Retirees Are One Reason the Fed Has Given Up on a Big Worker Rebound | Hacker News Reader

Retirees Are One Reason the Fed Has Given Up on a Big Worker Rebound

nytimes.com

21 pointsmooreds30 comments

Another reason - the strong dollar taxes companies for hiring US workers. Nothing wrong with people from other countries but its harsh when your own government does all it can to destroy your ability to make your own way on every single level, from an education system that requires lifetime peonage to a healthcare system designed to bankrupt you, to California style housing inflation from coast to coast. Then deciding to "fix" the inflation on the backs of the most impoverished.

Peter Zeihan has spoken about this in many of his presentations. Apparently it has been known since at least the 1960's that this would be occurring around now. Do corporate recruiting departments require that people are aware of these events in advance? Do companies and governments budget for it?

So wait, the Fed, whose chairman just a month or two ago was talking about how unemployment needed to go up in order to make inflation go down is now claiming that more workers are needed to make inflation go down?

They're just making this up as they go along, aren't they?

Well, no. Those two things go hand-in-hand. Even tho "unemployment" is a percentage, increasing the denominator doesn't mean that you're holding the numerator steady. If anything, you are probably holding the total number of workers steady.

Supply, Demand.

And what is involved here isn't a scarce resource per se. There is no failed minable element, no shortage of fuel, etc.

It's simply: increase the price of labor to get more labor. It's very very very very simple. Like, the first fucking day of microeconomics.

And increase the prices of groceries enough to break even at those higher wages, then watch the total sales plummet, then watch the grocery store go out of business.

Interesting point: ~Every time I've chatted much with retail sales help in (well-to-do) Ann Arbor, MI, they seem to live far away, in vastly more affordable (at their wages) locations.

Interesting idea: Scale minimum wages according to the cost of readily-available local housing for bottom-end service workers. So the wealthy NIMBY's could either pay stratospheric prices for lawn care, local groceries, restaurants, etc. - or else drive 5 to 35 miles, to stores & restaurants within easy walking distance of the workers.

There are not enough workers right now. The pandemic sped things up, but it was always coming. I have to wait forever in the grocery store because there are no cashiers, forget baggers, I haven’t seen those since before the pandemic.

Every place I know is desperate for workers who are somewhat competent and will, you know, work.

I am sure this will ease a bit if we truly enter a recession and companies start laying off in mass, but right now I don’t see it. If this continues the US needs to reevaluate immigration policy or at least the number of immigrants let in per year.

There are plenty of workers. The shortage is the number of people willing to bag groceries for the offered wage and work conditions. Companies can solve this pretty easily.

Companies can solve that pretty easily by raising wages... at the price of their business model. Grocery stores run on something like 1% margins, so if they raise wages, they either raise prices or go out of business. It's not just "accept less profit" for many businesses.

(For some businesses, yes, they could accept less profit. Those tend to be the ones that raise wages when they can't get enough workers, because they have the incentive to do so.)

This is why the American economy needs lots of poor people and no safety net, so that the business models work.

I know it’s meant facetiously, but I think it’s true. Without WalMart prices would the taco truck be able to offer the prices it does which maybe the most affordable way for some workers to eat, and the only job those taco makers have… we are on a precipice here.

The only way people clock into crappy jobs for little money is because they need to. If your produce was picked by someone paying $12/hr or more, it'd be a lot more expensive. It's absolutely true.

If the grocery stores' business model doesn't work, that's not going to work out well for the poor people either...

Looks like plenty of room for this in groceries. https://www.yahoo.com/now/kroger-reports-third-quarter-2022-...

The solution is the automation of low wage jobs. I fail to understand why they still exist in the developed world. When will we make that shift..and eliminate them entirely?

The automation for checking out and bagging groceries is terrible unless you are only buying a few things. It is slower and puts the work onto the customer.

In the UK here. I haven't seen a grocery bagger in over 30 years, and usually don't use a grocery cashier either. The work is done by the customer but I never found it burdensome. I shop for groceries almost every day currently but in the past did large shops every 1 to 2 weeks, with quite varied loads.

