After Slashing 33% of Workers in 6 Years, Railroads Complain of Labor Shortages
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If you are a business that is going to lay off a bunch of people... temporarily... then be sure get an agreement that they will come back.
Imagine you're one of these workers laid off. You move. You find another way to live entirely, another way to pay the bills, another entire path to another entire career. Heck, even if they give you your old job back... even at a higher wage. Would you take it back? It's not an obvious decision.
Now they're like, "hey come work on the railways" - and the answer is "fool me once, shame on me..."
Maybe it's not just money, maybe it's not just shitty work conditions, maybe people notice when you treat employees like commodities and choose not to become a commodity.
In reality, on the job training has largely disappeared in the last few decades outside a handful of trades. Business has pushed the risk and costs of training to labour and the costs have subsequently skyrocketed despite lower expected return.
I do agree that paying their workers more is necessary, but increasing the budget for them is still money that has to be drawn off somewhere else. So the term shortage seems quite fitting.
Eg people widely blamed 'panic buyers' 'hoarding' toilet paper, and made fun of how stupid and/or selfish people were.
In reality, much simpler explanations suffice:
Commercial toilet paper that you use in the office (on those big rolls) comes out of entirely different machines and with entirely different materials than the consumer grade stuff you use at home.
Normally, the demand for toilet paper is one of the most stable things in the world. So competition drives the manufacturers to run extremely efficient with no extra buffers.
But with the pandemic, all of a sudden there was a massive demand shift away from commercial grade to the lush consumer grad stuff.
Add in that many factories for all kinds of stuff had supply chain issues.
Yes, raising prices on the consumer grade toilet paper would have helped: it would have encouraged people to economise and to find substitutes (like going with the commercial grade stuff, or a bidet).
But for PR/psychological reasons, there seems to be a limit to how much supermarkets can raise prices for daily essentials.
I don't see how the commercial vs consumer grade toilet paper explains that.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-backed-company-s-mis...
Also, toilet paper is probably traded over longer distances than you realize. Your area not shutting down yet, doesn't mean other areas weren't already affected?
What you are describing is having stores re-price toilet paper to reflect demand. And that would have fixed the shortage. The problem then isn't that toilet paper isn't available, its that its price becomes completely unethical - rich people and not-rich people both have an equal right to toilet paper and pricing it up to level where the less well compensated have a hard time affording it - even if is available - is ethically problematic. Outside of there being laws against price gouging, stores know that customers will never forgive them for this - if you are working at a minimum wage job and you show up to Target and toilet paper costs $150 you could very well swear to never go there again.
That is massively different than what is going on here. We're talking about huge corporations that have spent years reducing their work force that want to increase their work for now and are upset that they can't get the same prices for labor as before. It's not like labor is going to cost 10x as before - it's an incremental increase. And its not like this is some fundamental right - people of all income levels should have a basic right to keep themselves clean. Corporations don't get to dictate what it wants to pay its workers. A 25% bump in toilet paper costs probably wouldn't have fixed the toilet paper shortage. A 25% bump in pay may very well fix this "labor shortage".
They aren't the same things.
A shop being out of stock does not in itself mean there is a shortage.
> The problem then isn't that toilet paper isn't available, its that its price becomes completely unethical
> ...
> That is massively different than what is going on here. We're talking about huge corporations that have spent years reducing their work force that want to increase their work for now and are upset that they can't get the same prices for labor as before
It also seems like you're trying to moralize this when it's just about supply and demand.
_A_ shop being out of stock doesn't mean that there is a shortage, but when all of them are it is.
> It also seems like you're trying to moralize this when it's just about supply and demand
I don't see how you can ignore the moral aspect - there is a massive difference between being able to afford toilet paper vs being able to hire workers at the rate that a corporation wants.
And people in general like pay raises but dislike not being able to wipe their bums.
Maybe variable pricing might have worked - price x for the first n rolls a and higher prices thereafter.
