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The perpetual truck driver shortage is not real

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134 pointstoomuchtodo378 comments

You see this in other trades also. The company complaining is not offering a market wage.

I remember a story about how in Denver a CNC company was having trouble hiring journeyman machinists. Well Denver is almost as expensive to live in as California and the offer was for 50 to 60k...

I remember this one time as a dev, I went through this entire interview process and they offered me 30k a year. I was literally laughing so hard I fell on the floor -- I thought it was a joke. Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.

I ended up working with them as a part-time consultant to actually find their first few devs. Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.

You actually fell on the floor? Were you in their office?

He may have been standing, and his knees gave out. It's worth considering alternative interpretations.

Or maybe he was in a dunk tank and he was so bowled over that he swung his arm out triggering the latch but someone forgot to fill it with water.

Another likely scenario!

Perhaps a bit less likely, but we'll allow it.

Yes! I literally fell out of the chair, which made it even more hilarious.

Yep, must have been hilarious. Thanks.

So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research? I find that hard to believe. I think they knew what a dev would cost and were hoping to be hire from the left side of the salary curve.

I've also been in a few interviews where the company was being evasive about the salary range. In every case it was below market and the hiring manager was just too embarrassed or too scammy to state it. Hoping they would hire someone desperate enough (ie "exposure").

Have you ever met business owners? They're not all that smart

In fact intelligence is negatively correlated with success in business. It’s all grit and a certain irrational headstrongness that’s needed

Sounds false. Do you have any citations for this claim?

Only beyond a certain point.

Once someone gets to Bill Gates level intelligence, I would agree any additional steps beyond that probably negatively correlates with grit and 'a certain irrational headstrongness' to a sizable amount, so much so that it noticeably reduces chances of business success.

I think most successful business owners are above average intelligence, but they’re also frequently really blinkered - they know a lot about something but almost nothing about a lot of other stuff, if it hasn’t come up in their path. It’s such a noticeable lopsidedness that I almost wonder if it’s a kind of prerequisite for being so foolish as to start a business.

The main criteria for becoming a business owner is access to capital not ability and by there are more small businesses then large concerns. Furthermore actually smart people aren't generally blinkered intelligence is by definition generalizable.

Your confusing reasonably trained in a narrow area with intelligence.

> intelligence is by definition generalizable.

How do you define intelligence?

I like this definition

"A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do"

I don't know where you live, but in most Western countries the capital required to become a business owner (i.e. start a legal business entity) is within reach of most people.

Unless we are talking about the money to file the paperwork to instantiate such an entity this just isn't true at least in the US.

Lets examine the parameters. In order to start a new business one has to be able to cover startup costs and live on your savings. Lets look at average savings as a starting point.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/american-savings-statistics/ About 33% have 10,000+ and 42% have less than 1000.

Even 10k is really very little in truth just a little runway until you can either acquire additional funding or crash and burn.

Lets inject some reality. Half of America has basically nothing. Another 25% would have to sink the majority of their accumulated wealth eg home equity into such an endeavor with a 50 50 chance of existing in 5 years. They COULD do it but it would be both scary and dangerous and half of them would end up ruined. It's like saying I could climb Everest.

I could scrape up the funds for the plane ticket and its possible I might survive the trip but anyone saying "most people could climb Everest" would be talking nonsense.

“and live on your savings.” << this is an obvious strawman.

There are plenty of ways to start a business without instantly giving up other employment.

To be quite frank this is mostly bullshit. Few people in the majority could live on less than full time hours or successfully launch a new endeavor on less. The counter examples mostly involve the "business" of owning things. For example owning the house someone else lives in especially if the day to day affairs are managed by a property manager, or investing in an endeavor wherein the majority of the work is done by those slightly less privileged wherein the "work" is effectively giving direction to secure your investment.

-“To be quite frank this mostly bullshit”

-some ramble about how it’s all too hard

Excellent debating style right there!

You dismissed the meat of the argument. People have finite amounts of time and money. In present context households are already running full tilt usually with 2 full time workers just to stay in one spot with too little in reserve to even cover ordinary disasters. It is this surplus of time and money that creates the opportunity for exciting things to happen like starting a small businesses.

Increasing costs and inequality rob us of the future surpluses that would be produced by such endeavors. Should we want to enrich our society it isn't sufficient to pretend opportunity exists we just endeavor to actually support it.

"You dismissed" - what, by calling it mostly bullshit?

The rest of your response is similar to your previous rambles about how it's all too hard, despite the countless examples, a mere google search away, of people who have started and run businesses in Western countries without instantly starving to death, or whatever your mostly-bullshit argument is.

So say you are liquid for 1000 bucks with average credit and a 50 hour a week time commitment to working and commuting to earn just enough to get by.

This or worse is about half the country

You need expertise, time, and money to start a business. The majority of people lack not one but all 3.

This is probably why only 9% own an established business. Indeed jp Morgan says that future business owners on average start out substantially wealthier.

https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin...

Which supports my assertion that the majority are ill positioned to start a business.

Money buys time, money buys relevant expertise in, wealth makes risk tenable because failure doesn't mean homelessness, money and financial health in fact buys access to borrowed money.

Everyone could just do what only 9% of people do is an incredibly privileged thing to say it's like Zuckerberg saying anyone can have a website or bolt saying anyone can run.

It's insulting.

Your glass is half empty. There are businesses you can start for under $1000, you may not personally be aware of them, but they exist (the business I own was started with much less than this amount in 2016 & has delivered decent returns with part-time hours since, no particular skills other than basic English & hard work required). Obviously you will need to spend time over your nominated 50 hour a week time commitment, why is this impossible? If you want to build wealth you need to put in the time. I don't recall claiming any of this was easy.

I guess some elements of capitalism need people with your defeatist outlook, to be lifelong wage slaves.

The glass is what it is. To be defeatist is to commit yourself to failure. I have no such ambition or shall I say lack thereof. To be a realist is to properly understand the world as it is and plan accordingly. If one wants to actually succeed then this is infinitely more valuable that fake optimism.

There are a lot of as you put it "wage slave" businesses which have 45 people making barely enough to live 4 folks making 20% more in semi-supervisory positions working 60 hours a week with lots of unpaid overtime effectively making less per hour than the grunts and 1 guy making a decent living.

You can accurately say that any of the guys could in theory move up but the logic breaks down trying to apply it to the group as a whole with one position essentially worth having anyone COULD move up but EVERYONE never could.

Society is essentially so constructed in the large. We can't all sell each other financial products. If we want society to function we will have to have a whole lot of people who are modestly compensated and I don't just mean french fry cooks. There are a lot of positions that are both challenging and necessary that really aren't paid that much. These people aren't all stupid losers and they aren't all too stupid to be business tycoons. They fit into the slots that society made and if we want people to move up we ought to do a better job at creating such slots and allocating resources to them.

Bemoaning the fact that people haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is basically useless.

What business did you start?

No, I’m saying that smart people can be blinkered, that knowledge is distinct from intelligence, and successful businesspeople are sometimes lacking in general knowledge, sometimes startlingly so.

I think it is necessary for being really successful in most fields that you neglect a lot of other stuff. I've had to deal with quite a few successful scientists, and it is striking how otherwise very intelligent people can show an almost shocking naiveté in regards to, e.g., politics (outside faculty, I might have to add).

My take is that business owners are bottlenecked on their capacity to take in information. If they could integrate more knowledge about what’s going on in their business, they would be able to make better decisions. And they know it. So there’s a very high opportunity cost spending that cognitive effort researching random things online.

You simply don’t get to put all your focus on making your business succeed without being a bit “blinkered”. That’s what focus means.

> So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research?

Some services vary in price by huge amounts.

Use Google to research how much it costs to have a company logo professionally designed, and you'll find you can spend anything from $5 (remote fiverr designer slaps your name on a stock template) to $5,000,000 (fancy ad agency rebrand for a fortune 500 company)

So I can see how someone could accidentally make an insultingly low offer for some services, despite having tried to research beforehand.

When I was in a similar situation I declined. (I was going to offer to contract, but then an absurdly low offer came in via email.)

It turned into a series of email flames from an "entrepreneur" that involved references to Frodo and the Ring.

Needless to say, the company burned out super-fast. The guy running the company didn't realize that he has to pay market rate in order to attract talent; and if he can't pay market rate, he has to reset what he's trying to do in order to meet his budget.

I had a guy literally laugh me off the call in my last search.

He kept pressing me for a salary number and I gave him one below market rate, well below what I ended up getting on another offer.

To top it off, he went on some dumbass rant about government handouts, "no one wants to work anymore", etc. Dodged a bullet there I guess!

> He kept pressing me for a salary number and I gave him one below market rate

Were you trying to get hired? If so, why would you do that?

I think any response would be fine as the employer is responsible for the offer. There's really no point asking me how much I would like to be compensated (the answer is always $1b) when the real question is how much are you willing to offer in return for my services.

Some employers ask this at the start. Then, you'll go through $x interview rounds.

If you say 100 quatloos, then go through 3 rounds of interviews, discussions, and they offer your 100 quatloos, you'd be an asshat to complain about salary.

And the employer would have every reason to think you're a dumbass.

Note that refusing to answer is fine, but being entirely dishonest (a random number, eg "any response"), would make me believe you are utterly untrustworthy.

>Note that refusing to answer is fine

I was required to put a "desired salary" in an application form. It was a required field. I wonder if the employer sorts by lowest?

Just put in an obviously fake number like 9999999999. It will be understood as you declining to answer

Not everyone is in a situation where they believe they can get an offer at "market rate"

Ideology doesn’t trump salary, metaphor included.

This reminds me of an interview I had @ Wikimedia (Wikipedia) a decade+ ago. They offered less than half what I was earning at a startup.

Is that surprising given that Wikimedia is ostensibly a non-profit and was in a much different financial position a decade+ ago?

For what it’s worth I do believe that wikimedia could allocate more of the dollars they have to their “core competencies”

Startups aren't exactly known for good salaries, I expected a comparable salary just without the option grants.

Non-profit doesn't mean bad salaries. I can say that because I work for a non-profit and I can compare my salary with many salaries in the industry through my union.

> Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.

Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?

The typical mind fallacy: amongst other things, unless it was done deliberately, it's really really hard to guess why you've upset someone, especially when they're so upset they don't talk to you any more.

Nah, if they stormed out right after you told them the salary, it's pretty obvious.

It sounds more like an example of 'cultural density' -- not wanting to realize or acknowledge something that's at odds with what your local culture desires (in this case, the desire to pay as little as possible).

This was the highest paid position in the company (30k a year) and a salary (which only their managers were paid in a salary). They thought they were offering a really good salary, not realizing it was FAR below market rate. They still hired engineers at below market rate (~60k) but I helped them find some really smart junior engineers who could maintain the existing code; and warned them that these engineers would likely leave in the next year or two, max.

They were able to become fairly profitable with full-time engineers, eventually, and ended up paying above market rate, last I heard.

What? Was everyone else at the company living in their car and relying on the food bank to feed themselves? Or was this in some strange ultra-low-CoL environment?

It was long ago, maybe 2009ish? Developer salaries were actually going down, IIRC, during this time. Likely due to companies exactly like this one and pivoting to more digital solutions. 100+k was very rare outside of SV. Adjusted for inflation, 30k is roughly equal to about 40-50k in todays dollars.

I had something very similar happen a lot of years ago when I was consulting and a client in a bank I'd worked with had asked me what it would take for me to consider joining them full-time.

When I told them they stared dumb-founded at me and said "but that's more than I make". We didn't talk about it again, as I don't know where you'd start explaining how capitalism works to a manager in a bank.

A former coworker got hired as a young company's DBA. They were more-or-less in the manufacturing space but with an internet sales channel. They had set up cubicles on the factory floor, with a "break room" on the floor consisting of a couple of vending machines with picnic tables. He wasn't getting anything done, what with the constant noise of pneumatic equipment and beeping of fork-lift trucks, plus the constant sweating from not having air conditioning.

He gave notice after a week, and one of the founders took him aside and asked why. Turned out he was their third DBA in a couple of months and they didn't understand why they were all leaving on such short notice. He was pretty gentle in letting them know...

>Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.

The most upsetting part of this is they were most certainly paying insane prices for that contractor, and probably weren't even offering you half of that. Businesses are so comfortable at padding another business's pockets with obscene mark up, but utterly refuse to let even a little of that money go to the "workers"

It's not exactly that simple. I know an employer in the cabinetry field. It's not genius work in the shop but you can't be asleep.

He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.

The town is full of hundreds of healthy males working for Walmart, oil change shops, non commission retail, and all those sorts.

There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.

Usually the issue there is nobody knows it exists. Or they are intimidated by not having skills, and having worked for WalMart, no expectation of any meaningful training.

Also, they don't own a suitable truck, nor own the suitable tools. The job might pay twice as much as WalMart, but if it costs you $40k-80k to enter that line of business, the wage differential is insufficient to pay both the capital expenditure plus depreciation of the required equipment. With auto mechanics, the folks selling tools (such as the Snap-On Tools truck operator) will handle the financing.

Screwing a cabinet together is actual work, you need to complete things at some expected pace at some expected quality (it's a low bar, but there's a bar).

At Walmart most of the time you can just fuck around and not do much work, if you get fired at Walmart you just go fuck around at an oil change shop until they fire you. I know men that have done this their whole lives.

Idk if you've been to a Walmart or an oil change place.. but they get people to work pretty hard and efficiently for low wages. That's basically their secret sauce. My Walmart appears to be staffed by zombies, yet for the most part the store functions pretty well day in a day out, 365 days a year.

Yes but they also get people who will just do the bare minimum and make everyone around them pick up the slack until someone takes the effort to fire them. There's essentially an entire category of people who do this.

