A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)
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I was managing a small optics factory in Livermore. We made laser mirrors to order there — any wavelength, any reflectivity, any angle, any polarization, you name it. I was working my ass off and was unmarried at the time. Thanksgiving came around and I had nowhere to go. But I hooked up with a church in San Jose that had a dinner for poor people and went as a volunteer. After serving the dinner, I wandered back into the dish room. I immediately went over to the sink and kicked out the lady who was pretending to work. I then washed all the dishes and left.
Comes one year later. I’m in the exact same situation. I call up that church. The lady says, “Oh, that’s very nice of you. But we don’t need any more volunteers, we have enough.” Oh shit. What to do. I found my old replica army parka I had bought in a Cambridge surplus store 20 years earlier. I went as a poor person. I didn’t want to be alone.
The first thing I found out is that poor people are herded, controlled, treated like children. We had to wait outside the church in the mild cold until permitted to enter, in a kind of line. So I sit down. I will never forget the beatific smiles of the volunteers that served us. This was performance art, and they were the stars. Everyone on the supplicant end noticed this, I’m sure. So the meal ends. I walk back into the dish room, survey the situation, once again kick out whoever was pretending to do the dishes, do the dishes, and leave.
I’ve downright gotten philosophical about it. The way my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories.
The way I see it, if some people get personal satisfaction and a good reputation from being the stars, and their stardom leads to them helping people, I shrug. If you’re in a desperate situation you use the resources you have in front of you, and even say whatever it takes for them to help you more. I just don’t trust their motivations as people who “help the disadvantaged” can have INSANE saviour complexes and hurt those around them so they can heal them. Because they don’t actually care about you - they care about saving and being seen saving.
You’re perceptive to have caught on to the game so quickly. It took me years.
Besides, in some regard the helpers might also be in need, even though not in a material sense.
https://restofworld.org/2024/nigeria-philanthropy-asherkine/
I'm gathering material for a possible book (or series of blog posts) on the role of stories in people's identities and sense of meaning in their lives, and I'd be interested in hearing more about your perspective on this if you fancy talking about it? fromhn at demersal dot net
OT, but I'm very jealous of people with this mindset and work ethic. I'm much too lazy to have done something like this, but have always looked up to people who see things this way.
Just walk up to the church and say you're the guy who volunteered to wash dishes that day. Of course the people who volunteer get something out of it, something you should have noticed when you were volunteering!
This particular kitchen though was enormous since it serviced 3 restaurants and a lounge. So the days were long and I had to work pretty much every major holiday and/or especial day. The worst was Mother's Day. It was brutal. Always a Sunday morning and unrelenting.
It was a sweaty, tough, smelly, and undignified, at times, kind of job. The chemicals in the soap used by the machine were abrasive as hell. Burned your freaking fingertips over time.
Only good thing about the job was lunch time. Having access to a lot of good food. But you never wanted to eat your meal around other people since everyone else thought you smelled and were put off by your sweaty appearance. Again, the job was not dignified, not in appearance anyway.
And I don't care what label or euphemistic title employers come up with for the job. (e.g. dishie, dishy, etc) It still doesn't change the job. It does not make it dignified until they start paying more money and more and more people want to do it cause it pays more. Until then, job freaking sucks.
A dishwasher by any other name would still have smelly, peeled and cracked hands.
For reference on my stupidity, around the same time I mixed chlorine bleach and hydrogen peroxide to make a stronger cleaning agent and independently discovered that chlorine gas is really nasty stuff! Wow -- only did that once!
It wasn't all bad. Several times I got to fill a 2'x2'x3' bin with strawberries after cutting off the bad bits, and ate several pounds of them each time. For non-Americans, that's around 40 kilos, but as an American I don't know much about the metric system, so that might be a few grams off :)
We had a dishwasher but I wasn’t allowed to use it. Too loud.
As a chef for 17 years, here is the advice I was given when I asked someone at age 16 what I should do to become a chef. He said I should get a job as a dishwasher. His reasoning is I needed to learn to appreciate and respect the restaurant's dishwasher because, in his words, 'when shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong, it is the dishwasher who will save your ass.'
At 17, I walked into one of the best restaurants in the California and told them I was looking for a job as a dishwasher and why. I was very lucky because it lead to working in the best restaurants in the world. It took another 5 years, age 22, before I learned the power of telling an employee out loud I can't succeed without them. They didn't even want a raise, they only wanted me to say those words.
I'm 100% sure I have already read this exact phrase before.
0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete
I have all of them in a box somewhere. I, of course, also have his book on my shelf.
IMO, Dishwasher Pete is a national treasure.
One of the examples he used, was to ask us
"Who is the most important people in a restaurant?"
>"The dishwasher, and the Janitor"
>>"Do you think you'll go to a restaurant again if its bathrooms are filthy and your dishes are dirty?"
His point was that you have to look beyond whats in front of your face, and look at things as a whole, as a system, identify all the components, even if you cant seem them - you can see their impact on the situation.
There are tons of jobs many take for granted and are much more important than we give them credit for.
The janitor and dishwasher are vital, but so too are most of the roles. It's a collective effort. Which of the legs of a chair is most important? Silly question imo.
Which person is least important, usually the one that makes the most money. Their capital is important, but with a more distributed wealth in society the workers would be able to own the restaurant without an overlord.
I'm really interested in the idea of flat wage structures. The cleaner is possibly one of the lowest paid people at my office, but they give up just as much time to be there for an hour as the CEO does.
I think this misunderstands a fundamental economic idea: people aren’t paid commensurate to their time or sweat invested; they are paid (in theory) with their differential contribution to the economy. Therefore, people who get paid well tend to have at least two things: 1) a rare skill and 2) a relatively high contribution to the economy. Sometimes those are correlated with effort and time, but they don’t have to be.
"I ask Aguilar: How does this compare to the construction work you did back home? 'It’s easy,' he says."
Perhaps for certain types of employees. I know that if the cost of my mistake is much higher then the level of preparation and study I'm going to do before committing to action is going to be greater. I guess some people just can't be made to work that way.
> the worst that they can do is fire you
If I lose a job in a kitchen, I can find work tomorrow, if I lose a job in construction, it's going to be harder to replace that salary. The zero sum analysis doesn't really work here.
My worst safety screwups in foodservice were 2 things: cutting through my fingernail and about 2/3 of my entire fingertip with a brand new chefs knife (looked away at somebody barking something in my ear while rapidly chiffonading basil) and plunging my entire hand into a deep fryer (slipped while wiping down the edge of the oil vat–again, rushing).
I’ve heard way worse stories coming out of construction. People breaking backs, having hands pulled into machinery… my mistakes have healed, theirs are permanently disfiguring.
I also worked for a week one summer with an uncle who laid brick. We built a chimney on a two story house. Mixing concrete and mortar in mixers and wheelbarrows and getting it to the work spots, carrying bricks around, carrying 100 lb sections of flue up half finished stairs and ladders.
No comparison. I never slept better in my life than that week. Hardest work I’ve ever experienced.
I’m sure construction, like foodservice, has easier and harder jobs. But I’d be willing to bet the hardest construction job is way harder than the hardest foodservice job. Not to mention more dangerous.
I had trouble parsing this and got a vision of you meeting yourself coming out of the loading area.
"Time to make the donuts"
"I already made the donuts"
She told me I could be an assistant baker and get a raise if I learned everything the two bakers could teach. When they day came they said "there's nothing more to teach you" (there was a lot more, but not for an "assistant"). I told my boss and she literally ran out of her office, me running after her, ran into the bakery shouting "he thinks he knows everything!".
No assistant baker job for me. I moved on the next day.
God, this is crazy. If she relies on proficient people, she must trust them. I cannot understand her motivation—just for fun or cruel?
Obviously I wasn't there, but that would be my suspicion. GP responded to being shamed appropriately. There are times in my life when I have been the sucker who feels compelled to double down. Perhaps it's a form of sunk cost falacy.
I also worked as a dishpig and kitchen hand in my early 20s before I got a job programming. The feeling of the kitchen humming during service is something I’ve never come close to in office jobs. The flip side of course when everything collapses, getting screamed at, shit pay and horrible hours.
