It's not a labor shortage – it's a wage and workers rights shortage

We have this bipartisan love affair with small business, and the fact is many of them are unproductive institutions abusing tons of poor immigrants to stay afloat. They also provide ideological cover for the more labor-intensive actual big corps. It's about time the rose-collard glasses came off.

Automobiles replaced horses, did I miss the memo on something replacing hair growth?

The economics and behaviors may change, but the need won't go away.

The house gets a percentage per head. You're really tipping.

If your girlfriend can do it for you, that's worth a lot more than the money saved. So in my view once you have established that your girlfriend can do it, that is the better choice regardless of price.

That’s the idea behind a general strike I believe, but coordination is hard (and figuring out a set of demands that is effective long term may be harder).

/me once stayed in Athens during a garbage collectors’ strike; didn’t suck as much as you’d think, but was undeniably spectacular

I think you're mixing jobs together that really aren't of similar importance. If all the restaurants shut down, nothing much happens. People buy food at the super market for lunch and dinner. If all the landscaping crews stop working, you'll get more natural growth and some trees will at some point reach into the street / path and become annoying. If the cosmetologists go on strike, you get some annoyed women who need to fill their afternoon time with another activity.

If ware house workers, delivery drivers or garbage collectors strike, shit goes south pretty quickly. I've lived in a major Northern European city during a garbage collector strike, and it was silly to look at because it was pretty obvious who'd win when the trash bags started spilling into the road after people kept piling them up.

Try bumping up the wages and advertising the fact that you do pay a living wage, that might have some impact. My fiance and I try to choose restaurants that are locally owned and are known to treat staff well. (We have friends in food service, locally. Word gets around.) I doubt we're unique in this.

It does depend a lot on location and other factors - you're going to find more people willing to spend more in some areas than others. Other people are perfectly happy to go to restaurant X knowing they fuck over workers but have the cheapest menu.

> a National Restaurant Association publication that said the average restaurant runs about a 29.9 percent labor cost without taxes, benefits and insurance, and about 34 percent with taxes,

So your 40% number is way off. Also hourly rate doesn't effect other labor costs

Somehow they managed to not raise their prices, or raise it insignificantly enough to where I didn't notice it (50 cents across the board maybe?).

For sit-down places, I frequently see price hikes of 20-30% since early 2020 and mandatory gratuity for parties of 4 now, which is frankly ridiculous, because the food quality stayed the same or has gotten worse. Not to mention that the whole experience of sharing an indoor space with an unknown demographic is dubious at best.

We ask, why don't workers go on general strikes? Well small businesses refusing to even try raising wages and prices amounts to a capital general strike.

Employers and employees simply have radically different market power, and that is as fundamental a fact in all economies remotely like ours as any econ 101 supply and demand.

That is is just plain corruption. Leaders (whether in governments or businesses) would rather have power for themselves than well-being for the country. Honestly, I had a hunch that developed nations didn't have less corruption, rather, the impact of corruption has been softened. Each individual industry leader might be corrupt but given enough competing industries their power diminishes. This is why government corruption is primarily associated with oil countries (or other resources) because controlling that single industry is the same as controlling the entire country.

You can clearly see it in Germany as well. Merkel and her party have close connections with specific industries commonly associated with Germany, the most prominent examples are car manufacturing because it is an export industry and the coal industry because Germany is resource poor (coal is all we have). If you work at VW CDU is the party you vote for...

Lots of the nonsensical stuff is not exactly random.

Still the finances could be balanced like this and you could end up with an equal number of recipients receiving the same average benefit. Perhaps some efficiency through consolidation.

There is serious consensus that this amount has not been enough for a while which is one of the things that sparks the discussion about UBI more often.

Walmart & McDonalds might presently be employing the most noticable share of present recipients, but that is far from universal. Yet.

Just like with health care, to get anywhere near universal you're going to have to tax something having deeper pockets than mere income no matter how many of the top wage-earners get high brackets and have loopholes closed.

You're going to have to tax commerce.

If that could be done plus phase out the income levies, that would be the best thing for a consumer economy in over 100 years.

Yup, that's called a subsistence economy. It's a very good thing that we can spend our time doing something better than back-breaking agricultural work and general housekeeping. That's what progress is all about.

