Trying to get a job in a labor shortage is harder than you think
goodjobsinstitute.medium.com
goodjobsinstitute.medium.com
The main thing was the idea of a reliable, steady paycheck, which vaporized in a flash for many blue collar workers. If you can't even have your act together enough to deal with a brand new employee on their first day, how do I know the check will drop at the right time?
Not enough respect, not enough pay, is no longer acceptable. Employers need to step up their game.
I'd say there is no labor shortage, only a exploitable labor shortage.
Employers who respect their employees, offer decent salaries, and adequate working conditions don't have a problem attracting candidates.
Somehow the businesses we see whining about their employees quitting in droves and having a hard time replacing them sound awfully nightmarish and highly disrespectful and outright abusive of their current and former staff.
A telltale sign is how this class of employers are blaming unemployment benefits and relief payments for eliminating their leverage over the poor souls who felt obligated to tolerate these jobs, and how they are no longer able to coerce them into falling in line.
We could have fewer vacancies if employers stopped strongly signaling that they don't want to hire people.
Extended unemployment benefits may now be over, but many are still not hungry enough to accept current wage levels. Post-lockdown demand is also different as many people realized life is better spending time with family than burning the midnight oil just to purchase more toys that will never be used.
This is not to say wage increases are bad. They are good. This is what we would want to see: jobs paying too little not getting applicants, forcing companies to increase wages. It is, however, bad that the government interferes.
I wrote something much longer, but to distill it down, the government didn't interfere. They did the very least they could possibly do compared to what they did for other transfers of wealth during the height of the pandemic.
Most people can't just go spend time with their family, and those toys are distractions from the shit show that is our corporate democracy.
Not only did they do that, but they also became arbiters of which businesses were "essential", part of the wealth transfer problem you mentioned. Couple that with ppp loans being processed by requested size because the government attached size percentages to the payouts realized by banks.
Government paying people not to work was interference, along with everything else. I believe that people are owed just compensation for it too! But that would look a lot different than extended unemployment benefits - people would be receiving their full salary.
All of this is interference and bad and not supportive of free markets.
Rather, the government should have done the necessary thing and forced people to evaluate their own risk. Nobody wants to visit your store anymore? You go out of business, and the gov isn't on the hook. That would be free markets.
Adam Smith emphasized the limiting of government intervention, not the complete removal of it. He also believed the government to be responsible for the education and defense of a country. While we can argue over what sectors are in fact 'essential', and about the government's execution, but it is reasonable to assume that preventing physical harm and death during the pandemic is a valid function of a country's government, according to the father of modern economics.
Going further, he argued in favor of 'institutions that promote free and fair competition'. So, I would contend that payments to prevent citizens from starving, and from subjugating themselves to the enrichment of others for scraps while in fear of bodily harm, are not only in line with Smith's ideals, but those payments create fairer competition.
If anything hurts the average business, it is entrenched conglomerates and chains, especially those with huge cash piles, that can easily raise wages to meet labor's demands. And that situation exists specifically because of a lack of government action to discourage the hoarding of capital.
I believe the government has a duty to implement regulation when there is harm caused to a third, non voluntary party in a transaction.
> Based on your arguments, health inspections, environmental impact reports, and laws against child labor would not exist.
I agree about not having health inspections. This should be left to third party businesses which offer accreditation. Businesses can opt in/out, and consumers can determine their risk tolerance. After all, a company that poisons someone is liable. Companies likely would be incented to seek out a third party accreditation or face higher insurance premiums. Result is nearly identical while the mechanism is the market and not regulation.
I think the Wagner Act, which is what forbade child labor, is terrible legislation. While it is preferable for children to not work, we have studies which show that child labor is mainly derived from poverty. Few parents would choose to work their children as opposed to educating them.
The Wagner Act also forced unions upon businesses which I think is a tragedy. Businesses voluntarily transact. If they want to negotiate work conditions through a single point of contact, such as a union, they should be allowed to do so and only negotiate with a union. If they want to only negotiate with individuals, that is again their prerogative. A hybrid approach is fine too. The Wagner Act led to terrible band-aids like right to work which just make negotiation standards even worse.
