Yeah, there is a big difference in ability on average between someone in their 40s or 50s who are running the cash register or monitoring the self service kiosk at McDonalds or WalMart and someone who designs and programs robots.
What we will see is more real unemployment, more migration of unskilled work or labor, and more participation in the so-called gig economy.
Oh, I could see why a politician would let them get away with it, if they just take a small portion of the money they saved (which in aggregate is actually a lot of money) and contribute it to that politician’s campaign…
Why is this always framed as “It’s not economical to pay that much to the employees”, and never, “It’s no longer economical for the owners to expect the same level of profits they once had”?
The cost of the meal is made up of material costs, employee pay, infrastructure costs (rent and such), and owner’s profit. Why is the employee’s pay the only part that anyone ever seems to worry about?
Because the main topic of the thread is about employment, the cost of employment, and participation in the workforce. Folks like to frame this as a feel-good or virtuous argument when in fact prices, including prices for labor, have no intrinsic value and are set by the market or by fiat. That said, second, third, etc. order effects don’t care about the stated intent of those who rule.
Reminds me of a perhaps apocryphal story about a county in the South around the turn of the century when opportunities for black folk had expanded somewhat. It was to the point where husbands could earn enough to support their wives who didn’t have to work as domestics any more to make ends meet.
When white households couldn’t find cooks or nannies at the wages they were willing to pay any more, the county passed a law that women of color had to work at a paying job outside the home X days a week.
Almost no one in the U.S. is starving. (and no, neither food insecurity nor hunger equal actual starvation.)
True. The thing here is that in most cases, the workers working in fast food places and other minimum/near-minimum wage jobs are people whose skills and experience are minimal.
That in itself doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of wages; it’s the number of workers competing for those jobs that causes the low wages. What ends up happening that when the employer says “Advertising job doing X for $7.26/hr”, they don’t need to raise their wages, because most of the time someone is willing to work for that wage, so there’s no practical reason for the employer to raise wages if they’re finding plenty of people who can do the job adequately at that wage.
The catch is that right now, with the market disruption caused by COVID and the stimulus payments, employers can’t find enough people at the price they want to pay. This isn’t a failing on the part of the workers in any way; they’re acting in their own self-interest when they choose not to work at a minimum wage job- presumably the combination of other jobs (regular or gig), and/or supplemental income from the stimulus payments are such that they are choosing not to work those jobs for the wages that are offered.
I’d be willing to bet that if one decided to pay $20/hr, they’d be swamped with applicants. But at $7.25? Crickets.
What’s frustrating to me is that the employers and their GOP hangers-on are trying to paint this as some sort of lack of virtue on the part of the workers(“Those people don’t want to work for minimum wage- how lazy they must be!”, rather than just admitting that it’s a market issue, and that the solution is to pay more.
The bigger issues to me are WHY we have such a large segment of the population who are competing for those low-wage jobs, thereby holding/driving the wages of those jobs down. Is it a lack of qualified people for better paying jobs? Is it a lack of better paying jobs? Is it something else? And how do we solve that?
As long as no one is actually starving, there’s no real problem, is that it?
It’s a market issue but it’s a market issue that’s created by perverse incentives. So-called stimulus should have never happened without a works program like the CCC. The US doesn’t operate in a vacuum and counterproductive domestic policy isn’t going to help us in the long term.
Looks like it’s going to become a political issue (what isn’t these days?) as Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey is now demanding that people maintain an active job search to continue to receive unemployment. https://www.abc15.com/news/state/governor-ducey-reinstates-requirement-of-looking-for-work-to-get-unemployment-benefits?fbclid=IwAR3UnCPxXCMBlUIq7FkPMk3dI5wHbJLAIlfhBiUqnuwKFpZAPQeJcXr13Ms
I’m sure it goes back to the ‘lazy bums who collect unemployment rather than get a job’ thunder that we’ve been seeing.
