7 ms·

Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.

eropple 10y ago
"Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it." It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows. The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else. (Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  > People aren't spherical cows. And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
  - eropple 10y ago
    I agree with you in general, but there is also the specter of international competition that is a lot harder to meaningfully regulate (we've seen what protectionist policies do, to all of our detriment). Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?
    - leereeves 10y ago
      How is China able to be so protectionist and so successful?
      - eropple 10y ago
        Because they can be an order of magnitude cheaper because the health of the workers they barely pay doesn't matter to them. This is starting, already, to change, if slowly, both due to external pressures (PR) and the rise, again slowly, of markets that are in turn cheaper and even less give-a-shit than they are. (EDIT: Also, it's important to realize that that "success" very much does not extend to rural China. They're not airlifting money out there the way that we effectively do for our rural populations and so industry is even more concentrated than in the United States, when you adjust for relative population size.) And this is the argument of the types who want to rail against OSHA and minimum wages and the like in America, but frankly, I like not living in a society with factory-crippled invalids and suicide nets on the windows so I am so very unsympathetic. It's an externality that I'm certainly not comfortable overall with, but the bright spot is that those dangerous, barely-paying jobs are a rear-guard action as we play out the clock towards ever-cheaper, more-pervasive automation; that said, the inevitably oppressive effects of modern capital owning that automation is why I am effectively, if not in name, a socialist in 2017.
      - scarface74 10y ago
        A lot of that "success" is not real. China is building infrastructure that no one is actually using. Temporarily propping up the economy but not tied to long term gains. https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/19/china-bubble-economy-2017/amp/?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/20...
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. ROFLMFAO. It's government that causes markets to become captured. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture It's extremely unlikely for a true monopoly to form in the absence of government regulation.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Regulatory capture is by far not the only kind of capture, and a well-run government can avoid it. Just as a fair free market can avoid whatever you're goalpost-hauling at when you say "true monopoly". Of course, it's also much more likely that a market without regulation enables collusive behavior on the part of actors with the greater balance of power who don't have to answer to the society around them. Monopolies are not and have never been the only, or even the biggest, societal threat. Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody. The only real threat to an entrenched oligopoly or a cartel in your sufficiently-free market is a necktie party on the streetcorner, and that in practice is rare 'cause paying for guns takes money.
      - mindcrime 10y ago
        and a well-run government can avoid it. Which is about as likely as the proverbial "sufficiently smart compiler". Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody. But in reality, cartel members cheat all the time. Take OPEC, for example, where members are always producing more than their official limits.
- x0x0 10y ago
  Except over and over again online -- and even more if you've ever gone to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in a small town -- these business owners do what the valley does. Whine they can't hire, and refuse to raise wages. I collect these links because I find it funny; I'd paste some but I'm on the wrong computer. But my guess is lots of these places are paying shit wages for shit work with low or no benefits and few advancement options. It's weird they can't seem to find decent employees, eh? This also matches my experience with family that still live in a similar area. Employers whine endlessly about the lack of workers for their $14 and hour factory job with expensive shitty health insurance. On the other hand, my brother runs his own chain of pizza restaurants in the midwest. He starts at 50% over minimum wage and pays for health insurance. Guess who has no problems hiring as many reliable employees as he needs?
  - eropple 10y ago