The same Wagner Act implemented a federal minimum wage which is in direct contradiction to free markets and equally as garbage as the aforementioned effects.
> If the government did not intervene, we would still have slave markets in this country because, as these last few years have shown, many people still see others as nothing more than stock.
Slaves are third parties subject to involuntary negative consequence so the government is perfectly fine to implement regulation here.
> While we can argue over what sectors are in fact 'essential', and about the government's execution, but it is reasonable to assume that preventing physical harm and death during the pandemic is a valid function of a country's government, according to the father of modern economics.
While it is true that I think the government should not have intervened by shutting any business down, I did concede they could make such a decision in the pursuit of public health. However, if they are to take this route, the government must provide just compensation. This is in direct accordance with the 5th Ammendment: "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The government effectively commandeered private property (businesses, rental properties, etc.) for public use (barriers against disease transmission). $300 extra in federal unemployment is not just compensation. Neither are PPP loans which were corruptly or incompetently administered. My point is that the government neither left it to the free market nor fulfilled the requirements of the law.
> If anything hurts the average business, it is entrenched conglomerates and chains, especially those with huge cash piles, that can easily raise wages to meet labor's demands.
I believe the violation of the law, whether having significant or marginal impact upon the victim, is a violation, and I therefore do not differentiate as to whether something was fine just because a victim is better capitalized. A very similar argument was just attempted on a constitution-violating "wealth tax", stating it only impacted billionaires so it's just fine. Thankfully it was pulled because it was ridiculous and illegal.
So I think we're mostly the same in opinion! I just am unflexible with violation based on emotional fairness; rather I default to a strict adherence of the law and/or belief that it should default to the market wherever possible.
What's funny is that for YEARS we've had employers saying "We'll go out of business if the minimum wage is raised $1." But now, they seem to find a way to pay much higher wages. It's just complete BS.
When I was a wee lad working in California fast food, minimum wage went up $.15, to a whopping $3.10/hour. What did the franchisee I worked for do? He figured out that at Store A, he had used roughly 30000 man hours of labor. $.15 increase in minimum wage meant an additional labor cost of $4500 (not counting payroll taxes, so maybe an additional 25%).
So he tells the store manager, cut the total # of hours used by 1400 over the course of the year. No thought given to how this would affect QOS, just cut the costs. So shortsighted.
I would also say that job fills are lagging enough not to have conclusive data yet. While you mention that jobs weren't filled in states ending benefits moreso than those that did, there are some articles out there that argue against that claim: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/experiment-over-labor-mark...
The above looks more at jobless claims and unemployment rates than total jobs filled. The US data, which is limited for me to perform eda since I'm on mobile, appears to be largely unchanged for states when comparing to a year ago: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t03.htm
From that we can maybe say that, although not encouraging job fills, at least ending the federal part of the unemployment saves tax dollars.
But I also don't think that is the full story. Although the extra $300/week ended in some states, the existing state money was still there, and that can go a long way to living a life of leisure when you're only other expenses are food and housing (let's not forget that there was also an eviction moratorium/no doc 12 month forbearance so the housing costs, even without $300 extra, are still subsidized by tax payers).
Even when the eviction moratorium ends, most evictions have to go through the courts which are going to be slow due to the amount of cases that will be filed.
And none of this touches on the stickiness of wages (hence businesses trying to avoid) and what that means for someone that just got a year+ of paid vacation while retaining their prior annual income or even exceeding it.
I don't think we will have a complete picture for awhile.
Also, the franchise I mentioned was McDonalds, and throughout the region, this was the common way of "coping" with min wage increases.
"Life of leisure" wasn't a comment on buying power, rather it was a comment on free time. If housing payments are a non-issue, all that is left is food and utilities. Unemployment can go a long way to covering those, often times exceeding those costs. The rest of your time is available for rest or self improvement to push yourself into a better position for when you're ready to re-enter the market.
McDonald's may be a large franchise, but that doesn't mean they make great decisions. We see large businesses go under all the time. Too many bad decisions, changes in the market, etc. will have them going to the same end.
