The Nahployment 'Crisis'

In My Humble Opinion
783

I am 70 and I’ve been hearing these same arguments against “kids these days” since I was old enough to notice. (And if we continue with this discussion somebody’s going to start quoting the ancient Romans.) The generation doing the complaining and the generation being complained about change; that’s all.

Your grandparents’ generation said the same thing about you. The generation of your grandkids, presuming the species lasts long enough, will say the same thing about the generation of your great-greats.

Works in the other direction too, of course.

Indeed. If it paid well and got respect – and in some particular workplaces it does, no reason why it shouldn’t in general – a lot of people would prefer it to sitting in a cubicle somewhere.

784

I’m almost 70, and when we were 20 the adults all thought of us as long-haired, free-love hippie freaks. (2 of 3 for me.) 10 years before us kids were all juvenile delinquents.
The difference is we mostly didn’t have to freak out about getting a reasonable job, being up to our ears in debt for college, and having the expectation of being laid off every few years. We had it much easier.
Except for getting our asses shot off in Vietnam, that is.

785

I’ve been wondering if the service economy might cope by switching back to a less “24/7” model, at least for physical retail.

I remember how startled I was on starting a temporary residence in the Netherlands to find out that most retail stores closed at like 5 or 6 o’clock. Even the supermarket was only open till around 8 in the evening. No, citizen, you can’t go do your last-minute shopping at 11 PM, because the employees deserve an evening at home just like you do, and the store owners aren’t going to subject employees to unpredictable “on call” work schedules just so you can shop whenever you want! Plan better next time, irresponsible consumer!

How much of the “convenience expansion” of retail availability in the past couple-three decades has been built on the precariousness of “just-in-time” shift scheduling? Would it have been economical for retailers to offer us those doubled or tripled hours of operation if they hadn’t been able to pare down wages and hours for workers with unpredictable shift work? Would the extra revenue from staying open 24 hours instead of 8 or 10 really justify paying three shifts of workers instead of one (or one and a half), absent the exploitative “precarious employment” model?

If not, then maybe what will help the retail staffing crunch is to make “after business hours” a thing again. If you didn’t get your latte or your pizza or your new TV or whatever before closing time, tough luck pal, you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow.

786

Noted thank you. That’s actually why I made the comment.

787

I think part of what’s going on is a story of wealth, and how much richer we all are now.

When I was young I worked all kinds of crap jobs. I simply didn’t have a choice. You worked or starved.

And even though I grew up in a city of about 40,000 people, there were poor opportunities for careers in science or engineering. So a whole lot of us had to move away from home to other cities to find work - and we did. You simply did what you had to do, because living at home indefinitely or living off of government payments simply wasn’t an option.

As for living at home, the problem was that parents then weren’t as wealthy, we had smaller homes and larger families. So there was a lot of pressure on kids to move out as soon as they were independent. The standards for everyone I knew were lkke this: You could stay living at home so long as you are going to school. If you weren’t in school you were expected to get a job and move out. Nice parents might give you a year or two to save up or decide what you wanted to do, then it was out the door. Everyone I knew was living on their own within a year of finishing school, whether high school or college. My brother dropped out of school and moved out when he was 16.

I lived in a basement suite with a roommate until I was 26 years old. Rent was still expensive then. Our first basement suite was $575 per month, in the mid 1980’s, when the minimum wage was $3.80/hr. Today the same type of place is more like $1200, but minimum wage here is $15. So it took 151 hours of minimum wage employment to pay for rent in 1985, whereas today the same place only requires about 80 hours of minimum wage for rent.

Home prices are similar. Houses were much cheaper, but mortgages were still large. Our first house was $143,000. But we had a 13.5% mortgage.

Today with mortgages being around 2%, every $100,000 you borrow over 25 years results in a pay,ent of $423. At 13.5%, the same amount costs
$1138. So even though we put down a decent amount of money we had saved, we still wound up with a $1400/mo mortgage payment.