Edit: also, the lip service of the title "porter" - the electric company will surely except that as payment
It's a different dynamic than a typical white-collar job where you're interacting with your manager (who can ultimately give you a raise) on a daily basis.
In my experience, in a typical white collar job, your manager might advocate for a raise for you, but rarely has the power to approve it.
Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself is fairly low value. Line cooks, chefs and most of the rest of the crew are not making much money themselves. Most Michelin restaurants are happy to breakeven for dinner service but make lots of profit on the catering, special events, books, branding area. I am not saying $10 is the right price only asking how do you price it when the industry as a whole does not pay well for back of house. We could say raise labor costs but most are already running razor thin margins.
Edit: Check out https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for examples based on real-world data.
It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost.
Works great for the upper classes - keeps the price down for those fancy Michelin dinners.
The problem is the US economic system is so backwards it values the ad pixel pusher more than the trash collector. At least until there’s a communicable disease going around and suddenly the trash collector is recognized as an essential worker and forced to come to work while the ad pixel pusher “works” from home.
I heard rumours that trash collectors in the US earn pretty good money, in part due to being unionized. I've experienced what happens if binmen go on strike firsthand and / or seen it on the news, it's not pretty.
Whereas industries where there's plenty of supply, like the service industry, cannot get a union off the ground because for every unionized employee, there's plenty of un-unionized people waiting to get a job that doesn't pay them enough, but it's a job and that's good enough.
If the person doing it (and the role can make or break the business) quits on short notice, then the current wage is clearly not enough.
Enough for whom and for what?
For a society with slavery, absolutely. Also for a GULAG.
If that's the environment you want to live in, North Korea is the best country! Everyone is getting wages that are enough.
>It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost
Yes, meals that people can't afford are too expensive regardless of what you personally think it should cost.
And wages that don't support living are too low regardless of what you personally think is enough.
I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work.
If you are unable (or worse: unwilling) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society that should be out of business anyways.
I understand that some have been brain-washed into believing that leveraging your education, inherited wealth or position of power to exploit others is a sign of being smart or some sort other conclusion that coincidentally justifies the desirable outcome — but that doesn't change the self serving nature of anybody discussing for that kind of exploitation. And as markets have shown to suck at respecting any externalities, be it nature, culture, the rights of future generations or human dignity, they have to be regulated to do so.
If your business is unable to survive that, it wasn't for the benefit of society anyways.
If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploitation within the given context. Not being able to live off your full time job is certainly exploitation.
If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.
Basically think of it as banning wasting people's time by offering them really bad jobs. (This is the "search theory" explanation, but there's also the "monopsony theory" explanation, which is that they can increase employment!)
Of course, wage boards and sectoral bargaining systems are probably better since they're more flexible.
And if people have a guaranteed level of support, then yes, there is a downside to saying "you're not allowed to exchange sub-self-supporting amounts of work for money". You don't need to ban wasting people's time; if people don't have to work to live, the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them, or figuring out how to automate them when previously it was cheaper to pay minimum wage.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of things people might want to do that aren't valued enough by society to pay even subsistence wages for. In a minimum wage world, those things either don't happen or they happen as side hobbies for people with other means of support. If you have UBI, you create the perverse situation of "I might do that for free because I don't have to work to live, but I can't take any money for it unless I can get someone to give me a lot of money for it".
They do /eventually/, but because working takes time, working a bad job reduces the time you have available to find a better one, which has the effect of giving everyone less than ideal work situations. That's why it's called search theory.
What if you are a lonely oldster who'd love to slowly sweep away dust and cigarette butts in front of the local store for 5$ an hour. It doesn't seem obvious that outlawing this is good for society.
But next time add sarcasm tags if you making that point.
It may. Buy are those issues worse than the current issues?
I don't think so — especially if you are inclined to look at countries where the minimum wage is close to (or above) the living wage.
That's what I consider the correct way to think about this. So do you have thought on what metrics you'd use to measure the net effect?
One of the nagging facts that bothers me is that, even as we see increases in minimum wage, there seems to be certain segments of society (particularly young men) who are disproportionately dropping out of the labor pool.
I'm thinking of a reddit post copied off facebook describing college or uni graduates in biology who could only get a job at Starbucks because there wasn't enough demand for their specialism.
So you want a dying wage. How can a dying wage exist? Two ways:
1 - someone else is subsidising the business, I.e. parents are paying the rent/mortgage, and food of the teenager
2 - the person is literally slowly dying, living in a caravan or a tent as ‘working homeless’ unable to afford healthcare or racking up debt, and it’s only a matter of time until they literally kick the buckets and cease to function. Or they will become birdedfor the taxpayer, with food stamps and other kinds of aid.
A business needs to pay for its inputs, labour is one of them. The cost of labour is whatever is costs to take care of basic needs of a human, the exact number is debatable but it does exist.
If we are going to provide subsidies, why don’t we subsidise healthy food, or planting trees or solar panels for example, for both businesses and individuals? Why should my tax money subsidise cheap labour, often for corporation that avoid paying tax themselves?
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/summary-inflation-re...
If we raised the minimum wage to $20/hour, some businesses would raise their wages, and some will fire those workers.
And once on welfare it is extremely hard to get off welfare because of claw-backs and because once you have a gap in your resume it's really hard to get a full time $20/hour job. There might be employers willing to take a chance on you for a lower salary part-time.
The solution isn't to raise minimum wage, it's to eliminate minimum wage and put in an equitable UBI/welfare system. It'll raise wages naturally, because if they have a decent safety net, most people will feel comfortable quitting / not accepting an unjustly low salary. OTOH, if companies make massive profits through paying low salaries then we should tax those profits to pay for the UBI/welfare.
Sure the US is always different (and solution working elsewhere can't possibly be applied to it), but granted: a UBI might be a better choice ultimately. But the question is if that is really within the set of realistic choices. A UBI is a hard sell even in comparably "socialist" countries in Europe. In the US it would be dead on arrival. Consider that maybe this is the idea.
You know, a bit like what the Hyperloop did for intercontinental trains, proposed by a guy who wanted to sell more cars.
It's not an either / or. If the US were to invest more in education and developing the economy everywhere, there would be more jobs beyond low paid "unskilled" labour. That is, at the moment there's too much demand in low paid jobs, too little in e.g. college or uni level positions, and too much supply of people desperate enough for a job to take something below the standards of living.
Compare with my country, which during the pandemic saw a large amount of people in the service industry change jobs, because during the pandemic a lot of restaurants and the like were closed. When those opened up again, they found themselves with a shortage of staff, leading to the ones that still worked in the industry to be in a strong negotiating position and have their wages increased significantly.
Take away the supply - by increasing supply of higher-paid and diverse jobs everywhere - and low wage jobs become higher paid jobs automatically. In theory.
I don't know how far this extends, though. I live in an area where nearly anyone who wants to can get an affordable college education (and, I'd venture to guess, very close to free in most cases). And yet the graduation rate is abysmal. The fact is the higher ed path is a round hole and many people are square pegs. We can't just turn everyone into a highly educated skilled worker. I agree with the other posters that a wealthy country should have a dignity threshold for the members of their society, but I'm come to realize education may not be the main pathway to get there.
The USA and many other countries already have a surplus of people with college degrees that have no real value from a job skills perspective (elite overproduction). Future job growth is likely to be concentrated in skilled labor fields as we re-industrialize. We should probably shift some funding away from universities, and towards community colleges and trade schools.
No need to compare, that happened in the US.
As for a "business plan", that's a total joke. In the real world most small businesses have no real plan. They just make it up as they go and try to survive another day.
If you think that unskilled workers should be paid more then how much exactly? Please be specific. And if paying that much would cause the business to go bankrupt and leave those workers with no jobs, is that a preferable outcome?
I worked in a restaurant for a while as a youth and made minimum wage. It sucked and I hated it, but that was good motivation to learn some actual job skills.
This is one of those pushbacks you see on social media that is used like a gotcha but it’s fairly useless because you and I know it can’t be encapsulated into a forum-sized answer any more than the question “what should a company charge for it’s product, and be specific.” The answer is it depends.
