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Comment by epalm | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like those businesses aren't viable, and should fail.

In other words, if a business cannot be profitable _and_ pay it's staff a livable wage, then the answer is to make adjustments so it can do both, or close the business. Paying staff a non-livable wage, while perhaps making/retaining a profit, is still hard on the business (high turnover rate, constantly retraining new people, etc), and is nearly untenable for the staff (required to work multiple jobs, 1 paycheck away from not making rent, etc).

As a business owner, I know "close the business" sounds ludicrous to business owners, and isn't even on the table, but this so-called "labor shortage" is going to force things to go one way or the other.

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Is there a case for an "unlivable wage" when a family member wants to add to the family budget, even though other family members (a spouse, or parents) provide the bulk of it but not exactly enough?

Clamping the lower bound of wages may put many of such people out of an opportunity to make some money. In other words, should a summer job for a teenager pay a livable wage?

This, of course, works best if the job is not taking 8 hours a day. I don't see why working multiple jobs, each of which takes a part of the day, should be considered bad; actually, my son worked this way for some time, which allowed him to pass a rough spot in job market in 2020-2021.

> In other words, should a summer job for a teenager pay a livable wage?

Yes. Many teenagers of working age are head of household and shouldn’t have their wages undercut by the dependent children of others.

> I don't see why working multiple jobs, each of which takes a part of the day, should be considered bad

Because it makes life unnecessarily stressful. Transportation costs, typically borne by the worker, increase dramatically. It’s more efficient to work a single job, if possible.

If you want a 17 year-old lifeguard in San Francisco to be able to afford a mortgage San Francisco, you end up with no pools in San Francisco and unemployed teens.

It may be hard to believe, especially for the typical Californian, but there are other kinds of housing than single-family homes. It wasn’t so long ago that a single 17-year-old making minimum wage could afford to house themselves outside of a family unit.

I believe it. I think zoning and building codes are most of the problem. Allow 200 sqft apartments like you find in NYC and you will see a stark reduction in the working homeless.

But aren't 200 sq ft apartments banned because they are unlivably small? The guys who enacted that should take a look at Tokyo and Seoul, and maybe actually listen to the reasons of people who rent tiny apartments there.

They are objectively livable in a literal sense. But, yes I agree that some policy makers decided that they would rather have people homeless than in unpleasant living accommodations.

Studio apartments of that size (sometimes even smaller) are bought by university students in Norway all the time, sometimes for as much as $200.000. They can be quite comfortable.

Not sure how they’d be priced in SF, but to my intuition that seems out of working homelesss range. In cheaper cities though, definitely.

These places are illegal to offer in sf. There is a minimum allowance for size

In a vacuum, the ability to pick up multiple jobs and do different things would be a net gain to individuals, yes. Plenty of people would like to do different things throughout the week rather than having to change jobs for a change of pace. This also assumes it's an opt-in, so if you like working on the same thing 40h a week, you can continue to do so.

Problem being, things today are indicating what is happening is not for the good of employees, but for the good of employers. Which brings with it a whole other slew of issues which disenfranchises the worker class. Which historically is a really bad idea if one's goal is to maintain a peaceful, functional society.

It's why the question of "should X be able to make a livable wage" is one which has to be answered very carefully, as this question is slowly slipping into the territory of "should people who spend most their lives doing what others want be able to afford living". That's how revolutions start.

The efficiency of human labor in a lot of these industries hasn't increased enough to justify the full cost of the labor. There's next to no efficiency increase you can get out of a truck driver or a waiter. Getting all of these people into industries that do have a better human labor efficiency is going to be hard.

You make a claim that there's no way to pay them according to their value. But there's several ways I can say that this is not true. First, a waitress is often a little bit of a salesperson so yes, she can up her skills to be more valuable. Second, the food or the goods being transported can be more or less valuable. A trucker might haul packing peanuts vs. iPhones. Restaurants can be more expensive or have higher margins. Third, we know it's possible to pay people a living wage because almost every other developed countries does it.

>First, a waitress is often a little bit of a salesperson so yes, she can up her skills to be more valuable.

This is true on an individual level, but I don't believe that there has been much efficiency increase here that has permeated through the industry. There has been no shovel to digger moment that has improved the ability for most waitresses to do their work much more efficiently. I think it's going to happen with self-checkout though (you will still need someone to staff self-checkout).

>Third, we know it's possible to pay people a living wage because almost every other developed countries does it.

But workers are better paid in the US than in almost any other country in the world: https://data.oecd.org/chart/6JwY

Spain has an unemployment rate of 15 percent. Its safe to assume that actual rate is higher than official rate. So no, "almost every other developed countries does it" is not true.

Also look up part timers in Japan, and the kind of capitalism there.

People that haven't looked for work in the prior 4 weeks aren't counted as unemployed even when they are.

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