Sure it would be much more efficient to pay what the job is worth rather than having to kludge around a living wage. Paying three guys with masters degrees to scub toilets isn’t great but there is no way with our projects to be 100% busy we can do 90% or 110% (relatively, it isn’t really that blocky but you can add a client or not) and since people don’t like being worked at greater than 100% long term on salary we end up with the 10% down time that can be used for clean toilets. Paying someone 26k per year is a luxury and not worth it to me, let alone if I had to may them more than $15/hour. I would totally add someone to my payroll for $15k per year purely to make the staff’s lives better.
Ya, and a lot of our messes are more industrial in nature. I’m talking about toilets but it’s more like dirty boot prints and huge mash spills. It is only, at most, a two day a week job.
Well, before this goes much further, I want to agree with something that you said earlier, in that a UBI would make these things a whole lot simpler to deal with, so there’s that. But until that comes to pass…
So the opportunity cost of having clean toilets is enough to take time away from projects when you are at 110%, or to interfere with their downtime when they have it. You would only need them 2 days a week, so that’s not 26k a year, that’s around 10k a year. The opportunity cost of having your engineers scrub toilets is probably significantly higher than that.
Right, but the problem is that that means that that person’s life is made much shittier.
So, either try to hire someone part time, to come in and clean toilets (and I assume other things as well) 2 days a week, or contract a service company who hires people full time to have someone come in 2 days a week.
Or do neither, and have yourself or your highly paid employees do it. My point is that we shouldn’t require people to live in poverty in order for you to have someone to do it.
If your cleaning is specialized, then you shouldn’t complain about having to pay someone more than the minimum to do it.
The big Silicon Valley companies I worked for all brought in outside companies to do cleaning. That way they didn’t have to pay benefits to them. Which might not be great for society as a whole, but did save money.
As for kiosks at Wendy’s, I’m all for them. The ones I’ve used let me order complicated things with a lot fewer errors than ordering from people. Investing in that improves productivity which is good for society in general. It also allows the companies to pay the more skilled workers remaining more. If companies that don’t want to automate go under, that’s capitalism in action.
Automating people out of jobs doesn’t provide a living wage or encourage people to take shitty jobs that are nonexistent. I’m fine with companies automating where it makes sense but that is generally in jobs with lower skill sets and higher wages which fairly squarely targets the minimum wage people that some are trying to help in the thread with the thought of “just pay them more!”
As for my cleaning obviously it’s not that specialized since three dudes with no special knowledge or tools or supplies can do the work. And no matter if I pay a different firm to provide the cleaning or bring someone in house and provide benefits it would still be a job that I’m not paying to have done because I can’t have it done cheap enough which is the point of the thread.
I’d say that it is better to not employ someone than to employ someone for less than a living wage.
If you don’t employ them, then they may find something elsewhere that’s better, they may work on their skills to make them more in demand, or the unemployment may get to the point where we end up implementing a UBI.
If you employ them for poverty level wages, then they put in effort to help you with what you need done, but they are still in poverty. It’s kinda a one sided benefit.
I have no problem with automation eliminating shitty jobs. I’ve done a number of them, and they suck.
Well, each of them got it partly right and partly wrong (insert sub-forum name here), so that handshake makes sense.
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There was a short period in which it made sense for employers to provide health care; during that handful of years, people joined a company right out of high school or college and stayed there their entire working lives. So having the company take responsibility for keeping them healthy made some sense.
Now, it makes zero sense. Yet in the USA (at least) we still cling to this idea that businesses should provide health care, with the tenacity of a two-year-old holding a candy-bar. NO I WON’T LET GO!!!
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You’re right; this is one root of the irrational clinging to ‘businesses should provide healthcare’ idea.
But obviously it’s not a good reason, from the viewpoint of the economy as a whole. The massive inefficiency and inequities of hanging on to this idea are staggering.
Unfortunately, these businesses have a whole lot more political pull than the small business or the underinsured.
That’s right. Though of course if we were to succeed, even partially, in getting the influence of money out of national politics—through SCOTUS decisions correcting the Citizens United case; through term limits, perhaps; through more stringent enforcement of campaign finance rules, etc.—then the distortions created by the advantages-to-Big-Business-of-keeping-workers-dependent, would be lessened.
I do think that the gig economy and the growth of small businesses may help this along. More and more people are not getting their insurance from big corporations that can afford deluxe packages.
And many of these healthcare plans are becoming less generous over time as well.
True. And some big corporations may be less focused on keeping people dependent, er, “loyal,” (outside of a small fraction of their workforces that would be genuinely hard to replace).
You did NOT just cite a Wooster Daily Record article! 
Well, I was just at the Wooster Walmart yesterday for the first time in a couple weeks and I was shocked to see that they’ve redone the checkouts to convert almost all of the cashier lines to self checkout. The stations were numbered up to 35 and only 4 were not self checkout; of the 4 only 2 were manned (womanned?). I can only imagine this model will quickly become widespread.
How is this the free market at work when the government pays people to sit at home?
If there are no jobs and no income then the peasants get restless and start doing things like marching in the streets, engaging in revolution, and stealing money and housing from the few that still have it.
So… many people feel it’s better to pay people to “sit at home” as opposed to some potential alternatives.
It’s the free market at work under that condition.
You might as well say Cuba has a free market under conditions.
Is there any government that doesn’t influence the economy at all?
And this isn’t directly regulating the economy. It’s changing something about the playing field itself rather than something in the rules. The effect may be similar, but I think it’s a different kind of influence on the economy than, e.g., setting a minimum wage.
Whatever you call it, it’s not the free market. It is government control. It is stopping people from taking these jobs. It is ridiculous to say that these restaurants are simply subject to normal competition. It is the government injecting itself into the free market. Maybe that’s a good thing; maybe it isn’t. What it certainly isn’t is a failure of restaurants to keep step with the competition.
What it is is the restaurants failing to keep up with the wages people can get at places paying similar to the enhanced UE benefits. Make it worth their while. People will choose jobs.
Will they? As a UBI proponent the most common anti argument is that people only work because they have to and if they didn’t have to they wouldn’t. I think that’s pretty true and that most people won’t strive for better if they have their basic needs met.
I think we’re heading to an economy that needs way less workers than we have and UBI will help with the transition and so the people who pull themselves out on UBI are a good thing for the rest of us.