At the risk of sounding as glib as your question, I’ll refer back to earlier comments: an amount that allows employers to “afford life”. That means these two things should not be happening at the same time: 1) a relatively high percentage of the employees rely on the taxpayer to “afford life” in the form of welfare benefits and 2) the company is turning a relatively high profit. Now I know “relatively” needs to be defined, but that’s what crafted policy does, and a forum like HN probably isn’t the place to get into those kinds of weeds. It can probably be pegged to CPI in some way, or limiting executive pay as a multiple of median employee pay when they do rely on taxpayers, as a starting point for the discussion.
It’s odd to me that you want to give a business a free pass for incompetence for lacking a viable plan, and then holding the employees to a high level of responsibility/accountability to “motivate” themselves to “just do better”. What you’re advocating is a kind of semi-permanent underclass since your understanding ignores all kinds of social and psychological barriers that prevent some people from getting “actual job skills.”
To use your own turn of phrase, get some “actual skills” at creating a profitable business.
Welfare does not subsidize employers, it is a subsidy /against/ employers. Giving employees welfare increases their wages because it increases their negotiating power.
If we apply market logic to that this would just mean that employers have to offer better deals.
I'm not sure this follows. By this logic, do you think UBI would cause employers to increase wages?
I think (given sufficient UBI), you would see some industries increase wages but many businesses fold because they are only viable by suppressing wages (which are then subsidized by taxpayers). So, yes, on one hand the remaining employers would be paying more but the overall employer base would be smaller.
Another way to think about it is that as forms of welfare go up like disability, those workers tend to fall out of the labor market. They are using that as a tool for negotiating higher wages. (granted, there many complications in this point)
Example:
-Employee needs $15/hour to 'afford life'.
-Business is only profit-positive if it pays $12/hour or less
-Assuming the employee will only accept a job if it allows them to 'afford life', as long as the government subsidizes the equivalent of $3/hour, business is able to turn a profit. Anything less than that, the employee does not accept the position and the business is not viable.
This was laughably on display a few years back when McDonald's received blowback by publishing their training that teach their employees how to apply for government assistance while they were posting outsized profits.
But it doesn't do that, in fact it requires the employers to raise their wages.
Your model has a single employer (a monopsony) who doesn't need to negotiate. That's a case where minimum wages cause both wages and employment to rise.
> This was laughably on display a few years back when McDonald's received blowback by publishing their training that teach their employees how to apply for government assistance while they were posting outsized profits.
McDonald's (mainly) doesn't have employees, it has franchisers and those have employees. Different companies.
More importantly, if you're on the left then you should think welfare is good. It's good that they're telling people that! We should require it in fact!
If you're saying that telling someone to get welfare is bad, you're making an argument that welfare is bad. In your model signing up for welfare makes employees poorer. That doesn't make sense.
Is there evidence to this claim? Even the most recent UBI studies seem to run contrary to this point.
This otherwise borders on a bad-faith post. Yes, McDonalds corporation is different than a franchise, but the profits of the former are obviously tightly coupled to the operations of the latter.
And it’s not a left/right political argument on whether welfare is “bad”. That’s an overly simplistic perspective. It’s about how a particular system is structured and whether that leads to desirable outcomes for society as a whole.
This is not an accurate description of the empirical evidence for either minimum wage or UBI.
The evidence is that minimum wages do not reduce employment up to 60% of local median wage and can increase employment - so there's no reason to get rid of it. And UBI doesn't have much effect in either direction - so it's not really that important and the main reason to do it is that it's much simpler than welfare alternatives.
Anyway, UBI isn't an alternative to minimum wage because the point of UBI and other welfare systems is to support non-workers, namely children and the elderly.
Those people are lining up to take a job that doesn’t pay enough because it’s better than no job or whatever worse job they currently have.
We could restructure society so that $5/hour is “enough” for some people and then the rest of could enjoy even cheaper meals. /s
If the wage for a job is too low to afford life, then we can say either the job is underpaid or the job is fairly compensated but simply not worth doing. If dishwashers quit in numbers for other jobs, dishwasher pay would have to rise if restaurants can afford it, or the restaurant industry would wither, and from an economic point of view, deservedly so.
Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction.
Their point stands.
This assumption is akin to a spherical cow, frictionless surface, etc.
In the real world capital and people won't ever move around with a minimum amount of friction, nor will people retrain for other jobs easily.
This also simplifies the scenario to assume that wages are the only income. It would be like building a mental model around people who live at home with their parents and concluding whatever money they make is obviously sufficient to 'afford life'. It ignores all the extraneous ways their life is being subsidized by others. Whether or not those external subsidies are desirable or sustainable are intrinsically related to this problem.
Food is based off https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan...
Housing 40th percentile is a pretty good metric for living wage. What would your metric be, 20th percentile, 10th percentile, something else?
Transportation is the true cost of mobility, including insurance, gas, motor oil, basic maintenance of vehicle.
Civic Engagement category isn't what you think it is and the methodology spells it out:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1400 (Entertainment: fees and admissions; Audio and visual equipment and services; Pets; Toys, hobbies, and playground equipment; Entertainment: other supplies, equip., & services; Reading; and Education)
I mean sure, cross that category out completely, but humans can't live on bread alone and this is exactly what this is measuring: living wage, not depression wage.
You can argue about whether median is a good measure, but the fact that this living wage allocates 0 dollars towards retirement and holidays, for me, is still not truly living wage. Any adjustment to the categories you take umbrage to is washed out by a basic savings plan for retirement.
I have seen this meme repeated a lot, e.g. any full time job should automatically provide for a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it.
Now the goalposts have moved to provide for food and housing and for "a kid or two".
Do you have any evidence that our societal productivity has advanced so far that we can simply pay this "living wage" to everyone working 2000 hours a year, regardless of their profession?
I would ask you - do you have evidence to show that lowering wages benefits anyone other than the employer?
Look at the Nordic countries. Paying everyone a minimum wage and creating a societal safety where education is free and everyone has access to the tools to better themselves results in staggeringly good outcomes.
The safety net from social security does ensure that it is pretty hard to starve and not have at least some accommodation.
Those two scenarios are pretty different.
Let's say a stay-at-home mom makes "a kid or two" reasonable. If I look up living wage charts for my state, that would require tripling the minimum wage.
We're nowhere near that level. The "two income" level is a lot lower and we're not even close to that one either.
A single parent with one child would fit right in between those stay-at-home numbers too, so that's not a goalpost move. Single with two children takes enough money that it would require a goalpost move, but single with one child does not.
Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing.
Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment.
Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids.
So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job?
Because they are afraid of being homeless?
- commuting from a lower cost area >60m away
- using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off)
- begging or selling themselves on the internet
- negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction
None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex.
Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.
I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips).
And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.
“Wouldn’t it be nice” is no way to live a life…FWIW…
A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units.
I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors.
1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations.
2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star).
3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro.
At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords.
We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.
Unless there is a deficit of housing, then they don't have to compete because you pay their price or you live on the street.
With a housing crisis as in the UK the cost of housing rises to soak up everyone's income after other essentials (food, water, energy). Rents are higher than mortgages because you pay the landlord's mortgage, then pay the costs of leasing (such as the landlord's insurance and their property managers fees) and the landlord's profits. Very few want to rent, but most can't afford a mortgage (because 'I'm paying way more than that in rent' isn't proof you can pay a mortgage, apparently).
Because when there are 15 people wanting to live somewhere and only 10 places, then the lowest the price will go is higher than 5 people are able/willing to pay.
If not, then you need to ration the housing in some other means. What would you prefer? Nepotism? Lottery? Sexual Favours?
Not due to landlords, it's because the amount that people can pay for housing has increased -- higher wages, more multiple-earner households, easier credit, secondary income sources, investment gains. Plus there are more "households" competing for the limited number of available housing units.
I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).
That said, in my country (Netherlands), a lot of service industry jobs (waiting, dishwashing, store restocking, etc) are jobs that people have temporarily or part-time during their studies. But it's a crooked comparison as tipping culture is still very much optional over here and staff gets paid more.
As for your update, in a free capitalist economy, no, you don't need to pay Carol more than the others, you pay her a fair wage according to laws, hours paid, etc; if that is not enough for her to cover the cost of living + raising kids, the government needs to compensate. As an employer you can support her private life by offering flexible hours, of course.