The same house today is worth about $350,000. But at 2%, the mortgage payment is almost identical to what it was then with the same percentage down payment, but wages have more than doubled since.

Putting together a full down payment today is definitely harder.

Education is crazy expensive if you plan to go out of state or to a premium school. But if you go to a 2-year college or a state school in your home state it’s not that bad. In Canada, at least. When I went to the U of A, it was around $1300 to $1500 per semester. For Alberta residents, it’s about $3000-$3500 now. In terms of minimum wage hours, university is actually cheaper now. But if you want to go out of province it gets expensive. UBC is about the same as U of A for residents of BC, but for non-residents it’s close to $35,000 per year. So you might have to settle for a local scholl. 2 year colleges are even cheaper.

Cars were also more expensive, especially if hou factor in quality and features, and the high cost of borrowing back then. Car loaans could carry 15% to 20% interest.

Some things are more expensive now, and some things are cheaper. If you live in a big expensive city, you may have to move. But it can be done, and people can still bootstrap their way into a good career.

788

That’s basically how the housing market works. If mortgage rates go up, people can still only afford the same amount in a mortgage payment, so they’re not willing to pay as much for the house, and prices go down so their payment stays the same. One issue with this though is, as mentioned, you want to get 20% down, and that’s a lot harder compared to your affordable mortgage payment when the nominal price is higher because the interest portion of the mortgage is lower.

789

What in your area is open 24/7? Other than a Wal-Mart that for the past 5ish years keeps cycling through open 24/7! Open until midnight! Open until 10pm! Open 24/7! the only thing around here that’s open after 9 to 10pm is one 24/7 pharmacy within 30 miles of here and a fast food place or bar here and there until 1 to 2am.

790

When I was in college 50 years ago we went to a 24/7 grocery store (a big one) so this is nothing new.
And the Netherlands is weird. When I was there they were hosing down the sidewalks in the middle of Amsterdam and closing everything up at 9 pm. Especially jarring since we came from Madrid where good luck a finding a restaurant open much before 9 pm.
We visited a factory where everyone - workers and engineers - left at exactly 5 pm. Not at all the case for American factories.

791

I went through the same thing. I don’t know about you, but our mortgage was adjustable, and went down after the blip of high interest rates. That was 40 years ago - your market must be bad if the price has only doubled since then. Plus, people were getting double digit raises. I did salary administration for some of that time, and I knew what all the non-managers in our department were getting.
One of the problems today is inequality. Not just for bosses, but people coming in with hot degrees make tons of money, while others don’t do nearly as well.
BTW the mortgage on the house I grew up in, from 1951, was about 2% also. During the '80s I never thought we’d see those kind of numbers again.

792

In Canada you can get mortgages that have fixed rates for up to five years. Or you can get floating rate mortgages. Unfortunately, I made a bad call and locked in our 13.5% for five years, because interest rates had recently been higher, and 13.5% looked like a good rate. Within a year it had gone down to 11.5%, but we were stuck for the first five years. Eventually we got our mortgage lowered, and after another 5 year term upgraded to a new house when rates came down more. I remember when we got 8%. It felt like a bargain at the time.

793

I’m not sure if this story has been mentioned:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/business/restaurant-workers-experience/index.html

A bit of a feedback loop. It’s hard to get employees so the restaurant is short staffed. Customers are frustrated because lack of staff causes delays. Customers take out their anger on employees. Frustrated employees quit. The restaurant is even more short staffed and remaining employees even more stressed out. In an environment like that, wages have to really get high to entice employees to deal with the added stress. Maybe they should offer something like combat pay to entice the employees to stick around.

794

Maybe they should greet the customers at the door with a (politely phrased) reminder that delays are the result of short staffing, not the fault of the servers, and that it’s really necessary to be polite to the servers.

And then back it up. Kick out anybody who’s rude to the staff.

795

I don’t think most restaurants are in the position of “firing” their potential customers.

