The reason employees aren't returning to work in America [video]

If $300 a week (before taxes) is a "big incentive" for people, they were being criminally underpaid before they lost their job.

I don’t think this is the kind of behavior we want to incentivize. But you are right - we have GOT to bring some jobs back that pay a decent wage.

Universal or managed childcare - like health care - is one of those things that is a massive drag on the economy if it isn't provided.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/childcare-a...

> The problem of childcare cost is unsolvable with women at work, it's as simple as that.

What kind of nonsense is this?

One in six women never go on to have children, it's great news that these women's access to the labour market has improved.

Second, childcare ratios aren't 1 to 1. In fact they're about 1 to 4 for babies <1 year, 1 to 10 for 5 year olds, and 1 to 12 at school age. Suppose all women had children (they don't), society still greatly benefits from the efficiency of a childcare ratio as high as 1:12 as opposed to women caring for their child 1:1.

Third, children aren't permanently children, and certainly not permanently babies. The first few years requires a lot of parental or private childcare, but afterwards kids mostly go to school for most of the day. A woman will have at least 45 years between adulthood and retirement and most of that kids won't need constant parental care like the first few years. Making sure women stay active in the labour force (even part-time) will greatly help their chances in the labour market throughout their career.

Fourth, I see no reason why we're speaking about women rather than about parents. Providing income and childcare are shared responsibilities. It's fine to arrange it in your own family as you wish, but society shouldn't speak about these topics as if they should only apply to women.

At a cynical minimum it wastes tremendous resources. I want smart, competent, engaged women to have children. I also want them to choose how to direct their considerable energies as they see fit.

It has nothing to do with genders - it has to do with the carrying cost of a household nowadays is tied to dual incomes (+ housing and health care costs have eaten up a lot of surplus income)

Certainly, my wife and I have ~semi-annual conversations on whether our lifestyle still makes sense (2 parents working, 2 kids under 5 in daycare:). There's definitely room to discuss that on societal level too. But there's no immediate assumption that my wife would necessarily be the one to quit work and spend extra time with kids - we're both engaged parents, both have our strengths and weaknesses, and once breastfeeding stage was complete both equally capable of parenting; and at the same time have both been career oriented and hold very successful positions.

in short:

"Are we as society on average supporting the model of two parents working" - a reasonable even crucial discussion to have.

"Should women be working" - hopefully settled a long time ago and anybody still questioning this will seem regressive at least, misogynistic more likely :-/

What should have been a great deal turned into a terrible deal. Unequal pay meant that initially, men didn't want to work any less when their wives started working, rising housing costs and child care ate up pretty much all the extra income, and stagnating wages meant that even as the pay gap closed, households still weren't getting ahead. We're overworked and underpaid, and employers just got more productivity for the same money as before.

We should go to a 24 hour working week.

Also, sorry this is grim, but the pandemic has also killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them were workers.

I wonder who's going to provide it.

Being male, I don't know if I would even venture into the area. I couldn't imagine being interrogated by parents, and the whole vetting process. And yes--it might make more sence for a woman to open up a child care facility? The list of government regulation must get onerious too?

Where are we going to find all these babysitters?

Second--the money will come on the form of a federal tax credit. Why do I feel that money will end up going to other things a young family needs?

At this point, I'd rather see a Basic Income that goes to all low income Americans. They could use the money for anything.

Current life of young people look like:

  — Get expensive degree
  — Move to expensive city for jobs
  — Hard to find partner
  — Cannot afford to start family, postpone children
  — Have children without family support 
  — Get into high level of debt

  — People have less or no children. This lead to increased taxation and increasing retirement age in many countries. It often causes social unrest when governments try uncontrolled external immigration to fill the gaps. 
  — People try to live frugal lives, reduce spending and try to save for retirement individually. This disturbs housing market and stall country economy and destroy luxury brands.

Full time child care in Brooklyn, NY was $2000/mo for 1 child when I inquired earlier this year.

Funded, but not really funded so readily accessible.

John Taylor Gatto (iirc) advised keeping kids out of school as long as possible, as nothing important is learned in the first few grades that wouldn't be learned anyways, or couldn't be learned more efficiently later. http://johntaylorgatto.com/

If the government were to extend school-as-childcare, it could be done in a way that restores the ability of children to learn from the real world. I don't know what 4, 5, 6 and 7 year olds should be learning, but imho Pre-K, K, 1st and 2nd grade "classrooms" are stifling.

Gatto's essay, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, is all over the interwebs.

What did Native Americans teach their 4 year olds?

It's possible your personal journey is effected by your experiences. 2009 was a financial crisis, when I'm sure many people were desperate for money. Others delayed entering the workforce by taking on college debt. It's not a sign of a healthy economy, but the strategic decisions of millions of people...