It is only a shortage if something is preventing the price from adjusting (like anti price gouging laws or price caps). That is not the case for labor. There is labor available if they pay more, and nothing is preventing them from paying more.
I don't think the railroad industry is having a hard time finding workers because there aren't enough unemployed people to hire, there are plenty of those. It sounds like demand is less than it was a year ago, and the supply of workers who aren't currently employed is probably higher. So something else is going on. Possibly, they've driven away peoeple with the skills they want with low pay and poor working conditions, not to mention laying off a bunch of them. And they aren't offering enough to attract new workers, especially if they aren't willing to train workers entering the industry.
Edit: that is, because the opportunity cost induced by extended and higher unemployment benefits is greater than the benefit of working — or so close that the effective wage, even at higher-than-usual wages isn’t worth it.
To ignore that effect and just focus on the negotiation dynamics is to miss the bigger picture (and unforced error).
[1] But even that would be dubious. It’s actually closer to the technical economic meaning of “shortage” when artificial effects prevent exchanges that would otherwise happen.
Companies don't want to pay more than $X. That's not the fault of labor. That's ownership trying to force labor's hand.
I'll believe that when executive pay at said companies isn't high enough to cover hiring 1000+ front line workers that they supposedly can't find.
Their CEO alone made $14m last year and their wages are $15-33/hr. "Can't afford" isn't the issue.
It's more like not paying $2.5 million for a house in the bay area and complaining there's a shortage. It can be an accurate statement.
Why must the answer be to force people into desperation such that they have to take crappy jobs with low pay and no benefits?
The government is competing with businesses for buying time, but they are willing and have the means to push the price to infinity.
Evidently you have not visited a lumberyard in 2021...
Yes, lumber has shot up, but that is a function of supply and demand, not inflation. Demand went through the roof, supply was constrained, prices rose, and are now falling, although there is still backlog and so prices remain high.
Supply and demand pricing is not inflation, it is the Free Market in action in all of its glory.
But lots of things are going up in price [1]. Lumber makes the best anecdote because it's a tangible commodity that everybody has bought at some point (and many buy semi-regularly), and it can't be blamed on semiconductor shortages. Not even with Deere's silly LTE-enabled feller-bunchers.
Also, unlike so many other industries, it makes no sense for forestland owners to take a hit to their profits in order to not "lose customers". Firstly, it's a commodity. But more importantly, they need to use those dollars they earn at the sawmill today to plant, manage, and maintain roads (expensive!) to a crop that won't come to market for another fifty years. This is especially true when they decide (always with trepidation) to accelerate the cycling of a few years' worth of land, as Rayonier has just done during the past month. Accelerating X years of harvest means making a bet that you know what the next X years of inflation look like. The futures markets' liquidity depth is nowhere near sufficient to hedge the amount of harvest acceleration that homebuilders are clamoring for.
That's why they are a canary in the coalmine for sudden and non-transient inflation.
I'm sure Janet Yellen will downvote this comment.
[1] https://nyts.link/https:/www.wsj.com/articles/whirlpool-cons...
The guy that predicted the 2008 housing crash (the guy from the movie) rang alarm bells earlier in the year on twitter that the US is headed for hyper inflation. That was until the SEC paid him a visit and he deleted his twitter.
If you want, go on youtube, type 'inflation 2021', adjust your portfolio.
August 11 is the date this will all hit the fan as July's numbers will be out.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/what-is-inflation/
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111314/what-causes-...
(Just to be clear, by inflation I mean an increase in the general price level. Not the enlargement of the stock of money itself.)
They pay lip service to free market ideals when it's beneficial to do so, but as soon as the free market means they need to pay more for labor, well, they offshore what they can and then complain of a skills gap or a labor gap.
It's actually just a "5 years experience university educated and willing to work for peanuts" shortage.
A lot of these companies are liars masquerading as if they can't find people. There are people who are applying, but HR is choosier than most even in the CS field. I really don't get it. Also, many factories do shady garbage where you go through temp-to-hire agencies, promising getting hired on after 90-120 days, then hold you on the leash for 12 months and not hire you.
