Random Thoughts Sechs: Eeeeehhhh...

[hobbsyoyo]

And the rot is spreading upward. The last two jobs I've had as an aerospace engineer did not offer 401k's and relied on job-title gimmicks to suppress wages across the board. The bigger companies have all eliminated pensions and are cutting benefits and pay at the margin, one step at a time so that people are less likely to revolt as piecemeal wage suppression is easier to pull off over time than all-at-once cuts. Union activity is heavily suppressed and a lot of companies actively feed anti-union culture to convince everyone that unions are a cancer on society.

 

[Lexicus]

Union activity is heavily suppressed and a lot of companies actively feed anti-union culture to convince everyone that unions are a cancer on society.

A really good analogy I read one time was that every union election in the world, more-or-less, is like the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018: one of the candidates, so to speak, is in charge of administering the election. There are cases where employers will sign neutrality agreements and honor them but they are rare.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Managers at one company I worked at would frequently make jokes about 'union mindset' when people couldn't keep up with their insane production demands and the average workers lapped it up like mana from god. These of course were the same people who didn't want to work too much overtime not because of the toll it took on their families but because it would 'put me in a higher tax bracket and I'd make less money'. Idiots.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The article is about the toll that massive turnover is having on the restaurant industry. The article laments how restaurant chains are struggling to keep workers and/or automate themselves out of the problem of having employees. What's frustrating to me about the article is how many times it points out that 'restaurants can't afford higher wages'. What a load bullcrap. For independent mom-and-pop shops, this may be true to an extent but it's certainly not true for the large chains that pull in billions in profits. While I don't think these jobs were ever truly desirable, minimum wage used to be much higher when adjusted for inflation, health care and rent was cheaper and they didn't uniformly rely on scheduling gimmicks to keep everyone under full-time employment. These jobs used to support families.

Here in Nova Scotia, a few years ago they raised the minimum wage...by 10 cents. There were employers complaining to the news that it was going to destroy them.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Here in Nova Scotia, a few years ago they raised the minimum wage...by 10 cents. There were employers complaining to the news that it was going to destroy them.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the small business owners who are operating on tighter profit margins than what the big companies are. But at the same time, a lot of the low profit margins at those smaller places are self-inflicted - turnover is going to impose massive costs on your business and if you are only ever going to pay $7.25 an hour, with deliberately crazy schedules and no benefits without even trying to retain your work force, then that's on you. And the big chain companies have no excuse whatsoever so long as they are pulling in massive profits that get distributed as stock buy backs and dividends year over year.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I think the place went out of business anyways. It was a not-very-good restaurant.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I think the place went out of business anyways. It was a not-very-good restaurant.

Reminds me of the failing restaurant in St Louis that railed against the minimum wage increase for destroying their business which they admitted was failing long before the increase in the same interview. The GOP-led state legislature overturned the St Louis wage increase in the end because hey, small government only matters when it's doing what the GOP wants it to do.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Around ten or fifteen years ago, there was a farmer complaining to the local newspaper about welfare recipients, and I think he tried to say that they should be forced to work on his farm at minimum wage so he wouldn't have to hire immigrant workers.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Around ten or fifteen years ago, there was a farmer complaining to the local newspaper about welfare recipients, and I think he tried to say that they should be forced to work on his farm at minimum wage so he wouldn't have to hire immigrant workers.

Projection tastes delicious. Actually that's not really projection. Self delusion I guess? Not sure what to call it.

 

[Synobun]

If you can't pay a living wage you shouldn't have employees.

 

[Lexicus]

If you can't pay a living wage you shouldn't have employees.

Or, if the thing is actually impossible to operate at a profit but is still deemed necessary to society, the state can run it at a loss and pay the actual workers a living wage.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Or implement Universal Basic Income.

 

[Lexicus]

And

 

[Takhisis]

Yes, I prefer the and, (italics included).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Here in Nova Scotia, a few years ago they raised the minimum wage...by 10 cents. There were employers complaining to the news that it was going to destroy them.

This sort of squawking happens every time even a suggestion of raising the minimum wage happens.

Funny, I thought every restaurant in Alberta was supposed to go under the moment minimum wage here was increased to $15/hour. They didn't, but of course that didn't stop Jason Kenney from deciding that 16-17 year old workers don't need an adult wage. It whooshes right past him that many of them are either saving for college/university or helping to support the family after one of their parents lost their job.

Around ten or fifteen years ago, there was a farmer complaining to the local newspaper about welfare recipients, and I think he tried to say that they should be forced to work on his farm at minimum wage so he wouldn't have to hire immigrant workers.

I guess he didn't realize that TFWs (temporary foreign workers) are usually subsidized so the employer isn't actually even paying the minimum wage amount to them (the balance is made up by the government). This has resulted in situations where restaurant owners have bent themselves into pretzels, claiming that they did so advertise for Canadian workers and not one person out of the whole 37 million of us wanted to work for them, and therefore they just HAD to hire TFWs... and incidentally make working conditions so crappy for their current Canadian employees that they were either forced to quit because they weren't getting enough shifts, or they were pressured to quit for other reasons.

 

[Commodore]

I have a crush on Jen Carfagno from The Weather Channel. It makes me feel like I'm cheating on my wife every time I want some weather related news.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

And of course my anecdote is just that, a story, not evidence. But I think it's instructive of how off the rails our job market has become as we allow the monied class to extract everything of value out of our economy to park it in the accounts of billionaires who do not re-invest in proportion to how much they've accumulated.

The thing with anecdotes though is that it can capture some nuances that (official) statistics (and narratives) can ignore. And each person's story matters, because they are not mere data points in an experiment or analysis.

 

[Snerk]

Sort of a cat funeral today. Not my cat but still pretty sad.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I just got a spam email in my inbox. Filters didn't catch it, because the body was literally just a bunch of broken HTML and keyboard smashing.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The thing with anecdotes though is that it can capture some nuances that (official) statistics (and narratives) can ignore. And each person's story matters, because they are not mere data points in an experiment or analysis.

Thank you for posting this. There are some people here in OT who say my posts don't matter because they're "just anecdotes". Well, pardon me for being born decades before the internet era where it seems that nearly everyone is documented in some way on social media or other place. Pardon me for not being fluent in "statistics". Pardon me for not regurgitating a university textbook when I post.

I use anecdotes to illustrate whatever point I'm making, or to contradict someone else who tries to speak for whatever group I happen to be part of (ie. all women are obsessed with shopping for shoes; I've seen that one here, and it's not true).