Edit: McDonald's response to wage increases isn't uncommon. Many business panic and reduce labor costs immediately so they can avoid passing the costs on to the customer. We see this in many metros, such as Seattle. For the workers that get to stick around, they have a better quality of life. But those workers that weren't providing value in excess to the new wage requirements are cut and have a terribly difficult time finding a new position.
And realistically, training is always a cost, even if people don't acknowledge it. It takes time for experienced people to get up to speed at a new workplace.
What about the cost of housing? Do you call that a shortage or do you blame homebuyers for not paying enough?
In the US right now, the workforce participation rate is at all time lows. There are more than 5 million people that were working in 2019, that are not working/looking for work today. That is a lack of supply, AKA a shortage.
It is pretty clear in this case that the supply exists, just not willing to enter the market at the clearing price.
Under this model, the word shortage is not well-defined.
This is certainly a model but it makes discussion hard when two models are using the same signifiers to represent different concepts.
That's why corn syrup became so popular. Its price isn't controlled.
The price of corn has now been pushed higher by idiotic ethanol mandates.
That's why you see a lot of "real sugar" products these days. Sugar's become more attractive in price as the price of corn products go up.
Unfortunately corn prices going up has been a serious burden on Mexican households where corn is a huge part of the diet.
That's how free markets are supposed to work.
I don't logically understand how someone can complain about pay being too low when working at all would be a huge raise from their current income.
The other meme is that this argument applies to nothing else: GPUs, cars, etc. are in a shortage. The bid and ask not crossing is evidence of a shortage.
There is an easy conclusion: HN users are on the ask side in the former case and the bid side on the latter case and merely attempting to propagate a meme that attempts to move things in their direction.
GPU Shortage has nothing to do with Employee shortage.
The GPU shortage is a symptom of clouds, crypto, consoles and more importantly Apple. Apple has so much buying power that they purchased the majority of fabrication capacity to sell you M1* chips. It doesn't matter what consumers want or do.
As for Employers and wages - Individuals can actually choose to work for places that pay livable wages. There is nothing more important in a capitalist society than wages that afford you the ability to thrive in said society. If businesses can't pay those kind of wages, those businesses shouldn't exist. Workers are not socialized labor systems for private business profits.
I love this phrasing and agree 100%.
There are a lot of people in the comments to this story making convoluted partial analogies trying to argue against your point without actually saying the quiet part loud.
This line of thinking would explain why one business with higher wages has an easier time recruiting and retaining employees than a business with lower wages, but I really don't understand this argument for a nationwide lack of hireable people.
Is someone better off making $12 an hour or $0 an hour? Unless they've found someone to subsidize their life (relatives, governments, charities, etc...) earning nothing makes their life worse off than earning a lower wage than they might prefer.
I like how this gun-to-your-head reasoning only applies to workers and not companies.
Are businesses better off staying closed indefinitely to avoid paying more than $12/hr? If your answer to that is “Yes”, then the “shortage” is among the demand for labor.
The line of reasoning that corporations are simultaneously both hurting from staying closed and they don’t need workers that much doesn’t seem logical.
Meanwhile, at a lot of these restaurants that fail - the owners absolutely THRIVED while screwing over pay and once that scheme was busted, its not the employees fault for not wanting to be a part of it.
This re-balance was long over due since the feds and states have not done much to keep up with livable wages themselves (at the pressue of businesses who said it would hurt them)
You cannot sate the insatiable, even if Apple stopped eating.
I highly recommend this paper from the '90s. It's just as relevant today as it was then. https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...
To be clear, there is a place for H1-B and O-2 visas, but they are systematically abused, especially in the tech sector.
To bring someone in from a foreign market they should be earning the top 10% of income for their field. The fact that they are synonymous with "cheap" is a major issue with the way the system works.
The current H1-B minimum salary is $60k That's FAR too low. They should be earning at least double that number so as not to artificially depress wages in the US.
It creates perverse incentives for companies to "look" but not find employees (unless they are willing to take a sub H1-B wage).
But further, H1-B employees are often in a terrible power dynamic. Being fired from their job often means being deported.
You can't compare H1B salaries for like nurses in the midwest with tech salaries though.
