Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Or maybe hotels have to rethink their business models. It's an inevitable consequence of real wage growth that labor becomes more expensive relative to goods and services. At some point, the old ways are no longer viable. Hotels can't hire as many housekeepers as before, because people are not willing to pay enough for hotel rooms. Hotels must then find ways to provide housekeeping more efficiently with less labor.
As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time
Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers. I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs ! I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ?
When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled.
They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything.
That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs. If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value.
(Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)
Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium.
Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place.
Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships.
To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.
Private companies are full of job systems as well. People hired to make their manager look good and justify larger budgets for example. You can walk into most companies and fire most of middle management and the company will end up more profitable and efficient as a result.
Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations.
You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed?
And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.
Sometimes other perspectives are more useful. Maybe the shortage is real and the reason for it is cultural. In some places, hotel housekeeping is seen as temporary work. It's something people in specific demographic groups do for a few years before moving on. If there are fewer people in those groups than there used to be, or if those people have found better opportunities, there may be a shortage. In such situations, raising wages may not be an effective way of attracting new workers. If people think people like them don't do certain jobs, they may be reluctant to take such jobs.
Ah, "people like them". You might try thinking through the who and the why here. Then you'll get to the "useful" part.
As a silly example, imagine if all hotels started paying $200 an hour to their cleaning staff. I think we can probably all agree that they would be flooded with workers and have no shortage at all.
Given that there is a shortage now, we can infer that there's a pay point between the current prevailing wages and $200/hr that would cause enough people to want to work in hotels to solve the staffing issues regardless of people's preferences.
> Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
doesn't get at the point of this:
>> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow!
In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us.
That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.
No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough.
Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations.
My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.
This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached.
The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market.
The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop.
Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
Or extracted too much capital when they could instead of paying down debt and got trapped under a rock when interest rates went up.
Speaking for my org personally we have zero debt, and are cash positive largely because policies like a hotel expense cap that prevent sales people from draining to company coffers
If I buy a farm/restaurant/hotel/retailer for top dollar and complain about cost of wages making it unprofitable, the problem isn’t the wages. But you’re stuck with your acquisition price, so you’ll lobby for lower wages and make no mention of your sunk costs.
If your wage goes up 10% but inflation is 11%, you actually have a real wage decrease. Generally speaking anyway.
Like it or not, new immigrants are more likely to take jobs that pay less as compared to non-immigrants.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
These are temporary and are at most 3 years. There is similar "if you don't have a job, you leave."
Add in the 2016 through 2020 was less favorable to immigration.
While past years, we haven't hit the visa cap for H-2B (like we do for H-1B), in 2022, applicants hit the cap ( https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/10/12/dhs-supplement-h-2b-cap-... https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/14/the-u-s-is-nearly-dou... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134417921/could-foreign-work... )
This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...
Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
That's fair, but technically I didn't say it would lead to wage growth. My point is that loose immigration allows capital to keep wages at their current levels, or lower them, because it's still probably better for those immigrating here than from where (whence?) they emigrated.
> Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
But is immigration the only solution to this problem? I get that birth rates are low, but it seems like that's due in large part to having kids being really expensive, on top of everything else being really expensive due to inflation. I don't get why we don't incentivize americans to have more kids. I get that orban is a controversial figure, but his plan [0] seems like a good thing for a government to do for its citizens. Why does helping families have to be a right-wing policy?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...
All told, the value adds up to tens of thousands in support per child, and yet it's nowhere enough to keep fertility rates at replacement. As such I doubt Orbans policies will as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...
However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.
This approach hasn't been good for anyone involved.
The employees typically seem quite miserable, as would be expected given their circumstances.
Economically, this approach also significantly increases demand for supply-constrained housing, health care, infrastructure, and goods. This in turn exacerbates Canada's current inflation problem, and it's made worse by these imported workers not offering any real (in the economic sense) productivity gains to help offset the increased demand.
The combination of these factors, plus cultural differences, seems to have resulted in a steep decline in the customer experience at such establishments over that period of time, too.
I now spend a small fraction of what I used to at such businesses because the experience is typically poor, at least relative to what it was in the past. I know others who have changed their spending habits, too, for the same reason.
I dunno, my pay sure hasn't gone up by 25% in the past 2 years.
The article says up from $10. I don't know whether that's a decent wage in the US, but it sounds low and $16 is just barely above the proposed compromise new US minimum wage figure, so it sounds not-hellish but not "do it just for the money" level.
Also, I noticed they said "25%" but $10 to $16 is 60%, and if you're griping and can say "we raised by 60% and nobody bit!", then you say that instead of "we raised by over 25% and nobody bit!". So I'm skeptical of the figures - maybe that 60% is best-case or something, and most people are offered $12.50 or something.
