Of course people only put up with it because they had no better option.
The question is, should we force people to take the option of "low pay, no benefits, rude customers"? If those jobs are really the only alternative to the gov't paying workers, then do we as a society think the correct option is "low pay, no benefits, rude customers"?
To me, it seems like the options should be "restaurants provide a reasonable employment" or "we don't have restaurants". One way to do this would be to make laws that force restaurants to do certain things (min wage, benefits, etc). Another option (and a much more "free market" option) is to provide competitive benefits from the gov't and let restaurants compete with that.
Either way, if we as a society aren't willing to pay enough to eat at a restaurant such that the restaurants can provide reasonable employment terms then we should maybe rethink how restaurants fit into our society.
If a survival stipend competes successfully against a low-paying, high-stress, and absolutely miserable job conditions then the problem isn't the stipend, is it?
A zero sum concept of blame isn't really helpful IMO. It's better to just try to figure out the policy consequences without the moralizing.
The simplest model of utility (linear in money) basically says "people will take these jobs if they pay $X more than unemployment." With unemployment in the US paying $300/week more than it used to, jobs now need to pay about that much more than before to stay competitive -- about $7.50 an hour. So for a $15/hr job, the employer needs to pay $22.50 now.
A perhaps more realistic utility model has diminishing returns to money. The classic example is log($). Put simply, "people will work a job if it pays X times what unemployment does."
In that model, the $15/hr job at 40 hours/week pays $600 before tax. Say unemployment used to pay $300/week, so the job paid 2x unemployment, and now with the extra $300 of supplemental employment benefits it pays $600, so the job has to bump its pay up to $1200/wk or $30/hr to stay competitive.
That's a modeled kinda space of policy consequences -- wages go up 50% or 100% or there will be employment shortfalls even before thinking about childcare shortages, reduced immigration etc. That situation can be spun as "benefits too high" or "pay too low" to score political points or drive policy, but these effects are clearly explanatory either way.
Regardless of one's opinion on the wisdom of the policy, it's still a glaring oversight in a news article about the dynamics of the labor market.
I've been a UBI supporter my entire adult life, but that doesn't mean that what's effectively a lie of omission is good for the discourse. Then again, it's hard to expect otherwise from a rag like NPR.
>conditions then the problem isn't the stipend, is it?
It's laughable to make that comparison when the "survival stipend" is money for doing nothing. I'm not sure how any private enterprise can compete with that.
Except they're not doing nothing, are they? They're raising their kids, fixing their car, cooking healthy food, going to the doctor, visiting their mom, and any number of other things that a person working minimum wage can't make time for. The survival stipend gives them not only money, but time. When you see that, you start to realize how much those crappy jobs COST people.
Based on my discussions with barber-shops and other lower wage earners... at least in my area... people are still afraid of COVID19 and don't want to work in a public-facing role during a pandemic.
I'm not sure how money would change that. Even if you doubled wages all of a sudden, if people are literally fearing for their lives, you can't actually get them to come in.
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In resort areas (beaches, etc. etc.), a lot of these workers were also seasonal. I visited the beach and instead of being greeted by poorly speaking German folk (No offense, but its often obvious when you're interacting with a seasonal worker...) in my favorite restaraunt... I was greeted by Americans (far far fewer of them, because they couldn't find enough workers).
German seasonal part-time workers won't come over because of COVID19. Asking them to risk an airplane flight for some money just isn't worth it.
Well, you don't usually interact with cooks, so that's a bit harder for me to gather information about :-)
You can actually gain a hell of a lot of information with a brief 30-second talk with a cashier, someone stocking the shelves at a store, waiter, or barber. Keep it brief: they're still on the clock and you don't want to waste their time.
Its also their job to respond to you (ex: talk about checkout, to point you in the direction of where items are in a store... or to serve you a meal or cut your hair). So its not very hard to translate a natural interaction into a brief 30-seconds or so question about their perspective in life right now.
Sometimes, you don't even need to talk with them. Like the German seasonal workers at my local beach area: I know it without even talking to anyone. The Germans are gone this year: I didn't see any of them. I normally see lots of them (often shy workers who respond "I don't speak English" when you try to talk with them), but I saw literally none of them this past week when I went to the beach.
I also studied a basic level of Spanish and German. I'm not conversational, but I can recognize when people speak those languages. So hearing random German discussions between seasonal workers in the background is common under normal times, and that's just missing this year.
> (IDK about you, but 3 seconds of googling is easier for me than conducting my own personal polling of people I see out and about)
Information gathered from the Internet doesn't always match my personal spot-checked polls. I was able to call the BTC peak when I noticed that randoms I'd poll were talking about BTC for example, while the internet was damn sure that BTC would keep going up.