H1B salaries also have a tendency to be under-reported (because they're base salaries): if you look at my L-1 form, it says a salary that's at worst half of what I made in my worst year in the United States.
There is a huge problem with allowing unlimited immigration of any category of people. Resources and space are finite. One country can only hold so many people and still offer a comfortable and safe life, just like one home can only hold so many people.
Our country can hold the world's population of high skill individuals seeking H1B status. It certainly can hold the number of individuals companies would seek to fill those roles (assuming salary is adjusted such that they'll not abuse the system).
We've reached a point where our opinions simply differ. I don't think our country can hold nearly as many people as you say, nor do I think it should. I'd rather help our existing population of high skill individuals get jobs, train up everybody else to see how many more people reach a high level of skill, and then if we really do find ourselves short of labor, slowly open up to people from abroad.
What sort of doublespeak actually arrives at “I want higher wages and better working conditions” after going through this (possibly proprietary to you?) process of unpacking the ~real meaning~ of people’s words?
Salary is not the only significant parameter. Awful working conditions also makes it very difficult to attract and retain employees, even if they are well paid. See for instance how one notoriously abusive FANG is currently experiencing high "regretted attrition" rates in spite of paying FANG-level wages.
The last administration actually started doing something about it, and issued a lot more RFE for fraudulent applications.
This is obviously a simplified extreme, but it scales. If there are not enough people to work the available demand, then economic activity is less than it could be—even if salaries are going up and roles are being filled.
> the annual inflation rate in the United States has decreased from 3.2 percent in 2011 to 1.2 percent in 2020.
So right now, wages simply haven't been adjusted to the existing inflation. This is not inflationary itself.
This low end market also appears to be plagued by the fact that both employers and employees are a market for lemons.
Small business operators are just very low quality in their management and operational skills and labour at this level is also pretty low quality.
The latter is hard to fix since the reasons are manifold and require complicated interventions with potential knock-on effects.
I wonder if the employer side could be fixed by a government program targeted at streamlining the hiring process - perhaps standardized job postings on a standardized local job board. I would lean to a private fix but the problem is that the kind of business management expertise transfer here requires expertise that is much better rewarded in PE or VC.
And since society overall is suffering from this market inefficiency, the only place to repair it at scale is the government. The problem is that governments themselves are plagued by poor management efficiency and probably lack the ability to come up with a meaningful change here.
Sucks, but you just gotta live with it, I guess.
People can order from a kiosk, or their phone.
Self checkouts remove the need for cashiers.
We no longer have people who punch buttons in the elevator for good reasons.
Want to be posh and still have these in your restaurant or store? Charge a premium and be prepared to pay people and give them benefits like health care.
Until we can automate cooks, busboys and dish staff those are the food service jobs available.
We need a higher level cashier to watch the automatic kiosks, but not cashiers.
If only it was as fast as having a cashier ring items.
Or just get groceries delivered. That's the real time saver.
By refusing to fill positions they get to shout to the press and politicians about how lazy people just want to collect government checks, while also doing everything they can to keep wages from going up on these bottom-barrel jobs.
I think they're waiting people out. Business owners know they can coast temporarily while forcing their existing staff to work harder. People have bills to pay; contrary to popular belief, one cannot just sit on one's ass collecting unemployment indefinitely. Welfare in general is not easy to collect, at all. So all businesses have to do is not blink first...
So no, the small businesses probably aren't conspiring, but they are likely riding in the wake of the large corporations (having to pay workers less to offer the similar prices to remain competitive towards shoppers).
The idea is business owners are acting in concert to protect their interests.
And for them to hire employees who can afford the skyrocketing housing costs, they would have to pay more. Possibly much more.
It's puzzling that many small biz owners don't seem to grasp this bit of economics. At least they give no sign.
I know they can't fix this bit of reality, but they seem clueless about it.
Only if they insist on maintaining the same profit margin. As demonstrated by the massive wealth transfer that happened during the pandemic, most businesses aren't hurting.
Why do you find it preposterous that people with the same problem and the same motivation act the same way?
Also: these folks certainly do talk to each other. At the golf course, the chamber of commerce, on social media...