They get paid the bare minumum and do the bare minimum in exchange. I don’t see a problem here. What do you do BTW? I would bet that not assembling cabinets.

The problem is that they put the whole store behind, then Walmart blames everyone for the store being behind and pressures them accordingly. Which is Walmart's fault, of course, but Walmart might as well be a force of nature as far as its workers are concerned; they can't change Walmart.

They're actually dead weight that the entire organization carries around, I honestly think in some cases they'd be better off being paid to not come to work.

What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.

For a much more charitable view, Everyone everywhere in the US knows walmart and how to get employed by them. Further, they trust walmart will pay on time. How many people know of Dave's cabinetry shop? How many people trust Dave's shop?

To me, a large part of the actual problem here is a marketing problem. It's really hard for a small shop to market that "hey, we need workers, we are willing to pay a premium, and no we aren't a scam company".

Well, and you have to put up with Dave. He might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with him, for all we know. Dave can't afford to pay me enough to put up with his toxic abusive bossiness.

Yeah, my point exactly on why someone would take a Walmart job over a Dave job.

Well, and you have to put up with your Walmart boss. S/he might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with them, for all we know. Walmart can't afford to pay me enough to put up with their toxic abusive bossiness, and don't offer much guarantee that the potential boss is better than Dave.

What makes it harder for many of those smaller shops is that they require the new worker to own their own tools. WalMart does not require workers to supply their own forklifts, nor bring their own mops & buckets when they start working there.

Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.

who the heck requires someone to own their own forklift

Walmart might be the biggest scam company in the United States — they've stolen over $100 million in unpaid overtime, and pay wages so low that they've recommend their employees utilize foodstamps. Then there are the standard corporate playbooks: a popular one is to keep a significant amount of employees just under full-time so you don't have to legally give them benefits.

There are hundreds of Dave's at corporate Walmart, and they care so little about the employees at any given location that they probably wouldn't even return an email, let alone talk to shift workers face-to-face.

Custom cabinet work does not have a low bar. You need to be familiar with multiple joinery techniques and finishing methods, even if your parts are coming straight off a CNC. Getting them perfectly square, face framed, mounted etc takes a lot of time and attention. For houses where the framing was done poorly, it takes even more time.

I believe fairly competent cabinet assemblers / installers are making $40-75 / hour depending on location. Everyone else paying less is half-assing it or doing a poor job.

Sure, but an apprentice can learn the basics to be useful on the job in a couple days.

That's not the point anyway, working entry-level retail is pretty much a 0 stakes job — quality has been mostly engineered out of it. Even a basic cabinet assembly job requires some quality control. Some people do not want to do anything of quality.

IMO we'd all be better off if people had a universal basic income and these people could spend more time finding something else to do with their time.

> There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.

Yes, it is called an insufficient pay to quality of life at work ratio, which also incorporates volatility of income.

All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.

But with pay like that, the shop would be out of business, because the consumers won't shoulder the resulting high price of the cabinets.

Either the business finds a way to be much more efficient (e.g. producing cabinets much faster and selling wider) while paying the workers more, or it has to scrape by while employing some less fortunate folks. (Or shut down, or course.)

> But with pay like that, the shop would be out of business

Maybe, maybe not. I will let the market sort that out.

If their "business model" is screwing over workers, then maybe it's not a good one, no.

Isn't that the business model of most employers in the US?

Are you suggesting $18/hr at Walmart is “better quality of life than $30/hr making cabinets”?

not set in stone, but might well be.

We do not know all the details. Does the $60K job require working nights or overtime? Does it require a flexible schedule?

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm shows there are not many subfields of cabinetmaking that average $60K/year. One is "Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing" which averages $60,520/year, so another issue is the actual job may call for more experience than just being able to use a screwdriver.

Otherwise, residential building construction laborers make $ 42,950/year, says https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm . They have more appropriate training than a grocery stocker. Why aren't they applying?

> All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment.

It's actually kinda common for higher paid employees to also enjoy much better working conditions.

Compare Amazon's developers to their van drivers. The developers get much higher pay and much better working conditions.

This doesn't follow nearly as well in the trades. Plumbers make good money not just because they are good at putting pipes together, but because most people don't want to spend their day getting dripped on or even dealing with wastewater.

> All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.

This is my understanding as well. Random piecemeal work in random places that only have one hotel and still manage to nail you for 150/night.

Yeah you can make $45k in 3 months, but it's 4 hours from nowhere, the work isn't consistent, and they don't offer healthcare or 401k. You can't make a live out of 1 month here, 7 months here, etc., and options like buying a big sleeper van isn't really an option when winter in rural Ohio comes around, etc.

It might ease of connecting workers to jobs. Walmart, wuick lube places, retailers all spend a lot of effort to make it known they're hiring and how to apply.

I have some family members in the cabinet business. Nobody is paying $60k/yr unless they're getting a lot of OT. They're commuting 2+ hours each way, don't get paid for the drive time, drive their own trucks, have their own tools. Most cabinet shops (almost all) don't provide any kind of benefits or PTO.

So, $25/hr, plus horrible commutes, plus tons of time and expense. There's a reason that guy can't find anybody, he's not telling you the whole story.

edit: 'of' to 'or'

I've posted here before about my dad in the cabinet field. He got a raise to $20 an hour in 1991. He worked a lot of overtime too, so by the end of the year I'm sure that was over $50k. In 1991.

50k in 1991 went much further than 60k in 2023.

That is exactly my point. Hence, I do not believe people are making that little today.

Would you believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Here are the "Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2022" for "51-7011 Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm

  Percentile wage estimates for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters:
  Percentile          10%           25%       50%       75%        90%
                                           (Median)
  Hourly Wage       $ 14.00      $ 16.61    $ 18.66    $ 22.91   $ 28.16
  Annual Wage (2)  $ 29,120     $ 34,550   $ 38,810   $ 47,660  $ 58,570

(2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.

The "Top paying industries for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" are:

                                          Employment Annual mean wage
  Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing   240      $ 60,520
  Federal Executive Branch                    190      $ 60,460

In the "Industries with the highest concentration of employment in Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" the best paying is:

  Motor Vehicle Body                        3,040      $ 49,990
      and Trailer Manufacturing

The most common (at 20% of the industry) is:

  Furniture and Related                    68,860      $ 41,620
      Product Manufacturing

While there is the caveat, "Estimates do not include self-employed workers", the example at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397458 was for employees.

EDIT: in 2001 the mean annual wage for cabinetmakers and bench carpenters was $25,120 with median of $10.74/hour and mean of $11.40. https://archive.org/details/welcometoamerica00demi/page/984/... . (It is the oldest record I could find, published in "Welcome to America : the complete guide for immigrants : the English-Russian version".)

What did your father do in the cabinet field to get $20 an hour in 1991?

Out of interest, how did you format those tables? They look really nice.

Thanks! Judicious use of the space bar and back-space keys. :)

No I do not believe the BoL.

He had just moved to the US in 1988. He had no real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat when he was a teenager. In 1989 my mom and I moved here with him. In 1991, he got a raise to $20 and we went to Price Club (Costco) and bought a ton of groceries, and took a photo with them on the kitchen table with all 3 of us using a self timer. It's a major memory of mine.

He was one of the 'foreman' in the shop handling the custom fixture/reception desk line. So if Sun Microsystems at the time wanted new cabinets for their new building, the rest of the shop would build the boxes, but my dad's department would build the reception desk. Basically, you could give my dad some drawings from an architect and my dad could figure out how to make it, while also getting it into the building. He was still cutting and assembling then too as 'engineering' and cutlisting is a short part of that overall work.

> No I do not believe the BoL.

That is because you are talking about a different sort of position.

talldatethrow described the position as "screwing a cabinet together for $60k", at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397458 . That is a cabinet maker.

From the BoL, a cabinetmaker is someone who job is to "Cut, shape, and assemble wooden articles or set up and operate a variety of woodworking machines, such as power saws, jointers, and mortisers to surface, cut, or shape lumber or to fabricate parts for wood products."

Your father did more than that. He was a foreman, he did design, and he worked on custom office furniture including installation. Of course he gets paid more than a non-supervisory cabinetmaker working in a factory.

As a first approximation, "First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers" at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes471011.htm says the mean wage is $77,650 - nearly twice as much as the mean wage for a cabinetmaker at $42,120.

There are no factories left in America that make the kind of furniture you're talking about.

So yes, every cabinet maker basically must think a little these days. You're not going to find someone screwing together ikea like boxes in America.

> You're not going to find someone screwing together ikea like boxes in America.

That's actually quite literally what my cabinetmaker did for my most recent home. Ikea cabinets cut down to size in his shop, and installed when ready/all the parts got in. Other brands seemed pretty identical to this - largely premade parts with a few sections designed to cut down to size.

Didn't seem to take much more than a measuring tape and a couple different saws to me. I'm sure I'm being flippant, but it was eye opening seeing that process vs. watching my grandparents build a second home growing up.

Part of the reason wages have not kept up is also due to the work becoming less skilled. The middle has been more or less completely hollowed out as far as I can tell. The types of job my grandfathers both would have set the dinner table with in their respective trades simply no longer exist. You either need to go mass-market low-end and seemingly as low quality as gets you a check in the mail, or high-end luxury market and all the spit'n'polish that entails.

I'd love to be wrong - but trying to simply find those craftsmen in the "middle" to hire is more or less impossible for me.

That's not a cabinet maker, that's a handyman basically.

When I said people should go work for a cabinet shop and make $60k+, I meant in a place that's making medium to high grade cabinets, custom hopefully or atleast to spec for track homes at worst.

What you're describing is somebody modifying mass produced cabinets from a catalog and installing them.

The installers I know all make $80k+ a year if they do work you're not embarrassed about.

You earlier described the position as "screwing a cabinet together for $60k", when you wondered why a stocker making $40K wouldn't want to change jobs.

Now you are describing a position which requires non-trivial training.

How long does it take to learn those skills? Who pays for the training?

https://www.carpenterstraininginstitute.org/apprenticeship-p... says "To graduate from cabinet maker apprentice to journeyworker, you’ll complete 7,000 hours of on-the-job training (OJT) and 640 hours of classroom learning." That's much more training than needed for stocking. It gives these statistics for the carpenters training as a whole:

  Average earnings for all first-year students:
    $33,436 – $46,363 + benefits*
  Average earnings for all second-year students:
    $45,600 – $63,200 + benefits
  Average earnings for all third-year students:
    $51,666 – $71,646 + benefits*
  Average earnings for all fourth-year students:
    $57,748 – $80,077 + benefits*
  Journeyperson
    $60,789 – $84,295 + benefits*
  Foreman
    $72,485 – $97,010 + benefits*

which again means $60K/year requires a lot more training than being a stock clerk.

Can you point to a job listing for this sort of position? I looked and found roughly comparable positions, but paying less than $80K.

"As a Woodworking Prop Builder, you will play a pivotal role in bringing our clients' visions to life by crafting unique and eye-catching props and decor pieces. Your craftsmanship will be on display at a wide range of events, from weddings and corporate gatherings to private parties and more." paying $18-$22 hourly

"The Craftsworker, Carpenter position focuses on carpentry and basic construction related projects/repairs. The position requires good math skills and the ability to think outside of the box. Experience in set design or custom woodworking is a plus. The Craftsworker, Carpenter works with a variety of materials, such as wood, fiberglass, rebar and concrete. The Craftsworker, Carpenter is often called upon to build/construct things that don’t come with blueprints or an instruction manual; they are built to specifications of the client and/or to fit in an allotted amount of space. Projects can vary from day to day, based on work orders, department requests, routine maintenance, or capital projects. Tasks can include such things as roofing; fencing; wood structure repairs; fixing doors/door hardware; installing door systems and windows; fixing ADA building access buttons; fixing shift doors in an animal enclosure; constructing safety fences/barriers for an exhibit; designing and building an automatic animal feeder disguised to look like a tree; or constructing various exhibit elements such as artificial plants, rocks or trees." paying $30/hour. That's far more than cabinet working and still only $60K/year.

(The site I was using doesn't have linkable URLs.)

Zip Recruiter has positions for cabinet maker in the range "$12-22/hr".

Cabinet Maker salary in the US average $37K/year says https://mint.intuit.com/salary/cabinet-maker based on nearly 3,000 income tax records, with a max of $70,500.

Why do you keep doubling down on your father's personal experience? It's one data point from 30 years ago. It doesn't really matter.

It matters to me. And unless we want to assume my father was special and gifted a salary long ago, and now everyone I know in that industry from his lifetime in it is an anomaly, I have to talk about it.

We could instead assume that you are either very ignorant or just talking crap.

Sure you could. At that point you should just give up entirely on talking to people if you think I'm lying about the experience of my cabinet maker father.

You could be telling the truth as far as you know. Did your father tell you everything?

That's a simple way to resolve this impasse - point to a job ad for a cabinet maker offering $60K/year for someone with no "real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat". [1]

You know an employer right now who is looking for people. Can you point to a help-wanted ad for that company showing what they are looking for?

I did a job search and found a $66K/year Cabinet Maker I job in Hawaii (which is one of the best paying places for cabinet workers according to the BLS tables you don't trust), for the state Department of Education. However, it requires apprentice training or 4 years of carpentry experience. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Cabinet+maker&l=Hawaii

From the same site, in Hawaii, there's an offer for on-the-job training, starting at $17/hour, so about $35K/year + overtime.

Otherwise there are cabinet maker jobs in Hawaii in the $20-$25/hour range and require a few years of experience. The same holds for elsewhere in the US.

