
This pandemic may well end up being a huge boon for real wages.
As many have noted: there is no labour shortage. There's simply an unwillingness to pay what the market demands. Additionally, the last 12-15 months have taught many people that commuting into an office is completely unnecessary and is essentially wage theft since you aren't paid for those 1-2 hours of commuting time.
A fallacy of youth I've found is to fall into the trap that things are only getting worse. A benefit of having some more experience and perspective is the realization that things happen in cycles.
We had union movement spring up, which were a huge boon for working conditions and real wages. In many cases the pendulum eventually swung too far in the other direction and unions became a tool for political power and an excuse for inefficiencies that paralyzed industries.
And then in the last 50+ years in the US we've had the cult of Ayn Rand acolytes take hold and sell people on the idea that they need to be beholden to employers. It's partly (IMHO) why we've largely seen near zero real wage growth in 40 years.
My hope is this is a turning point where we'll start to see it's unacceptable to not provide living wages and not to provide basic human rights like affordable health care.
This won't be a quick process but the main purveyors of pro-corporate propaganda, the Republican party, is essentially in its death throes. It is a now a minority that can only govern through voter suppression, disenfranchisement and gerrymandering.
Here's something I want any defenders of billionaires to consider: if you give people a living wage, what do you think is going to happen? They're going to spend what they earn. This is the fabric of an economy. After all, who does a trillion-dollar market cap company sell to if only 0.01% of the people on Earth have anything to spend?
If a business can't survive that then the business simply isn't viable.
Why exactly should we expect people to work below a livable wage just to keep a non-viable business afloat?
Then you spun off into tired partisan flamewar.
dang devotes a lot of energy to encouraging people not to do that, so I'm going to do the same here.
The problem is that the maths doesn't work anymore. Wages have been flat for so long that the slight increase in costs, distributed around a person's life, caused by the pandemic pushes McJobs into "working there makes a loss" territory.
Every single employer that crawls out from under their rock and howls some version of "nobody wants to work anymore" is saying "I pay crap wages for my crap job, and expected to do so forever". When the boss and all the customers spend every moment of every day taking a dump on you, they should be grateful when the worst that happens is you stop turning up.
Even worse, they also expected to make obscene profit off the backs of those workers being paid crap wages.
McDonald's, as one example, makes $10B in profit every single year. [1]. Their profit went up during the pandemic, 13% YoY.
How anyone thinks they shouldn't increase wages and be content with only a few billion in profit is insanity.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...
[1] https://work.chron.com/average-income-fast-food-franchise-ow...
Now I'm starting to think all of this is simply the endgame of our education system.
1) A PhD is generally an economic disaster. For 6+ years you are making less than minimum wage, and only the most technical fields benefit from it economically. Those 6 years put you almost $250K behind someone earning a decent engineering salary--and the working engineer has a 6 year experience record and corresponding professional network. If you have to spend a couple more years as an underpaid Postdoc, you never catch up economically.
2) A quick Master's generally makes good economic sense in a technical field--get it as cheap and fast as you can. It's generally worth a nice salary bump, and it puts you into a slightly different category when layoffs and stuff come around. (Master's degrees often can be considered for "R&D" positions that a Bachelor's is considered unqualified for even with 20+ years of experience--HR rules are stupid.)
3) Advanced degrees in non-technical fields are a HUGE net negative economically.
In addition, a non-trivial amount of foreign grad students are sponsored by their government to be there. Colleges love them because they pay full, non-resident prices in cash.
At the same time, there are a number of perks that come with getting a Ph.D. that are hard to get without one. For instance in my job as a lecturer, which requires a Ph.D. for the position:
- I only work 9 months out of the year, and I'm paid a salary most people don't earn over 12.
- I get 9 weeks paid vacation each year (5 weeks between fall and spring semester, 2 weeks at the end of spring semester, 1 week in the fall semester, 1 week in the spring semester).
- I only work 4 days a week during regular semesters. Of those 4 days I work maybe 4-5 hours a day.
- I can choose to work over the summer semester if I want more money, or I can just take off for 3 months.