That said, in an idealized, socialist country, people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody has to work to make ends meet. Unfortunately, this is often not compatible with capitalism or government policies / expenditure.
Which means that other people who do go to work support those who sit around and do nothing. As someone who works, I have no desire to support people who don't work because they don't have to.
> people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody _has_ to work to make ends meet.
Parents who leave paid employment to raise children are far from "sit[ing] around and do[ing] nothing". If we value future conditions (even restricting that calculation only to economic productivity, though I'd argue other considerations also matter) then investing resources in raising and educating children is rational, even for those of us who don't have them ourselves.
I'm the breadwinner for someone who stays at home and she's immensely valuable. A fact I'm quite aware of as she just left for a few weeks on a trip and now I'm working and doing what she does. She does all the house chores, picks up medications/runs errands, is trying to get a business of her own off the ground (is making ~500/mo with potential to scale if she's allowed time to actually do it), etc. She also contributes a lot to making sure our household is embedded in our community, which in turn enables us to both more efficiently help others (when we can) and to receive help when we need it without relying more on the government/taxpayers. She does the work required to do things like help our parents when needed (we're siblings), which would otherwise be paid caregiving paid by, you guessed it, the taxpayers! She also makes me a way better worker because I'm the one person on my team who actually can focus on work all day and doesn't have to frequently step out for life things.
And this is without children in the home.
Not to mention students, people with disabilities (some of whom may end up being a greater boon to society if they're allowed to reskill or be pickier about jobs rather than being forced to work themselves to the bone until they can contribute nothing + their medical needs end up being worse than they would have been if they were accommodated in the beginning), etc.
The idea that the only way people can contribute to society is via paid employment is a sign of a lack of creativity.
The idea that socialism or whatever government system would mean that nobody has to do any work is only appealing to downwardly-mobile elite children, which America has a lot of, and who mainly like to live in Brooklyn, start political podcasts and do drugs.
People really actually have to grow food and clean the bathroom - the point of economic systems is to get them to do it, not to get them to not do it.
They all get the same wage. The minimum is set to be enough for a chosen living situation, and everyone gets at least that much.
(Though some subsidies to help with kids would be reasonable.)
Because renting a room is cheaper than renting an apartment, because ramen for 2 meals a day will cause medical problems that show up later than hunger, because some medicine is better than no medicine, because there’s an entire gradation of misery between “paid a living wage” and dying tomorrow.
I was kinda upset today that my raise I just found out I was getting will barely beat inflation, but according to this MIT site, I make enough, by myself, to support another adult and 3 children, based on where I live.
Thats a very different perspective for me today.
I'd rather see the answer on the other end closer to a UBI then making basic jobs uneconomical by making a "minimum wage" higher then the value of the labor.
The fable of the plumber captures the essence of this.
What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
The next thing to keep in mind is - if we trained up all the dishwashers, could they do your job? Perhaps we'll find your job is not that easy after all.
The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
> Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
> In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
Yes, it's a lovely fantasy—but the real world doesn't work like that. The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me. The "free market" is just sucking off rich people with bad taste.
> Where do you get this idea?
Read Capital and get back to me. We need to open the schools!
Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and read up on the theory of people who disagree with you.
Specifically:
> The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized.
> Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
I fully agree. But to say all labor is alike is wrong. Some labor is worth more. That doesn't mean the people doing it are better people. Their work is just higher quality / on a larger scale / better / faster / in the right place / at the right time / all of the above.
> The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me.
True, but they won't stay rich unless you make them much more money than they pay you. Do they stay rich? (Interestingly, the restaurant industry is notorious for ruining unsophisticated investors)
Not if the benefits of this marginal productivity increase are hoarded by a small subset of society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... You don't need to listen to communists to figure this out—you can just read Schumpeter.
- The decoupling is not equal for all the countries examined. For the US, wages as a fraction of GDP has been roughly steady, declining from 49% in 1942 to 43% today [0]
- We're going through major demographic changes - we have two huge cohorts in the boomers and the millennials entering different life stages in huge numbers. We're also living much longer. This will mess with asset prices and wages in weird ways. Lots of old people holding on to their assets much longer than before, and lots more young people entering the workforce all at once.
- Some of the above issues are getting straightened out. Millennials were behind in wealth creation for a very long time, but for the first time are ahead and are now on our way to become the richest generation in history. [1]
- Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded. Scrooge McDuck may have a hoard of gold coins, but real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...
I very strongly disagree with this—the more wealth you have, the more you can afford to manipulate society (both public and private spheres) to create favorable conditions for retaining or increasing your wealth. This is just the concept of Buffet's "moat" broadened to apply to the rest of society rather than a market segment.
> Real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
"Productive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What actually might provide value to society and what might generate returns are wildly different things and are often diametrically opposed. Actual democratic control over the economy would yield a very different society than the one we live in, and it's very difficult to see how a capital-driven society doesn't create poverty and the long laundry list of associated evils (homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, widespread mental health issues, malnutrition, violence, etc etc).
Not to mention—more relevantly to our discussion here—technology's potential is woefully, woefully, woefully hamstrung by our insistence on using it to extract wealth from each other. Imagine what a smartphone could be capable of if it wasn't viewed as a profit center well outside the control of its users. Imagine what kind of internet we could have if people weren't obligated to sell ads to keep it running. Etc. This devotion to the "free market" (as if such a thing could actually exist outside of a textbook) has destroyed liberals' ability to imagine humanity's actual potential, and the demand for continual returns creeps into all our lives in the form of lower quality products, constant ads, drowning in plastic waste and roasting all summer. If the market is going to course-correct towards rational use of resources I have no clue what this would even look like.
> A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
The best way to make this argument will be to show when this fails (as it does, occasionally, do). Currently it's really only failing where global warming is literally washing real estate out to sea. Judging by who owns the real estate in this country—mostly, the richest generation to ever have existed and very possibly to ever exist—being a NIMBY is evidently a great way to grow your wealth. Crassus was known for making money by withholding his firemen from burning buildings until they handed the deed over. Joe Manchin's daughter makes money by exploiting an insulin monopoly at insane profit margins while people regularly have to choose between food, insulin, and rent. Etc. Markets are only able to correct these dynamics over the long term, much longer term than a human life. Hell, some of Europe's aristocracy are still clinging on to money and power that their family acquired a millennium ago for reasons completely lost to memory, and the "failures" famous in European history occur over centuries (e.g. see the Fugger family). The easiest way to make wealth is to already be wealthy.
> As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
Of course! Trying to pass down what money I can is certainly why I took the job over, say, being a dishwasher. However, this is not an opportunity for most folks, and by any definition of making this an opportunity for everyone (not just a subset of society) is directly contradictory to the fundamentals of investment, which relies solely on using wealth inequality to drive productivity increases.
Look, all I'm saying is that investment is really useful for driving economic improvements... until it's not, at which point whatever service the invested-in thing provides should be nationalized and run at zero margin to avoid inevitable enshittification. I strongly, strongly recommend reading Schumpeter. For being the father of our industry I'm flabbergasted with how few people actually read him. It's easy to look at the 20th century and confuse the economic boom that came with industrialization and exploitation of virgin frontiers with the natural course of market forces, but the latter is coming to a close. Buckle up!
When you look at productivity vs total compensation, there may have been a small decoupling but its far less.
Does the random pair of apple trees growing in a field or the stream that supplies food and water have no value? Human labor didn't produce either of these, so by your definition they cannot have any value. Clearly that can't be the case.
I'm going to assume that you're using the communist definition of value, which is a bit more nuanced, as it determines value from the amount of human labor that went into producing a good. While human labor certainly can create value, it can also destroy value, so simply measuring human labor in terms of hours cannot reflect the actual usefulness that time provided. Hitting a bike in random places with a hammer for eight hours does not produce a more valuable bike; it probably destroys the bike, and no sane person would pay a higher price for that bike. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of communist economic systems.
Contrast this with the capitalist definition of value, which is simply to measure the price one is willing to pay for a good. If the price a consumer is willing to pay exceeds the price for which a seller is willing to sell, then you have a mutually beneficial exchange. Only time will tell whether or not the seller or buyer will actually benefit, but numerous experiments throughout history have shown this to trend upward in terms of improving the standard of living for the poorest in society.