I did find that CalTech is looking for "a Journeyperson level contributor in carpentry and cabinet making" at https://phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti... and they pay $29.75 - $43.75 Per Hour, but require "Completion of apprenticeship or equivalent training, one year or more of journeyperson level experience and five or more year’s total experience in cabinet and/or carpentry trades"

Furthermore, that person "will apply journeyperson level skills in providing building maintenance, laboratory installations and rehabilitation projects. This person will also apply cabinet making skills to the layout, fabrication, and installation of new and rehabilitation projects" and must be able to weld, and they would like someone with at least 5 years of work experience in a university or facilities setting and CNC machining certification.

So yes, "approach $100k for dependable people that known the field" is possible. But that's someone with years of experience, and for something far beyond the basic skills your father had.

Certainly not something a stock clerk could easily retrain to do, as you complained about at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397458 .

[1] What kinds of sailboat? A dugout canoe with a pole sticking in it? A small sailboat like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenichi_Horie#First_solo_voyag... requires advanced carpentry skills - Kenichi Horie paid someone else to build it.

According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics the mean hourly wage for cabinet makers and bench carpenters as of May 2022 was $20.25 per hour. Even in San Francisco the mean hourly wage was only $26.37. Lesson for today - your instincts abiut whay real world, non-dev jobs pay are totally out of whack with reality

And if your dad was an entry level or journeyman cabinet maker today, he'd be making $25/hr no benefits.

It’s really hard to undo people’s impression of what things are “supposed” to cost after decades of outsourcing manufacturing to low-wage countries. People who aren’t looking for artisan work really aren’t interested in paying inflation-adjusted prices from 30+ years ago, which is an interesting pairing to the not uncommon complaints that things don’t last as long.

Well, the labor force has finally decided they're not going to do hard work for starvation wages. The guys running the companies have increased prices, but haven't sent that money down to the labor force. I have a friend that's a plumber, he easily makes his company $450k/yr in billable services, he's making less than $30/hr.

Yeah, between active wage theft and the growing profit-taking I’m not surprised that the union movement is stronger than it’s been in my lifetime. I don’t know your friend but I know a bunch of people like him.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for your friend to start his own plumbing company with some other disgruntled plumbers, and offer lower rates too to happy homeowners.

The most important part is that these were not starvation wages in the 80s!

People used to pay american employees enough to survive, thrive, and even support local businesses that didn't have to crush their margins to 2% to compete with walmart.

The reason everything sucks is because americans have only cared about "sticker price" in comparison shopping for decades, and I posit that's mostly because the american income has spent the past several decades being cut in half simply because employers didn't pay people.

> He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.

I've seen trade jobs that get described like this. However the reality is different. The jobs are effectively seasonal and no one makes $60k because they don't end up working a full 52 weeks of the year. They get paid per job and once they finish the job there's no work and thus no pay until the next job. A lot of times employees are expected to own and supply their own tools. They often also require a commute out to a job site.

Working trades like this ends up averaging out to a bit better than minimum wage but without predictable schedules and/or long commutes. When someone makes six figures it's because the job was a new subdivision or something.

Prior experience cannot be the for setting wages. No matter how rustled an employers jimmie’s over big numbers, when enough are out of because it does not make financial sense to take a job, people will revolt.

If small businesses cannot hang due to their model (and sensibilities) being based on 1990s math, the solution is tax the mega rich and rebalance the market in the aggregate.

If you fail at hiring you have failed at the most important aspect of running a business. He is doing something or several things wrong, and there is no excuse. He can't blame anybody but himself for his troubles finding people. Just like you can't blame your competitors if you don't get customers. Hiring and training is a crucial part of running a business. Is he training young men to work for him, or is that "somebody else's job"?

Sounds like an advertising problem. How would anyone know about those cabinet making jobs, as opposed to very visible jobs at places like Walmart? I've certainly never seen an ad for a $60k a year entry level cabinet-making job!

A Walmart job is an exceedingly reliable paycheck for a clean job in a climate-controlled environment where the majority of the occupational risk is exposure to the public.

I can't fault anyone for choosing that option if they can live with the income level, it's relatively sane.

where the majority of the occupational risk is exposure to the public

... at Wal-Mart.

Personally, I'd rather work with all of the chemicals on the "Things I Won't Work With" list, but that's just me.

I'll take Wal-Mart over Amazon any day.

The public are fine, come on.

> Personally, I'd rather work with all of the chemicals...

My best friend was a chemist. He told stories of some of the accidents he saw (or heard, or saw the property damage, or triaged victims of, or ...) during the relatively few years when he worked in a lab like that.

Quite a few of the chemists in that lab left chemistry, and did not return. My friend left the lab, and moved into computational chemistry.

And maybe after they work there for a while, they can switch jobs to Target where the customers are better.

I'll tell you exactly what that is is cuz I'm that guy. Couldn't get anyone to take a chance and train me. I'm rather quite handy and safety conscious but couldn't get a job doing production work without experience period.

If you want stock boys you can pay em cheap but you gotta train em.

Instead I moved and found work in tech which matched my education.

> and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.

This is so bizarre. If someone knows how to build a cabinet, why would you promote them so they no longer build cabinets? If someone loves building cabinets, the only way to make more money is to stop building them...

It's one of the problem why companies cannot find skilled workers...

A friend of mine explained it as "We rise to the level of our own incompetence". Start a job at level 1, do a good job, get a promotion/find a new job to rise to level 2. Repeat until suddenly, you were really good at doing X job, but just got promoted/moved to doing Y job and now you are struggling because it's not very related to what you did in the previous position that you were good at.

It makes sense at a certain level, and can explain why we get so many people in positions they don't seem suited for.

Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building. But being an expert builder usually means you are intelligent and thoughtful and logical. So if you combine your cabinet experience with those traits, you are a great candidate for project manager, where you can be paid more and provide more for your family.

It's not like they are forced into it. No shortage of people that turn down the chance to get into management.

> Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building.

That's rarely a thing. Most jobs pay is not correlated to the value it creates. Simple example is software development. Team of 10 can create product that generates millions every day, but their pay will not be correlated in any way with that revenue. Maybe a manager will get a bonus, but most of the money flows to the owners.

I'd rather work at Walmart then screw together cabinets, personally.

That is part of my calculation of where to work, not purely money.

> The company complaining is not offering a market wage.

It is not always the company. In the UK there is a shortage of driving instructors. Many of them self-employed and can charge for lessons whatever they like but for some reasons they don't - probably people already squeezed by cost of living cannot pay much more and instead ready to wait weeks for lessons which are readily available in countries without a shortage.

'They can but they can't'

Sounds like a functioning market to me :)

Market stop prices from going too high but doesn’t solve the problem of shortage. If part of the problem is that it is hard to get a certification required to be a driving instructor government can work on making it easier/faster (not going to happen unfortunately).

This is caused by IR35 changes where self employed de facto can no longer offer services, as they are being forced into something called deemed employment, where they have no employment rights, but pay both employee and employer taxes without ability to make profit. Many people in the industry simply threw in the towel, because it became pointless to work.

(Going with the assumption that it's purely due to salary)

If you adjust the salary for new-hires, you'll have to also adjust every employees salary otherwise it becomes unfair to existing employees. Lets give a raise to everyone in America to match inflation isn't really a tenable strategy. Most small businesses would simply go under if they had to do that for 50-100 people. I believe this is the unfortunate reality of many businesses in the US which are struggling already.

> Most small businesses would simply go under if they had to do that for 50-100 people.

If you can't pay your employees market wage, why do you deserve to stay in business? Do restaurants ever expect to underpay their tomato suppliers using the same logic?

You deserve to stay in business when you are a legal business entity that is following all the laws and regulations. Giving everyone a raise is not required by law. It is not a realistic strategy to get out of this inflationary environment - that's my view.

> You deserve to stay in business when you are a legal business entity that is following all the laws and regulations.

You also need to be making a profit though, or at least break even after all costs are accounted for. Otherwise you will run out of money. In our current economic model, a company that is too inefficient to compete in the market does not deserve to stay in business.

There isn't a conspiracy against hiring people who are going to make you money. Anyone who adds value to a company and is going to generate more revenue than their labor cost is likely going to be hired over someone who does not.

> Giving everyone a raise is not required by law.

Maybe it should be. Even if only to match inflation. Salary actually decreases over time if you don't receive raises. $100k/y today might be equal to $110k/y next year.

You can type that comment, but perhaps if you were in someone else's shoes you'd have a different opinion.

Imagine the entitlement required to think that filling out a few forms and paying a fee (all that is required to own a business) should entitle you to take advantage of people for your own gain.

OK, so .. why is this the employee's problem? As soon as they can find better compensated work elsewhere, you're not going to succeed in underpaying people.

This is self-evidently true in all cases and I really don't get how some people can't get this.

Here in the UK we have a perpetual doctor shortage, except that we don't, because young doctors are worked to the bone in incredibly stressful environments in what seems to be a "paying your dues" model so that you can possibly, maybe earn the fat consultant money that older doctors get on their way to retirement. My understanding is that most leave for better money and living conditions in places like Australia. They exist, they just opt-out.

In the UK, independent software contractors are vilified pretty regularly, and there's often a lot of learn-to-code pushes because there's a perceived shortage. Maybe some of those people could just learn-to-medicine instead and solve both problems.

Agreed but there is a time component here as well. There may in fact be a doctor's shortage because getting a supply of new doctors takes X number of years but the demand is now.

In the UK with NHS shortages it's all about wages though. The time component just means that whenever they finally get the wages figured out it will still take years to improve.

We have a peculiar situation where NHS can't raise wages, but they certainly can hire staff from agencies at much higher rates (and agency mark up). Imagine if NHS could hire staff directly at those rates...

I’m not familiar with UK politics. Why can’t they raise wages?

Bureaucracy, corruption...

NHS management is notoriously corrupt and a bureaucratic nightmare, which is why the national health service failed in the UK.

If you live elsewhere and are surprised to have never heard about this, it’s because it hasn’t been acknowledged yet by the government to save face, but anyone with relatives stuck on a NHS waiting list or who have sadly passed away waiting for an ambulance that doesn’t come already knows this.

The Conservative party wishes to destroy (by privatization) the National Health System. It will be replaced with a "health" system substantially identical to the American system.

Leaving aside the political aims of the governing party, the NHS employs a lot of people, it's the biggest employer in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, so even a 1% raise costs a large sum of money.

Large nominal sums of money are really easy to turn into a negative headline, rather than the cost of using staffing agencies which requires a bit of analysis.

See Brexit for an example. "We're spending £350m per week on this, isn't that mad?!" versus "various analyses and projections show that raising trade barriers and reducing staff mobility will likely have a negative effect on domestic businesses"

>"We're spending £350m per week on this, isn't that mad?!"

Aren't you sorta forgetting the more salient point of this headline? That it was an outright fabrication with no justification or basis in reality?

I know, but it doesn't necessarily matter in this context, my point is that big simple numbers make good headlines, and complicated analyses do not.

That's always an excuse to not pay market rates.

If you really need doctors NOW, bump up the rates as high as they will go. At some point you will either run out of money, or you'll find a doctor somewhere in the world willing to take the 12 hour plane to move to the UK for the 1 million pound an hour wage you're offering them.

Or you don't literally run out of money...but it still doesn't work out so well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

Also worth keeping in mind - there's a big difference in "market rate" between "well-treated doctor in a well-functioning health system" and "relentlessly over-worked doctor in a wretchedly crumbling health system". And even if paid well above "market rate", the latter position will attract far fewer applicants who really care about patient welfare and outcomes. And suffer considerably higher turn-over.

I do see your point, but the fall of the Weimar Republic isn’t a great comparison.

Ultimately, it still boils down to “I think you should be limited to making X for doing job Y, because I don’t believe it should be worth as much as job Z, which is clearly prestigious enough to be worth 2X.”

Market forces are a surprisingly efficient means of separating perceived and actual value for pretty much anything, even with some fairly sizeable warts.

> of the Weimar Republic isn't a great...

Yes and no. A nation like the UK can afford to pay any one doctor millions of pounds. But that solution scales poorly to a national level. And worse if you try to scale it to all the other sorts of essential workers. And when an extremely large, complex system is wretchedly mismanaged - paying the guys in the trenches 10X does not fix that. For example, many of the UK's public buildings were built with "RAAC", and are at risk of collapse: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/04/raac-crisis-...

Meanwhile - a rather large number of HNer's seem to disagree with you about the virtues of those "efficient market forces" when it comes to health care. Perhaps discuss it with them here? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398504

No. Doctors who qualified in a different country cannot simply start working. They have to do expensive and time consuming training to convert their credentials. This is partly because it's very important your doctor has appropriate language skills and understands the local system - and partly because local trade associations of doctors insist on it to protect their own jobs.

The "paying your dues" model is also strong in the US, particularly in our manufacturing sector. I work ancillary to the machinst population (as the guy they call when their machines break, basically), and most of thee guys are so gaslit about "paying your dues" that they won't take all their vacation time because they don't want to be perceived as the lazy guy in the shop. In the sane line, senior workers will berate younger newcomers for not knowing anything, rationalizing it by proclaiming they are self-taught, and the suffering brings discipline. After all, the senior workers believe they had to suffer at that age, so everyone else should, right? The who manufacturing population in the US is low on critical thinking, and thus ripe for all kinds of abuse.

Factory owners understand and exploit this. In one such instance that I found frightening, a shop I was visiting in MI had plastered posters up with messages to the effect of "you have a right to work, don't let anyone take it!" as though their governer's repeal of the Right to Work was somehow an attack on workers themselves, and not a gut punch to factory owners who are anti-union. These same owners will spout "nobody wants to work anymore" while offering a pitiful wage for jobs that demand years of experience, or special skills.

I see the gaslighting in everything from tiny 10-man shops to factories the size of small towns, and it is frightening how much power the owners have over this population through insighting fear and anger.