When my Bank-teller is able to talk about her Bitcoin "investments", I know we've reached the peak. Besides, people are excited to talk about their viewpoints and its always fascinating to me. (I do visit the banks on occasion still: gotta collects $5 bills and coins and ATMs don't always dispense those)
Its not a lot of effort and yet gets me tons of information. I don't really see any downsides in just doing it on occasion. I'm not like a newspaper reporter or anything (so this isn't my job), but having a quickie pulse on what other people are actually thinking is really helpful in making my own decisions about the world.
This is just the simple "what's the talk around town" sorta thing. Its not hard to start conversations and enjoy another person's point of view.
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Besides, when we start talking about innately political subjects (ex: is the current shortage due to unemployment checks vs the current shortage due to a lack of immigrants??), it helps to do some on-the-grounds fact-checking. Asking random strangers a quickie question every now and then results in far higher quality. Sure, the strangers remain biased according to their own viewpoints, but... there's still huge amounts of information from their perspectives.
And its not always politics. Asking about "hey, what's that food you're eating? Is it good?" is a good way to find new restaurants. Or "When is your next shipment of X coming in?" is a great one to ask in stores, so you know when some hot commodity is shipping (ex: GPUs at Microcenter or PS5 at Target). Its not like the internet knows when the specific Target at my street-corner is getting the next shipment of PS5s.
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What do you think of "X new product" (useful in determining my next stock purchase: is there on-the-ground buzz about the Ford Maverick? Should I buy the stock F??). Etc. etc. There's just always good information to be gained from helpful strangers. And more often than not, I think people are happy to have a bit of smalltalk in the day (as long as you keep it short).
Well, I guess I haven't really asked around how many cooks have died. Long story short. That's just not a statistic I've personally gathered (and such a statistic would be socially awkward to discuss).
A lot of what I was talking about in the top comments were just the anecdotes that I could personally verify with these spot-checks.
Waiters / Barbers / etc. etc. _ARE_ afraid of dying. Not necessarily the ones serving you, but their former coworkers aren't coming back because of the fear. Maybe dead-cooks have something to do with it. But I can say for sure that front-line workers are willing to talk about their fears (or their viewpoint on the fears of their former coworkers).
I personally know 3 people who left the restaurant industry (1 RNA certification, 1 barbering, and one realtor) last year. I know of one person who spent their time during shutdown working on IT certifications who is currently planning an exit. I don't blame these people for not working in food service. I did my time there, it's miserable on all fronts.
I think the bigger problem is shutting down the industry and starting it back up. People who had to go elsewhere to make ends meet aren't going to go back. It's going to take a long time for these restaurants to recover lost talent. They are going to have to offer a lot more than the old status quo if they want to woo workers back.
I don't know about that. I do think it's way way better than helicopter money and PPP loans, but I don't think it'd help this particular issue. Flushing people out of a local maximum (in terms of effort to compensation) will just have them searching for a new local maximum. A lot might find that their old local maximum was one of the least optimal. Furloughing people gives them time to better optimize. Which in my opinion is good for the workers, but I think you'd still see some people hunting around- they just wouldn't have a fire lit under them.
Those measures are expiring, or already have expired in many places. It'll be interesting to see how many people come back.
There are also high numbers of people retiring and lots of alternative low-skill job options these days. Many people are changing careers upwards as well. Lots of well-paying employers are also short on labor. COVID was a catalyst for many to reevaluate their job situation.
It does hint at how generous the rushed stimuli were:
"Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave."
If you want to go that far, you might as well mention how the "American Dream" has been dying since 2008 and took a major shock in 2020. Why work hard and bust your butt in a country and real economy that is falling apart and currently has no long-term prospects?
In what sense did the "American Dream" take a shock in 2020? Iirc, by far the greatest %-age net worth growth in 2020 was among the bottom 50%: greater than the growth in the top 10% or top 1%.
> was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices).
It was driven largely by real estate appreciation. How do you figure that this is ephemeral?
Your second paragraph contradicts your first. America's policy in 2020 was decisively _not_ neoliberal, and was in fact one of the most generous in the world[1]. This is in part due to necessity borne of a smaller safety net than other OECD countries, but it's a huge mistake to interpret this as simply canceling out the scope of the fiscal action; at the very least, describing a government capable of specific spending bills at this scale and reach as committed to neoliberal orthodoxy is ridiculous.
Similarly, "neoliberalism" is an absurd description of an administration whose agenda is based on the increasing acceptance of steady-state gargantuan deficit spending (as we begin to cautiously accept that inflation is not appearing to nearly the degree we've feared for the last decade).
There's a large contingent out there engaging in a combination of wishful thinking and blind extrapolation of an outdated impression of USGov fiscal habits. It's a good fit for a post-truth world (I've lost count of the number of dumb friends who think that the extent of covid fiscal relief was a flat $600/1200 payment). But HN hasn't quite reached that level of disconnection with reality, so let's not steer it that way..