Sure it isn't a complicated job — but without it the likes of us would not be able to enjoy going to a restaurant. And it is a job that would be both mentally and physically too exhausting for many people.
Let's stop doing as if jobs like these are not real jobs. When push comes to shove some of these jobs are way, way more essential than whatever white collar job it is the high brow people who love to reap the results of that labor are doing.
People who say dish washer isn't a respectable job are essentially saying Restaurants shouldn't exist without them being able to profit from exploitation. I am not saying this is your position, but if it is I hope you do realize that this is a anti-humanist position.
All jobs are real but some are less valuable than others. There is nothing wrong with being a grocery store stocker your whole life but I am not sure how you set the wage for a 5+ year worker that never moved on/up from stocking shelves. I think its a fairly difficult problem to answer and throwing in classism and white collar vs blue collar is just deflection on accepting its hard to come to the right answer here.
Now markets have shown time and time again that precisely that human dignity is ignored within market logic (just as other externalities like air quality, a unpoisioned environment or the rights of future generations). Given the markets inability to honor human dignity I suggest regulating this part of it by mandating a minimum wage that is a living wage and keep that wage updated at least on a yearly basis. Not a radical thing to demand.
A real job is one that allows you to lead a dignified life. Being okay with essential jobs being paid below that wage is a problematic stance to take for various reasons and comes across as an egoistic stance to me (e.g. imagine someone saying: "While I enjoy cheap and good coffee, I don't want the batista who made it to afford to live off it.")
There are not many reasons to say that, but all of them are to some degree egoistic. You might be a star bucks manager that makes a good living off your workers earning less. You might be a customer that wants to pay as little as possible and is okay to ignore the exploitation. Or you might think this is market logic and go like "they simply have to find another job" (thus admitting it is not a real job anybody should expect to live from).
Now my stance — just like yours if I got that right — is that all jobs are real jobs.
It was funny but it did make me think - Perhaps in the mid-levels, experience can compensate for the lack of special skills or motivations as an employee will know enough to do his immediate superior's job "well enough" (average or slightly below average) too.
Well it's not.
We don't. It's the market's job to determine the wage. If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.
Or complain that "no one is willing to work".
we have a heck of a hard time emulating or creating navigational system for robots, specially if we don't train them million of times for extremely simple tasks like grabbing boxes in a controlled enviroment. let not mention energy usage these things need; point is: maybe reaching a plato of being a dishy is easier than coding/programming C for embedded systems, but we can't deny that a lot of people in tech don't learn or get into different fields projects all the time, so there isn't a "keep learning/tinkering hard all the time" type of thing...
is it easier to build a website for a client with an open-source framework that you used for the 100th time or being at a almost 40 °C kitchen washing dishes in a speed way faster than one would do @ their houses?
That is definitely not the case when you allow people to work for less than $ 20k a year.
That makes it a democratic problem to pay people so little.
I have worked as a washer before and it’s hard work. It also took zero skill and have hired people off the street before to do it. The output is binary. Clean or not clean. Nothing wrong with it. Its a job but not meant to be a career
No, you're very obviously not. This line of argument is the very poster child of "if you're not doing something I think is important (and, apparently having clean dishes at a restaurant is by your own words "fairly low value") like being 'innovative' or 'creative', you are of little value and don't deserve adequate pay". Were you twisting your Mises Institute wristband fondly while writing it?
"I don't like what you said, so I'll pretend you didn't say anything" Glad you agree your statements follow that logic. Come to the table with real arguments or sit down please.
Because it's important, vital really, it has noun value, but for some reason it is not verb valued. This disconnect is also rampant among nurses and teachers. If you know any, ask and they'll let you know. Dishwashers don't even get an appreciation week.
Have you ever worked as a dishwasher? It may not be complicated, but it's hard work.
It's not usually just washing dishes either, you're expected to help all around the kitchen.
And if the pastry chef quits in the middle of service, or if some waitstaff doesn't show up for the night, you might find yourself suddenly doing another job with no training (and no extra pay either), while still having to wash the dishes at the same time.
I work in IT these days, and honestly my Job is way easier and less stressful than when I washed dishes.
Again. I am not suggesting the wage is too low, high or right. Only suggesting it’s hard when there is a line out the door to fill that role.
So is that cushy-ass PM job with a plethora of fringe benefits. How much do they make?
> We could say raise labor costs but most are already running razor thin margins.
Absolutely true
Willing to bet the latter given Per Se was charging 5% of that salary for a single dinner.
$12.95/hour in today money.
The minimum wage in 2017 was $7.25/hour.
I wasn't making a comparison. I was just providing information.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2022/home.htm#....
https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage...
We can't survive without a strong happy disher
This reminds me, the artist Gregory Blackstock retired with a union pension at 55 after 25 years' service as a dishwasher[0]. His art provided another source of income, but apparently he was swindled out of his estate.
In my union we very much care. What we do now is advocate for a reduction I the number of outsourced positions, and hire directly, so wage and conditions are improved.
It's true unions optimise for certain things too (they also have limited sway and time), as I experienced as an expat. Especially when you know it's temporary, it's unlikely you'll ever see a personal benefit.
OTOH, a union just managed to negotiate 10+% higher wages in my first year in current job, unbeknownst to me, so that's nice.
For instance, in financial industry, there is a certified financial analyst (CFA) designation that some choose to get. Employers normally pay those with a CFA higher wages and people sign up to get this certification and pay dues, all without anyone being forced.
Mandatory unions seem bizarre to me, essentially just rent seeking.
So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.
It seems like you don't really understand the meaning of "rent seeking". For something to be rent seeking, it must not provide any additional value. Unions do generally provide value, and in fact one of those values is a protection against actual "rent seeking" from employers, such as pay and benefit cuts (one of the easiest ways to earn more money with no extra value produced).
When this becomes the norm, the union stops working for the workers and work only for itself, its usefulness is gone and can be disbanded.
That's a very US centric view. Unions are ample powerful in other countries without requiring mandatory membership. Previous places I've worked in Europe it's not unusual to have multiple unions represented in a company, and even collaborating together on various negotiations. It wasn't unusual for employees to change unions based on what the union was or wasn't doing for them as a member. Monopolies are absolutely awful, and that applies to unions too.
>So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.
That's a really bizarre quirk of US mindset. So what if someone else gets the benefits of a better working conditions? Great for them, that's a fellow human being who's life now doesn't suck quite so much. That should be celebrated.
If better working conditions is the only value the union provides you, your union sucks.
I've joined unions in the past because of the access to all the other stuff that they can provide, like free legal support, representation in disciplinary situations etc, just as much as working conditions.
It is of course however it can be argued that the US is somewhat of a unique case here.
To quote wikipedia (which itself is citing three other sources in this quote's case)
> According to labor historians, the US has the most violent labor history of any industrialized nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
So the US has a bit of a unique history here. A less than fun example of this is that the organized labor holiday "May Day" is celebrated in many countries notably excluding the US.
This of course being despite the fact that the date was selected by the AFL (now AFL-CIO, one of the main union federations in the US) to memorialize the general strike in Chicago that ended in the Haymarket Massacre (May 1st 1886 - May 4th 1886).
Because the US already had Labor Day in September, which predates the May 1 celebration.
Labor day didn't become a holiday until after the May Day vs Labor Day debate started. It started as a concept in 1882 but it was not yet celebrated in any significant capacity and most unions pushed to change the day to May day after the Haymarket massacre in 1886. The first state to make it a holiday (Oregon) didn't do so until a year after the debate was already ongoing and it wouldn't become a federal holiday until 1894.
Specifically the federal government pushed for Labor day over May day and chose to commemorate the one and not the other with a federal holiday because of fears that memorialising the Haymarket massacre would further empower the labor movement which was at its peak in the US at the time.
And then in the 1950s the US government would then try to further overwrite May Day with "Loyalty Day" in a McCarthyian attempt to limit May Day's celebration.
> Specifically the federal government pushed for Labor day over May day and chose to commemorate the one and not the other with a federal holiday because of fears that memorialising the Haymarket massacre would further empower the labor movement which was at its peak in the US at the time.