You are seeing a symptom of even the small business owner seemingly struggling for income. People don’t realize the ultra wealthy hired the best and brightest for decades to capture all the excess wealth/productivity generated from technology capital gains.

If prosperity was shared as in 1965, the mode income would be 6 figures.

The UK government also artificially limits the number of doctors that can be trained each year. Doctors obviously support this to boost their wages.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62594141

I don't think its lack of suitably qualified people leaving school - I know someone whose parter was responsible for selection of students for entry to one of the UK's top medical schools and they said they really struggled to find fair ways of selecting people given the oversupply of "perfect" candidates for a relatively small number of places.

The NHS is a monopsony employer and has hardly any competition, I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary. Surely if what you're saying is true, junior doctors would not be paid less per hour than someone working in Aldi.

A friend of mine runs a successful business bringing over doctors from the Philippines, Pakistan, etc to work in the NHS, so the gap gets filled that way.

If that's true why aren't they going to work at Aldi?

Salary progression is the most obvious reason but don't discount the effect of morality and ethics.

I know two junior doctors, one is working in Australia and the other is still in the NHS and would never countenance leaving no matter how rational a decision it may appear.

> I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary

This is far from true. On the margin, doctors can work in the private sector or leave the country. Only a few choose to do so, but this is (among other reasons) because the NHS always has to respond to price pressure to keep that small number from growing to where it causes shortages.

Recently a change in how pension contributions are taxed was pushed through almost entirely because it affected senior doctors. If the NHS had pricing power as you suggest, why wouldn't they just tell doctors to pay up?

> Here in the UK we have a perpetual doctor shortage, except that we don't, because young doctors are worked to the bone in incredibly stressful environments in what seems to be a "paying your dues" model so that you can possibly, maybe earn the fat consultant money that older doctors get on their way to retirement.

I wonder what would it take to end feudal employment model that so, so many industries have and what software seems to mostly avoid.

I remember arguing with my doctor mother that had an intern. She practically claimed that the intern _should be_ paying her for learning experience and that's so burdensome for her to even share the knowledge she gathered during decades of experience. It's unthinkable for most software engineers, who often create free products, tutorials, articles with no expectations of pay.

the model for doctor work was designed by a guy who was a cocaine addict. he made it work... cuz he was stimmed to the gills most days. so start by tossing that approach out.

another specter hanging over the industry is that studies have shown that hand-offs to different nurses and doctors is what leads to errors, and in medicine that sometimes means people dying cuz of dumb mistakes. the solution was to keep someone on shift, like 12+ hours, or often more for sensitive cases.

i've done 60 hour weeks in IT, and even napped in a data center -- that hum is relaxing! -- but those were one-offs, while it's a lifestyle for the docs.

>people dying cuz of dumb mistakes. the solution was to keep someone on shift, like 12+ hours, or often more for sensitive cases.

Which was entirely the wrong "lesson" to learn! Once again doctors bristle at being told they should improve their processes instead of being arrogant hero complexes that can do no wrong.

They should have improved the handoff and paperwork processes. Airplane mechanics have been handing off extremely complex procedures and concerns for decades, with very few accidents. So maybe we should learn from them instead of letting tired doctors continue to mistreat people.

Doctors similarly were grumpy about bringing in checklists like pilots have, despite them having a demonstrated effect.

The complaint is valid. A better title for the article would be trucker shortages are self correcting. The “number of trucking carriers has increased 45% since July 2019;” you don’t see a 50% increase in the quantity supplied without a supply-demand mismatch, which in anything but a perfect market causes localised shortages.

When confronted with these shortages, Congress tends to “fund employee driver training and recruitment programs,” which does nothing for independent owner-operators. Given that is the responsive end of the supply curve, the next time something must be done about a trucking shortage, it should be in making it easier for aspiring owner-operators to secure SBA loans.

> Given that is the responsive end of the supply curve, the next time something must be done about a trucking shortage, it should be in making it easier for aspiring owner-operators to secure SBA loans.

Government should not be help people by offering them debt with improper underwriting. All it does is screw up prices and long term supply/demand curves such as with education and homes, and screws future taxpayers for the benefit of current taxpayers.

If the government wants to encourage more people to become truck drivers, then the government can start paying its drivers more, improve minimum working conditions for truck drivers, and pay truck driving schools directly to offer free truck driving qualifications.

> then the government can start paying its drivers more, improve minimum working conditions for truck drivers, and pay truck driving schools directly to offer free truck driving qualifications

Paying its own drivers makes sense. The second two are straight out of the ATA’s playbook for industry capture by large incumbents. The part of the supply curve that’s responding is owner-operators. They don’t benefit from working-condition mandates or driver’s schools; the large incumbents do. The second two advantage them over owner-operators, and could conceivably exacerbate the problem.

What is the goal?

Is the goal for society to have more truck drivers? Or is the goal for the government to help increase the number of owner operators?

If being an owner operator is a good business, then a lender will do the proper underwriting and extend a loan. If a lender does not, then that means the truck driving business is not lucrative enough, and so people should be looking elsewhere to sell their labor.

> What is the goal?

Smooth logistics. When Congress intervenes, it’s to alleviate supply-chain snarls.

> If being an owner operator is a good business, then a lender will do the proper underwriting and extend a loan

Why do you pre-suppose a functioning lending market for independent truck drivers? A 50% increase in owner-operators could easily saturate what used to be a cottage financing industry before being noticed.

The core point is we tend to think of truckers as employees from a distance. That shapes our policy responses, e.g. knee-jerk assuming the problem is pay or working conditions. It’s not just that because many truckers aren’t simple employees.

They might be offering a market wage under their price constraints.

If everyone raised wages together, we wouldn’t magically be wealthier. Number of workers is approximately zero sum, but their productivity in regards to wealth generation is not.

Wage growth has not matched productivity growth for decades.

The integrated wage growth has only happened for the very wealthy. Ie they captured the gains.

I recently was headhunted by a company trying to place someone in Denver. The pay was 80k a year, less than I make in the midwest.. a substantial raise in cost of living for a pay cut with no remote work option. I told her she would have a very hard time finding someone in my area to take that job.

I worked at one company in the valley that said they couldn't find any more good developers. In silicon valley!

No, they just wanted to pay terrible wages... glad I got out.

Medium to long-term follow on effects get lost in these discussions. For example:

Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking? If so, you're correct. To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices for many of the things you purchase. Same with taxes. Same with company sponsored healthcare.

Those greedy shareholders and business owners are feverishly working to control labor costs through continued automation, continued OCONUS production, and continued passing along of costs to customers.

I understand this reply will be downvoted into oblivion, but I wrestle with these issues in business every day and feel obligated to point out the unpleasant reality of a globalized supply chain that pits US workers against those making far less outside the US. Its a slow read, this story, and one that is far from over. It doesn't end well for the United States unless public policy changes toward immigration and public aid competition to gainful employment.

I have no issue with higher prices to provide workers a livable wage. I have an issue with record profits and profit margins in a period of time that is also seeing record prices for consumer goods and services. The dishonesty from the profit makers is astounding

> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices for many of the things you purchase.

I'm advocating for higher wages for truck drivers, and lower wages for trucking company executives.

Will it come out in the wash? I don't know. But it certainly means that the net increase in shipping costs is smaller than if you focus only on the increased driver pay.

Basic numeracy: looking at top transportation CEO pay, it is coming out at $5-30M. Grabbing the first company on this list, they have 12k employees. If we completely spread out the CEO comp (which is mostly equity) everyone makes maybe a couple grand more a year. That is going to affect employee pay by less than inflation.

https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-in...

A couple grand a year for 12k people isn't nothing. If you expand it out to more of the C-suite, it gets even higher.

Just looking at the salary is incredibly naïve; these CEOs and other higherups sit on immense piles of stock options purchased with the company's profits.

And way too often weird """loans""" on the companies books made to the execs, with no expectation of repayment.

I upvoted you, because you don't deserve any downvotes for your comment.

However: If workers are paid more, they also have more money to spend to purchase products and services. This is good for the vast majority, including almost all businesses. It is good for the workers who get a better material standard and quality of life.

There has been a great increase in worker productivity in the last decades, why is that never accounted for? Almost everybody I know who actually work, produce the same as it would take 5-10 people to produce just 20 years ago. That's probably true for truckers as well, with modern logistic systems, huge lorries and better highways.

Higher wages and higher prices are probably bad for the huge amount of the population who don't work and never has worked. But with higher salaries, work will look more attractive to them as well.

I downvoted you just because you used upvotes for exactly the wrong reason, justifying it by encouraging others to use downvotes for exactly the wrong reason.

i haven't encouraged anybody to use downvotes.

My math is that for something worthless like bananas, the fuel I buy to bring them a couple miles from the store costs more than the fuel to ship them to the store. Of course they truck rather efficiently, but they also sell for ~nothing.

How does it work then that the trucking cost is the primary component of the price? Or do you mean something different by "Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking? If so, you're correct."?

Many shipping (as in, the ships on the seas) use slave labor. If the cost of transporting goods raises far enough, including coast-to-coast domestic shipping, that will provide an economic incentive to produce things domestically.

> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices

I'm constantly amazed at how commonly people have been brainwashed to miss the other perfectly valid option.

Lower profits.

If you look at the margins on logistics and grocery stores (at least over here in Europe) you'll find the profit margins are quite poor, around 10% or less.

Even if all profits were directed to reduce prices or raise wages it wouldn't have that big of an effect.

Reduce profit of the oil company, reduce profit of the company that made and sell the truck, reduce profit of the tire company, reduce profit of the private company that charges tolls on the roads, etc. etc.

> It doesn't end well for the United States unless public policy changes toward immigration and public aid competition to gainful employment.

You mean COMMUNISM!

It's communism unless it's for the benefit of the military industrial complex, then it's patriotism.

Three of the biggest per capital military spenders are communist countries, and its all sold as 'patriotic duty'. Capitalism is a hope fraud from some, but Communism is hope fraud for all but a few.

> Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking?

How much of that is the cost of the driver though?

Around 70%, if it's a owner-driver (so includes fuel and maintenance) in UK.

The market is due for a correction after decades of outsourcing and undercut goods. Convenience came on really fast and now our expectations for the true costs of things have been completely skewed. I'm fine with certain goods getting more expensive, but I fear without the proper treatment the govt will continue to let food and medicine compete in the same markets as luxury and convenience goods (consumer electronics, etc.).

I've thought about his often, too, but I am of the opinion we can all thrive together or die together. As much as I would love to have 20-million in the bank, live off interest, and have the working class cater to my every need, it's an absurd dream.

I want the bottom of the barrel to lead a dignified life if they're willing to work a full-time job. If the upper, upper-middle, and even middle class have to readjust, then so be it. The working poor need to stop subsidizing others.

It IS a difficult problem, but if the answer from anyone in leadership is others should work full-time and not be able to go to the doctor when needed or buy a crappy condo or worry about food...then those people need to step aside from their positions and allow someone else to at least try (and when I say leadership I'm talking about those that allocate capital and pass laws/policies).

I am a big believer that work for work's sake has no virtue, it is better to die on the side of the road than work for peanuts (it's anti-labor and makes the world worse).

So next time you are purchasing something, do you promise not to look for the cheapest option, but the one that pays a good wage to the supply chain? As long as people make purchase decisions based on price, they will be part of the problem.

"Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent."

Oh - stumped. Were you in the debating club?

No, I don't. It is about bottom-up accountability. Expecting top-down accountability is stupid and a recipe for an unhappy life.

We need to teach people to stand-up for themselves, not expect those above them to eventually accommodate them.

Well, when they stand-up for themselves, cheaper labour (whether it's non-unionized / illegal immigrant / offshore ; you name it) comes and provides an alternative and people price hunting do actually enable them. In a free market the price signal will sort the bottom out. The only solution is top-down accountability, government enforcing rules, tariffs etc. and consumers voting with their wallet (kind of happening with ESG stuff now). But as people try to find the cheapest of everything, amazon and the like who works people to death and prevents unionization and what-not will prevail.

> Guess which expenses impacts most prices, the most? Did you guess trucking? If so, you're correct.

Can you provide a source for that statement? There are certainly some kind of goods for which your statement is true, but as a general statement I'd say it is just plain wrong.

probably a bubble thing as most produce of the hn crowd does indeed not need any trucking

Well, "impacts most prices, the most" is a kinda complicated statement to parse, so I don't know precisely what the original poster meant.

But almost all products on store shelves got there by truck. As do almost all the products in an Amazon warehouse. And almost all the inputs a factory uses will arrive by truck. Even the gas in the gas station arrives by truck.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to things like video games, netflix subscriptions, gym memberships or electricity. And obviously, trucking costs are lower per-item for items you can fit more of in a truck, and lower as a % of item cost for higher cost items. You'll notice the cost of trucking a lot more on a bag of onions than you will on an nvidia 4090.

If you count a weekly food shop of 50 items as 200 prices per month and a single netflix bill as 1 price per month, "impacts most prices, the most" could be true.

Politicians are generally very wary about things like gas tax increases because they don't just increase the amount households are paying at the gas station, they also increase the cost of the weekly grocery shop and many other things too.

Even for relatively cheap and bulky food like potato or onions I’m quite certain that trucking is only a small part of the price in the store.

To everyone advocating for lower C-Suite pay, let me explain how it works:

1. Trucking company ABC needs a new CFO or CEO.

2. Mrs. Smith is a Wharton grad qualified for the role, and Mr. Smith is a Michigan State grad also qualified. Mrs. Smith is 3x the compensation expense to hire as Mr. Smith.

3. Mrs. Smith has a network of bankers, industry contacts and Wall St. analysts she's cultivated over years. Mr. Smith has no such network or specific industry experience.

Who would you hire?

Who would you want hired if you were an investor in the company? If your existing 401k was invested in this company?