    I grew up in a town where this was going on. Some just complain, you're right. Others literally can't make the math work, and I watched a local company submarine themselves for trying. There are few advancement options because there are few ways to advance. They're dead-end jobs, and there's a wage ceiling because their competitors don't have to play by the same rules. They're jobs that won't exist in twenty years, maybe not even ten, because of a number of factors; the question is not how to better employ the people who would be their workers, but how to give everybody a baseline-decent life regardless of "work" (in an economy where most "work" is rapidly becoming less important).
    - x0x0 10y ago
      Sure, some businesses aren't going to work out / the economics don't work. Others are like the wire manufacturer MLP Steel: there will (probably) continue to be a need for someone who can make custom stuff fast, and that requires you to be local so it's a couple day delivery instead of a month being shipped from China. But their claim is they pay "$12 to $20 an hour, plus health care and benefits", which means they start you at $12. The fuck do they expect for $12 an hour? That's under $20k/year after taxes, in an area where craigslist suggests it's going to cost you $700/mo to rent and heat a place to live. Again, my brother who runs pizza restaurants starts employees at $16.
donald123 10y ago
Where do you think the better wages come from?
jghn 10y ago
And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. There's nothing inherently wrong with that either, but it doesn't solve the "we need jobs" problem that politicians claim to be trying to solve.
- phkahler 10y ago
  >> And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. Import taxes can fix that. Our poorest citizens can't compete on price with the middle class in some of the poorest countries.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Cheap imports allow for cost savings so the money otherwise spent on expensive domestic goods could be made elsewhere. We tried raising tariffs to protect local businesses and consumers in the 1930s and all we got was a lousy world war. The only time broad tariffs genuinely worked in America's interests was under Jefferson, when his devastating tariff hikes jump-started the industrial economy. I'm no history expert, but I think it's fair to say that a solution for a pre-industrial backwater might not work as well when it comes to a (then unimaginable) technological, military, and economic superpower. To paraphrase Paul Krugman on government spending, trade is a two way street where your spending is my income and my spending is your income.
  - pm90 10y ago
    Its not that simple. Remember the the predominance of American economy is not self-generated: it is a part of the world economy. Now, when you create artificial barriers like import taxes, American businesses become less competitive in the world market, as such tarriffs do not exist there. Over time, they stop innovating until they reach a crisis point. e.g. see what happened to the big American automakers. They have a monopoly on trucks in the US and yet they became uncompetitive to the point of almost going bankrupt.
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    Import taxes might give you a win in the short-term, but they are harmful over the long-term, especially when our trading partners retaliate. This makes American manufacturers / exporters less competitive in overseas markets. And as Jack Ma said "when trade stops, war starts". Reducing international trade is a Bad Thing in the general sense.
nilkn 10y ago
How do you know they can afford to do either? Many businesses are barely scraping by. I think many folks used to startups flush with VC cash are very disconnected from this reality.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
And conversely, the people who say they can't find work should accept lower wages and move to where the work is. Meanwhile, all of these people should keep their hands out of the pockets of the rest of us. (To be fair, the non-workers are far more likely to take my money than the non-employers.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
randomdata 10y ago
I live in a small town myself, which has its own struggles finding enough people for all the jobs. The biggest thing I've noticed when having conversations with out-of-towners is that those people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point. Somehow we've collectively built up this idea that there are simply no jobs to be found outside of the cities, period. With that, nobody outside the local region even thinks to see what jobs are available in these places while on the job hunt. I have a feeling this idea of no jobs really was, more or less, true at one point in time and the preconceived notions simply haven't kept up with the ever changing landscape of the world. This isn't the only example of where information seems to severely lag reality.