And in 2009 there was no pandemic. You weren't risking actual life and limb to work a 9-5. In 2009 most people didn't have smartphones. There was no real option to make money online.

And let's be clear: just because people aren't working for a corporation in a 9-5 doesn't imply they aren't working. Today you can make money online easier (Only Fans comes to mind). The people who become internet models can make more money quitting their jobs and devoting their effort to content creation. And honestly, a pornstar has more prestige and better hours than McDonald's, too...

I've made a personal mission of trying to rehumanize every damn job, saying hello, how are you, stopping sometimes to talk about kids or the shitty people leaving shit in the kids playground, or just asking how's the family going. Not only did I make friends with the bus drivers, the street cleaner, the store cashier, the security people everywhere, but now I feel better the pulses of my communities, and have a far less difficult time talking to new people and giving or asking for help. I know those people and they know me. During the pandemic, I just sometimes asked news about family or kids and the amazon drivers here were crushed, their families sick and dying all around. One of them stopped and just cried there. Yes as one other commentor said, it's a job, man up, do it. But also, when there's a crying father there telling me he's been yelled at the whole week, he's been late for deliveries for days, and getting his pay docked, fuck ALLL that. Come on, have a water, a coffee if you can stomach it, late for late... And talk. Learned some of my neighbors needed a talking to. No one deserves to be treated like that. I... didn't see people were so shitty to each other, especially what one lady called 'the help'.

Even the people I'm never gonna see again, it costs me almost nothing to say hi, hope your day's OK, thanks, and it brings sometimes the simple joy of talking for 2 minutes and feeling all fucking human. Some make it hard (uber eats kids...) but still, hi, everything OK? How's your family? I can't do much, but tipping and talking, yes.

And don't let me started on making your salary almost only from tips. You're really wondering why you can't find 'help'?

The video is about people choosing better opportunities for themselves. If there aren't people to do those hard jobs, then those jobs need to compete with the opportunities these people are choosing instead, for example through higher pay. Saying these people should choose worse work, for the benefit of others (eg. business owners), by appealing to some nebulous concept of nobility is exploitative.

can't get workers to work hard 8 hours a day doing hard labor, maybe add more breaks than the minimum you are legally required to? Or maybe stop suspending the workers next two shifts because they were 5 minutes late from traffic 1 too many times? Maybe consider that threatening to fire workers if they don't work late or overtime isn't productive? Maybe stop paying minimum wage which hasn't risen with inflation or rent prices and increase your prices out to compensate or consider that if baseline worker wages have risen slower than inflation, but management's wages has risen faster than inflation, you've had to do so off the back of your workers ability to have spending money outside of barely living.

That kind of thing is best kept for where markets don’t accurately price externalities, not ”$foo businesses can’t find staff at a price they are happy with”.

You're arguing for the destruction of economic activity in the name of reducing the 'wasteful use of resources', which is just silly. You're just making it harder for these folks to support themselves, while burdening others with the need to support them.

You mean they might not be able to buy gas at all. Gas stations will shut off their pumps when they close, so you can't even do self-service credit-card purchases.

Switching to credit card kiosks won't help. It's usually illegal to have a gas station operating without an attendant. Something to do with that whole danger of blowing up and killing lots of people thing.

> maybe, out of 5 gas stations, 1 will remain open and now have 5 times as many customers

Except it costs some money to open and close the store, costs some money to have alarms & surveillance while the store is closed, costs the store in damages, and more than that, costs customers who will prefer the store that will always be open, even during normal hours. It may not all be as wasteful as you think.

And what happens when the store that can justify staying open happens to be the one that doesn't provide diesel, propane, milk, or similar? It can be very detrimental to the city.

If the labor cost of the graveyard shift doubled the total cost of operations for that shift would increase only marginally. That gas station is only going to shut down for that shift if there's a significant change in costs. A small increase is completely covered by a single late night or early morning fill-up.

Usually, because fewer people are willing to work late nights, pay is usually higher for the night shift. This is often called a "shift differential".

> But right now, 4 out of 5 gas stations are open simply because they can be, no matter how useful they are.

If there was no economic advantage to being open, the store would be closed.

As others have pointed out already, this is already true today: We use undocumented-workers, recent immigrants who don’t know better, and prison labor.

Recently, prison labor use has been on the rise.

Your hustle-culture narrative is appallingly toxic and your entire argument amounts to learning to love being treated like garbage so that you don't feel bad when you do it to others once you're the one on top.

And even if the benefits are entirely "inflated away" in aggregate (which is extremely dubious given that UBI produces real economic value in terms of stability), that's just the aggregate effect. To take an extreme example, if the Fed prints 1,000,000 exadollars and distributes them equally, then yeah it's pure inflation, but it also massively redistributes wealth to the point where everyone is practically identical. Hopefully that example demonstrates that the effect isn't zero even if it's just "inflating itself away."