Is there a reason it's particularly difficult to bag your own groceries in the USA?

I am not familiar with the UK model, but there isn’t enough room in the automated systems in the US. There isn’t really enough room for the carts or for bagging groceries. Beyond a single bag. The systems are really designed around buying a few items.

If only there were some mechanism in a market-based economy to solve labor shortages…

I’d rather work at the grocery in walking distance from my house. They pay roughly a fifth of what my current employer pays new unskilled hires without experience. Keep this in mind before you berate the impoverished help for not catering to your whims.

I am not berating workers. They are all doing the best they can and what makes sense for them. I am berating corporations and employers for not solving their own labor problem by offering higher wages and the government for being a too restrictive with immigration policy for years.

There is a very real economic impact to low or negative population growth.

Didn't we all know that boomers would retire after 2020 en mass? This was published by news outlets every few months in the last decade.

Headsup, social security is also going to get drained faster if said boomers live longer.

Wealth concentration among progeny/estates of boomers is also going to increase, exacerbating inequality.

Aging is rapid. Expecting 60 year olds to fill the labor force and do hard work is unrealistic. The number of able bodied boomers is even lesser than the numbers indicate.

A lot of things we take for granted in America just wouldn't function without the workers. E.g. If you expect to be able to talk to a human when your bags are misplaced by an airline, you won't find that human.

America really needs to reevaluate the amount of jobs that is just inefficient red tape and paperwork. Barring immigration (let's be realistic, America is not an immigrant-friendly nation), there is no way we will have enough workers. Those many children just don't exist in this country. We will have to learn to live with a lower quality of life where things break all the time and there is a shortage of skilled humans to take care of the complex systems we have built over decades.

When you say the US isn’t immigrant friendly, I think your focusing on concerns about the impact of very high immigration that has surfaced in recent years among certain groups and media, rather practical resistance to immigration.

“The United States is home to the highest number of immigrants in the world. An estimated 50.6 million people in the United States—a bit more than 15% of the total population of 331.4 million—were born in a foreign country. The number of immigrants in the U.S. has increased by at least 400% since 1965. The population of immigrants in the United States is incredibly diverse, with nearly every country in the world represented among U.S.”

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

>America really needs to reevaluate the amount of jobs that is just inefficient red tape and paperwork

Companies already mostly did that after the 2008 recession when they started cutting jobs and requiring the remaining workers to pick up the slack. Automation is our only way out of a situation where there's not enough hands to do all the work we want to get done.

This world view isn't compatible with the capital intensive firms we see. High property, holding, and estate taxes are coming.

https://archive.vn/2rSwV

Which is why we need to close the free-for-all immigration and drastically expand H1-B.

All these immigrants are going to live where? If I’m not mistaken there’s a massive shortage of housing that resembles affordability when over occupied.

Who’s going to teach them about all the fucked up shit we all tolerate daily. Christian nazionalism. Lost causers. Anti vaxers. Need I continue?

Who’s going to explain to them that a visit to the hospital can bankrupt them?

What about predatory creditors and gambling?

How are they going to be prevented from succumbing to a life of despair, like so many other Americans are experiencing on streets across the country? You think people want to immigrate to America to bag some out of touch tech bros groceries, pump their gas, wipe their ass, drive them home drunk, or deliver their farm to table meal kits for sub minimum wage app based gig work?

Yeah. Sure. Immigration is the answer, but not in the way I suspect you envision. Immigration like that would bleed the few social services left out, and something will fill their places. I suspect it’ll look more like mass murder and crimes against humanity than the romanticized plantation era .

There is no free for all immigration.

It would be fine if there was. There would probably be a huge rush of people from South and Central America at first, but it isn't like every person everywhere is eager to give up their life to move thousands of miles to a different country. And then immigrants don't depress the economy (they fill jobs but also bring demand that creates more jobs...).

No we do not need to increase indentured servitude. Fix the h1 program first then you can expand it

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