Come on! Real estate appreciation only matters for people that own multiple properties and can therefore afford to sell without compromising the roof over their heads, i.e. landlords.
My sole property doubling in value, along with every other house in comparable neighborhoods, is 100% ephemeral, because there is no way to realize that value without liquidating my family's quality of life--a counterproductive maneuver.
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Trump Admin was paradoxically nationalist at home and neoliberal abroad (probably because he's a professional clown with no understanding of governance); US foreign policy has not meaningfully changed since 1991/2001. It's all about securing the conditions for global neoliberalism, i.e. American military and financial imperialism, which ensures I can buy a jar of premium African tree nuts from Costco for a fraction of an hours labor, even though it required many hours of labor to produce.
Anyway, that pyramid scheme called neoliberalism is collapsing, and it's only going to get worse domestically in America as a sad but necessary result.
Plus, the idea that your level of living expenses is completely immutable is idiotic. Obviously people don't turn over housing at the drop of a hat, but sitting on extra tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't worthless: homeowners do move, and large increases in a leveraged asset mean even minor downsizing in one's home can allow large increases in other expenses.
> Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.
Interestingly, even America had its only explicitly-anti-neoliberal (in rhetoric, at the very least) President in the last 3+ decades in office at the time. Think what you will of him—I certainly have some thoughts—he was notable for that highly unusual, for a national-level US politician with the backing of a major party, policy stance.
That aspect of that particular phenomenon hasn't received a ton of attention (to be fair, there was a lot of stuff to focus on) so I'm not sure whether it represents any kind of trend, but neoliberal policies are actually fairly unpopular among voters across the board, though very popular among leadership in the two major US political parties for quite some time.
He got elected on a reactionary populist platform, and if he (or Bannon, rather) had any desire to shift American policy, he inevitably got discouraged from doing so by Washington's unelected bureaucracy. So he ended up using his largely ceremonial 4 years of power to enrich his family and friends.
>Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave. "I was working what I decided was going to be my last kitchen job," Cornett said.
They're referring to unemployment benefits. I was surprised to find out that a friend's kid has been collecting them for a year - this person has a STEM degree and lost their job due to a fire at work, not COVID. Doesn't matter, the state gave blanket extension to unemployment benefits. In the past you could collect for only a few (maybe 6) months - not sure of that particular state's laws.
That makes sense though, because a blanket unemployment benefit extension is probably cheaper to implement than a bureaucratic mechanism to determine which jobs were lost as a result of COVID.
Exactly. This is not about tips, it's about waiter salary being too close to free money to stay at home. We are seeing this problem with waiters at other countries too, where employees are paid "full salary" and tipping is not even a thing.
The answer to any labor shortage is to pay more. Either take the profits currently captured by the owner and use them for salaries or raise prices and do the same. No consumer should ever be responsible for an entrepreneur’s failing business model.
>Its hilarious that you don't read the article to realize the comment is wrong
Sure, if you take the article at face value. The key argument seems to be "more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return". On the surface that might suggest that people are getting out for non-monetary reasons (ie. not related to pandemic relief), I'm skeptical whether that's actually the case. It's easy to tell yourself and the pollster that "no amount of pay" would make you go back when the government has been paying you unemployment for the last 16 months. When unemployment ends and the bills pile up, I suspect a good chunk of them would eventually go back.
It’s neither rational nor fact based. The government isn’t “paying people to sit at home” it’s providing the bare semblance of a social safety net (kind of, not really) in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic. Hopefully these changes become permanent because automation continues to decrease the need for workers and wealth inequality continues to pressure the working class at historically high levels.
>It’s neither rational nor fact based. The government isn’t “paying people to sit at home” it’s providing the bare semblance of a social safety net (kind of, not really) in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic.
That might be the intent, but that's irrelevant to the actual distortionary effects that it causes on the job market that gp is talking about.
If it was fact based they would have provided those facts. They didn’t. It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not.
The comment was correctly flagged dead for being flamebait.
>If it was fact based they would have provided those facts.
What facts do we need here? That the program exists? I doubt that's in dispute.
>It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not.
1. I think the "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." guideline[1] applies here. The weaker interpretation you seem to be using is "the government's unemployment policy was deliberately designed to get people to stay at home" (as opposed to providing safety net), but the stronger interpretation would be "the government is effectively paying people to stay at home by enacting a policy that gives people money, but will withdraw it should they find work".
2. An argument could be made that the government literally wants people to stay home, as a matter of policy. After all, there would be much less people complying with stay-at-home orders if they ran out of cash, couldn't buy food, and had to find a job.
>for being flamebait.
I fail to see how that's the case. If the commenter called the people on unemployment "lazy" or whatever, you may have a point, but they didn't.
It's entirely rational and fact based, but it does threaten the worldview of the people who parrot everything they hear in mainstream media. Americans will never let "the new normal" be permanent, and only the grossly uninformed hope otherwise.