All these companies can suck it. They absolutely deserve the "shortage" they've created. Most people end up wanting to go to retail or get a degree because they're sick of being treated like a literal personal labor slave who honestly is more likely to be fired on a whim than the average office worker. General labor working conditions are at rock bottom. We traded excessive safety for being treated like robots. Ever tried talking to someone for fun at a factory full of temp-to-hires? You don't exactly get to know anybody. So the system is devised to treat you as a robot. If robot-38273 does not perform, decommission them and get a new robot.
CS field has been famously short on labour for decades. Wouldn't we expect them to be less choosy?
That is the level of pettiness general labor jobs are at. I've had several interviews and never had a drug addiction, willing to work for damn peanuts and they still wouldn't give me a job. I'm not saying I was a perfect candidate, but for real, getting a general labor was way harder than it was to do white collar jobs. Companies just don't hire anybody at those salaries. Then they complain when they only get people who can't pass a drug test. Yeah cause they quite literally are the only people in the world willing to put up with your BS as an employer right now.
Or the best part, these companies are in garbage cities nobody wants to live in anymore. I'm sorry, but a single walmart and 5 fast food restaurants does not make a desirable place to live.
And my point was that companies hiring programmers put up with much more bullshit from the likes of me, because they have to, if they want to hire enough people.
Programmers are coddled.
I have never had to do a drug test for work (though I never worked in the US). And most of people in software that I know would avoid places where they would have to take a drug test, just out of general principle. (Unless the money was really good, of course.)
Workers in most other industries have it much, much harder. Just as you describe!
An economy in which there are a large number of job openings, with fair pay, that are in such legitimate demand that they offer training and other incentives, AND receive a sufficient number of capable applicants, yet never end up being filled.
It’s not that the positions aren’t really needed, or that the job listings are an excuse to hire cheaper, less qualified labor. The jobs just go unfulfilled, and actual business opportunities get left behind.
I don’t get it, but it’s a real phenomenon that doesn’t get enough attention.
The companies advertising the job then use those as leverage to hire an overseas candidate (immigration backdoor). The company always cry labour shortage and dismiss local candidates.
In the scam, the company brings a foreigner on a special visa (usually highly skilled visa, candidate may not have those skills but no matter). The company pays they foreigner the high salary with the condition that the immigrant pay the money back under the table (and don't talk).
In some cases the jobs advertised are not real. They are a front, once the foreign candidate arrives, they are assigned work in a completely different low skilled job for their employer (but have a fancy job title) and are happy to do that for a long game shot at residency.
That's the beauty of a free market: it works even if the participants don't support it. Competition forces people to do the Right Thing.
Alas, enough people need to support free markets politically, otherwise it gets eroded over time.
Actually, that's the beauty of a well-regulated market.
Entrenched monopolies don't compete; they collude. See for example the Canadian telecom market which is under-regulated and thoroughly corrupt.
It's really hard to keep up a monopoly without legal protection.
If you are concerned, there's a relatively simple key-hole solution for migration: just auction off visas to the highest bidders, and distribute the proceeds amongst existing voters.
Nearly 90% of farm workers are immigrants[1]. That has, at most, "a minor effect on wages"? I'm extremely skeptical of that.
1 - https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/about-farmworker-justice/w...
Farmers would switch to less labour intensive crops, eg wheat instead of fruit, and make slightly less money.
Migrant's basically 'create' their own farmworker jobs. Those jobs wouldn't exist without them.
Researchers have looked at the effect of migration on wages. Just ask your favourite search engine for 'migration and wages' (or similar terms), and see many papers.
Eg https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2017/does-immigration... or https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/th... or https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-th... or https://www.oecd.org/els/42365109.pdf (just to give the top results I get from Google).
Basically, the papers say that the effect is probably zero, or at most very small.