- I don't really have a boss. The department chair is essentially just another faculty member who fills the role for a while. If I wanted to I could even step up and do it for a couple of years. But other than getting my classes assigned to me, I'm completely autonomous. There's no one monitoring when I come to campus or when I leave. As long as I show up to class, no one cares.
- I have the option to go for tenure which gives me unparalleled job security.
- I get an assistant to whom I can offload the more boring parts of my job (grading).
- I get full tuition for myself if I or any of my dependents want to take classes. This more than makes up that $250k if I want to put my kids through school at my institution.
- I can spend 20% of my time contracting for extra income. I've found people pay a premium for the Ph.D. after your signature for things like expert testimony, credential evaluation, and tutoring (rich people who want their kid to get into a top college will pay $300 per hour for a tutor with a Ph.D.).
- I have access to a campus community including the libraries, fabrication labs, gyms, pools, cafeterias. You might find these at large tech companies, but you typically won't also find a theatre, sporting events, and concerts right outside your office.
- I don't have to work in a high cost of living tech hub. My job is in-demand basically everywhere in the world. If I want to move for a year I can be a visiting professor somewhere else for a while and come back.
I don't know of any other job that's really comparable, and a Ph.D. is a hard prereq. More than worth the early economic hit in my opinion.
Just to be clear, you think working at a McJob actually costs you money?
That's clearly not enough, especially during a pandemic before there was a vaccine.
"For those of you who think you can just pay more and raise prices by a nickel, you are out of touch. As a point of reference, in 2020 the minimum wage increased from $12 hour to $13.50. The increase in costs to my business based on 2019 hours was over $65,000 which is most of my profit. Then covid hit."
If the only way some businesses are going to stay afloat is by paying low wages then maybe they shouldn't be in business.
The entire restaurant business is fundamentally predicated on paying most of its workers below-living wage rates. If restaurants paid its workers reasonable rates, the cost of eating out would rise (not by the same amount as wages, but a significant proportion thereof). This would have dramatic impact on the frequency and social breadth of dining out.
I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, just pointing out that it's about a bit more than just some specific businesses.
I'm sure that letting them stay unemployed and drawing even more government assistance is a net benefit to society.
Labor market shortages due to short term government incentives are going to lead to long term capital investments that automate manufacturing and service work happening sooner rather than later.
That was going to happen in a decade or two regardless. But if there's been one common thread in the insane policies of the last year, it's accelerationism. People will be caught in between without the skills to navigate it.
For restaurants I think a lot of it relies on informal family labor, or 2nd generation cooks who are indeed often Latino.
Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
Hospitality is often from the illegal labor pool. Sure, Mariott doesn't pay below minimum wage--they just subcontract such that the subcontractor can't possibly be paying minimum wage.
Construction work is also quite often from the illegal labor pool. A raid has shut down every worksite I know who had an unannounced one.
Shall I go on?
> Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
1) Illegal labor depresses the wage of those not willing to do the work below minimum wage.
2) Payment to illegal labor is generally cash and dodges taxes. Most do not have bank accounts that they could cash a check at anyway.
> Illegal immigrants could actually be a net positive since they’re additional customers and don’t use the services they pay taxes for.
They are not a net positive.
Illegal aliens often avoid paying many taxes by being paid in cash, while others fraudulently use fake SSNs. Meanwhile they use many benefits meant for citizens, while also depressing wages for low-skilled labor and increasing housing costs.
> All three national studies concluded that illegal aliens in the United States generate more in costs than revenues to federal, state, and local governments combined. [0]
> 2013 estimate pegged the cost of undocumented immigrants — the cost of services received minus their tax contributions — was about $54 billion a year. [1]
[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-HEHS-95-133/h...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-how...
When you get hundreds a week to not work, why is it any wonder that people choose not to work? When you start working at a $10/hour job and lose $20/benefits for being poor because you pass a threshold, is it any wonder people can't get off of government "assistance"? When it makes more financial sense to remain single and get benefits than it does to get married and create a stable family, is it any wonder?
