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...
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If prosperity was shared as in 1965, the mode income would be 6 figures.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
Your confusing reasonably trained in a narrow area with intelligence.
How do you define intelligence?
"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"
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.
There are plenty of ways to start a business without instantly giving up other employment.
-some ramble about how it’s all too hard
Excellent debating style right there!
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.
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.
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.
I guess some elements of capitalism need people with your defeatist outlook, to be lifelong wage slaves.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Were you trying to get hired? If so, why would you do that?
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.
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?
For what it’s worth I do believe that wikimedia could allocate more of the dollars they have to their “core competencies”
Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?
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).
They were able to become fairly profitable with full-time engineers, eventually, and ended up paying above market rate, last I heard.
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.
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...
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 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.
Sounds like a functioning market to me :)
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.
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.
What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.
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".
Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Maybe, maybe not. I will let the market sort that out.
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?
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 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.
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'
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
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
Motor Vehicle Body 3,040 $ 49,990
and Trailer Manufacturing
Furniture and Related 68,860 $ 41,620
Product Manufacturing
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't fault anyone for choosing that option if they can live with the income level, it's relatively sane.
... 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.
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.
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.
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...
It makes sense at a certain level, and can explain why we get so many people in positions they don't seem suited for.
It's not like they are forced into it. No shortage of people that turn down the chance to get into management.
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.
That is part of my calculation of where to work, not purely money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they just wanted to pay terrible wages... glad I got out.
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.
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 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.
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.