So something you could relatively easily compensate existing workers (or voters) for, by laying a fee or tax on the migrants.
https://www.aar.org/article/mexican-crew-interchange/
Trucking doesn't work like this at all. A Canadian can drive a load down them self (or as a team of two) from Montreal to Houston, and pick up a return load in Memphis to drop off in Toronto.
Good Bosses
Stable CAREERS (regular, predictable, hours; real advancement, a career path)
Maybe a strong union that's worth joining. Rail probably has one of these, but a Barista probably doesn't (and should).
Government Engineering has been a giant sucking sound of retirements. The knowledge loss is crazy. Larry even tried to quit so they dropped his targets and increased his pay.
Not sure the company could pay enough to keep from having a "shortage" and still stay profitable.
I guess that improves margins, but I also wonder how much work/profit they throw away by becoming more hostile to their customers.
It's worked out well for the shareholders anyway.
Unlike a ship, trains get broken up and re-assembled regularly on long journeys, so you might draw the short end of the scheduling stick.
That said… I have also never met a group that complains more ore talks about how much money they make.
That said… I have also never met a group that complains more (about everything) or talks more about how much money they make.
Or am I missing some more sophisticated angle?
Means the same thing.
The percent of the population working a job has dropped 6‰ since a peak in 2000.
If you can't pay people a wage to match how bad the job you want them to do is, your business shouldn't exist
I fully agree that some jobs aren't worth doing at a given price. But this is all relative to someone's next best option. You have take both sides of the decision into account and there are more factors at play.
Of course some business models are unsustainable. That said, I think it is dishonest to claim people are finding better pay elsewhere.
If people think they can have a better life by not working at all, I think it is relevant to discuss why that is the case and if that is problem that needs to be discussed.
But I don't think that's what the "your business should not exist if you can't pay!" people actually mean.
I agree you certainly wouldn't want to lower your expected profits just to have more employees.
"Labor shortage" frames the issue in a way that faults workers, not the business.
I've never thought of that as assigning fault to either engineers or employers. More how non economists describe demand being stronger than supply.
If that is how some people are actually reading it, I understand the confrontational responses more, though!
Even Wal-Mart who is often seen as being in an ultra low profit margin industry, has over 2.3m employees and yet could have paid each one an additional $7,000 just from profit in a given year.
The job itself is not easy and the locations (as mentioned in a different thread) aren't in the most desirable locations. Typically you're working outside, you have to deal with seniority when getting shifts (which eventually does pay off if you stick with it), and you'll be dealing with the NSTB if anything goes wrong.
This is entirely a quality of work/throw cash at it problem. If you can't make the job better ("You'll be on call all week and will have to report within 3 hours notice if we call you at any time of the day to ride around in a port-a-potty in all the weather") then you better pay up.
(See also the labor shortage in the trucking industry if you were considering other modes of shipping)
So I think in this particular case, it's pretty fair to disregard their complaints about "labor shortages". I also doubt they're competing with Silicon Valley for IT talent, for example, so their labor costs shouldn't be anything out of the ordinary.
Your criticism would be more valid when it comes to restaurant business, where margins are slim and companies are small, and less able to weather economic pitfalls.
I do hear it a lot of "your business should not exist!" for working class enterprises like restaurants.
Companies without infinite money should be making up the difference by offering other things, like flexible hours
If they want people, they're going to have to convince them to re-locate. Their web site does not indicate they are trying.
(Those are locations of railroad switchyards, which don't have to be near destinations. There's a tendency in the US to put them in them middle of nowhere, where there's cheap land for tracks, rather than, say, downtown Chicago, where they were a century ago.)
On 90 minute call, too, 24/7, in a business that never closes and is pretty much equally active around the clock. As you build up union seniority, you get more control of your schedule.
Pay more.
But I say on the margin, because it's not 100% of the story.
It's not easy to design a system that provides for the needy, doesn't cost too much, and doesn't give undue incentives to become/stay needy.