Finally, I object to treating this question in pure economic terms. We shouldn't be overly concerned with optimizing aggregate economic outcomes for society. Those at the top end can more than afford to give up some wealth, and those at the bottom are struggling to a heartbreaking degree. The utility function of holding wealth is not linear and if you're interested in increasing everyone's well-being then that's a fact you have to address.

Companies in America are incredibly top-heavy, and a more stable economy could emerge if those resources at the top are distributed down to the worker. If implemented properly, UBI could push companies to share more of those profits with their workers without affecting the buyer.

Additionally capital generates more social value when it circulates (when its being spent) vs when it is stagnant (when it sits in a bank). Even if things are more expensive, more people having access to things allows local economies to grow

I don't know if you've ever worked with people in low socioeconomic strata, but I've been a camp counselor with some kids who's socioeconomics were such that eating off the dollar menu at McDonalds on their birthday was a big deal. I don't think Chipotle being more expansive is a material concern so long as actual purchasing power goes up.

I tend to think the minimum wage should be regarded as a moral concern - if you can't make enough to live decently then the line between effective indentured servitude and freedom is eroded, and this is dangerous in a society premised on the general welfare being such that each citizen has enough leisure time to be educated and vote.

If they are truly happy with the basics, then they would be happy with working 16 hours a week on two days. The truth is that the earning opportunity that allows this, forces them to live in an expensive location that then burdens them with another 24 hours of pointless busy work.

If I work hard and then win the lottery playing $2 tickets (so it already doesn't matter how hard I work), I can already not-work for the rest of my life. So the question isn't if this is possible, it's how many people can be supported at a 'basics' level with current technology.

What is your second sentence here, apart from pure moralizing?

> Scrubbing toilets pays less because fewer people can write software

Sure, this is the obvious dogma so I didn't repeat it. But it only applies within certain assumptions - namely that unskilled labor can be arbitraged across borders, and that the people who aren't capable of writing software still need to bid against those who can to make a comparable amount of income to pay as rent. As I said, the contextless narrative is quite convenient if you're not subject to the pointy end of the market mechanism. But when we're critiquing the system, we need to examine its assumptions.

> The idea of some huge protected aristocracy in the US is a convenient myth

I never said there was one. By my analysis, our oppression is quite democratic - hence the lower-middle class goal of buying into real estate / stonks / etc and thereby becoming beneficiaries of the problem. While this is a common path to success under the current system, that doesn't mean that it is possible for everyone to actually take it.

In a debt-based economy, economic positioning is intrinsically zero-sum - by succeeding in moving up the ladder, others must be stuck below you. And the economic priesthood has driven us more and more into debt because it puts the economy under centralized direction. I'd wager this is the true source of your discontent, yet rather than looking at the puppetmasters pulling the abstract strings that define the large-scale trends, you're doing the easy thing of blaming those closest to your position.

Since we're responding in edits:

> One only needs to look at your words. “Puppet masters”, “preisthood”, “debt based economy”, etc. None of it jibes with reality.

Puppet masters is hyperbolic, but priesthood is simply a call back to an older term for the same role - setting and promulgating societal policy while pretending to be neutral. And "debt based economy" is straightforwardly factual - add up your monthly budget and look at the proportion that goes to your actual survival (food, utilities, maintenance, depreciation), versus how much goes to servicing debt streams (mortgage and property taxes). We're a debt based society - the poorest members don't have small positive balances but rather negative balances, and are thus forced to work to pay their economic rent "or else".

> I suggest perhaps examining what psychologist would call your external locus of control, it won’t serve you well in life

When describing how the system works, what else would I use besides an external locus of control? I obviously don't control the economy!

I'm on the financial treadmill the same as everyone else, and take my own actions based on what I can change (internal locus of control). But touting those actions as if they're a solution rather than mere mitigations is falling into the trap of assuming the system can only be this way.

Economically, I'm in the libertarian-Austrian camp rather than progressive-MMT/UBI. It's my experience that when people say to "study economics", they really just mean stop questioning the assumptions of the Keynesian/post-Bretton-Woods regime of overwhelming monetary inflation.

Did I expect a job that anyone else could do to compete for me with a high salary? No way. I wanted a higher salary so I hustled on the side and got a degree in a field that paid more. Some of the people I worked with did the same, some didn’t. That’s the way it goes. I think the people complaining mostly feel guilty about straight to college and a high paying job tract. Think of it as the jobs equivalent of white guilt.

Regarding copy-left, whenever I make contributions to the commons, I do so in order that others may have a zero-marginal-cost lunch, so to speak.