Where did I say that? But now that you brought it up... the problem isnt from competition, but from the paradigm shift that prevents low skill labor from supporting themselves (or trying). There is a lot of debate about how mass automation will affect macroeconomics and labor.

They're considered quasi-UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#Quasi-U...

I do agree there are better implementations to be had, and that the implementation probably makes all the difference in outcomes. That said, I wouldn't say they're expressly not UBI.

I also just learned about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#Alaska_...

(And yes, the lower-middle class will probably still be net UBI recipients if only barely, because this helps with smoothing out incentives at the lower end. You don't want to have a sudden benefit cliff, or else a breakeven point that's infeasibly high.)

Is this not what happens, in a distributed way, via property taxes?

True

> Lower rates usually means the relative profit increases.

The spread increases? Not necessarily.

> Then, because as rates fall and prices increase, the volume of mortgages increases.

Because housing prices go up in response to lower rates, I am not sure that is the case. You can almost think of the total payment being the same, and adjusting the principle/interest ratio.

I think large exurban tracks are how they try to boost volume.

> As long as rates fall, banks win.

Doesn't follow from the rest. Homeowners---whoever can afford it, typically do well relative non-homeowners who really get screwed over here. Homeownership in general is bad, in that other ways of doing housing would result in better land use and growth, but this is because low density is loose-loose, not because banks make more money that way.

2.49% auto loans are common, and some people can get even better. Mortgages are similarly cheap.

A pizza place in the center of a popular city with high ratings probably can up the prices.

Perhaps in some cases, but far from always. Down the street from there are 3 'cheap' pizza places within a ~5 minute walk from each other, that all server basically identical quality pizza at essentially the same price. If any one of those where to raise their prices people would almost certainly not pay and just go to one of the other places instead.

There is also a 4th place that serves much higher quality pizza and charges 50-100% more than any of the other places as it is. If they where to raise their price by a buck then people would no doubt still pay since the people who go to that place have already proven themselves less price sensitive.

A small business can still be exploiting workers with abusive labour and business practices.

If your business model relies on working your employees to death while paying close to nothing then, regardless it's a golden goose or a money pit, then you have no right to complain that you're being held accountable for exploiting and abusing workers. Moreso, you have absolutely no right to complain that the job market rejects your exploitation.

Small business that doesn't make much money, doesn't pay its workers much, and requires a lot of exploitation to keep the doors open.

Now the workers are leaving and those businesses are going bust.

It's capitalism at work, but it hurts if you run a not so profitable pizza joint.

This is why there is a push for a global tax.

Anyways, the point is that there are a ton of ways to reduce or eliminate profits. If I was a business owner making $4 million profits, I'd reduce the profits so that each employee made an extra $1,000 to 50 employees for $50,000, they won't be squawking and bitching and are happy, or a little bit better, about the piddling amount.

I say that employees should not go to work for corporations and chains, either. F them all.

I have some sympathy if the mom and pop if they barely make any money, but there are some mom and pop places out there where the mom and pop own 10 locations, which is not huge, compared to chains. But they are making $1.5 million in income per year, all the while they are making sure that employees don't work more than 30 hours per week so that they don't have to pay benefits, no health insurance, treat them like crap and not dignity. I know that all businesses don't do this, but probably 95% do, even though I have no citations for this. But I rarely read about those companies who do. And don't say many do, but nobody hears about them. No way.

And again, for the person making $5,000 per year, who cares if they go out of business. They are NOT doing it right. It is only logical that they should get a janitorial job, or work in a stock room for $30,000 per year. It's just logical. And, with making $5,000 per year, their restaurant is probably filthy, bathrooms filthy, substandard ingredients, dirty kitchen, sh-tty chairs and tables, indifferent wait staff and cooks. Again, not every single one. But if you're making $5,000, that sure is the way to bet.

Furthermore, if there are only companies like Amazon making all the sales, then that is a monopoly, and it should be broken up. Monopolies are the bad part of capitalism, and is why the government should break them up. That is what they did with AT&T in the 1980s and telecommunications really took off after that.

You are using a straw man argument.

Or alternatively, fine, do it that way, but look at the owners' financials and wealth (not just income). If they are making $1.5 million per year, then lower that to $100,000 per year and get gold health insurance for employees, have employees work 40 hours per week instead of jaded sh-tty owners only scheduling less than 30 hours so they don't have to pay benefits and employees have to work 2 jobs, have them not treat employees like sh-t. That also works for me.