They know they have a widow of pent up demand and want the resentment spread across all business or ideally to the workers.
That Sonic stays empty as no one goes there anymore, because they literally have TWO employees inside. One to cook and one to take orders/prep. They no longer use the drive-up kiosks. 2 employees. Who in their right mind would work for such a shitty place, when they all pay the same anyway and all are hiring.
I've been at a company with only 2 people left and I was the one running service calls- making the money. One day I woke up and realized I didn't need the company, they needed me. So I left to work for myself and my boss (the owner) asked me what he was supposed to do now. As if I could ask the same of him had they fired me. I'm so tired of the power imbalance.
In a real free market we'd see a wage increase as companies compete with each other for the few people left willing to work for next to nothing. Instead they all pay as low as possible, never full-time, and have random shifts/days worked so they cant find another job.
This all smells of collusion without colluding. They all want to wait it out so they can get back to taking advantage of the helpless.
I think it's less about refusing to fill positions and more about refusing to fix hiring practices that discriminate against all but the most formulaically ideal candidate.
People who've paid for past transgressions need jobs. So do first time job seekers, people over 40, people with no credit and people living in the 'wrong' zip-code.
Stop whining and hire them for the jobs they can fill.
Economy have never recovered for the Main Street since 2008 crash and all these news about labour shortage is just to manufacture consent to suppress wages even further.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/13/1045463623/high-schoolers-are...
or "classic" moves like https://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-pr...
Basically "we can't hire anyone, so the government should get rid of regulations" this is why there has been like a 40 year nursing 'shortage'
You can't hire people if it's impossible to live where your jobs are. This is absolutely where we are today.
Remember that a "labor shortage" is always just a shortage at the current price.
It's pretty easy to imagine what those job ads look like (a million prerequisites and minimum wage). And subsequently the foreign workers are heavily taken advantage of since they can't switch jobs on that particular visa.
Edit - I should add that immigrants put up with it anyway as it gives a path to permanent resident status. The whole visa program erodes the bargaining power of Canadian workers and explains why there's so many jobs advertisements on Canadian job boards with absurdly low pay for the requirements; for example programming jobs that pay $17/hour.
I can think of a lot of positions where "candidate showed up on time, having showered, wearing clean clothes, and exhibited a pleasant 5 minute interaction" are enough to make an offer. Does the applicant want to be tested on leetfood or something?
A clarification I'll add is that the hiring processes (for most mid-large employers) are multi-staged (off site drug testing, etc) and the most straight-forward hirings take a month or more.
However, I think the problem with minimum wage jobs like fast food is that the kind of people who need that sort of job probably have a lot of problems in their life, among them money; it's hard to keep reliable transportation, you don't have paid time off to decompress or deal with family/medical stuff, and so on. You work a lot of hours to try to get ahead, which leaves little time for anything else.
I thought HN hated convoluted hiring processes for the sake of making them convoluted?
If I can choose to work somewhere that wants my skillset and not just someone who can code and lead other coders I will almost certainly enjoy, be more interested in, and grow more from the former. Then again, in absolute terms, starting from zero in something might be more of a learning opportunity in a way.
Knowing the hiring practices of some consultancy firms and how they routinely upsell their hotdog junior devs as prime rib senior developers, I have to say that I also know a few senior developers who were hired this way.
Imagine as a programmer you have a bunch of specialized skills, have worked at a bunch of FAANGs and the interviewer is just like, "Oh you can program when you can you start and BTW here's $X". The number is probably too low and you'd be pissed at your time being wasted.
Edit - to add to this, dismissing the value of an employee's skills is a deliberate tactic to underpay.
Is it really a good idea to negotiate salary with someone whose starting offer is well below market rate? I mean, even if you feel you can get a change of heart out of them, is that really the character you want in someone who can have a considerable impact on your well being and even life?
Your initial offer as a company signals a lot of things aside from the raw value. Even a $10000 improvement in starting point may signal "we won't cheapskate you on:"
- personal computing equipment - infrastructure - benefits - actual use of vacation - training/development - office/cube/chair - functioning HR/support systems - proper staffing
Let's not pretend there is perfect information on companies. All large companies have good and bad teams. I wouldn't bother with Amazon because landing a "good" amazon team lottery ticket attempt is not worth the interviewing time, stack ranking, hostile culture, and "new job vulnerability" etc that Amazon imposes.