Well, "fair" is whatever the market is willing to pay and whatever the environment is that it finds itself inside. And the market doesn't get to shape the entire world outside of the market to suite it.

The market exists inside of a society. Sometimes society meets needs that the market would otherwise provide. In those cases it's just kind of tough luck, if you don't like it go find another market. Is it "fair" that Open Source has made certain segments of software impossible to monetize using traditional means? I don't know, but it's reality. Is it "fair" that we as a society are unwilling to let people starve, and that gives them a sense of confidence about selecting jobs? Well, it's reality.

People voluntarily decide to form communities and societies. When businesses enter those communities and enter those societies, they consent to play by the democratic rules of those societies. If society decides that it wants a minimum wage or unemployment benefits, businesses are free to move elsewhere. In fact, they're much more free to move elsewhere than their workers. The average American citizen can not afford to move to another country, that takes money.

So I disagree quite strongly with the notion that giving those people who don't have the funds or ability to move more agency over whether they want to work is some kind of restriction of the market. Amazon could pull out of the US if it really needed to, Bezos is living here by choice. Most of its workers couldn't, most of its workers don't have the ability to consent to the system they find themselves in.

> So why should the be free for that person and not the provider?

Because businesses consented to living in a democratic society with rules, including social safety nets and standards based on whether the society at large is willing to let its citizens live in poverty.

In a lot of ways, the ultimate system of nature for humans is collectivism and government, there has never been a human society that hasn't eventually ended up setting up some system of standards for how far we're willing to let people fall and how much poverty we're willing to subject people to, and that collectivism and shared standard of living is no small part of why we are the dominant creatures on the planet. I disagree that it is "natural" for people who are out of work to starve to death, I think it's very natural for human beings to set up formal structures that prevent that from happening, it's one of the really big things that we do as a species.

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I also want to point out that it's very selective to argue that "fairness" in nature means people having no leverage over whether or not to participate in a market. Even more than that, it's also very... questionable... to correlate "natural" with "fair." Even in a situation where a business didn't the create the problem, even in a situation where a business isn't holding a gun to your head and forcing you to work with threats of violence, a coerced contract is still coerced, and appealing to the natural state of that coercion doesn't really make it better.

If I find you bleeding to death and sell you a single bandage for a million dollars, you can argue that it's not my fault you're in that position. But that doesn't mean the sale isn't happening under duress, it doesn't mean it's suddenly a free transaction. Duress and coercion does not need to be actively created by the party that benefits from it.

This is not a real thing, this is a fake assertion you have invented in your mind. No one is getting paid to "not work". And no, workers who have lost their job, collecting their unemployment they earned during past labour, never counts as getting "paid to not work".

>Once the government spending stops, things will change quickly.

In most places, the paltry, tiny financial aid for workers ended months ago, and nothing has changed at all.

> For instance here our dog daycare can’t hire enough employees

They should consider paying wages. If they paid money for labor, they'd get labour. It's really that simple.

What most "employers" actually want is nearly slave labour, volunteers, like they had pre pandemic. Employers swear up and down that no one wants to work, and then you find out they pay just $15/hr or some other insultingly low slave-like wage (a wage so low that no human could feasibly live alone off of it, much less advance in any way in their life).

A single adult with no debt, and no dependents, in Michigan, "making" $15/hr doesn't even take home enough money to rent a modest 1-bed apartment in the city, much less eat or do anything else with their life. At this wage, the adult is literally poorer every day they show up to work, they are literally donating their labour to a for-profit company. And most people are not "perfect ideal adults", they have children, or student loans, or elderly parents, or a tricky medical condition, or any other totally-normal totally-reasonable life complication that they need money to help cover, so they can show up to do good work for you.

I don't know your local market, but I guarantee if your dog daycare was in Michigan and it started paying $25/hr, they'd fill those positions in just a few days. Their employee "shortage" is a fake problem they have intentionally created for themselves, not some sort of indicator of people's willingness to work.

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Everyone wants to work right now. No one is hiring at a liveable wage. Most reasonable people are not going to get out of bed and go to work all day, just to end the day poorer then they started. That would be insane. But that insanity is what every company seems to demand of labour these days.

part of this probably has to do with the fact that many benefits like pto and workman's comp are so heavily gated by bureaucrats that rather than fighting to squeeze blood from the stone, many people simply find they are more rewarded by a flexible schedule and cold hard cash.'

as a point of comparison, i can earn upwards of 90 dollars a day doing 'in home dog-sitting' which basically amounts to playing videogames and sleeping at some rich person's house. i get to choose the dogs & clients i work with, i get to choose when i want to work. i never get yelled at for taking dogs on walks that are 'too long' or threatened for using my vacation time to go to a funeral.