I stepped away from the professional world and am working retail for 15/hr while I get my shit sorted out. This only works due to the following factors:
1.) I have zero commute expenses. I live a five minute walk from work.
2.) I have state provided healthcare independent of my employment, which most Americans can't get. I'm only eligible because I have a severe disability.
3.) I live in a LCOL area. We're still under 1k for a two bedroom apartment and houses can be had for ~100-150k.
4.) I have some professional contacts/a network with higher incomes that can help me out if I need it and don't abuse the relationships.
We're still struggling a lot. If you're going to be homeless with or without a job, why bother with a job?
I actually did, even if you adjust for inflation.
And the paper route I had probably paid half of that.
Eventually I had to learn to code.
Wait until you learn about this thing called inflation!
I would option to say taking care of kids is more physically demanding than cleaning.
If it's just supplementary income it wouldn't really matter about benefits as the spouse would already have benefits.
And the kid thing it strongly depends on the age and type of kid. Kids at the most physically exhausting ages also tend to take naps which gives the parent a respite. You can also trade off with the other parent/other relatives if you're tired. Can't do that with work: Your coworkers aren't going to do your job if you have an off day.
The physically demanding part is in the demand for physical consistency.
C'mon man. At least have a serious argument. You act like a person cleaning a hotel room can't stop to use the bathroom or take a few moments to collect themselves before starting on the next room.
Have you ever stayed at a hotel? The staff moves at a normal rate, there doesn't appear to be a rush, they aren't sweating through their clothes. I've seen staff in their phones, texting, changing their music.
Not in room cleaning - I was a dishwasher - but yes, I know how it works.
If you think 3 minutes in the bathroom is the same as an actual break, it's not. They appear not to be in a rush because they have to set a sustainable pace. That doesn't mean it's not difficult, especially for females. Many things that are easy for males physically are a PITA for us.
There's not always a spouse with a good job. When the employment market is in favor of employers people just have to accept shitty jobs. In tight labor markets these low wage no benefit jobs are hard to fill and current workers at an establishment don't lose much by quitting for greener pastures. Even with a spouse who has benefits through work, many employers don't subsidize family benefits. Their solution is a "spousal surcharge."
Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
There are almost certainly miserable working conditions, bad hours, and still an overall low wage. If people are able to find better jobs, then hotels need to treat people better or pay more to offset that.
Are we seriously going to cry about megacorps not getting away with paying workers trash wages for miserable jobs? Boo hoo, pay more.
Well, that's why they're going to robots I guess.
> Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
I worked a much worse factory job for years. I don't blame people for not wanting such a thing, but sometimes it isn't all about pay, either. You couldn't pay me to go back to my old job.
Corporations having trouble finding workers to exploit is now a moral failure of the worker for not enriching rich assholes enough.
"To keep the employees they do have, the couple tries to accommodate staff needs" yeah, that's what good employers should have been already doing before.
Note that this isn't the first time in history this has happened.
Curious about where you live and where you grew up? I ask because none of these rings true for me. Many of my friends have bought homes and started families, along the way, they’ve created their own traditions, and are part of communities where they know their neighbors. And this isn’t in just in one place in the country.
If you and your friends are rich and dull enough, you can ostrich-hole it for a while yet.
If you want to see the canary in the coal mine, try befriending someone who works in the service industry.
I have a couple of very close friends in the service industry.
They are less well off than others I know and it’s reflected in their lives (still renting, fewer vacations), but no signs of societal collapse (have families and community relationships) there either.
What am I supposed to be noticing?
Had a friend making about $50k waiting tables depending on the year in a city you’d likely never heard of before switching to sales.
Another working in a kitchen planning to buy a home soon.
I know a couple local bartenders who do much better than I expected for a neighborhood bar.
Met a guy years ago who was a school janitor and for whatever reason I always thought they would be poor. Turns out that’s a pretty good job.
That said, none of these people work as a cashier at McDonald’s or hotel room cleaner either. The one making $50k worked at a national steakhouse chain, not a fancy one but a step up from Applebees.
If the incentive to work is "yeah you can show up and nothing will go wrong." Great. The same thing happens if you don't leave your parent's basement/subsidized housing/your friend's couch and you won't have to put up with as much crap or pay for a car. Do you see why people aren't bothering?
Perhaps what’s needed is to bring back family homesteads, but that doesn’t feel like much progress.
35% of households had access to electricity.
About 20% had some sort of indoor plumbing, running hot water would be even rarer.