It's absolutely absurd to argue that the labor movement was at its peak in the US in the 1890s. This was the era of the Pullman strike--which the government infamously ended by force--and the Sherman Antitrust Act being used against unions under the theory that they were an illegal monopoly on labor. Labor in the US probably reached its peak after WWII. The 1890s were extremely business friendly.
September Labor day preceded May day in both concept (1882 vs 1886) and legal observance. As you noted, the US made September labor day a public holiday in 1894. If you are aware of any country that made May day a public holiday before that time please tell me; I haven't done an exhaustive search, but here's a sampling of when European countries started observing May 1 as a public holiday:
Austria: 1919
France: 1919
Germany: 1933
Russia: 1917
Spain: 1931
Sweden: 1938
UK: 1978
This wasn't just the era of the Pullman strike. This was during the Pullman strike. The federal government specifically tried to push through a labor day federal holiday as a concession to ease tensions during the Pullman strike. They would not push forward May Day as a federal holiday because they saw memorialising the Haymarket Massacre as inflammatory both in general and at that moment in particular given the volatile situation (even though in practice acknowledging the labor struggle's marred history would have been a better bridge towards peace than a concession and a following violent strike break).
> and the Sherman Antitrust Act being used against unions under the theory that they were an illegal monopoly on labor. Labor in the US probably reached its peak after WWII. The 1890s were extremely business friendly.
Yeah the establishment was extremely anti-union. That's why it was the peak of the labor movement at the time. This is exactly the same reason why the late 50s and the 60s were the peak of the civil rights movement at the time. Things were very bad and it was a painful bloody period where the people were rallying with all their might to try and force progress in the right direction. This is the exact time when everyone was out throwing themselves into the gears to try and make the powers that be listen.
> If you are aware of any country that made May day a public holiday before that time please tell me
I don't know of specific countries however the call for May Day to be made a public holiday in all countries was in 1904 and even before that there were demonstrations on May Day in the US and across Europe in the 1890s (in 1890 in particular).
However that's not the important part. The important part is that in the US, even before legal observance, May Day was being observed by unions and those unions would strike on May Day if they weren't willingly given the day off to observe it. Hell the year that Labor day was made a federal holiday, that May Day (before the Pullman Strike had started) there were the May Day riots of 1894 in Cleveland.
And it's not like I'm claiming that May Day was already established outside the US at that point. It grew outside the US later but it was very much an American labor movement holiday and had at that point replaced labor day as the holiday of the worker. Labor day started as a holiday of the worker but the events of the era quickly shifted that date to May Day and Labor day instead became a minor concession from the government and businesses so as to appease workers without giving them the thing they were actively asking for.
>I've joined unions in the past because of the access to all the other stuff that they can provide, like free legal support, representation in disciplinary situations etc, just as much as working conditions.
Apologies if English isn't your first language, but those things are "working conditions"
It's hilarious in a kind of tragic way, how Americans continually tell me things are impossible or can't possibly work the way that other countries manage to make them work.
No, no, it's everyone else that's wrong.
>In my experience
Really doubt this is significant, meh.
What if I want to work for my employer but only for more money? Suppose I'm a rockstar and my employer agrees, but their hands are tied because they can't pay me more and have to instead pay off the pension funds of people that retired a decade ago and older employees
Eventually situations like this bankrupt a company, sadly due to decisions made decades ago. Just because a company's hands are tied does not mean that current employees need to take sub-market wages. They can, if they are being compensated in some other way (unique experience, growth potential, etc) but normally people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Also, company management needs to negotiate contracts which are fair to all three parties -- owners, current union members, future employees who will bear the burden. It is a tough but important balancing act.
How on Earth can you generalize that? Look at the kids math literacy and obesity in CA. How is this bringing value to the team?
Surely we can be adults enough to discuss this without the partisan edge.
This sounds quite crazy. What if there are 5 unions like we have in France?
It is how they hold their power. If it was optional, they would whither away over time.
In France unions are optional (in the sense of adhering to one, their presence is highly regulated and a company cannot do anything against that). They are quite strong (depending on the industry), and representatives are elected.
If a union does not do anything then it indeed whither away.
Now - in our case, some situations are a parody (especially in some places like positions in the administration, the famous fonctionnaires where everybody is on the street when the post office is required to be open outside the times "10:30 to 12:30, except on Mondays", for which their ancestors fought :))
We have a love-hate relationship with unions (which of the love or hate depends on whether you need to take a train and you forgot that there are only 126 days in the year when they are not on strike :))
Hmmm...can you elaborate? Because I've always thought the "right to work" (ie, not be forced to join a union in a unionized industry) is an example of sacrificing short term comfort. In that case, weakening the union provides a short-term benefit (no paying dues) at the cost of long-term benefit (higher wages, better benefits, improved safety etc.).
I'm trying to find a generous interpretation of your comment, but it comes across as one of those overly libertarian theoretical perspectives that tends to break down in practice.
If the labor market functioned correctly you wouldn't need unions to enforce any of this, which is obvious, because these benefits exist in almost every non-unionized industry as well.
The only reason to engage with a union is because the employer is so large they not only monopolize the consumer market but the labor market as well. The correct solution is to break up the monopoly.
See my previous comment about theory breaking down in practice. There are all kinds of asymmetries that make economies not function correctly in a theoretical sense and we (as a society) develop policies to mitigate those dysfunctions.
I don't know that the scales operate in ways that allow for every corporate (pseudo)monopoly to be broken up and still have viable industries. Especially in countries that succumb to regulatory capture. That means there would need to be some countervailing balance to that power, and that's where unions come in.
If every employer would be allowed to hire exactly one worker, then you could probably do without unions, but that would yield a totally inefficient economic system I wouldn’t want to live in. And therefore modern economies allow unions as an exception from the rule. Otherwise, at least in some trades, wages will go down to the absolute bare minimum, which will lead to political instability, which leads to less economic activity.
Laws change every day. There must be a working process for that.
Otherwise, I think you might be a little optimistic here.
small example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Friday_(Minneapolis)
1. A comment about how in general there should be a way to do that, but not engaging in the topic, ceding all power to the corporations which would be glad to take it, giving none back, and just mildly sneering at anyone foolish enough to join such a basal endeavor as a union.
2. A comment about how we would need to accomplish that goal and that establishing the working process should come before unionizing as it is the proper solution to the problem, ceding all power to the corporations which would be glad to take it until we solved the problem that is effectively created by corporations to be unsolveable.
Collective action works, it solves problems, it gives workers space to live and have basic rights, and we don't have to throw up our hands and say "there must be a better way!"
Because of this requirement, some people argue in favor of permitting mandatory union membership, on the basis that without it, individual workers can free-ride, enjoying the superior pay and benefits the union negotiates on their behalf without joining and paying union dues.
Others argue that forcing people to join a union and pay dues is illiberal, and should be outlawed.
This is the crux of the "right-to-work law" debate, where "right-to-work" describes laws that make it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment.
Personally, I find it odd that federal law requires labor unions to negotiate on behalf of non-members, but I am also not particularly well informed on the topic.
About 10% of the workforce is unionized and only a few percent of the unions funds come from the members. The rest is from companies (mandatory fund), the region, ...
So it's important to remember that European Unions and American Unions are NOT the same thing! Despite having the same name.
In the US the union is directly tied to the job, you can't pick your union. In Europe you can chose your union.
This "little" difference dramatically changes the unions, and is the reason why a majority of Americans hate unions.
It depends on the work. In my high tech company there are I think 5 unions, all more or less equal (one of them is more "blue collar" oriented but still). When there are elections, it is usually a matter of preference of people who are in the union, more than whet they will do.
But I discovered that they allowed students to work as dishwashers, and if you did that, then you got your lunch for free — and even allowed to get seconds. That also kept me off the playground, where I tended to get bullied a lot.
So, for me, that was actually a good experience in grade school.
Sure, I had to deal with the super hot water and the super high pressure sprayer, but that didn’t take long. And I could quickly and efficiently load the trays into the commercial grade steamer that sanitized everything. I felt good about doing that job well, and I felt like I got a good reward for it.
Thinking back, I don’t know why they allowed a 6th grader to work as a dishwasher. That was probably illegal according to the child labor laws. But I think it worked well for me.