As previously stated - the medium/long term considerations are entirely lost on the "pay 'em less" crowd. Its feels great to say and that's about it.

To everyone advocating for lower corporate profits:

1. Good luck attracting investment capital.

2. Have fun competing against companies not similarly constrained.

3. Enjoy down cycles where the additional retained earnings would've helped you stay in the fight.

The lack of real-world experience and considerations to my original comment is disheartening.

It's much simpler than that. Marc sits on Board A, which has CEO Daren, who sits on the Board for the company that Marc is CEO for. Marc votes to increase Daren's comp, who will then go on to vote to increase Marc's comp.

CEO pay is completely divorced from reality, and from their performance.

How can "public policy changes toward immigration" replace wage hikes? Won't that just result in a large population of untermenschen suffering substandard living conditions? Essentially a slave class?

> To everyone advocating for higher wages, you're actually advocating for higher prices for many of the things you purchase.

I don't think this is necessarily so. How do you know that prices can be raised? What if the market won't bear those price increases? If the price of a product could be raised profitably today, why wouldn't the the company do so, regardless of their labor costs?

If McDonalds could sell 10 million burgers for $2 each and 8 million burgers for $3 each, they will raise their prices to $3/burger, regardless of what they pay their employees.

"The perpetual truck driver shortage"

This is called "begging the question" i.e. assuming something you need to prove.

I don't actually know if the number of licensed and experienced drivers is too high, too low, or just right. But neither does this article. All their data is about the number of trucking companies, not drivers.

I'd guess anecdotally the driver shortage is real, given that I know three truck drivers, one of which is long haul, and is on track to retire in his 40's, the others are making quite good money after both jumping from company to company every few years since they started.

You don't see massive wage increases if you don't need additional talent afterall.

The downside is, if you can't fill your need for socialization, it's a very lonely life, and really isn't for everyone. That alone explains the shortage handily in my book.

In the UK I recall we have about 70k or more drivers with HGV licence who don't work as drivers and there is a "shortage". There are two main reasons they no longer work - first one is government changed the law, so they can no longer run a business (if you own a haulage company, you can't perform service as an owner) and so not many fancy driving without sense of working for oneself and expanding, the second reason are poor wages. So even if someone comes to terms that it is now a dead end job, the alternative cost of doing it is too high. E.g. spend years behind the wheel and in 10 years time, due to inflation you will probably be making less money than when you started. In that same 10 years time you could have learned a different trade and make up for the time spent on learning and have a view for progression.

Yeah, like I said: it might well be real, but this article presents no evidence either way.

Worker shortages always come down to the same old boring thing “Nobody wants to work…” “for what I want to pay + under the conditions I want to offer.”

This is the free market working as intended. It is the way in which workers improve their conditions. A “worker shortage” is just workers voting with their feet and going someplace better.

I wish people would use terms like "liquid market" rather than the extremely disingenuous "free market" terminology. Free markets are a marketing term that doesn't apply to reality.

Because liquidity is a term for assets such as stocks, and related to how quickly one can liquidate something. It has nothing to do with labor.

What you may be thinking of is a “fluid market”, which corresponds to how loose or tight a labor market is.

Either way, there is no problem with saying that the free market is working as it should here…free markets are a concept and of course 2 words will never summarize the extremely complex world of supply and demand, and all the exceptions to the rules(neither will whatever 2 words you come up with).

If it's not a free market, because of restrictions/regulations on that market, then we should object to calling it a free market!

Look, I know it's a handy phrase that we've all grown accustomed to, but when it doesn't fit, we shouldn't try and force it to fit, just because it's comfortable.

Then we basically have to throw the definition of any abstract idea out the window, or put an asterisk next to it with every possible caveat. Of course the implementation of a free market is not the same as the perfect concept of it because we live in a complex world.

But I guess this is your hill to die on, not mine.

Well, anyone who claims to know what a "free market" is supposed to do is straight conning you. As i said, it's a disingenuous marketing term with no application to reality. If someone intended to say "supply and demand" surely they would use "supply and demand".

Supply and demand is a part of the free market philosophy, and it also exists in non-capitalist ideologies. What a free market is supposed to do is well understood and studied...what it actually does with the addition of caveats such as political motives, human nature, competition, etc... is very different.

Sounds like you're the one that got conned.

Unless you expand on why, it just sounds like a definitional game

Free market means free from economic rent. Which roughly means that no one makes extra money just because they are in a position that allows it.

Sometimes. Occasionally specific skills just aren’t available. For example, there are many available construction laborers, but very few skilled carpenters.

My friend and his brother are electricians… they quote $600/hr for new customers and the response is “when can you start”. Often the timeframe isn’t acceptable, and they don’t overbook.

With trucking, it’s specific types of runs that you cannot fill. Nobody wants to take LTL loads to NYC at any price.

Nobody wants to take LTL loads to NYC at any price that people will pay.

I'd go get a CDL and take LTL loads to NYC for $1M/pallet if enough people would pay that.

We don’t live in an Economics 101 world. Unless you’re talking military airlift or similar.

What does happen is that companies with local agent networks or partners will engage that local partner. NYC is large enough that all sorts of unusual capability exists. If you need to get a bunch of farm animals in midtown, there are in-region companies who can do that.

Companies that don’t have appropriate supply chain ops just aren’t going to effectively do business. If in-region to you means a DC in North Carolina, for example, you’re probably going to get eaten alive by the competition.

>We don’t live in an Economics 101 world.

We do, in fact, live in an Economics 101 world. Sure, you also need Economics 102-499 to fully explain how it all works, but applying Economics 101 to any economic situation will yield a correct understanding 90% of the time.

That said, the poster you're referring to is 100% correct: every service has a price at which people will perform it.

Sure, but you have to look into why the skills aren't available. With trades, it's typically because nobody is willing to train people from scratch, so it's not surprising that they can't find anyone willing to spend several years getting paid minimum wage to do manual labor while simultaneously paying for trade school. A lot of the older guys working in trades learned their skills in the military, but with declining enlistment and the military increasingly farming out that work to contractors, that doesn't happen as much anymore. Tradesmen definitely do make good money eventually, but by then they're in their 30s with debt and a sore back.

Sometimes it's "for what I am able to pay", because the business doesn't support higher wages (or it won't make a profit). It is unfortunate, but it sometimes mean that the business just isn't viable. Or that "another" of that business isn't viable (if there are enough people willing to accept that wage, but only for the the other instances).

Yes, and it’s it interesting that the free press is so impossibly bought that the real story — that of workers saying no thanks — isn’t covered much?

I own companies. I’m on the wrong side. But it’s true.

A shortage just means that the quantity supplied is less than the quantity demanded. You can have a 45% increase in the quantity supplied, as TFA says, and still have a shortage. We don't know anything about the change in the quantity demanded during that time.

That being said, the article is correct that there is no shortage because there is no ceiling on the price of truck driver labor. Companies just don't want to pay more.

When you say companies don't want to pay more, are you talking about the trucking company or the company that needs goods moved?

I'd imagine that a trucking company will pay almost as much as possible to a driver, because as long as there is a profit in the shipment, it makes sense to pay the driver to move it. If you book a piece of freight for $1000, would you not pay a driver $990 worse case, just to move it, because that's better in the long run than losing business?

It seems more likely that the people that need things moved think it's too high and decide to not move the items at all.

I was talking about the trucking companies, since they are the direct participants in the demand side of the trucking labor market.

I agree with your analysis though. They should be willing to pay truckers whatever wage allows them to profit. They would rather have more of that surplus to themselves though. The price that the clients are willing to pay to have their goods moved ultimately dictates how much of that surplus there is for the truckers and the company to split.

> They should be willing to pay truckers whatever wage allows them to profit.

That's pretty superficial. The critical question is "how much profit?" There is a world of difference between coming out $0.01 ahead of costs and coming out $10M ahead of costs.

But IT people should 'charge by value'. Why shouldn't truckers be able to do the same?

I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that "willing to pay whatever allows them to profit" is missing any consideration of the desired magnitude of the profit, and although this is elastic, it's not infinitely elastic.

Trucking is so under competitive pressure that it is essentially a race to the bottom. You only get into trucking when you don't have a whole lot of options left. The hours suck, you make peanuts and your body goes to shit. It should cost a lot more than it does.

I know truckers making $150k a year, living on 5 acres of land with a decent house and a 3k sqft metal shop for all their toys. Let's not go crazy making superficial judgements just to feel better about programming as a career.

Exceptions, rules and all that and I wasn't making any superficial judgements: trucking is a harsh life, besides the fact that it is downright dangerous, iirc the most dangerous job short of the fishery industry (on ocean going vessels).

Forbes says it's #6 on a list, behind loggers, roofers, fishing and more

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/workers-comp/most-dange...

So, read 'one of the most dangerous'. I've also seen articles that list it as the most dangerous, I don't have access to raw statistics nor do I care to argue the finer points of this for the sake of fake internet points, the fact is: trucking is super dangerous, far more dangerous than IT jobs ever will be and is on average comparably badly compensated. If you disagree with that in principle feel free to state why.

If you pay $990 on a $1,000 job, you'll lose your own business soon enough, that it won't matter if you lose any business!

From my experience in trucking the industry is full of webs of middlemen all looking to take their slice. The result is that everyone is trying to screw everyone else. Drivers have the least leverage.

Software contracting is similar.

There's a lot of overhead to running a business, some of which is captured on a balance sheet and some not. There's risk, there's stress, there's wear and tear on both man and machine, and there is opportunity cost. Just because you expect to make a profit on paper doesn't mean that it's worth the effort.

I have a friend who is a truck driver.

He went through the whole interview process, including a road test (which he easily passed, as he's very good), and found out they were only paying $30/hr.

After bitching about it, they went up to $35/hr, but the extra $5 was put into a 401(K).

Guess what the investment for the 401(K) was?

BTW: He walked.

Getting paid hourly can be a boon in some cases. I know multiple truck drivers governed by time on the road which happens to include "time waiting" and many don't get paid for that wait time.

It is an interesting industry as you have short haul, long haul, large companies and small.

> I know multiple truck drivers governed by time on the road which happens to include "time waiting" and many don't get paid for that wait time.

It's always been bonkers to me that we've allowed lobbyists to carve out exceptions to labor laws for specific industries.

If you are required to be at a specific place for a specific time, and you're paid hourly, you should be getting paid, full stop.

Why we allow trucking companies to not pay their drivers because they're waiting for something and not driving is beyond me. Just like flight attendants that don't get paid until the doors are shut. If you're not allowed to leave, you should be getting paid.

Airline workers and all those airport shop employees are not paid for their time going through security. Recently reaffirmed by the courts. Can you imagine arriving at the office and then spending an hour unpaid in line to get in?

Yup, I have a brother who is a truck driver. It's a brutal industry that looks to screw over it's workers at every angle possible.

They try to get you to purchase your truck, so you are locked in but also so you are on the hook for the inevitable maintenance (we are talking $250k).

They push you to work the limits at every angle. The maximum road time, the maximum ranges/etc.

And when you start talking about 401ks/etc, it's almost always real garbage. Everything is nickel and dimed to the maximum extent possible.

Is there no union?

There are truckers unions, IDK how popular they are. The issue is every truck owner ends up being a "business owner". There's enough freight companies that unionizing can be really tricky. One business will simply die and reform.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-most-of-americas-2-mil...

These simplistic models of Supply/Demand don't work in the real world. We have price-controls on rent, property tax increases, utilities, healthcare, etc, etc. Would you support removing those?

I didn't think my comment indicated any policy prescriptions.

The law of Supply and Demand is maybe the most rigorously validated theory offered by Economics.

It correctly predicts what will happen in each of your examples:

- Rent price ceiling, shortage e.g. Apartments in NYC

- Property tax increase, decrease in demand for those properties

- Utility price ceiling, shortage, e.g. water in CA

- Healthcare price ceiling, shortage. e.g. long wait times in countries like Canada

Whether or not any of those shortages/surpluses is good or bad is going to depend on your own personal situation. But you aren't even in a position to correctly evaluate that without something at least as predicatively powerful as the law of supply and demand.

It doesn't "correctly" predict anything because most of macro-economics is junk science with value only in the limited context of political platforms and giving people some sort of false hope. When the Nobel prize winner of Economics says its all bullshit, I tend to take notice :)

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/09/famous-econom...

Supply and demand effects and the effects of price controls on supply is a topic of microeconomics, not macro.

> For the record, Romer is calling out one theory and one mathematical construct. The theory is RBC, or Real Business Cycle theory, which suggests that fluctuations in growth are caused by external shocks (oil prices, new inventions, etc.) not by anything central banks do

Soooo not the theory of supply and demand.

Important to note here: "The Nobel prize of Economics" is not actually a real Nobel prize. It is another third party "prize" setup to emulate the nobel system, so it's much more like the "Nobel peace prize".

It's another example of economics pretending to be more rigorous and functional as a science than it actually is.

IIUC, this is a labor market dynamics kind of thing?

Low barrier to entry, increased short-term demand leads to a truckload (heh) of businesses starting up in the space, all competing for "enough" drivers but spread across the too-many employers, leading to wage competition which rises to a level that is not supportable.

I mean it's right there in TFA:

> Operating authority grew by 45%

> Truckload demand is only up about 11%

> too much capacity chasing too little freight.

So I'm not sure why they don't connect the dots correctly.

So it's not a simple matter of "they aren't paying enough". They can't support this kind of wage inflation, because the high number of trucking companies also means they don't have pricing power. It's not even possible to sustain losses in the short term by overpaying employees, thus killing off the competition entirely, because you won't ever be able to own enough of the market to set your prices to match. If you cut salaries after you've killed off the competition, you'll lose drivers in droves and will never make up for the red ink. Those drivers will become independent operators, not desperate to come back to work for you.