796

If they go out of business because their servers won’t eat shit any longer, it won’t matter how many shit-feeding customers they might have had.

And they might well get more loyalty from other customers, who don’t want to have to listen to people harassing the servers.

The whole idea that we have to tolerate treating retail workers so badly that they’re driven to tears is something we ought to get over.

797

It’s not just low pay/status jobs that are being abandoned–I was talking to a friend I hadn’t really been keeping up with during COVID and found out he quit his job a couple months ago. He’s a respiratory therapist who worked in a facility in Vancouver WA, that wonderful bastion of moronity that gave us the biggest measles outbreak in recent history, is a hotbed for Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys idiocy and is just chock full of absolute assholes. He went through the pandemic trying to keep these ungrateful science deniers alive while they held armed protests outside the hospital, bum rushed the security guards trying to keep out the unmasked, screamed and spat and threatened fucking hospital workers for doing their damned jobs. And during all of it that stupid meme of calling them “heroes” justified the numbers of them who caught COVID and died or got so exhausted and beat down they could barely function while management kept them understaffed so profits would stay up. He finally just had enough and quit. Now he’s doing those side gigs doing dump runs and maintenance jobs and rehabbing interesting old cars and selling them and figures that maybe someday he’ll be over the PTSD caused by simply trying to do his job of keeping people breathing. And because hospital didn’t take care of their people it’s now down an experienced, excellent RT because they can’t seem to get it through their heads that people are NOT machines and they need to take care of their employees if they want to keep them. My friend is finding out he can make enough to get by doing side gigs and he’s happier doing it. Why should he go back to that kind of torture? I don’t blame him a bit.

798

Personally, I’m the longest-tenured shift manager in the grocery store I work at. I’m easily qualified enough to apply for an assistant manager position and get it, and from there get my own store in a few years - indeed, two of the three assistant managers currently at my store are people who I trained when they started with the company, and they aren’t the only ones out there.

The main reason I don’t, even though it would come with a considerable pay increase, is that I don’t want the heartache of the extra hours and workload and probably having to relocate to another part of the state. In the position I’m in now, I can put in my eight hours a day, go home without worrying about the phone ringing because of some crisis that’s suddenly arisen in the dead of night, and have some power to help fix problems and improve things without being ultimately responsible if it all goes wrong, and I’ll still be able to retire as a millionaire as long as the company doesn’t go tits-up in the next 25 years.

799

I’ve done customer-facing service jobs before and saw just how shitty entitled assholes can become in a capitalist economy. Everything I’ve read or seen on viral videos leads me to believe my worst day in retail wasn’t even one percent of the shit show people deal with now.

Manager guy: “Dad gum, like nobody wants to work fer a livin’ no more.”

No, people want some fucking dignity, and now that they’ve had time at home to think, they realize they don’t need to accept living life as a field slave.

So, pay up mother fuckers. Throw out the bad customers. The customer’s not always right.

800

No shit–those entitled fuckwads spent a year and a half bitching and moaning that they can’t go out to restaurants and bars, then when things open up a bit they go stampeding in bellowing like water buffalo with a toothache throwing their considerable weight around and demanding to be coddled and catered to. And the employees who had to scrape by on basically no income take one look at this shitshow and decide they can stick it out a few months more and quit. Because they got used to peace and quiet while also undergoing a ton of stress over the pandemic and they, like all of us, are on their Last Nerve and are refusing to accept any more bullshit from garbage customers.

801

One of the great things about coming back to work as a contract programmer for the company that surplused me after 37 years is that I have 40 hour weeks now, and they would pay me for overtime if they need more.

I haven’t actually calculated it, but I’m guessing I’m making more per hour now then I was when I was working 50-60 hour weeks, even if my total take is less.

802

I guess you were young in the 1930’s then, since unemployment payments were introduced in 1940 in Canada. Not too many folks have starved to death due to unemployment in Canada since the Great Depression.