In 1965, CEOs made 20 times (2,00% more) the lowest paid worker. Now it is 300 times (30,000% more) than the lowest paid worker.

For most of the 20th century, the tax rate for the wealthiest was 70% to 90%. And this was NOT only during the war years. It was around there from 1918 to 1985, when the top rate was lowered to around 35% and stayed there since. That is about the exact time that the rich got richer, and everyone else stayed about the same, or went down, due to inflation.

And if you say that the owner took all the risk to start the business, fine, cool. Let them do all of the work without employees. I'm good with that.

What you say is yet one more specious argument to pay employees less so that owners can buy more yachts and bigger houses. But fine. Do all the work in 10 locations, all by yourself. Good. And good bye.

Sure, not everyone lives in a major city. It doesn't make a lot of sense for a line cook to make $50k in Victoria or Amarillo. But in these places, they are not being paid the ~25-30k which could be equivalent to about $50k in the city (which still isn't enough to buy a house). They are being paid $7.25 an hour and the tips aren't so good.

You totally miss the parents point, which is that most restaurant workers are barely paid enough to rent and eat, to make the point that the US has a diversity of CoL.

First thing: let me ask you this...are you a business owner and have a vested interest in keeping wages down? Or maybe your parents or friends are business owners and you sympathize with them?

This is not about whether it is a coastal or rural issue. It is about a fairness issue.

No matter what city, rural or urban, if a business owner owns 10 locations and is making $1.5 million per year, let's just say for example, and he or she is paying $7.25 per hour for a total of $14,500 per year, and with zero health insurance, only offering 30 hours per week in order not to provide benefits that they do have for full time employees, and treat employees like sh-t, F them. I don't care if $14 is a lot in a rural area. That's not the point. I know you want it to be the only point to argue, because maybe it in your best interest to argue only that point.

However, even if it is only politically/philosophically your point, like maybe you are a libertarian or something, your viewpoint is probably that employers are free to offer any wage, and employees are free to accept it or not. Well, what is happening, is that employees are not accepting in droves. And this is causing business owners to say, "No, we don't mean free offer and acceptance, what we means is we say that in order for us to not seem like the total c-nts that we are, but now that people are taking us up on that and not accepting our offers, we want to cry like the whiny b-tches that we are and complain about how people that should be working for us, are not, and now we can't make $1.5 million while paying them $14,500 per year." That's what this is really about.

And there are a lot of other false arguments. That "the owner took the risk and is entitled to the reward." Fine. Ok. Great. Do the whole thing yourself then. Perfectly fine. Go to it dude, or dudette. Knock yourself out.

Or, sometimes people say that the money is "all on paper", another shitty argument. Jeff Bezos only takes an $80K salary, and is taxed only on that. Most of his wealth is "all on paper." So, you (not you you, but those who say it is paper wealth, I don't know if you do) are telling me, seriously, that if Bezos goes into a bank, and the banker knows it is Bezos, and Bezos applies for a loan to buy a $10 million home, that the banker says, "No, you only have a salary of $80,000." That is because the "paper wealth" is actually collateral, as are all the equipment, inventory, real estate, etc. Same as any business owner.

Another fallacy is "the business owner can't re-invest if they pay out larger salaries and provide more jobs." Yeah, right. With their multi-million homes, and vacations to Gstaad, Switzerland and safaris to Africa. I haven't seen Jeff Bezos do one god damn thing with his $200 billion, except keep trying to drive his employees wages down and trying to keep them from unionizing. Yet, HE doesn't want to keep HIS salary down, and recently bought a $150 million home in Los Angeles.

And, yet another fallacy, "business owners pay 80% of taxes." Who give a fluck? They should pay a lot more. You think this is ridiculous and communist? You have been brainwashed by the all-pervasive media. If one is into MAGA - Make America Great Again - or a libertarian, or whatever, you have to realize that if you turn back the clock, for most of the 20th century, tax rates on the wealthiest in the highest tax bracket was from 70% - 90%. It changed in 1986, when Ronald Reagan got it reduced to about 35%. And that is about the exact time that the rich started getting richer and poor started getting poorer.

In 1965, CEOs in the US earned 20 times more than the average worker but by 2015 it had risen to 300 times.