Most people heated their houses by shoveling coal or feeding wood fires.
Society was even more racially segregated and legally codified and brutally enforced by the government.
In warmer rural areas it wasn't uncommon for hookworm to be endemic due to shallow dug latrines.
1/12 children 10 to 15 were working instead of school.
Most adults did not graduate high school and illiteracy was not uncommon.
This whole subthread is quite strange. I'm still not sure what societal collapse GP is seeing.
And some people honestly liked living like that. My great-great grandparents lived until the 1980s (born in the 1870s) and refused to get indoor plumbing. People are weird and sentiment matters.
Meaningless, no, because we're hairless chaos apes living in hives of other hairless chaos apes and plenty of our fellow apes live their lives based on this subjective measure which means it needs to be considered in governing and managerial decisions.
One of the main themes of conservatives is that then is better than now as well as holding back change their supporters push the notion that things are getting worse (regardless if it's true or what specifics) to help them get elected
(I worked in political communications and spent a couple of years getting lists of stories and headlines from all sides of the aisle fed to my email.)
One example of this is all the fear-mongering the Dems/their media arms do around things like abortion rights or queer rights/safety. (And before anybody comes for me, I'm a lesbian so I'm impacted by both.) Like apparently I'm supposed to be constantly terrified by the backsliding on both. And they do concern me but like I grew up in the 90s? I personally remember things being worse and I wasn't curled up in a ball throwing money at the Dems to Save Me. (And speaking of memory holing, as a gay millennial I remember quite clearly how long it took for the Dems to get behind gay marriage: Let's not pretend the current socially progressive planks are anything other than realizing we're a voting bloc that can be pandered to as hard as the MAGA people. I have no doubt the Dems would throw queer people under the bus tomorrow if it were a more viable electoral strategy to do so.)
Strange times indeed.
What is the evidence for this?
This just reads like the eternal conservative lament that society is going down the tubes.
Except for Israel wouldn't you say though counties have some of the lowest religious participation? What about nationalism?
I'm not trying to prove the opposite of you view as this doesn't show causation but I think it sufficiently counters your view
BEFORE the pandemic most americans couldn't afford a $400 emergency bill, people are pretty desperate in the US on average and if you don't encounter that day to day you are living in comparative luxury.
This “rent” thing sounds suspicious, you do you I guess.
You are likely still going to be entirely dependent upon that support network job or no job. Jobs that are available to most people dont generally pay a living wage anymore, is that not sinking in for you?
When you say "support network" - I hear that as "friends and family" or some sort of community support (eg: church?) Is that what you mean?
And if so, is it "fine" to not work and thus be a bigger burden on this network? Meaning, even if a role doesn't pay a "living wage", there's a big difference between just living on your friend's couch and eat their food (or whatever) and being able to work and contribute say $2K/month towards your friend for the favor they are doing you?
workers (should) have unions, the ability to go to strike, and the political position to ask better
The anger of the general public is moving on from high unemployment rates to low wage for workers.
- Have no job ? Nobody cares anymore since service industry needs a workforce (even if you're qualified in any other field)
- Have an underpaid job ? You can have a political impact nowadays.
Also, jobs allow you to have better jobs in the future. You build experience, and working in some companies, like Amazon, allows you to follow a university course, as mention in OP's article.
If you're not doing this for you, you should just have a job to be able to flip off abusive bosses.
>Jobs that are available to most people don't generally pay a living wage anymore
I don't think it can be a long lasting trend. Check out China, where ppl are protesting. And check out what happens at Amazon in the USA, where the high rate of resignation worries management https://news.yahoo.com/amazon-burns-workers-quickly-executiv...
But in your situation, if you have the opportunity to work, you can do it to grow the GDP and make your wage. You can't just expect that others, who might also dislike their jobs, have to pay taxes to share their salary with you just because you don't want to work.
There are real issues that cause unemployment : real estate that prices out workers in cities with jobs, banks that expect you to have a job before giving you a credit, when you need to afford a license and a car before you start a job, inconsistencies between companies expectations and job seekers, injuries, depression or lack of confidence,...
But being a crybaby about working isn't a reason to piggy back on workers.
I'm not even neoliberal, I'm communist. And I think you should work both for yourself and for the sake of the others.
What a strange statement. Could you give some evidence?
> It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work
Uh. They may not starve to death but most would certainly end up living in the street and die early in almost all developed country.
You can't have a shortage of underpayable workers, since a shortage means that quantity supplied is less than quantity demanded at every possible price point.
What it is, is purchasers seeking government intervention in the market to artificially suppress market clearing prices.