It's why the best IT jobs are found via networking, and the best candidates don't really hit the open market.
So HR opening with an insulting offer is very likely ruining a far better hire/fit than an open market negotiation. Typically HR does not distinguish between the two. They should. Of course it can be hard to distinguish between a "good hire" via recommendation and someone building an organization of lackeys, but that is also something HR needs to evaluate, and not simply revert to "cheap offer for everyone".
It is very important to emphasize how vulnerable you are switching jobs. Unless your skillset VERY CLOSELY matches the new job (and that is pretty rare), you won't know their codebase, processes, political/budgeting/power structure, business requirements.
Depending on the company, they'll either have good onboarding and tolerance, or... sink or swim. And people fundamentally don't like helping new hires outside of whatever perverse virtue signalling they want to show to their bosses. Every company's HR and Ticket systems are byzantine and annoying, and helping new hires through that is basically reliving the torturous new hire process for whomever helps them.
A cheap offer also shows that they will pull the plug on your quickly. A good offer is a willing sign of investment. All those common fallacies in human nature with sunk cost / valuing things what they cost you / etc are very very very much things in a human organization.
> people fundamentally don't like helping new hires outside of whatever perverse virtue signalling they want to show to their bosses
This is work culture there but really really that is not the case everywhere
Possibly this is, one of the many, reasons why people are hesitant to get a job on which besides having a shitty pay (on which you can underperform if you [consider] you are "over-skilled") you also have to deal with shitty people
I interpret low-ball offers (and by low-ball I mean rates well below the going market rate) as blatant attempts to abuse and swindle me and a collosal show of bad faith.
Accepting such an offer means being exploited, and being offered one means the exploiter saw in me a valid target for abuse.
I don't know how it's possible to not take it personally. Your income is perhaps the most influential parameter that governs your life.
> It's not like showing anger is going to get you a better offer or better working conditions.
Not accepting abuse does not mean getting angry, at least if you're an adult.
Managers most often don't pay from their own pockets. They are not trying to abuse, exploit, swindle, etc. They are just humans like you and me, trying to do their job. They have job openings, they hire for those, but generally don't have much say in the compensation for those openings. A lot of managers have simply to incentive to underpay. I can't talk about all, the world is too big, and there are probably plenty of exceptions. But the vast majority of managers simply would love to pay their employees as much as they could, only it's really not up to them.
Whole businesses have shut down over this. An entire burger king quit all at once and posted in on their signage.
I will never eat at another burger king knowing how they treat their workers now.
If more people had ethics and morals other than the 'holy profit' we'd be a much better society.
I, for one, stand with my brothers and sisters in their struggle.
I guess you need to have been through it to have empathy anymore.
Thanks for wasting my fucking time, is more polite than they deserve.
It is in fact, frustrating because you are looking to sell your skills, not a hastily put together image. There was time, energy, effort and potentially years of life poured into what you're attempting to present.
I guarantee you- if you are not working, have bills to pay and/or a family to take care of, and you do your part- being prepared, well groomed, informed about the company. You interview, you interview again, then finally with the owner. And after all this time, preparation, endless interviews, $ costs, time costs, etc and they lowball you- you will be offended.
If not, you didn't need the job. Shit, I've been offended over this rigmarole when looking while employed.
Many businesses do it on purpose, making you sink time and money so you feel invested and they hope you will not realize the sunk-cost fallacy.
This is how businesses these days negotiate, and it's disgusting. Much like making speaking about compensation against company policy even though it's illegal.
Companies break laws, exploit us, and we all just bend over and take it.
That's not really the same.
What you described is a Michelin Starred chef applying at McDonalds...
I had to hire quantity. Like 100+ temp employees in two months. I didn't have time to waste on interviewing people who already checked out via a trusted source.
Especially if it's a right to work state and the training requirement is minimal, it's probably better to hire the person right away.