If I have it right then, in a very real sense, there is actually a shortage of drivers. There are not so many that there are enough willing to work for the peanuts that the companies can afford to pay.

There is a low barrier to creating a trucking company, but a relatively high barrier to becoming a driver -- CDL, clean license, lifestyle acceptance. So they can't just "gig" it out in the same way that nearly anyone can become an instacart person.

A winning formula might be to do convoy-style autonomous driving, at least for medium to long routes. You'd need only 1/4 of the drivers and can pay them 33% more, while at the same time having more gross margin. But didn't uber give up on that business recently? Maybe they can't defeat the unions.

> Maybe they can't defeat the unions.

Which unions are you thinking of?

teamsters

> Trucking salaries have decreased by as much as 50% since deregulation, according to economist Michael Belzer. Unionization rates are far lower, too, falling from about 50% of all truckers to under 20%. And by doing away with regular routes and hours, employers can take far more advantage of drivers.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-most-of-americas-2-mil...

just because they only control (employ) 15% of the trucking industry (per some other source, not the article you cite) doesn't mean they don't have the power to block this kind of thing. That 15% might be enough concentration and funding to pay for the needed lobbyists.

That article even says

>“Even truck drivers who weren’t members of the union benefited from the relatively high wages and decent conditions expected in the industry,” Hamilton said. “All of them generally benefited from the relatively strong position that was spearheaded by the Teamsters.”

This is in reference to 1964 and Jimmy Hoffa, when the teamsters were (I believe) still up and coming and AIUI were strong enough to lead "by influence" but not yet strong enough to lead "by authority".

In CA, autonomous trucking was just dealt a blow:

https://teamster.org/2023/07/teamsters-applaud-california-se...

That aside, I'm not saying that unions are definitely the reason, I just suppose they might be part of it. You haven't convinced me otherwise yet. I do see lots of articles on unions opposing these efforts (of course) and unions do have lobbyists. I'm not a student of this stuff so I won't belabor it further.

I guess Uber actually got out of the autonomous trucking biz awhile ago. It was Waymo that got out more recently. Maybe it's nothing to do with unions, rather exactly as they say: to focus their business.

Many drivers get swindled into the "owner operator" scheme where the trucking company owns the truck and sets the rates that the driver (who thinks that they're an owner-operator, but is really an employee) gets paid. The vehicle ends up out of warranty long before it is paid off and the folks who think that they're owner-operators find out that there is no way that they can make ends meet. They end up bankrupt and the trucking company ends up taking ownership of the rig again.

While some people can and do make a living at it, many get swindled.

The actual shortage is a shortage of suckers.

Any industry can only have a shortage for slightly longer than it takes to recruit and train. I've heard about the nursing shortage for more than four decades. It can't take more than six years to fix. Although recently, a lot of nurse pay has finally risen dramatically.

You can have a shortage for other reasons. In a perfectly liquid labor market (which only exists in theory), you can also have shortages. The canonical example is a price ceiling.

If the government comes in and says that you can't pay more than x dollars for a thing, then some people willing to pay x dollars will not get the thing. That's a shortage because they wanted to pay the market price (in this case a government fixed price), but they couldn't obtain the good.

In cases of shortages, methods of discrimination other than price must be used to decide who gets the goods, and who goes without. Without a price ceiling, the price would increase so that the quantity demanded becomes equal to the quantity supplied. Basically a bunch of people deciding they would rather something else because the good is too expensive.

Sometimes the market itself is the reason for the shortage. The value of the work itself may be high enough to justify paying the market rate, but the employer may not be able to capture enough value to pay that. Maybe positive externalities are a large part of the value. Or maybe the industry buying the goods/services consists of larger companies with more negotiating power than the industry providing them.

You see both in healthcare. Patient health is an externality, because the patient is not the customer. The insurance provider is. And insurance providers tend to be larger than healthcare providers.

And a similar issue exists in Europe where most healthcare is paid for by the government.

The value goes to the individual, but the costs paid for by the governemnt.

Locally in Finland the situation is way more perverse, without going into too much detail the money to pay for hospitals and higher level care comes from a different pool than what goes to GPs and local clinics.

The second pool has been underfunded for years, causing many local clinics and GPs to refer patients (particularly old patients and those with multiple ailments) to hospitals and higher level care as the lower level care doesn't have the money to hire enough staff.

This, in turn, puts patients into a higher level of care than necessary, causing not only increased costs on a per patient level, but on a system level.

Not to mention the fact that a whole heap of elderly people are lonely, and simply visit the 'doc cause they're nice to chat to and they don't really pay for the visit.

If you'd fund / develop more programs to e.g. have school and daycare kids do things with retired people, you'd probably have fewer lonely old pepople.

If you'd better fund the local clinics, there's less need for more expensive higher level care.

> And a similar issue exists in Europe where most healthcare is paid for by the government.

> The value goes to the individual, but the costs paid for by the governemnt.

A healthy, productive, individual produces a lot of value that is captured by the government in the form of taxes. The government also runs a very differential pricing scheme where the individuals with higher salary get more of their value captured, though they do "lose out" on not being able to refuse low value service or provide better service to high value individuals.

(Not to say that the government necessarily does a good job of managing healthcare, just that they do get to capture some of the value produced there)

That analysis ignores people who get trained but just don’t want to do the job for whatever amount of money. They’d be happy to take less money just to not do the job.

I hear that happens a lot with nurses.

Classic “every job is equivalent to my office job” kind of analysis. “I couldn’t possibly fathom the idea that if a job had a very comfortable wage it still wouldn’t be worth doing because my frame of reference is moving between various offices for meetings and occasionally checking my emails.”

When I worked inpatient psychiatry we were very underpaid and constantly understaffed. Later in my career when I was involved in the admin side of things we did increase pay a bit which helped but we had a kind of cynical joke that even if we could pay 6 figures to the entry level direct care staff we’d still have staffing issues. At the end of the day it’s a job where you have constant exposure to bodily fluids, loud noise, and sudden violence. It was often chaotic; staff quitting on day 1 was so common that we eventually made it policy to do a facility walkthrough during interviews so that people were well aware of what job entailed so we’d waste less money on training. Even then it still happened with some regularity.

The howls of "nursing shortage" are made to entice youngsters into the field in order to drive down wages. When wages drop, people quit to do other things, so wages rise. When wages rise, the media shouts "nursing shortage" from the rooftops.

As a career, nursing suffers from a huge amount of burnout and COVID led to large numbers of medical professionals being physically attacked for failing to apply horse dewormer as the purveyors of "alternate facts" kept claiming was a magic cure. Many in the medical profession saw friends & coworkers die from COVID, so the sharp wage increase in recent years was an attempt to mitigate a shortage.

Few years back there were news about self driving trucks replacing, or as some like to say “freeing”, truck drivers. The news agencies and the corpos paying them assured us this would happen in two to three years. What happened?

Partially, California said no: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelharley/2023/06/07/califo...

I see, California has sane people in government. At least judging by this topic.

Truck drivers do a lot more than just turn a steering wheel. While autonomous driving might alter hiring in the field (especially if it gets to the point where you don't need someone with a CDL to do those tasks), it's unlikely that the number of people employed in trucking is going down anytime soon.

> The news agencies and the corpos paying them assured us this would happen in two to three years. What happened?

I've been following self driving cars pretty closely, and I've never seen this as a consensus opinion outside of Elon Musk types.

On markets with free pricing, shortages or surpluses quickly transform into higher or lower prices.

I’m perfectly efficient markets, sure. But the employment market is exploitive by design

It’s exploitive in the same way the grocery business is.

Food is essential, but with enough suppliers it’s plentiful.

Thankfully, there isn't such a system anywhere in the developed world. We have price controls on rent, utilities, healthcare, etc. It would be extremely hard to convince folks in a democracy to vote against those.

We also have changing legal frameworks for the free movement of capital, the repatriation of profit and the free movement of labor. Fairly sure that if you fully explained the actual repercussions of these, folks in a democracy would not vote for them either. But we got them anyway.

You didn't say which country you were referring to, but capital is heavily regulated in the US. So is labor, so is profit. All economic activity is within the context of the governing laws, of which, there are too numerous to list here.

There are aspects of democracy that are pure self-interest driven, and some that are driven with rose-tinted glasses to create a future society that we all want to live and thrive in.

"Explaining actual repercussions" is just another way to inject bias, there isn't a proven method to reliably predict macro-level impacts of laws and regulations. We all have beliefs, and hopes :)

I don't see anything we disagree on really. Maybe just the phrasing of things.

I was expanding the list of things that make markets "non-free".

Before various "free trade" agreements it would have been impossible for capital to have been moved to other countries, used to build facilities there, and then repatriate the profit. Now, in many cases, that's completely legal (and one might even say "encouraged").

The EU provides us with an example (sadly the only one I know of) where free movement of capital and profit was coupled to free movement of labor.

Well, this is about the price of labor, aka "wages".

Those prices are still mostly free in the US.

Sort of. If you pay new-hires significantly more than existing employees for the same work, its not going to end well (and it can potentially open the company up to a lawsuit on discrimination grounds). I suppose the caveat is check your local laws.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm

That intro was funny. Reminded me of the old Coffee Talk sketch on SNL:

“The perpetual marketwide truck driver shortage isn’t perpetual, marketwide, or a shortage. Discuss.”

Shortage aside, the trucking industry is NOT okay: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/07/1084923395/americas-truck-dri...

> according to the American Trucker's Association

It's unclear if you read either article.

See also school bus drivers, and teachers.

Something that is missing from comments in this thread is that companied do not necessarily have the freedom to pay whatever they want.

The equation for any business offering goods and services starts with what their customers are willing to pay for their offering.

If the product is unique (Armani, Gucci, etc.) and with less competition (or brand differentiation/loyalty), prices can be higher than commoditized goods and services.

If the good or service is commoditized and has lots of competition, prices have a real ceiling. For example, nobody is going to go to McDonalds and pay $50 for a cheeseburger. They might pay half that much at a celebrity high-end restaurant, yet, at McDonalds, the limit is somewhere around $5, or 1/10.

That, in turn, dictates how much the business can spend on the rest of the cost structure, fixed and variable costs.

Some seem to think that just because employees ask for a certain number a company should magically be able to do it.

Right now United Auto Workers is asking for a 45% pay increase and working 32 hour weeks while getting paid for 40 hours (which is an additional 25% boost (they are certainly not going to produce 40 hours of work in 32 hours). And more.

This represents a complete disconnect from reality. This kind of thing leads to outsourcing, automation and job loss. Entire industries have already been decimated by this kind of thing.

Trucking is no different. Buyers of transportation services can't pay double rates. This (worse than this) already happened during the pandemic and it brought things down to a grinding halt.

We were paying $30K to move a container that used to cost $2K. You can bet that cost had to be passed on to customers. And the result? Less orders. Less work. We had to let people go.

There's a utopia being taught out there that vilifies all business. If one digs, this always come from people who have never run anything even resembling a non-trivial business. Of course, from a frame of reference rooted in pure ignorance, anything is possible.

If you want people at McDonalds to make $50 hour, go pay $25 for a burger. Heck, if you are passionate about this, lets pass legislation that allows restaurants to charge a variable rate. They post the minimum they want for their product and the customer is allowed to pay more. Brilliant. We can align cost and wages with ideology.

How many people are going to go into McDonalds and offer to pay $25 to $50 for a burger. Yeah. The number is zero. Of course. So much for ideology vs. reality.

This is no different from people pushing for higher taxes. In the history of humanity (I think I can say this) nobody has voluntarily chosen to send the government more than what they are required to pay and lead by example in support of their ideology. The world is funny that way. Talk, talk, talk. And 100% of is is hypocritical.

> Heck, if you are passionate about this, lets pass legislation that allows restaurants to charge a variable rate.

Why would legislation be needed for this? Hotels/airlines/rental car prices change all day every day, most probably via computer programs by now.

There are already “market” price menus at restaurants and differing prices for lunch and dinner menus.

Can you cite anything about UAW asking for a 45% pay increase / 32 hour work week? It sounds like either hyperbole or not the entire story.

Not hyperbole, but the 45% increase is over a 4 year period (so 10% increase each year).

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/day-workweek-46-raise-uaw-ma...

The truth of course is somewhat less than the headline. It's +47% over four years, and more importantly, starting pay today is effectively $10/hr less than what it was in 2007. This isn't so much a raise, as it is 20 year past due cost of living adjustment.

As far as the 32 hour per week, why not? Worker productivity has risen, it's about time we start getting that John Maynard Keynes promised 15 hours week.

They're asking for 20% to offset recent inflation and then 5% per year until 2027[0].

Misrepresenting a cumulative 4 year increase as a single upfront one is honestly disgusting behaviour. I can only hope that GP shares the same level of disdain for the CEOs of these companies who actually received a 40% increase in their compensation over the last 4 years[0].

[0] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2023/08/03/u...

> Misrepresenting a cumulative 4 year increase as a single upfront one is honestly disgusting behaviour.

It's not. Even under normal conditions, central banks aim for 2% inflation per year, and a further 3% increase in wages is everything but disgusting - it's time for the workers to get back more of the profits that the megacorporations distribute to shareholders, especially as productivity increases historically have not been redistributed to the employees. Time for the latter to be compensated as well.

I think you misread GP's comment pretty badly.

They're saying that misrepresenting the UAW demand as a 45% increase is disgusting, not that the 45% figure is itself disgusting.

As sokoloff has pointed out, we don't disagree with one another. My comment was a criticism of those who portray workers' demands as a single massive increase, rather than a small yearly increase.