The "needy" have no claim on the output of the productive. There is no free lunch, there is no claim to the unearned. The solution is to get rid of welfare entirely, on principle. Anything less leads to this mess eventually.
As to the latter half of your comment, society has a claim on the output of the members of that society, given that the entire operation is built that way.
Society presents you with opportunities that you may not otherwise have. Stated conversely, the expectation is that the opportunities that one might not otherwise have are given to them -- the very definition of welfare.
To do otherwise is merely to try to pull the ladder up behind you, not some great moral ideal.
"Society" has no claim on the output of the members of society. Actually, there is no such thing as society above and beyond "the members of society." What you're claiming is that "the members of society" have a claim on "the members of society," but obviously it doesn't manifest itself in a just way otherwise you could only claim what you deserve, or in other words you wouldn't claim anything from anyone else without mutual agreement.
What your statement really means is that one group of people in society "the needy" have a claim on another group "the productive." As a productive "member of society" you are forced at the point of a gun (don't pay your taxes, then defend yourself from being arrested) to support the most worthless scum on earth as long as he has the social grace of being "needy."
Need does not produce food, need does not build houses -- those are productive efforts -- but need is the ultimate claim on the life and labor of all the productive members of society.
If you want to help the needy so much, I will not stop you, please feel free to spend every last penny you have supporting them -- but leave me out of it. I have a right to live my life as much as they have a right to squander theirs.
Yo, we took an informal vote and it looks like everyone agrees that businesses don’t “deserve” cheap labor.
Anyhow, even if I agreed with your concept of "justice", your definition of society is also wonky, if you imagine that it can only be defined by the sum of its current constituents.
Society does not consist of only your contemporaries, and is not made up only of the efforts of those who are currently contributing.
You, as a member of whatever society you are member of, benefit from the contributions of the members of society who have come before you. To some degree, you also suffer from the mistakes of those before you as well. The society you are a member of gives you a great many affordances, some of which you are able to benefit from more than others due to your circumstance, and some of which you do not benefit from at all.
If you believe that you have not benefited from the society you live in, at the expense of others, you need to think on it a little longer.
Then the needy have no need to participate in, support, and follow the rules of society and might as well support principles of anarchy. Why should they bother with this system they have no chance of succeeding in?
When we decided to form societies and governments, we already decided we were going to work together to help each other out--all this social contract stuff.
The increasingly extreme stages of capitalism we see now has instead recreated an abstract form of survival of the fittest in economics. This has slowly broken the social contract that gave rise to people agreeing to join and participate in societies to begin with. Many are struggling for basic needs, not just wants. Everything is about how much money and capital you can roll up.
If this gets too extreme, for the bulk of the population who aren't doing well (those who have no claim on the "productive") in this abstracted form of survivalism, why not just push for anarchy and revert back to lawlessness and the non-abstracted survival of the fittest?
What do the needy have to gain to follow this arbitrary abstract system they've lost in? They might have a chance of becoming a king in a different structure so they will support other options. If you get enough people who think like this, you will see major changes in government or perhaps complete collapses of societial structures.
Welfare needs to exist, we need to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If we don't, we risk massive social instability because only the winners will have any sort of incentive to participate. Plus there's, I don't know, being human mixed in there too (maybe it's just me but I feel everyone should have some basic support).
Capitalism can only exist if you can provide the stable societal structure for it to exist within, for property to accumulate, for property rights to be granted, honored, and enforced. For that to happen you need to make sure the poorest participants have some interest in participating in your society and not rejecting it outright. I suppose force is another option if you like authoritarian systems.
Unemployment insurance serves a valuable role in giving people (barely enough) means to look for new employment - which can consume a lot of time - without needing to immediately seek new employment outside of their area of expertise and thus damage their chances of getting a new job in a field that suits them, and if a job suits someone then it suits everyone because it means someone is capitalising on their potential.
Wage-slavery is not how any employment system should work.
> Unemployment insurance serves a valuable role in giving people (barely enough) means to look for new employment [...]
