Shortage of Adult Workers Makes Teens Employable Again
reason.com
reason.com
Is that a fun way of saying workers are getting pushed out of areas where workers are needed? Yeah that's a preexisting crisis.
What part of cost of living lowered? Food and building materials were already tariffed and pandemic made doing anything more expensive so prices soared even more.
We’ve had people come in thinking that we were like the baking shows you see on Netflix, just making fun cute things all day. They get scared of the work. A lot of younger applicants have a distinct air of entitlement, that their work is so incredibly valuable, even though they’ve never had working experience before. I can’t (literally can’t) pay these people huge wages. They don’t provide enough value, and no customer is willing to pay the associate price increases to the product to compensate the wage increase. If everyone agreed that paying $10 on a croissant was acceptable, then sure we could pay more, but it’s not purely the decision of the business owners.
I’m aware that we could just increase prices, pay better wages, etc. But there’s a very real risk to the business when making a large price change. We sell to a lot of other businesses, and they are sensitive to price changes. So while I’d love to hire and pay people extremely well, we can’t simply decide to pay more and have it work.
All that said, about half our employees are quite young (not teens though). They are usually the most energetic and willing to learn, but they are also the most unreliable (ghost, quit with no notice, untruthful about time off, etc). Managing people is way harder than it looks…
Blue collar work is by definition manual labor. Low skill labor goes in, product comes out. You have to constantly provide labor in order to create value. Software is very different because once it has been written it continues to provide value without constant input (yes, I'm ignoring maintenance and such). In theory the software can provide exponential amounts of value compared to the cost of labor. In that case sure, increasing the wages won't have a meaningful impact on the company income.
With blue collar work, and our in particular, there is a direct correlation between the cost of the labor and the profit from the product. The kinds of people we might employ have 1) zero experience, 2) troubled past that wouldn't pass a background check, 3) little to no education (many never finished high school), or any other multitude of reasons. These are vastly different kinds of people than what you might find in a white collar job.
In a business based on blue collar work, you really only have two choices: increase sales prices in order to pay employees more and hope the market will bear it. If not, you can pay employees market rates and keep the doors open. We have plans to start offering health insurance and benefits to all our employees, in addition to raising wages, so there's that to consider...
I say this as a former Oregon service industry worker.
And I am aware that labor creates value, but not all labor is equal. No one questions if a junior developer should earn as much as a senior/partner/staff engineer, but it's very much the same here. I ask someone to roll some dough into a ball and that I'll pay them $17/hour to do that. Some people will be faster and produce better balls, while others will be slow and produce lumpy round things. They are not producing the same quality and quantity but the cost to me is still $17/hour, therefore on paper one is more valuable than the other. That's not a heartless or mean way of looking at it, that is literally a required part of costs of goods sold. Ingredients and labor dictate how much each ball of dough costs to make.
We try our best to take care of our employees because they are so important, and you won't find a single one of them that says we are exploiting them. But they are not software people, and the dynamic is very different in the world of manual labor.
Sounds like the crew of 4 should just incorporate...
Edit: fixed typo.
Amazon has economies of scale that smaller shops simply can't achieve. That makes certain business models only viable at their scale.
> I’m aware that we could just increase prices, pay better wages, etc. But there’s a very real risk to the business when making a large price change. We sell to a lot of other businesses, and they are sensitive to price changes. So while I’d love to hire and pay people extremely well, we can’t simply decide to pay more and have it work.
I don't think your business model is viable.
You'll need to cut costs somehow. Time to re-negotiate your lease?
The internet has changed my expectations of news reporting.
If you redistribute the resulting capital returns, that could be nice, sure.
Stick to neoliberal capitalism and it's dystopian, though.
It's great.