Off topic, but my wife collected our grocery receipts for a month, and we computed that it costs us $17 a day for two people, all 3 meals, and that includes things like cleaning products. And we don’t eat red beans and rice every meal. And what we eat has a lot more variety, and is better for us, than any place outside.
The emergency aid was set up to keep people from getting kicked out of their homes and starving, and to keep the economy from cratering - and to keep up demand. It obviously worked.
How long would you think it would take to set up a jobs program, and how would you do it while letting people in it work from home? And how soon would it be taken down when the pandemic ended - which it was supposed to do long before now, especially in the view of the previous administration.
CCC worked during the depression because it was long term, but CCC sure didn’t include social distancing.
I don’t think I’d call it a perverse incentive; it’s pretty much a foreseeable consequence of essentially paying people outright. There aren’t any unforeseen consequences going against the designers’ intention or anything like that.
If I had to guess, this was entirely by design. The people in Washington are not stupid; they had to know that this would basically pay some people who didn’t need it, pay others who do need it, and for some set of people, provide them with an alternative to working minimum wage jobs.
The conspiratorial part of me feels like this could be used as evidence for or against UBI, since that’s in effect what this was- a trial run.
The biggest question though is whether it’ll stick. I’m pessimistic, in that I suspect that for many people who aren’t currently willing to work minimum wage jobs, that’s entirely due to the stimulus payments, not because they’ve gone on and found better/more work. For some, I’m sure that’s the case. But for others, it’s probably meant that they didn’t have to work, or didn’t have to work two jobs, or something else for the duration that the money holds out. But once that stimulus money runs out, they’ll be back where they were in say… 2019, and end up flipping burgers again.
I’m usually sympathetic to the business side of things, but in this case they need to eat their own dog food and pay more money. Who the hell cares why these people aren’t working? We know why they aren’t working- they don’t need that chump change right now. So companies ought to pony up, not just whine about it to their politicians.
On the other hand, many office workers are desperate to get away from their families and back into the office where they can have some peace and quiet, free coffee, and a chance to go to the pub after work.
The biggest question I’ve seen regarding the new work-from-home white collar environment is how entry-level workers fit into it. It takes a few days in most office environments to get into the swing of things and be productive, even if you’re familiar with the requirements of the job. For entry-level office workers, it takes a few weeks to be near the level of their experienced colleagues. Their levelling-up is based on impromptu teaching, observation, and the ability to ask questions or request assistance. All of these are diminished when people are interacting remotely by text/audio/video. If someone has the experience to deal with that type of interaction, then they can get by. Someone thrown into it without a chance of personal interaction is going to have it pretty tough.
Actually not very many. Most office workers don’t really want to come back to the office. They like the lower cost of not commuting. They like the flexibility that WFH provides. The like the lack of micro managing from their bosses.
I think it really depends on the job and the duration. I enjoyed working from home for a few months this spring, but to do it permanently I’d need to convert a room or part of a room into an office, which is no little thing.
So all you liberals: “are you prepared to kill turkeys on the midnight shift? Pick vegetables in the 100-degree sun?” Or perhaps acknowledge that immigration policy is slightly more complicated than soundbites? As a start, maybe you should notice that most areas that are heavily agricultural are also generally conservative. Maybe also notice that most farmers are decent businesspeople who have a pretty good idea of their labour requirements. Then put together a policy to meet those labour requirements, instead of starting with socialism principals and trying to backtrack into a labour policty that won’t suit your target market.
For what it’s worth, Biden’s proposed immigration policy seems decent to me. Of course, it’s the same policy the GW Bush had when he was president back in early 2001.
I think part of the reluctance on the part of the employers are that wages are sticky. If you hired someone today at $20/hr and in 3 months the stimulus payments are done that person is most likely not going to take a paycut back to $7.25/hr so now they have to be fired and a new person hired. That frictional cost adds to the already elevated cost that the employer was facing. I’d guess more of them will go with automation that higher wages and we’ll never see a full recovery from COVID.
Or move production to Mexico or Asia.
Yup, if you want your fast food (the topic of this thread), you can go to Mexico or Asia to get it now.