The American Government is taxing the successful, rewarding the lazy and acts surprised when it has obvious effects... They are feeding the bears and making them dependent on handouts.
Full stop, the reason why American workers are hard to find and hiring is difficult is because companies aren't paying enough money. Executives and shareholders have had decades of amazing wealth accumulation, but that has to end. The unwinding is happening and the gains from productivity, automation, and innovation belong to everyone and this moment in history may force government to adopt policies to make it happen.
What i don't understand is why can't they simply raise the costs and pay more? Surely all their competitors have the same problem. If a business is not viable at these higher costs then you don't really have viable business.
Workers have alternatives. That’s your answer.
Renumeration expectations are entirely malleable and subjective. When you've been riding the gravy train, even $15/h looks a pittance.
> Executives and shareholders have had decades of amazing wealth accumulation, but that has to end. The unwinding is happening and the gains from productivity, automation, and innovation belong to everyone and this moment in history may force government to adopt policies to make it happen.
What does America have to offer in 2021 that would prevent said executives (at the potential behest of shareholders) from jumping ship?
Unemployment benefits should (at least?) provide for/cover the living essentials.
Therefore, the question should be "what if the (minimum) wage/pay provided (at least the same) liveable value"? [Or, rather, that is the problem.]
Coupled with the potential ability to advance above the minimum wage and earn more, majority of people would choose to work.
I believe that well-known USA minimum wage stagnation graph says enough.
(Disclaimer: I am not a citizen of USA, but I believe I am, frankly, more familiar with its policies vs my own (EU) country's... and that has only taught me that I shouldn't even contemplate living in the USA. [Personal opinion based on an informal cost/benefit/risks analysis.])
> Therefore, the question should be "what if the (minimum) wage/pay provided (at least the same) liveable value"? [Or, rather, that is the problem.]
Unemployment was boosted during the pandemic to where a large percentage of low-skilled workers had exactly that cost/benefit to consider: Unemployment paid more than the job they lost, and now employers are looking to get them back without a raise.
My point is that benefits give you, say, 65k a year in benefits... when you start working at a 20k a year job, you lose 40k in benefits.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
> The dramatic rise in welfare spending has created a “welfare cliff.” As more people have become eligible for increasingly larger benefits, the “penalty” for working—lost benefits due to increased income—has steepened and been described by analysts as the “welfare cliff.” This has been especially true for workers near the poverty line who are eligible for multiple programs (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, the EITC, TANF, and subsidized public housing), as workers reach a point where every additional dollar earned can result in a more than 50 percent reduction in benefits.
If you scratch out the word "lazy" and instead have me say that the government is handing out benefits that create a perverse incentive to stay unemployed/underemployed because it's literally a cut in pay to get a job for a large number of people.
> For example, the CBO study found that households with incomes just above the poverty line—or between $23,000 and $29,000 for a family of four in 2012—stand to lose 60 cents of every additional dollar to either taxes or lost federal benefits. In the face of such a high penalty, many low-income people choose either not to work or, as CBO finds, “put in fewer hours or be less productive.”
These people are trapped in a place where working for $20k a year isn't worth losing $40k a year in benefits (or more)
> In the early part of the pandemic the UI supplement was even more generous, at $600, but its expiry in the summer had “little effect on overall employment”, according to a paper published in February by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Likewise, in the areas where the current $300 is a relatively larger boost to income, employment growth has not weakened since January, when that uplift was introduced.
This comes off as unnecessarily moralistic.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
Why would you advocate for people to become paupers?
Seriously, the only reason wages need to be so high for low skill jobs in California is because the idiots governing here can't wrap their head around building more housing and every little social justice issue blocks construction approvals. If you cut the rent prices by 5x in the Bay you'd make $10/h a living wage.
I worked fast food, Walmart, etc. I was worth minimum wage. I got an education, developed skills that are hard to find and become worth more.
My other posts point out that my phrasing was wrong (people are hung up on the word lazy) but my points remain: The US has a perverse benefit system that makes it worth more to work less before a certain point.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...