- scarmig 10y ago
  I'm sure that a job exists for me in Smallville, USA. But I don't need a job; I want lots of jobs. In my city, there are, within a 30 minute commute (Muni willing!), tens of thousands of well-paying, interesting jobs I can jump to if my current company goes south. Having options empowers workers. It's no surprise that most workers gravitate to places where they're empowered.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Bingo. I've lived in Smallville, USA. Single tech job within a 60 minute commute. Maybe 10 in the surrounding counties. In a city, if you lose your job or voluntarily want to move on, there are at least a few others nearby. In small town USA, you have to move--likely to another state! Too risky. No way I'd move back.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      It seems a little myopic to only look at tech jobs. In fact, I'll be surprised if anyone interested in working in tech struggles to find a job at all. But in terms of the number of people employed, tech is not that big of an employer, and software development specifically only accounts for about 0.8% of the workforce. There are more farmers than that. Back to the topic at hand, there are 7,635,000 unemployed Americans. There are 5,040,000 vacant jobs. The vast majority of those counted as unemployed theoretically could have a job, but for various reasons they don't. A big reason, as we've been discussing, is that they live in cities while the jobs are often in small towns. Your story is sound for a tech professional who can jump around from job to job on a whim, but someone who is already struggling with unemployment has proven that the city cannot offer them what it can offer you. At the same time they don't even realize that other options exist (again, not rejecting the job, but not realizing that they exist at all).
amyjess 10y ago
I'm just curious: what would it take, in terms of wages and working conditions, for you to move to a town in the middle of nowhere with 4200 people, 98% of whom are white, and where poverty and drug abuse are rampant? I can't imagine taking a job there for anything less than upper seven figures, and even then I'd just work there for a year or two and then move back home and retire young. I'm a Jewish atheist lesbian trans woman. In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words. I can't imagine anyone who's not white moving to any place that's 98% white, and even most of my white friends would balk once they realized they wouldn't be able to get good sushi there. And of course, there's nothing to do, very few people to talk to who aren't on meth... Jesus, I'm a pretty big fan of living in sparse places, but I still don't want to live any further away from civilization than an exurb of a major city.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  People shouldn't downvote you. I'm a Jewish non-theist straight male, and I share a lot of the same concerns. Mind, a small town without rampant poverty and drug abuse, and particularly in a non-religious area... that's another thing. It's easy to skip the stupid sushi shops, and if you live somewhere within driving distance of the sea you can buy fish and make your own damn sushi. It's especially easy to skip if a reasonable professional salary goes so much further, speeding up a timeline towards personal financial freedom. But no, I definitely don't feel safe about living in a place where only the church-men are holding back violence born of altered minds and raw despair.
- krakensden 10y ago
  > In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words. These places have problems, and I understand that you are being hyperbolic, but it's a bit much. It's like a demographics-inverted version of Trump's inner city warzone stuff. They're just people, and they aren't that different.
LordKano 10y ago
The wages are a part of it. Scottdale is less than 30 miles from where I live. I know Western Pennsylvania. Experienced tradesmen can make really good money in this area but the downside is that they have to work long hours in harsh conditions. If they were paying more money, they'd be able to pull in qualified candidates from further away but they'd also attract more undesirables. They'd still have to separate the wheat from a lot of chaff. Monetary compensation isn't all of it though. There is a surprisingly extensive problem with opiate addiction here in Western Pennsylvania. In the past 5 years, I have had four friends or acquaintances die from definite overdoses and several who are possible(likely) overdoses. I'm from a suburban, middle-income area and we have heroin addicts all over the place. Ten years ago they were eating pills but with the crackdown on prescription pill mills, they have moved on to heroin.

