Hacker News Reader

Comment by bern4444 | Hacker News Reader

Who would have thought.

Amongst all the companies complaining they can’t find workers, they seem to all maintain a truly massive cognitive dissonance and lack of complete self reflection.

Good for Chipotle for demonstrating actual leadership.

If anyone here is a fan of the tv show The West Wing, I always like the quote

    You are so fond of calling yourselves the "leaders of the free world." So, lead.

I feel companies often so enjoy calling themselves and being called leaders in their industry but they forget to actually lead and demonstrate leadership

View on HN

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/amazon-renews-call-15...

I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure this just out prices small businesses. Bigger businesses can take the strain and get some great PR.

A fair point. Perhaps it will also outprice other similar sized businesses too though

One could view this as the efficiency gains due to economies of scale being passed on to workers.

Good, let's free up capital for enterprises that can better compensate workers.

This sounds like capitalism at work! And, not in a bad way for once haha.

I've always found it interesting that the plague was one of the major drivers of the elimination of serfdom in western Europe. When half the population died, workers suddenly found themselves in high demand. They were able to demand better working conditions and dramatically higher wages. [1]

I'm hoping for a softer version of this in high unemployment payments.

Personally, I'm ok with business who can't afford to pay employees a living wage going under and being replaced by ones that are willing to.

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

I agree with you a good bit as well. This is a rare opportunity where employees have a slight upper hand and don't have to be dictated to for once.

I think what many businesses of all sizes often forget is that you get back what you give, usually as a multiple. Further, this increased return is often overlooked or ignored since its not immediately measurable until the action (increasing employees' pay) is taken. The flip side being, an increase in wages is an immediately determinable cost and so becomes the initial focus.

You have a lot of down votes with no comments

I like the result. It's long overdue. Without Covid things could have gotten worse over the short term.

However, I don't like the process. You can't just let the Fed/government follow a strategy because that strategy does not fulfill its stated goals which results in doubling down on the strategy. Increasing the money supply is only excusable if you do so to hit your 2% inflation mandate. The Fed needs more precise tools so that it can actually do its job without collateral damage.

Relying on the government to send economic stimulus only works when the government actually thinks that the economy is in big trouble. It's a good fail safe but it doesn't help when your economy is limping at a low growth and inflation rate for a decade. It's easy to shoot down a infrastructure bill if the only reason it exists is to add 0.5% inflation from 1.5% so that you hit 2%.

Chipotle has repeatedly been found to perform wage theft at scale, so let’s not get excited too quickly until the results are in.

You just described the entire food service industry. Chipotle is far from the only offender, or even the only big offender.

Can confirm, had wages stolen while working as a waiter.

IMHO, the problem here is they could have done this before. Forcing them to do so has wider implications for smaller companies, so maybe the real solution could have been some way to specify which kind of companies should have a minimum wage. I think Chipotle is in a position to do this while many other companies wil ljust have to eliminate positions.

The minimum wage already eliminates positions. It’s just that thanks to inflation, every year more and more tenuous jobs can be made available since the minimum wage doesn’t track the rising revenue.

Given enough time, the minimum wage would simply cease to be impactful.

We should reset the minimum wage to at least levels on par with what it would be inflation adjusted. That impact on the economy was the intention of the law in the first place. Jobs that are lost are jobs we never intended to exist in the first place.

Remember, you can still do lower than minimum wage work if you work for yourself. With a hiked wage, no longer will corporations be able to capture this section of the market, and instead small businesses can do it instead which would be more stimulative for the economy.

> Jobs that are lost are jobs we never intended to exist in the first place.

I'm not so sure of that, we couldn't possibly assess the full impact here, but I guess we'll see what happens. I would think constraining large companies only would be the solution here, and small companies have more options because presumably the employer and employee relationship is much tighter and they can sort things out better. Hope it works out for the best.

Wasn't the original minimum wage meant to support a family on one income? Is that really a realistic goal in a modern two worker family setting?

I think this is looking at the situation a bit backwards.

Most families have both parents working so they can afford to live at the same level that a family in the past could afford with one working parent.

If minimum wage was meant to support a family where only one adult is working then we would in fact need to double it to really make it have the same effect it did in the past.

I'm not saying we should do this, just pointing out that raising the min wage is absolutely a worthwhile goal and so much value has been ripped away from the majority of Americans from inflation.

I definetly agree with raising it, it's basically entirely useless right now as it's so low awful jobs already pay more than it anyway. it just seems trying to make it entirely inflation adjusted is ignoring the reality of women entering the workforce. I think two people working full time on minimum wage should be able to afford a stable family though.

Of those making the minimum wage or less, 62% are women and 38% are men.

If we have to think about women in the workforce, then let’s start by considering that the majority of people working awful jobs for awful are women and that even if they leave those jobs they still have a wage gap inflicted upon them.

The minimum wage is meant to help people by enforcing fairness, and in this case it will likely help women.

I think it should have been written differently to begin with. I'm not a lawyer but they could probably target specific people to benefit from minimum wage (i.e. by age group), and/or have the minimum be a function of a number of factors. So minimum wage for a teenager with no kids is different than an adult with a family.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com