The issue is a lot bigger than just what the pay is. It is about income inequality. If you don't like it to be on that topic, and how it should be only about what is 'affordable', hey, that is just your opinion, as well as the business owners, too, conveniently.

But, employees are entitled to their own opinion, and that is that business owners who don't share in the wealth can go f themselves.

And, for the little place that goes under because can't afford to pay, well, raise your prices to cover it. If that means that you have to raise the price of pasta in your restaurant from $15 to $40, then do it. But, that is hilarious, because the owner would want to just take that as well, and not pay the employees a dime of it. And if they can't raise prices to cover costs, including investing in employees, then it is the capitalist way - go the f out of business. You suck at business. You are not providing a great dining experience that customers will pay more for.

And, the more mid-sized business owners who ARE making millions per year, they also won't pay the increased prices and increased revenue to employees, in order that they can buy their yacht or whatever. Or a bigger house so that their vain spouse can brag about it at cocktail parties.

But again, let the owner do all of the work himself. That's fair enough, if employees won't work for those low wages any more, be they in rural or urban areas, whether or not they can buy a low-end house or not. Business owners can just suck a big one if they are greedy, like most are. Tax them at 90% at the top tax rate. AND, that includes wealth, like stock. Let them sell it off to pay 90% taxes, so Bezos would owe taxes of $160 billion. And again, this is not me being a socialist or communist, but what actually happened when America actually was great, from the 1918 to 1985.

I don't know what point you tried to make, but it's completely irrelevant if the business owner scaled things very carefully, blew all his YouTube money on restaurants all at once, or inherited his family business. How the business came to be is totally irrelevant.

The only relevant point is how employees are treated, and if it is fair or not. If not, and this is the key point, why should anyone continue working for a business that abuses and exploits them?

Are they paid fairly or a slave wage? Can employees live on their paycheck or do they need food stamps to get by? And are employees expected to endure hardship just to finance their bosses' careful or reckless expansion strategy?

What we're seeing is people answering those questions with a resounding "no". There are far better things in life than work yourself to death to feed a "very carefully scaled business" that earns the owner a small fortune.

People exist for reasons other than validate someone else's business model, and there is more to life than working shifts for peanuts at a "carefully scaled business".

1) I personally hate choosing things from menus as as I truly like all the food "that isn't bad" (for all dishes there exists a pareto equal or better dish which I like. Something like that?) That fact that a single dish du jour can get more attention an planning re seasonal ingredients and other inputs due diligence is a huge plus too.

2) I am also fine committing to eating at the same restaurant once, twice, maybe even 3 times a week, and do that anyways.

Count me in!

If that is buffet-style and a hefty land value tax to stop landlords from milking the restaurant, so be it.

All those big CEOs getting caught on the hook.

There are people who dine out 3, 4, 5 times a week, who don't really know how to cook anything beyond microwaved meals... that's completely insane!

And I think that's kind of what all of this hysteria is about. Because yeah, if the price of a burrito went up by $2-3, those people would have to learn how to cook some basic meals for themselves.

Not so long ago, dining out -- having another human being cook & bring you your food -- was a luxury, reserved for special events. This is something completely different.

Rationally, we should all make coffee at home rather than spend $2-7 per day on coffee.

My point was that Starbucks can help with their labor shortage by eliminating cashiers and just having a kiosk or app.

I was once a security guard and it’s terrible work. So boring. The pay was crap. Of course, I would have liked more pay. But I was much happier getting a different, better job, than even doubling my pay.

There is so much inefficiency about your typical restaurant visit just begging to be optimized out. Restaurants win, too, because they can accommodate more customers per hour.

I tend to just not go to sit-down restaurants because they always manage to turn a 30 minute eating session into a 90 minute wait-fest.

USA's system is perversion in all possible ways.

The main advantage of public heathcare is that being single-payer it can use its monopolistic buyer power to push prices down. It leads to lower overall costs, but also to underinvestments and lower wages in healthcare.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28408862

https://arindube.com/2021/08/20/early-withdrawal-of-pandemic...

Per his findings, at very best the early end to ui lead to 160,000 jobs in june+july this year (6% over states that retained ui). And that’s without adding any of the complicating factors like how most of those jobs may have just been taken from new entrants to the job market. I don’t think that’s enough to explain the overall ”labour shortage” trend.