Unemployment insurance is very weird: I agree that insuring against unemployment can be a good idea for many people. But why can't they purchase that insurance like eg their car insurance?
Then everyone can buy the type of insurance they want. They can decide how long they want their payouts to last and how high they should be. (And, of course, also how high their insurance premiums are going to be.) No need to involve one-size-fits-none central decisions.
(Though from what I can tell, when people prepare privately against bouts of unemployment, they typically 'self-insure', ie they accumulate savings, instead of buying an insurance policy.)
Just to be sure: providing publicly for the needy can be a worthwhile goal. But that should likely be means tested, and not called an insurance, and should probably also not be linked to _not_ having a job.
They can. And in many cases they should, on top of the mandated minimum insurance.
That won't stop the state taxing them and providing minimum insurance with the taxes. Why? Because unexpected negative income volatility that isn't covered has social as well as personal costs, and the simolest way to mitigate the social costs is to assure that people are insulated against some of the personal costs.
It's not only mandated minimum insurance, you also have to buy it from a monopoly provider. And you can't opt out by pointing to your pile of cash for self-insurance, either.
(At least not without jumping through a few legal loopholes.)
> That won't stop the state taxing them and providing minimum insurance with the taxes. Why? Because unexpected negative income volatility that isn't covered has social as well as personal costs, and the simolest way to mitigate the social costs is to assure that people are insulated against some of the personal costs.
That's just welfare, not really insurance. Welfare for poor people is a different thing.
By having employers pay into an insurance scheme that’s betting against them going out of business the idea is if the plant does go bust then the workers have at least a few months to figure stuff out (better than nothing!) and whatever social support systems the town has won’t be overwhelmed. And as the insurance is (ostensibly) a hedge against mass-unemployment it means that businesses with riskier business models or with greater-societal-collapse-potential will pay more to make up for it (though in reality I understand that employers’ unemployment insurance contributions are now at a fixed %, I might be wrong, please correct me)
You mention some social support system, but seem to be assuming that it has to be organised at town level? You also mention unemployment insurance, which you seem to be implying is organised at some wider geographic level?
If you change your comparison to systems with the same geographic support area, the difference you point out would vanish, or not?
To be clear: geographic diversification is good! That's why eg the long standing US bans on branch banking were so bad for their financial system. (And why Canada whose banks had branches in all corners of the nation had a much more stable system.)
But that's besides the point. The point was that paying people to be unemployed is, on the margin, giving them on incentive to stay unemployed.
As one alternative, if you pay people a universal basic income, you have less of these bad incentives. But you also have a much higher cost to the overall system.
Designing a good system is hard and full of trade-offs.
The question about how much employers contribute to some unemployment insurance vs how much employees contribute, and how much each of them _should_ contribute is also an interesting one. But independent of our main discussion.
From an economic point of view, who contributes doesn't make too much of a difference in the long run: employers care about total cost of employment, employees care about total benefits of employment.
There's however one benefit to having an employer contribution to things like social security (or equivalents). And the government of Singapore often employs this tool:
In a recession, one reason unemployment goes up is because the market clearing wage drops faster than actual wages paid. That's called 'stick wages'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
In Singapore, when unemployment threatens to go up, our government cuts the employer contributions to our version of social security. Effectively giving everyone a wage cut.
When times get better, they raise the employer contributions back up.
(That's similar in effect to how a temporary burst of inflation can help employment numbers: because wages are relatively slow to adjust, an unexpected bout of inflation drop real wages in the short run.)
No. I wasn't assuming that. I'm just using a small town with a few large employers as a good rhetorical example.
> You also mention unemployment insurance, which you seem to be implying is organised at some wider geographic level?
It doesn't have to be, but the bigger the pool that's spread-out to diversify risk, the better. That's a given.
> If you change your comparison to systems with the same geographic support area, the difference you point out would vanish, or not?
