Hacker News Reader

> money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work

Lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but it sounds like you think that "crap bosses, crap customer interactions, crap hours" are things not in the employers control. Be nicer, have sane schedules, make customers (generally) happy goes a long way.

> Raising pay ratchets up inflation, and isn't a response.

While pay raises have a slight inflationary affect, worker pay over the last few decades FAR lags modest inflation. IF you have to work TWO jobs just to cover rent, then your pay is too low.

> lowered wages due to the "expected recession". You would start looking for a new role

Unless this "expected" recession is fictional, employers do exactly this, but just not in the way you frame it. It's true they generally don't ask for pay cuts, but cutting hours and shifts, drop bonuses and even lay people off. And since it's a recession and many businesses are similarly affected, you just can't "look for a new role".

> pay increases can never go down

In absolute terms, sure. But if future pay raises are below inflation, you actually do lose ground in real terms.

"Lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money"

This line made me realize that, yes, lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but that no one is fine making sacrifices for survival. Sure, you can deal with it for a while, years even, but if every day requires a fresh sacrifice then you will wear out and ultimately break.

Maybe less likely if everyone has to sacrifice like this, say in war or famine, we are remarkably good at adapting to our situations.

But, when your friends are buying houses and getting married and having children and going on vacations and you're stuck flipping burgers and paying all of your money on rent and ramen? No, there's a point where anyone would break.

> Unlike food, gas, houses, movie tickets, and restaurants, the amount of money transacted in wages/salary cannot go down.

And when, exactly, looking at 5-years windows has the amount of money transacted for movie tickets, food, gas, etc. gone down instead of up? Not prices from one week to the next or to the next month, when did prices consistently trended downwards for a period of 5 years or longer for a given product?

Gas prices 1932 - 1971?

At least that! For a period some 40-90 years ago we had stable to decreasing prices in gas... In the United States of America :)

A raise to $16 from $15 is a 6% raise and an increase of $2k a year. That is a HUGE amount of money to someone living off $15/hour.

If inflation is driven purely by rising wages (hint: it isn't), why are corporate profits through this roof this quarter?

You are right and the GP is wrong. When I worked for near minimum wage I was very conscious of exactly what I would get in each week's paypacket. Either a couple of extra hours or a small payrise (eg. 40c per hour for being kitchen trained) were a big deal to me.

If you are making say $380 a week, you might have fixed costs of $200-$250 a week. Other costs, maybe $60-100, which are difficult to cut without making your life much worse. And the constant chance of an unlucky break which will cost you $300-1000 and need to be paid straight away.

A small payrise can mean the difference between having $20 left over for everything nonessential, and having $50 - 2.5 times as much. Or the difference between having $30 and having nothing at all. Or the difference between ending the week with slightly more than you started, or with slightly less.

> The money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work.

What are you even talking about? Of course money is the problem.

Do you talk with regular people, outside of the tech bubble often? If money were really the problem, Walmart employees would jump at an opportunity to work at Costco or any of the other higher paying places. OP is claiming that because salaries aren't high enough, people are deciding to stay home and watch Netflix.

> Walmart employees would jump at an opportunity

That's exactly what they do. Most of my family falls in that category, and a desk job doing customer service at AT&T with reasonable health insurance is a big fucking deal. Getting that higher paying job in that market isn't as easy as you think it is.

Yes they would.. except that most places where there is a walmart, there is no costco. They do not have other higher playing places that can accommodate the workforce. I currently live in Seattle and when I drive down to Portland, there is maybe 3 costcos along I-5. There are a tons of more walmarts, targets and other big box stores. Walmart is the largest non-federal employer in US.

Do you really think people work at Walmart because they love the job? Check out /r/target for some insane stories. If forced to choose between insane working conditions or take their chances, some are willing to take their chances.

I think what happened was a lot of those low-tier workers had time to evaluate what they were doing during the lockdowns, and figured they didn't have to be treated like dirt anymore. Some people of course retired, and Covid claimed people too ... so now those low-tier workers had job choices.

And bad employers found their labour pool was more selective. They thought the root cause was Unemployment Insurance and people sitting home, but even after those programs expired they still faced difficulty hiring.

So, I don't think people are siting home watching Netflix; but they are unwilling to work for a crap boss serving crap customer during crap hours for crap money, because there are options.

Well, yes and no.

Imagine the average software developer earns $140,000 but due to some historical oddity, a company needs to hire people who'll develop software while people occasionally spit on them. They actually had a team of people doing that, and getting paid an average of $130,000, but they laid them off during the pandemic. Now they're finding it impossible to hire.

In a sense this is a money issue, in that I'm certain they could hire software developers who'll let you spit on them for, say, $1,000,000 a year.

In a sense it's not a money issue, in that if they could just remove the requirement to be spat on they could probably rehire for only a modest increase in salary.