> For example, nobody is going to go to McDonalds and pay $50 for a cheeseburger. They might pay half that much at a celebrity high-end restaurant, yet, at McDonalds, the limit is somewhere around $5, or 1/10.

FWIW, a Big Mac near me is now $7, add fries and a drink and it's $11.58. They've still got customers, although the lines seem shorter than they used to be. At least they haven't started asking for tips.

Fast food is not particularly cheap but people buy it out of habit or because they perceive they don't really have another realistic option.

Well and it's fast.

> Right now United Auto Workers is asking for a 45% pay increase and working 32 hour weeks while getting paid for 40 hours (which is an additional 25% boost (they are certainly not going to produce 40 hours of work in 32 hours). And more.

> This represents a complete disconnect from reality. This kind of thing leads to outsourcing, automation and job loss. Entire industries have already been decimated by this kind of thing.

Do you know what the profit of Ford was for 2022? [1] 23 billion dollars. And how many people does Ford employ? [2] 173,000. That's $132,000 available for ford to pay each of their employees on top of salary they already paid.

Do you know how long it takes UAW's wage increase to take effect? [3] 4 years. (or roughly a 10% increase in pay each year).

Do you know what the ultimate max salary asked for is? [3] $47/hr or $75k/year

So you are saying a company that made enough profit (that is, revenue - expense, which includes employee wages) to give each of their employees a lump $132,000 bonus in 2022 couldn't afford 10% salary increases for the same employees over 4 years?

You should really sit down and do the math on this stuff. There's monied interest by car manufactures to paint this as uncharitably as possible. So of course you are going to see articles where these poor multi-billion dollar companies are just scraping by... with record profits.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/gross...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/numbe...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/day-workweek-46-raise-uaw-ma...

Thanks for posting this. I was content to downvote and move on, but I think you did a good job here. A lot of what the post said is pretty handwavey and leaves out key details to the point of basically becoming FUD at worst, or charitably someone who has only a very superficial understanding of these things through a lack of doing any critical research on the topic.

You only hit on a couple of their points, but I note that all the rest of them at a glance are subject to the same sort of deficiency from critical analysis and factual sources.

Their premise is false, and when called out on it, they resorted to claiming the official numbers are fraudulent, with no source. Even though they chose an “official” number themselves as the premise for their argument.

Cite where I said the numbers are fraudulent.

That is what “Hollywood accounting” would be if it were subject to regulators.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398156

Do you think Hollywood is not subject to regulators?

Does Disney file a 10-K? Has star wars made a profit?

I'd suggest reading the linked wikipedia article first to understand what hollywood accounting actually is. It is neither illegal nor fraudulent. It is arguably immoral, but we aren't talking about morals in this thread. I'll assume you simply don't know what the term Hollywood accounting actually means and that's why you thought I was saying Ford committed fraud.

> Does Disney file a 10-K?

Yes, and they are not required to breakdown financial figures for each movie they make.

> It is neither illegal nor fraudulent.

Because it is not subject to regulations, it is specifically designed to screw various vendors in the movie business, without violating any business agreements (or skirting the line so that it is not worth the counterparty to file a lawsuit).

If Disney did try to submit a 10-K with the same calculations they do for their “Hollywood accounting”, it would be illegal.

The key point in the Hollywood accounting Wikipedia write up is:

> Because of the studio's ability to place arbitrary charges along the value chain, net participation "points" (a percentage of the net income as opposed to a percentage of the gross income of a film) are sometimes referred to as "monkey points". The term is attributed to Eddie Murphy, who is said to have also stated that only a fool would accept net points in their contract.

This is all irrelevant for SEC filings, since those have to include ALL ins and outs of the business. If a Disney CEO tried to screw investors by artificially lowering net income and reducing the investors’ profit, heads would roll.

This is ignoring the basic fact that CEO and other company executives are compensated in shares in the first place, which means they want net income to be high so that the share price goes higher.

> This is all irrelevant for SEC filings, since those have to include ALL ins and outs of the business. If a Disney CEO tried to screw investors by artificially lowering net income and reducing the investors’ profit, heads would roll.

The Disney CEO wouldn't screw investors by lowering net income. Investors aren't (generally) compensated with income. In fact, the opposite is true, Disney can force net income down buy doing a stock buy back which drives the stock prices higher. There's a reason investors, for the most part, ignore net income. In fact, always having a positive net income is generally a sign that the company is not investing and growing, which in and of itself is generally treated as a negative sign from investors.

> This is ignoring the basic fact that CEO and other company executives are compensated in shares in the first place, which means they want net income to be high so that the share price goes higher.

Net income is barely a predictor for stock prices (especially now-a-days). For example, disney had a 170% increase in net income in their March quarterly report. Did they see a 170% increase in stock price? A 17% increase? Or a slight loss?

> In fact, the opposite is true, Disney can force net income down buy doing a stock buy back which drives the stock prices higher.

Again, this is false.

> Net income is barely a predictor for stock prices (especially now-a-days).

This is also false. Sort by net income (aka earnings) here:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

That Ford 23 billion number you are citing is Gross Profit, not NET

This number ignores expenses that are not involved with the product and cost of goods sold.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grossprofit.asp#toc-gro...

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/financials?p=F

"You should really sit down and do the math on this stuff."

Before coming in hot with numbers and firing back I would check what you are saying first.

Perhaps consider Hollywood accounting [1] before being concerned with net income. Suffice it to say, it's within ford's best interest to often report negative or near negative net profits. That's how you reduce your tax burden.

It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything. (including money spent on stock buybacks, dividend payments, and CEO perks).

A company that has 23 billion in gross profits and -2 billion net income isn't what you think it's saying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

If you are equating unregulated Hollywood accounting to SEC regulated 10-K filings, then either you need more education, or you distrust the system so much that conversing would be pointless.

And businesses cannot reduce net income by the amount of dividends or stock buybacks, for obvious reasons.

> If you are equating unregulated Hollywood accounting to SEC regulated 10-K filings, then either you need more education

Are you saying it wouldn't be advantageous to claim an easily recoverable loss which both makes your shareholders happy and reduces your tax burdens not only for the current year but future years (because you can defer losses)?

Hollywood accounting is orthogonal to the concept of a 10-k. The numbers are "real" but they are also VERY easy to manipulate (IE, doing a stock buyback).

I'd suggest considering the case study of sears. Where somehow a public company went bankrupt yet the owner ended up with billions of dollars and... the company.. again.. somehow. [1] That is hollywood accounting in it's full action and all perfectly lined up for 10-ks (after all, AFAIK the SEC never stepped in here to give Lampart so much of a slap on the wrist).

I'm not saying that Ford or others are anywhere near as bad as what happened to Sears/Kmart. I am saying that the same system Ford operates in, sears operates in.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/downfall-of-sears/

> Are you saying it wouldn't be advantageous to claim an easily recoverable loss which both makes your shareholders happy and reduces your tax burdens not only for the current year but future years (because you can defer losses)?

What is a “recoverable loss”?

>Hollywood accounting is orthogonal to the concept of a 10-k. The numbers are "real" but they are also VERY easy to manipulate (IE, doing a stock buyback).

Orthogonal means unrelated. It seems like you are using orthogonal to mean “similar”, but I am not sure, since that does not make sense. Either way, how does a stock buyback manipulate anything?

> I'd suggest considering the case study of sears. Where somehow a public company went bankrupt yet the owner ended up with billions of dollars and... the company.. again.. somehow. [1]

Because the owner was not Lampert, but a company with limited liability that happened to own many of the shares. And Lampert has done very poorly with his Sears investment, he has most likely lost wealth over the last 15 years when a riskless SP500 investment would have gained a ton.

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsxn8l0u5yr6z...

> What is a “recoverable loss”?

Unrelated to the topic at hand. I'm not accusing ford of omissions to their 10-K. That's not what Hollywood accounting means.

> It seems like you are using orthogonal to mean “similar”,

No, I mean orthogonal. You simply do not know what "Hollywood accounting" is.

> And Lampert has done very poorly with his Sears investment, he has most likely lost wealth over the last 15 years when a riskless SP500 investment would have gained a ton.

Really hard to say, but he was able to leverage 4.6 billion dollars [1] to repurchase sears.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sears-chairman-eddie-lampert-of...

The SEC does not police tax loopholes. As long as everything they do is documented and legal, the SEC allows it. Hollywood accounting isn't some myth, giant companies like apple do it, where you can "lease" or "sell" intangibles like "IP" consisting only of your brand identity to a separate legal entity in a different jurisdiction that taxes it differently, allowing you to play games with who owns what, and who books what revenue, and who claims what income.

This is all SOP in any company big enough to have its own accounting department. That's like, their entire job and industry.

Goalpost shifting

Lol -2 billion in net income is exactly what I think it is saying. Are we saying Ford is committing accounting fraud or trickery?

"It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything."

What about administrative costs? What about debt? Do we ignore everything besides COGS?

Dividend payments, stock buybacks, etc are not ways to disappear everything. They are ways to make their stock attractive to buyers, keep them in dividend indices, etc

How is this whole thread ignoring standard accounting and the reality of properly running a business?

> Lol -2 billion in net income is exactly what I think it is saying. Are we saying Ford is committing accounting fraud or trickery?

No. That's a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. I'm not accusing ford of doing anything illicit with their accounting. I'm saying that net income is a number that's both easily and frequently gamed.

> What about administrative costs? What about debt? Do we ignore everything besides COGS?

Nope, I'm saying we should pay the "COGS" fairly because they are ultimately what makes the business run. The admin and shareholders can be paid after the cogs get paid.

Have you considered that money is fungible? The admin can take lower salaries, do less buybacks, and enter into less debt. And, in fact, I'd suggest (and you'd likely agree) that a good business does that anyways. If operational costs were 0, any business could still find a way to have negative income.

No, net income absolutely is not “easily gamed” for a publicly traded company.

You’re out of your element here.

> It's super easy for a company to make up additional overhead above and beyond gross profits to disappear everything. (including money spent on stock buybacks, dividend payments, and CEO perks).

Share buybacks and dividend payments are uses of cash, but do not reduce net income. (They are not an expense.)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/112013/impac....

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/090415/are-dividend...

You’re digging yourself into a deeper hole here.

Uh.

23 billion was the gross profit

12 billion operating income

-1.9 billion net income

Ie they lost money in 2022 when all was said and done.

Also no company that has taken outside money from investors can just give their profits to employees and not share the profits back to the investors.

No investor would ever give money to a company where their share of the profits - which they were duly owed because they took a risk and put money into an enterprise - is not returned to them - and instead shared to employees because it’s the righteous thing to do.

No CEO or CFO would keep their jobs for long if they did this.

That’s just not how capitalism works.

This is just such a ridiculously limited view of how investment can work and what capitalism is.

Tons of investors give money to companies without any realistic expectation of ever receiving any profits - they believe that the value of the stock they own will increase in the judgement other future stock owners. That's the only reason Amazon was able to receive capital investment for more than a decade.

Workers also take a risk in choosing to go work for a company, and frequently it is a bigger risk than the one taken by capital owners. The latter will rarely invest in a way that puts their lifestyle on the line, whereas that's all the former can do.

There are pros and cons of the capitalist system, but it does neither capitalism nor us humans any service to present this sort of childish 10th grade view of what it is and how it works (or doesn't).

You need to re-do your math. In addition to what others have said, if they start paying 40 hours pay for 32 hours work, they're going to have to hire 25% more people to produce the same number of cars - that is, to reach the same income.

> We were paying $30K to move a container that used to cost $2K. You can bet that cost had to be passed on to customers. And the result? Less orders. Less work. We had to let people go.

If it's so easy, a new player will enter the market

If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient. The same economic effect causing the the steel factory to be down the river from the mines is still in play.

> If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient.

I saw a picture of canned peaches that said the peaches were grown in Argentina and canned in Vietnam.

Those peaches made two trips across the Pacific just to get on a grocery store shelf in America.

It's ridiculous.

Right, let the free market work and it will. If you find yourself swimming against the tide of the market, you are either going to get very rich or very poor. Generally best to stay in your lane.

It was "the free market" that gave us peaches travelling twice across the Pacific to get to a grocery store.

Massively lower labor costs in two countries, and lack of the infrastructure in one of them: the typical scenario for capital to seek out these energetically absurd but (temporarily) profitable arrangements.

Offset by international tensions, Panama canal backups etc. These are all economic costs. Keep up or die

I already posted a comment saying something like this to the story here, but it's likely enough that the energy the consumer spends bring the can of peaches home exceeds the energy used to get it to the store. Where's absurd defined?

The fact that mass-scale transportation of goods means that the amortized cost/impact per can of peaches is small doesn't invalidate the point that mass-scale transportation of goods is energetically ridiculous and likely adds about 3% of global greenhouse gases.

Sometimes the amortized cost per unit isn't the important point.

Of course the amortized cost is important. If people eat a lot of steak and one steak is ten years of peaches, we should focus on the steak!

"Hey everyone, I know the world is doing just fine, but I have this new idea. We'll burn giga-joules of energy every year shipping stuff all over the place, but not to worry, because the joules-per-can-of-peaches is hardly anything".

OK, then.

Correct, even if the world isn't doing fine.

Thankfully we don't have to choose between dealing with the insanity of shipping everything everywhere six times during production to take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulation somewhere, and steak production being terrible for the environment.

We can get rid of ALL the stupid things that are "profitable" to a few middlemen but nobody else.

A video about how “Grown in Argentina, Packed in Thailand” actually ends up making sense

https://youtu.be/0aH3ZTTkGAs

The summary is that pears must be picked 1-2 weeks before they are ripe and are allowed to ripen under refrigeration (otherwise the inside ripens first and they get mushy). Instead of running air conditioners, a ship running in cold water provides “free” air conditioning. The biggest market for room-temperature stable fruit in syrup is south east Asia, so packing in Thailand is closest to the biggest customer base. And with the scale they have there, it makes sense to just pack the fruit for the smaller markets like the US at the same place instead of creating secondary supply chains for each market.