I don't see any difference between a (hypothetical) city-wide unemployment insurance scheme vs. nationwide unemployment insurance scheme, except that in the city-wide case the risk pool is much smaller so the overall risk of the insurance fund being depleted sooner by a simple large mass-unemployment event is much higher.
According to Wikipedia Zakat is basically a tax on wealth (not income!); the funds are supposed to go to various needy / worthy people, but it doesn't mention anything about unemployment.
Anything I'm missing that you want to point out?
Zakat on produce (fruits and veggies), and cattle each have a different way of calculation.
As far as unemployment goes, if the unemployed individual falls into one of the categories of people that deserve Zakat, then he will get it, it's quite straightforward and very fair. Actually, an individual may be employed and still deserve Zakat.
This way, we ensure that the lower class of people are lifted up, while not overburdening society with insanely high tax rates.
Economists have also looked into the effects of wealth taxes.
Taxes specifically on the value of land held enjoy broad academic support: land is hard to hide or smuggle out of the country, and its supply is fixed.
> As far as unemployment goes, if the unemployed individual falls into one of the categories of people that deserve Zakat, then he will get it, it's quite straightforward and very fair. Actually, an individual may be employed and still deserve Zakat.
Yes, that's what I alluded to: making unemployment the condition to get assistance, gives a certain (perhaps small) disincentive to employment.
Of course, making being needy the condition instead of being unemployed, gives a certain incentive to staying needy. Traditionally communities regulated this via social mores and standards.
Interesting point. As far as I'm aware though, Zakat laws do not apply to land. Only if that land is making produce, then Zakat is owed on that produce. Zakat does not apply to properties either.
> Yes, that's what I alluded to: making unemployment the condition to get assistance, gives a certain (perhaps small) disincentive to employment.
Yes I think I agree. It also goes both ways. Not every unemployed person needs assistance. A rich retired person does not need any for example.
> making being needy the condition instead of being unemployed, gives a certain incentive to staying needy
This only seems to be a problem in modern Western societies that have certain social programs which people keep debating. To be more specific, just because someone is unemployed, they are not automatically immediately eligible to receive Zakat. They only take Zakat if they fall under one of the categories of people eligible to receive it.
Islam encourages people not to be needy and depend on others; they should work to sustain themselves and not be a burden (e.g. https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:296). Living one's life purposefully relying on Zakat is not something that is common (of course barring certain situations that are beyond one's control, e.g. some severe injury or an old person who has no family members left). If you look at historic accounts, there was a time during the Ummayad Caliphate where in Iraq there were no people left to take Zakat, because everyone paid their share and everyone was working. The poor class was all but eliminated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Interesting! Land Value Taxes are seen as especially efficient, because they also apply to fallow land. Thus giving a strong incentive to do something with the land, instead of just 'banking' it.
> Islam encourages people not to be needy and depend on others; they should work to sustain themselves and not be a burden (e.g. https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:296). Living one's life purposefully relying on Zakat is not something that is common (of course barring certain situations that are beyond one's control, e.g. some severe injury or an old person who has no family members left). If you look at historic accounts, there was a time during the Ummayad Caliphate where in Iraq there were no people left to take Zakat, because everyone paid their share and everyone was working. The poor class was all but eliminated.
These kinds of social norms are common outside of Islam as well, and very doable in smaller scale communities.
It's a bit harder to keep them up when the welfare system gets administered at the level of large countries.
(Though not necessarily impossible.)
Of course, geographic diversification also has its advantages: even if a whole region is devastated, the rest of the country can easily pitch in.
Trade-offs everywhere.
From my understanding, Zakat will apply to any asset you use to bank things. Let's say you run a grocery store. Long lived items that are not sold after 1 lunar year will have Zakat apply to them. They're treated as money basically. Similar with land or property, if you're not doing anything with them, just banking them, then they get treated as money. Hope that makes sense.
wat?
Nobody is entitled to cheap labor.