Do you think you learned any valuable lessons that carried into adulthood? I started working in 9th grade as a busboy/washer and look fondly back on those memories; not only as a way of getting out of the house (bad family situation) but also as a look into the lives of the adults that worked there. As an adult now, I feel sorry for the middle age people who worked there because they obviously didn't really want to be there, but they needed a job and frying eggs as the local greasy spoon was apparently what was available. But I'm happy now and I get a small amount of comfort knowing that I can go back to that line of work if I ever found myself in a bind and needed to make an extra $2k. I'm sure my adult body won't handle it as well, but mentally, I think I'd be prepared.
But as a dishwasher in 6th grade, I didn’t have any adult supervision. I worked alone in there. And I don’t think that kids 16 or under should be working without supervision. And I didn’t have a youth work permit, which was most likely illegal.
I don’t know that I learned a great deal as a dishwasher that would be useful in the adult workplace, other than how to efficiently and quickly load a dishwasher. I guess if I had to go back to that kind of work, I could do it again.
Ironically, the car I bought from my parents was a 1974 Chevy Malibu Classic with a 350ci V8 engine, and if I had been inclined to do street racing, that would have been a perfect car to use for that. But I was a straight arrow and I had no flipping idea what I had in my hands, so I just drove it calmly (well, mostly calmly) to and from school and nothing else.
A couple years later, when I was in college, I wasn’t driving it at all, because there was no reasonable parking on campus, and was effectively forced to take the campus bus. So, I ended up letting the car rot, and we ended up paying a towing company $50 to get it out of the driveway and haul it off for scrap.
I only sometimes washed dishes at middle school. If you wanted the cafeteria "hot lunch", but your parents didn't pay for it, you could get it that day by volunteering to wash everyone's trays, in lieu of recess.
Personally, I think this wasn't a great lesson. In the current very inequitable US environment, I support simply giving nutritious food to all kids, and choosing some other occasions to teach whatever other values. Also, it's possible to too readily "know your station in life", and endure things you really shouldn't, so I don't think kids should be conditioned to do that automatically.)
And in restaurant kitchens, I've heard in many cases the rates paid for work are dragged down because undocumented workers don't have a lot of options, and so in some sense are exploited. Which seems especially class-oriented when they're working in a pricey restaurant, serving people who probably aren't working any harder than they are.
You are making a solid case to issue permanent residence permits to all undocumented workers (since our economy would, at this point, collapse without them), and - most importantly - punish employers with prison time for hiring people unauthorized to work going forward.
That's it, illegal immigration problem solved.
Employers like that are having their cake and eating it, too. The undocumented workers are the ones who get punished for their employer's crimes. Sorry, I'm not going to cite sources, as I've yet to hear about anyone going behind bars for hiring illegal immigrants.
EDIT: never mind, here's a source[1]. It wasn't hard to find.
>For example, the latest available data show that during the last twelve months (April 2018 - March 2019) only 11 individuals (and no companies) were prosecuted in just 7 cases. There were no prosecutions during either of the last two months.
Corporate employers aren't even being prosecuted. This tells you everything about the hypocrisy of the entire system (and anti-immigration rhetoric in particular, whether legal or illegal).
EDIT 2: "sporadically" hiring illegal workers isn't even a crime punished by prison [2]. Yay.
[1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/559/
[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
ICE officials raided a few facilities a few years ago, and actually found about 900 undocumented workers.
Many of them gave evidence to officials, including written instructions from the company that advised them how to fill out employment, banking, taxation paperwork if they "didn't have documentation", i.e. Tyson didn't just know this was the case, they were actively enabling it.
And in press conferences, when journalists asked "Are there any plans to investigate the company or issue fines or charges?", the response? "We are not considering that at this time."
What it actually ended up looking like, with some other safety issues raised around that time is that Tyson perhaps decided their undocumented workers were getting a little too angry about poor safety standards, and making waves. It would be entirely unsurprising if Tyson made a sweetheart deal with ICE that said "Hey, if you come to these plants, you'll get to make this big stink about undocumented workers" (and remember, this was during the Trump administration), "but in return, can you leave us out of it?", shades of "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
That's becoming more common. My school district just announced they have funding to give all students free breakfast and lunch for the next three years. They got that funding through the government (and I think it may have come all the way from the feds). We're not a low income district, so I assume that funding is easily available.
Even before then, it was mostly a "pay if you can" policy. The kids have accounts and they punch in their ID number when they go through the lunch line, but it would never refuse even if the account balance was negative. They'd ask parents to bring the balance positive, but it was never revealed at the student level that someone did not have adequate funds.
Slowly but surely we're trying to make sure students can focus on school. Hard to make everyone's home life ideal, but we do what we can. Hopefully this translates to their increased success in life and each successive generation will improve.
They don't do that anymore, but stuff like that was commonplace in the past.
In Japan, it is customary for elementary school children, all of them, to be doing the food distribution and cleaning. (who is doing what rotates.)
And in moderation, so children have lots of unstructured time to play and learn and socialize on their own.
Part of why this works is because Japanese school is structured differently from American school. In the US the class of students moves between teachers’ rooms; in Japan the teachers move between classrooms. So things like lunchroom coats that fit the particular students are always in the same place, and the lunch is served in the classroom so you’re only serving a few dozen people.
Professional Dish-Washer Shares Tales From the Pit [2007] https://www.npr.org/2007/06/12/10991537/professional-dish-wa...
Dish Out Of Water https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/conventions/act-two-17
Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States [book] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060896426?ie=UTF8&tag=thi...
These were like tiny ovens (same horizontal dimensions but only 40-50cm tall)
I haven't worked in a restaurant so I don't know about that complexity (cutlery, porcelain wearing out) but glasses.. oh man we had 99% mostly pint glasses (beer/UK) and shot glasses and 1% wine and champagne glasses, and considering people breaking them we had to restock (replace broken or replace worn out) every week.
Guzman says he's a better chef for having cleaned pots and pans and worked his way up in the kitchen. “Cooking school doesn’t prepare you for a broken dishwasher,” he says.
https://www.glassonline.com/usa-opinions-differ-on-decline-o...
"One hundred years ago, by one historian's estimate, the bars, hotels and restaurants of New York City broke 500,000 glass tumblers every day." (2003)
That would put my estimate at over a million bars, hotels and restaurants in New York in 1903.
East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses
Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8XSIVhsE4
Still, going to put this in my stack of lifestyle choices next to film photography and vinyl records
- Try running the dishwasher a second time with no soap, or on a rinse cycle
- If you use soap pods, try putting it not in the soap tray, but directly in with the dishes. [0]
[0] This video (starting at 11:40) explains how soap is used in a dishwasher. This guy (who has an excellent channel) gives tips to maximize soap exposure in your dishwasher, but you can do the opposite to minimize it instead. If you have a good machine, your dishes might still come out clean.
Our rinse aid is disabled on our dishwasher.
I tried to do some research on the safety of the chemical, but couldn't find anything online
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(22)01477-4/ful...
It's evident that some of those trusting people are willing to make or save a buck while putting you at risk.
At the end of it, people should probably make their own assessment as to whether they should put themselves at risk. And I don't mind drying a handful of dishes if the alternative is to lace them all with surfactant.
These products all have surfactants as the main ingredient, and surface tension is what literally define us.
I use the dishwasher for glasses most of the time and haven't noticed any difference, but all i use is the cheapest powder/gel and only half of what fills up that little slot.
Being a dishwasher “was the first time I went home proud of myself after a day's work.”
Any reasonably-sized restaurant needs a dishwashing machine of some kind though, eg a conveyor - I don't see anything in those photos.
It's a service - $3000/month includes hardware and support.
There's lots of brief moments of downtime in a restaurant to do stuff like shuffle a tray or two over for the robot.
Robots like this are pretty common in the industry (like the mechanical industry) and one costs around 50k and we already produce them at scale.
How much can they lease it for, in your opinion?
There are other dishwashing robots. Useful for cafeterias, maybe.[2] Cute, but not too useful.[3] So far, none seem to be deployed much. But that will come.
[1] https://standardbots.com/blog/collaborative-robot-prices-the...