1> If it's so easy, a new player will enter the market

2> If it's truly too expensive to ship the goods you want, you need to stop sourcing things astronomically far to be efficient. The same economic effect causing the the steel factory to be down the river from the mines is still in play.

This thread has some of the dumbest comments from people who obviously know nothing whatsoever about business. Lending validity to the Dunning-Kruger idea, people somehow think they actually know what they are talking about.

The above two comments fall under this category. And yet, I will address both of them in hopes that (1) someone will learn something and (2) others will refrain from posting comments about shit they know nothing about.

Having an opinion doesn't make it valid.

It would be like me posting about heart surgery. I would fully expect people to laugh I what I might say and let me know just how stupid I am to pretend I understand the subject --and rightly so.

Comment 1: Short version: Impossible.

The shipping industry, from 2020 until somewhere around 2022 was a complete mess. The cost of moving a container from Asia to the US (and anywhere else) rose by a factor of 10x to 15x. From approximately USD $2,000 to somewhere in a range between $20K to $30K.

If you were shipping something other than to China, good luck. We had to ship a few crates to Singapore. Ocean freight that normally takes a couple of weeks was being quoted to require at least THREE MONTHS and at a very high price. Why? Because all shipping capacity got diverted to China.

We ended-up having to air-freight. Even that took a ridiculous amount of time. I don't even want to talk about how much more the shipment cost than normal air freight. It was a mess.

Ports were stacked with containers not going anywhere.

New players?

It takes three years or more to build a new ship at a cost of a hundred million dollars. That is, assuming a normal economy and supply chains. In the period between 2020 and 2022, good luck building anything at scale. Car manufacturers had to make cars without components and park them until they could get those components. To make a dent you'd need to build, I don't know, 100 to 500 ships, if not more. Which means making an investment between $10 billion and $50 billion. BTW, during difficult times like that, anyone taking an order to build such ships would likely charge a 25% to 50% premium. We are talking about a potential $75 billion investment.

That investment would result in ships being ready to sail not earlier than 2026. By that time, with things back to some version of normal, freight pricing would also return to a normal trading range. Which, in turn, likely means whoever made that investment would be facing bankruptcy and that CEO would also be out of a job for being a dumbshit.

Comment 2: Not sure how to reply to this other than to be surprised by the lack of connection to reality the comment reveals.

OK, well. We don't make anything in the US and Europe any more. Our supply chains are long. And there's no way around it.

Bring manufacturing back?

OK. Well, this will take decades. In some cases it is absolutely impossible. In other cases it would require 25 years of solid investment in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Do you actually think we can pull off anything even remotely close to this when we can't even build a high speed train across California. Our politicians have failed us for at least five decades. If we our nation was united and our politicians --all of them-- actually worked towards goals for the benefit of the nation and its people, maybe we could pull some portion of that back in 25 years. As we exist and behave today? No way in hell. Not happening. Ever.

During the pandemic, the world discovered that nobody could make N95 masks. One of the simplest products to manufacture. Not only could we not make the masks. We didn't make the machines that make the masks. And we didn't make the cloth needed to make the masks, or the machines that make the cloth.

People who are not in manufacturing don't really have a sense of just how bad things are in this sense. We can't make anything. If China decided to shut down exports for six months the world would descend into the dark ages. It's that bad.

So, yeah, comment <2> is just, well, being kind, misplaced.

Next time you post about something, be sure you actually know what you are talking about. Don't be like me talking about open heart surgery. Good for comedy, and not much more than that.

There was a cheap restaurant near me where the chef, as a joke, decided to add a exorbitantly expensive (for them) dinner entree. Customers were supposed to see it was a joke and not order it. It backfired, and soon the chef found himself regularly buying ingredients for this entree. Unfortunately, the reason he priced it so high was because sourcing those ingredients was a huge hassle. He stopped selling that item, but not before learning a lesson about what customers (not necessarily his) in his area are able to afford.

Yet you see many of these companies make huge profits each year , you see CEO getting paid obscene salaries and those is being increased at much % than workers.

GM CEO salary went up from 23M to 29M between 2021 and 2022.

Signals matter , if you expect workers to empathize with management then management should not be getting 30% hikes y-o-y on top making 500-1000x the salary of an average worker .

Did the GM CEO salary go up? Or did GM’s share price go up, causing the previously scheduled stock grants to increase in market price?

Usually, the vast majority of compensation is scheduled a few years in advance, defined as a certain number of shared. Clickbait is then made using changed in the price of these shares even though the compensation agreements did not change.

One could of course question whether such compensation schemes are moral at all.

My answer won't fit in the margin of HN's CSS controlled layout.

How is choosing to take ownership/equity in a company in lieu of cash as compensation inherently immoral? If the complaint is about the compensation structure and not the amount. You'd have to hold some pretty fringe views on ownership in general(re: homes, cars, small businesses etc.) to question that.

Giving management equity was done to mitigate the Principal-Agent problem[2], lesser management(agent) is aligned to shareholders(principal), less likely they will take action on their behalf effectively.

However this puts management interest in direct conflict with employees . More you exploit/squeeze the last bit of productivity the law and job market permits you will do so in determinant of employee health, fair and living wages.

As a shareholder, that is rational behavior, you only care to maximize returns to the extent permissible by the law[2] . Environment, employees or any other non profit concern cost money if not required by law why should you do it? the competition will not be doing it. They will become cheaper and be able to out compete.

Aligning management to shareholders solved the problem for shareholders, but it has made the problems for workers worse, combined with weak labor protections in this country means only protection workers have is the market, if their skills are niche and in-demand they will be able to negotiate better wages, otherwise they are screwed.

---

America's unique strong immigration over the last two centuries is why labor protections are pretty weak compared to most of Europe and other developed economies, if citizen labor protests too much, America in the past always imported foreign labor to keep the supply high and market cheap for businesses.

Funnily all the right wing anti-immigration rhetoric is really anti-business as it gets- if it actually impacts policy in reduced immigration then workers will be able to push the labor demand-supply equation to their favor as they did in 30s. This is not necessarily a good thing for workers in the long term either, when America no longer is able to attract talent in same way as before, jobs will go abroad instead of being cheap and domestic.

---

[1] Even when required by law, we will the follow the law only if there is any real threat of enforcement and penalties actually that are high enough to hurt. When the cost of breaking the law is negligible or non existent the law will likely be ignored.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Stock based compensation means that the value of the compensation is based on the stock market's assessment of the company's value, which may change over time.

However, the notion that any increase (or decrease) in that assessed value is the result of the work of the executive in question is almost always false. So, if the stock gains 10%, the stock-compensation gains 10% ... but non-stock compensated employees, who may have been just as responsible for the 10% gain, if not more so, likely see either no gain or a smaller one.

Stock-based compensation for any employee that is not available to all employees is just allowing the ones who receive it to free-ride on the back of the accomplishments (or failures) of the entire enterprise.

How does that matter ? Compensation is compensation. It is still money she gets to spend, don’t you think the board and she calculated the potential increases and bargained accordingly? Does it not cost the company and shareholders the same whether paying in options or cash [1]

Shall we tie all workers compensation to a high base + lots of options ?

- 2020 profit $13.672B - 2021 profit $17.878B - 2023 profit $20.981B - 2023 profit $22.344B

Yet GM cannot afford to give 10% year on year hikes for next 4 years ?

If management is responsible for profits then they are responsible for the losses too do they return money back in bad times ? Of course not , they will just negotiate more options to compensate for low price . Do you think she will stay and work even one year at her base compensation level of 2M ?

hypothetically let’s say the better salary is going to cost GM 10B a year . The profit would halve and stock would crash , it would still be a healthy company with 15B in profits but management and shareholders will be pissed, would it bad outcome for society or the company ?

In a unregulated capitalist ecosystem, the company will always pay the bare minimum, the shareholders and management incentives will not allow anything else .

Look at Apple for even starker example, most valuable company on earth unimaginable profits every year yet they pay their retail staff peanuts and don’t give them basic benefits because they can and the market expects them to.

[1] It does , all else being the same - They could have sold the stock for the same money in the market, or simply not diluted everyone with new issues and increased the stock price to reflect that.

> How does that matter ?

It matters because words have meanings and using words correctly facilitates effective discussions.

yea, but hiding behind the differences in meaning does also not help effective discussion.

i get where you're coming from, but also sympathize with the position of "if the compensation changes in value, the value of the compensation has changed"

maybe time to question this whole stock option thing for c-suite and just grant all employees a similar share of company performance

The text upthread that started this was “GM CEO salary went up from 23M to 29M between 2021 and 2022.”

That is both wrong and misleading. Wrong for obvious reasons, but misleading because the nature of salary is that statement suggests that someone (the board or compensation committee) made an explicit decision to change their salary from $X to $Y.

UAW members already get a profit sharing bonus!

"Today’s announcement that eligible UAW-Stellantis members will receive a record average profit-sharing amount of $14,760..."

"Ford...members are expected to receive an average of $9,176 in profit sharing."

"UAW members who work for General Motors received the news that they may receive up to $12,750 in profit sharing"

https://uaw.org/tag/profit-sharing/

ime a lot of companies do this, but most don't

also phrasings like "average" and "up to" tend to obstruct an important part of the picture (i.e. the common worker)

No business has an absolute right to exist, if you can’t break even no one owes you anything.

And as a democratic society we have the right to set minimum standards for labor. We should do this with a realistic understanding of the outcome, but if some businesses become unworkable that’s fine.

> This represents a complete disconnect from reality. This kind of thing leads to outsourcing, automation and job loss. Entire industries have already been decimated by this kind of thing.

You're a fool if you think outsourcing, automation, and job loss weren't going to happen regardless.

"Oh yes, we love our workers and as long as they don't get too uppity, we'd never dream of trying to replace them with technology that will cut our labor costs in half" - said no one, ever.

In Germany, there is an account people can donate money to, to reduce state debt ("Schuldentilgungskonto"), without any personal benefit. It's not even tax deductible. I think that would qualify to refute your last paragraph. It's not used a lot, though. 1.33M in 16 years.

>If you want people at McDonalds to make $50 hour, go pay $25 for a burger. Heck, if you are passionate about this, lets pass legislation that allows restaurants to charge a variable rate. They post the minimum they want for their product and the customer is allowed to pay more. Brilliant. We can align cost and wages with ideology.

The price of skyrocketing their wages is more like $0.35 more, not $45 more. Also, managers frequently and systematically steal employees' tips; it's not a good system and you shouldn't support it (note: that does not mean "don't tip").

403 Forbidden

1) I did an interview and got turned down because my salary expectations were normal.

2) They hired a couple of offshore people to do the job, and a couple months later that failed.

3) So they came back and signed me for my regular salary. I cranked through most of the non-trivial parts of their fairly complicated application. Then they laid me off, thinking the heavy lifting was done.

4) They replaced me with a handful of offshore devs.

5) ONE month later they needed me again because their devs couldn't make this other part.

7) Again, I made that, and again they laid me off once that was complete. Again, they replaced me with _even more_ offshore devs. Last I checked there was about 7 offshore/onshore-offshore devs covering that one position.

There is no way my request of about +50% salary cost more than all that nonsense. But that was their culture. I stood out like a soar thumb on their balance sheets.

Seems like you should have been contracting with them from the get go and that was kind of obvious.

There wouldn’t have been anything on my list past step 4 because I would have doubled my salary requirement in order to return for any subsequent requests for help.

I increased the salary ~23% (again, market rate for me doing basically all of the work) when I wanted to quit half way through #3 but they knew I did all the non-trivial work so they agreed.

Good on you, then!

Just a little nitpick, but you stood out like a sore thumb on their income statements. Income statements is where companies, record costs and profits, balance sheets are where they count all of their property and debts. Thankfully slavery is over so people do not go on balance sheets.

I agree with the other poster, you probably needed to be a consultant for that one. And you would have been better off billing yourself out of some kind of corporation so that when the higher ups see your bills they can imagine they are paying for 10 offshore devs and feel better about themselves.

Damn dude, at what point do you insist on a contract that protects you in case they decide to fire you again?

I left a job in 2007. Things were so stacked against me that I had no choice but to leave. Two years later, the manager contacted me to apologise. He told me that they'd had to hire five people to replace me because they could not find one person who could do everything I could do. He said, "We didn't know what we had in you." I reminded him that he had asked me in the interview why he should hire me and I had responded, "Because I am the best candidate who will interview for this job."

Someone shared this post with me because I was complaining in a Slack about how the theme of my career seems to be not getting hired for the position but later getting hired to fix the things that were fucked up by the person they did hire. Begs the question, is hiring really that difficult?

Taking a slightly different angle than most of the comments here, what if there really is a worker shortage?

Trucking seems, like trades or certain manufacturing jobs, to be in the category of labor historically done by men to provide for a family and not, e.g. for the sake of itself like medicine.

Married men, according to the BLS, work about 10.6% more weekly than unmarried men [1].

And as men without college educations are increasingly less likely to get married [2], you’d expect to see less total hours worked, and thus effectively less workers, in exactly these fields.

In other words, there may be a real shortage in labor in the sense that society has come to rely upon a group of people’s willingness to perform this labor at a given level of compensation, but the reason why that group of people was willing to do so has been invalidated. Thus there’s a shortage relative to an expectation which will have to get resolved one way or another.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat22.htm

[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/14/as-u-s-ma...

> the category of labor historically done by men to provide for a family

With cost-of-living increases, are these jobs still paying enough to provide for a family?

If they aren't, then it's possible you have cause and effect backwards: less families, because one job can't support a family anymore.

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