I think I'd agree to be spat upon (depends on how often it happens) if that means my salary was doubled. This means my time till retirement is more than halved, which sounds like a good enough tradeoff. Probably also tells you how much I dislike working in the typical work environment.

> Raising pay ratchets up inflation

Studies on local minimum wages (such as Seattle's aggressive ratcheting) suggest that low-end wage increases have negligible effects on inflation.

This has a pretty obvious basis when you consider that the 1% and especially the 0.1% have an overwhelming majority all the money in the economy.

Completely wrong.

1. Nobody is talking about $16, but living wage payment that are not paid to workers. 2. It's millionaires and billionaires who increases the inflation, not workers.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/19/ceos-not-workin...

>This is lazy explanation that's easy to agree with if you don't think very hard about it.

And that's a lazy ass response because you only talked about wages and ignored EVERYTHING else. Wages alone, fine I don't disagree terribly with what you said. But it's everything else that is the major issue!

The complete lack of basic benefits- which translate to "I don't give a shit about you as an employee, just do as much work as you can and I'll give you as little as I can, and no one can stop me because there's little to no regulations on what I have to give you".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

>European Union legislation mandates that all 27 member states must by law grant all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation

How many people doing the jobs that pay under even say 40k get 4 weeks vacation? Get sick leave? Get maternity benefits? Get any descent healthcare? Those are the REAL problems.

> A shitty job at $15 an hour is equally unappealing at $16 an hour.

See a contrary opinion here:

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-me...

(Look for the “Wages, Non-Work Survival Stress, and You” section)

If you are payed better than most jobs you could otherwise do, you may find that it motivates you.

Every time someone calls someone else lazy I am thinking that there is a demotivational element somewhere that actively discourages people from working.

Now that's a lazy explanation. Inflation does not equal pay. That's a lazy assumption folks love to repeat without the slightest evidence. Other than the lazy "It's obvious to me".

Think of a world that worked that way. The only way to make a country work is to have a slave-labor class that struggles for a pittance while simultaneously bidding up the prices on things? I guess Karl Marx would agree, but I don't think he had any more evidence than "It's obvious to me" which is the bar here.

I did crap jobs for $8/hr because I needed to pay rent.

Same here. Ironically it's rising rent and gas prices that will force people back to work, rather than pay bumps because bills still need to be paid.

I have read your other comments on the thread too and I am really confused about something - are you saying that life/US treated you unfairly and hence everyone should suffer as you went through (suck it up, buttercup is the phrase I believe)? or are you saying that these crap jobs for $8 are fair?

I did not grow up poor neither did I grow up rich.. but I would love for people in my neighborhood, my state, my country and rest of the world (somewhat in that order) to have a better life with less uncertainties than what the previous generation had. The attitude of "I struggled, so everyone should also struggle" makes very little sense to me.

I'm saying that struggle made me a better, more complete person. It taught me virtues like not wasting time, using money wisely, saving, educating myself, not taking anything for granted, amd ultimately building my own business.

The upsides of struggle don't make as much sense to people who didn't need to struggle. But there are upsides nonetheless, and I would contend that a society without struggle for the individual becomes decadent amd lazy.

That wasn't the reason for this comment, however. It was that when I hear the attitude 'why would anyone want to work for $16/hr', I know I'm talking to someone who doesn't need to work.

Worker insecurity is a real and intentional thing: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

On 2)

CEO pay in 2021 went up 18.2% in 2021 and inflation is through the roof. Rich people wealth has exploded and inflation is through the roof as a result. That whole talking point is a scare tactic but inflation is through the roof and normal wages are in the toilet.

Typical humans would save the money to live on through daily expenses.

CEOs spend on big projects with inflating costs, circularly inflating costs.

It’s simple arithmetic and a whole lot of propaganda the rich are the best. Really the masses are just poorly educated (<13% have advanced degrees).

CEOs hiring people for big projects is the cause of inflation? Typical humans save money? I'm not familiar with the world you're describing.

Of course not, you don’t want to think in terms that do not align with your experience and propaganda addled brain.

The Fed was just saying they’re trying to get wages to stop going up; aka CEOs tossing more money at people, and trying to get people to save.

It’s gaslighting while ignoring the obvious trend; decades of CEO pay/growing wage inequality have lead normies into high inflation despite being told paying workers more would be the cause.

The powers that be are not dumb; they intentionally peddle narratives contrary to their intentions all the time; Roe v Wade for example. They’ll conveniently ignore the status quo of paying them more deflating our buying power because barely 90% of country is college educated and won’t question the hierarchy defined for them their entire lives, and the educated are outnumbered so they just play along.

I don’t know how it can be anymore clear; decades of doing what we were resulted in the situation we find ourselves; JIT logistics only the elite can thrive in.