The 20k cobot would be the "blind" kind that is only useful in fully automated lines thst deal with the same type of product, not a dishwasher with a lot of variables
In 2003, PV panels were a pretty darn mature technology. The technology was decades old. Modules cost about $5 a watt, one twenty fifth the price they were in 1975. More than two gigawatts of them had been installed worldwide. (Millions of panels!) No way could they fall in price by half, right?
Surprise. By 2010 another 38 gigawatts of solar had been installed, and the price per watt was down to $2.32. No way could they fall in price by half again, right?
Surprise. $1.02 per watt in 2012, and another 61 gigawatts installed. $0.52 a watt in 2017. $0.26 a watt today.
Just in 2022, the world installed 86 times as much solar as existed on the entire planet in 2003.
If you build a lot of something, it can get very cheap indeed.
The components inside them are pretty standard too
Now this deli I worked at had no machine so all those pots and pans stack up and by afternoon, when the cooking is done, there's a huge stack of dirty dishes. My first day working there, I show up after school and since they know I'm coming there's the huge stack of dishes waiting for me, the new guy. They tell me to get cracking on it and so I don the apron and get going. This is maybe at 2pm.
As I'm working away, folks periodically check in with me, kind of with these quizzical looks, but they don't really say anything other than an "all good?" type of vibe. And I'm sweating my ass off because the amount of char/build up on these stainless steel pans/pots/etc. is off the charts. But I'm diligently working away getting them absolutely friggin' spotless! Like restoring them back to their brand-new state.
Well, you see where this is going. The guy who got me the job, a friend who's also a high school guy but a bit older, comes in the back, as I'm finishing up, maybe 4 or 5 hours later. The two owners of the deli also come around the corner. My friend's like "dude, those have never looked like that," pointing at the huge stack of cleaned pots and pans. And I'm like "whattaya mean?" And he's like "all of that black stuff? Just stays on there!" I'd literally cleaned off years of charring that had built up. He slaps me on the back, starts laughing his ass off. One of the two owners, when he stopped laughing, was like "I didn't know why the hell it was taking you so long but... they look great!"
I understand the appeal some people see in the work (it is honest work after all), but I literally could not hear what people said in there. I just nodded and assumed it wasn't profane!
It was grueling work, but I met a lot of interesting people, one in particular turned me on to studying Chinese which changed the whole path of my life. Also gave me entre into bussing then waitstaff. Paid my way through high school car insurance and college surviving. Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.
a lot of the discussion about wages ignores the value of experience; students pay to spend their days learning but it's somehow unfair for someone to get paid to learn job skills that transfer to other jobs
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
> That's not generally true. [...] in the 90's and was making
These are not contradictory?
"Tipping culture" has definitely gone too far.
What about the pilot and other members at front? Do the tipped flight attendants kick some bucks over to them?
It definitely feels like an abdication of responsibility (and obligations) of the company that those people work for.
Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.
As it stands today, if you're tipped and you work a shift where there are fewer customers, you implicitly get paid less (and have more of your tips soaked up by your employer) for exactly the same amount of effort. If you work a graveyard shift for eight hours and see $40 in tips from eight customers, you effectively worked minimum wage with $0 in tips, not minimum wage plus $40. For the people working those jobs, that's multiple meals or tank of gas.
There's no practical reason for having a lower minimum wage for tipped employees, it's literally just an excuse for employers to pay their tipped employees less. If we as a society actually believed that some professions should be compensated based on effort, there would be a different minimum wage for people compensated by commission. But that doesn't exist.
So to answer your question, you're not necessarily "directly compensating" the employee, because a non-trivial percentage of your tip goes towards subsidizing their employer.
Whatever your job is or was, are you not a professional who already gets paid well for your work? You're at my office as a consultant already getting paid a good salary by your company, and I try to flip you a 50, you just take it? Oh right, that's why you laughed at all my jokes. Well good boy. I like that.
Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute. The only people who are ok with that are people who like the feeling of being on the top side of that power dynamic.
I don't recall mentioning anything else. What your basis for making this claim?
> Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute.
At the end of the day, a prostitute is also a service provider engaged in a fee-for-service transaction. Scrape away the emotion-laden woo-woo here, and I don't see that there's anything much of a substantive argument -- it seems completely proper for a portion of a service provider's compensation to come directly from the party who the service is being provided to, regardless of whether there's some other middleman in the transaction.
You're trying to project your own prejudices onto others here, but I doubt the people who are happy to make higher income via tips than they otherwise would are going to agree with you.
From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?
They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason.
[edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.
And why should they be getting less indirect pay?
You entice the customer with the lower price, and once they have committed, you can hit them with another charge or fee without as much ramification.
Restaurant customers can be price sensitive, so tipping is a way to advertise a lower price that isn't actually real. Also, it's pretty ubiquitous, so unless you heavily advertise a no-tipping policy like Kroger delivery, most people will assume tipping is required, and factor that into your now higher price.
I typically do tip because I'm never buying just drip coffee and I'd like to reward the person who took the time to make my drink.
In exchange there's typically some latte art which takes some skill to build up.
I replied "Can I see my dog first?"
It just shows that there's an expectation, and at that point it should simply be built into the advertised price.
Tipping seems terrible for restaurant owners since it lets waiters capture an unusually large share of the value of the product.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fac...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/minimum-wage-raci...
> I think that there are five basic motives for tipping. Some people tip to show off. Some people tip to help the server, to supplement their income and make them happy. Some people tip to get future service. And then other people tip to avoid disapproval: You don’t want the server to think badly of you. And some people tip out of a sense of duty.
So, it is complicated. The part about the owner to avoid paying their workers properly is a consequence of the tipping culture, not a cause.
I don't recall if the chef/cooks got any but I also believe they were salaried.
AIUI, front-end servers are supposed to kick some money into a pool for back-end staff.
> Tip out is the restaurant practice where servers or bartenders share a portion of their collected tips with other staff members who contribute to the dining experience. This can include bussers, food runners, and sometimes even kitchen staff, depending on local regulations.
* https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-tipping-out-guide/
This could be legally regulated, or it could be social convention.
What they paid me was totally up to them.
I posted this elsewhere in here, but this is not true. They are often tipped out of a tip pool, especially in pricey ($100+ a head) restaurants with a lot of tip money to go around. People I know have made $40/hr this way, and I even know a guy who dish washed at age 17 at a counter service place and still made $20-35 an hour this way just off the tips that the little payment machine asked for when you picked up your food yourself.
It is a complicated topic though, as it is actually illegal to include BOH people in tip pools in some states. This is because it is often a sneaky way for owners to steal tips by underpaying BOH compared to how they would have to pay them without a tip pool. So you might live in such a state.
I've always found it amazing a cook makes a meal, a waiter carries it to the table. It can be a $10 hamburger or a $100 steak. The waiter gets a 10% or 20% tip of the total value of the meal. All just for carrying a plate with different food on it food which they never made. The cooks and dishwasher get squat of that. Granted cooks are paid more than dish washers.
I had to master the dish tank first. Everyone did and everyone dished and cooked. I had to be able to run the dish tank by myself with the restaurant at full bedlam before I was able to progress as a line cook.
We were doing $40-50k a week in the early 1990s. I love doing dishes to this day.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130313143038-5434591-best-a...
I mean who had to take out the trash and lift the the damn thing into the dumpster when it was filled with water? So annoying.
That said it was fun job in it's own way, the variety of the people working there made the place a hoot.
another reason to eat at home.
> I push a full rack into the dishwashing machine, where it gets blasted with 160-degree water and a solution of detergent and a drying agent, emerging 30 seconds later. Well, most of the time. When I send a large cutting board into the washer sans rack, it brings the machine to a halt and forces my teammates to open a metal door in the center to remove the obstacle.
https://www.jacionline.org/action/showPdf?pii=S0091-6749%282...
One thing I hated was power spraying ramekins and the sauce would hit you in the face... But yeah I remember those days listening to changelog while I washed plates.
This is the IT version of dishwashing!
Not only do they have a tendency to incompetent, they can very unsympathetic and dismissive towards people viewed as below them.
Meanwhile in Europe, four weeks guaranteed by EU law, and many states go above that, and many companies top that off. Oh and a truckload of public holidays on top.
Working at the corner hours of the day, in a backbreaking job, for 20k a year and just one week of vacation? JFC.