Times may have changed but when I worked jobs at the companies that currently are complaining about labor shortages, the first thing they did during our on boarding was tell us how to sign up for food stamps.
I don’t really care if welfare queen businesses can’t stay open after they’ve been sucking at the government teat for decades in the form of welfare for their workers. When your level of “impossible to hire” is set below the minimum needed to sustain an employee, then you are useless to society at large and you deserve to go out of business
the 2800 total from stimulus payments at most helps defer 1-2 months of living expenses. The unemployment payments you cannot get if you are "are unemployed by choice" since by definition you had to lose your job for other reasons.
Why do you act like giving even the barest of bones to people is an assault on businesses?
That condition was waived during COVID. Plenty of people are on unemployment who were not fired.
The fact is, something like 50% of unemployed workers were receiving more than their previous wage. You can argue that we should be restructuring the economy or whatever anyway, but it's incredibly dishonest to suggest the US gave out the "barest of bones". The US COVID benefits were per-capita the highest in the world, by far.
> The fact is, something like 50% of unemployed workers were receiving more than their previous wage. You can argue that we should be restructuring the economy or whatever anyway, but it's incredibly dishonest to suggest the US gave out the "barest of bones". The US COVID benefits were per-capita the highest in the world, by far.
The unemployment benefit for corona was calculated to be a minimum wage job plus 40 dollars a month. A single minimum wage job is not enough to live in most of America. America is one of the costliest places to live. If this is more than they received from working a job previously then that job did not pay enough and their workers were likely getting benefits ala McDonald’s and Walmart employees on food stamps.
I do not think it’s dishonest to call it the barest of bones to give just enough to live from the richest country on the planet, _and_ I don’t think it’s dishonest to call that the barest of bones even if it’s more than they made earlier.
Do you think there should just be no welfare? If that’s the case then we disagree on fundamentals here and won’t ever come to an agreement on the Covid payments
No... they are still on unemployment from the loss of their job last year. The rules changed, but the people already on unemployment (voluntarily) did not lose eligibility.
> The unemployment benefit for corona was calculated to be a minimum wage job plus 40 dollars a month.
This is _on top of the existing state benefits_. You are pretending that the federal benefits are the only UI, which is just not true.
> This is _on top of the existing state benefits_. You are pretending that the federal benefits are the only UI, which is just not true.
No shit. If you look at my comments you might find me taking about this as additional and how 1 single wage job isn’t enough to live.
The real problem businesses are having is that being forced to figure out an alternative to working at a shit job for a year meant people figured out alternatives. People learned other skills and changed careers.
That’s on top of al the deaths. Most of these shit jobs were frontlines workers who got hit hard by Covid. You don’t need to kill everyone to make the labor market really tight. If you made it so there was even 1% less supply than demand and there’s still margin available to use then you’d see salaries skyrocket as firms need to start cutting their margin to acquire labor.
I found that statement incredibly out of touch and lacking empathy.
Or get paid cash and still claim the $600.
On the other hand, a very simple/easy system meant that the process wasn't overly onerous at a time where other contractors were legitimately missing a lot of business due to pandemic restrictions.
We asked a number of people for cleaner recommendations and many had a similar story of struggling to find someone, their cleaner taking leave from work, etc.
I'm not fighting against stimulus. It was critical for many businesses forced to close or copping follow-on impacts of that. My business took significant hits as lockdowns started and I received stimulus payments (and kept working on what work was coming in).
One of the (few) perks of being a subcontractor or working for somebody else is not really having to deal with the homeowner. You get to answer every question with "hey that's a great question you should call my boss and ask him".
Owners take on the risk of providing a stable paycheck for their employees, and far far more beyond that. In the vast majority of small businesses, the owner is the last one to take a paycheck.
There is plenty of work to running a roofing company that's beyond just the physical act of putting the roof on a house.
Who does the marketing to find the projects? Who handles the billing (and inevitable disputes)? Who places the orders for supplies? Who cuts the paychecks? Who handles OSHA requirements?