eropple 10y ago

"Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it." It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows. The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else. (Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)

wlesieutre 10y ago
> People aren't spherical cows. And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
- eropple 10y ago
  I agree with you in general, but there is also the specter of international competition that is a lot harder to meaningfully regulate (we've seen what protectionist policies do, to all of our detriment). Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?
  - leereeves 10y ago
    How is China able to be so protectionist and so successful?
    - eropple 10y ago
      Because they can be an order of magnitude cheaper because the health of the workers they barely pay doesn't matter to them. This is starting, already, to change, if slowly, both due to external pressures (PR) and the rise, again slowly, of markets that are in turn cheaper and even less give-a-shit than they are. (EDIT: Also, it's important to realize that that "success" very much does not extend to rural China. They're not airlifting money out there the way that we effectively do for our rural populations and so industry is even more concentrated than in the United States, when you adjust for relative population size.) And this is the argument of the types who want to rail against OSHA and minimum wages and the like in America, but frankly, I like not living in a society with factory-crippled invalids and suicide nets on the windows so I am so very unsympathetic. It's an externality that I'm certainly not comfortable overall with, but the bright spot is that those dangerous, barely-paying jobs are a rear-guard action as we play out the clock towards ever-cheaper, more-pervasive automation; that said, the inevitably oppressive effects of modern capital owning that automation is why I am effectively, if not in name, a socialist in 2017.
    - scarface74 10y ago
      A lot of that "success" is not real. China is building infrastructure that no one is actually using. Temporarily propping up the economy but not tied to long term gains. https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/19/china-bubble-economy-2017/amp/?client=safari https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/20...
- mindcrime 10y ago
  government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. ROFLMFAO. It's government that causes markets to become captured. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture It's extremely unlikely for a true monopoly to form in the absence of government regulation.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Regulatory capture is by far not the only kind of capture, and a well-run government can avoid it. Just as a fair free market can avoid whatever you're goalpost-hauling at when you say "true monopoly". Of course, it's also much more likely that a market without regulation enables collusive behavior on the part of actors with the greater balance of power who don't have to answer to the society around them. Monopolies are not and have never been the only, or even the biggest, societal threat. Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody. The only real threat to an entrenched oligopoly or a cartel in your sufficiently-free market is a necktie party on the streetcorner, and that in practice is rare 'cause paying for guns takes money.
    - mindcrime 10y ago
      and a well-run government can avoid it. Which is about as likely as the proverbial "sufficiently smart compiler". Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody. But in reality, cartel members cheat all the time. Take OPEC, for example, where members are always producing more than their official limits.
x0x0 10y ago
Except over and over again online -- and even more if you've ever gone to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in a small town -- these business owners do what the valley does. Whine they can't hire, and refuse to raise wages. I collect these links because I find it funny; I'd paste some but I'm on the wrong computer. But my guess is lots of these places are paying shit wages for shit work with low or no benefits and few advancement options. It's weird they can't seem to find decent employees, eh? This also matches my experience with family that still live in a similar area. Employers whine endlessly about the lack of workers for their $14 and hour factory job with expensive shitty health insurance. On the other hand, my brother runs his own chain of pizza restaurants in the midwest. He starts at 50% over minimum wage and pays for health insurance. Guess who has no problems hiring as many reliable employees as he needs?
- eropple 10y ago
  I grew up in a town where this was going on. Some just complain, you're right. Others literally can't make the math work, and I watched a local company submarine themselves for trying. There are few advancement options because there are few ways to advance. They're dead-end jobs, and there's a wage ceiling because their competitors don't have to play by the same rules. They're jobs that won't exist in twenty years, maybe not even ten, because of a number of factors; the question is not how to better employ the people who would be their workers, but how to give everybody a baseline-decent life regardless of "work" (in an economy where most "work" is rapidly becoming less important).
  - x0x0 10y ago
    Sure, some businesses aren't going to work out / the economics don't work. Others are like the wire manufacturer MLP Steel: there will (probably) continue to be a need for someone who can make custom stuff fast, and that requires you to be local so it's a couple day delivery instead of a month being shipped from China. But their claim is they pay "$12 to $20 an hour, plus health care and benefits", which means they start you at $12. The fuck do they expect for $12 an hour? That's under $20k/year after taxes, in an area where craigslist suggests it's going to cost you $700/mo to rent and heat a place to live. Again, my brother who runs pizza restaurants starts employees at $16.

donald123 10y ago

Where do you think the better wages come from?

jghn 10y ago

And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. There's nothing inherently wrong with that either, but it doesn't solve the "we need jobs" problem that politicians claim to be trying to solve.

phkahler 10y ago
>> And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. Import taxes can fix that. Our poorest citizens can't compete on price with the middle class in some of the poorest countries.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Cheap imports allow for cost savings so the money otherwise spent on expensive domestic goods could be made elsewhere. We tried raising tariffs to protect local businesses and consumers in the 1930s and all we got was a lousy world war. The only time broad tariffs genuinely worked in America's interests was under Jefferson, when his devastating tariff hikes jump-started the industrial economy. I'm no history expert, but I think it's fair to say that a solution for a pre-industrial backwater might not work as well when it comes to a (then unimaginable) technological, military, and economic superpower. To paraphrase Paul Krugman on government spending, trade is a two way street where your spending is my income and my spending is your income.
- pm90 10y ago
  Its not that simple. Remember the the predominance of American economy is not self-generated: it is a part of the world economy. Now, when you create artificial barriers like import taxes, American businesses become less competitive in the world market, as such tarriffs do not exist there. Over time, they stop innovating until they reach a crisis point. e.g. see what happened to the big American automakers. They have a monopoly on trucks in the US and yet they became uncompetitive to the point of almost going bankrupt.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Import taxes might give you a win in the short-term, but they are harmful over the long-term, especially when our trading partners retaliate. This makes American manufacturers / exporters less competitive in overseas markets. And as Jack Ma said "when trade stops, war starts". Reducing international trade is a Bad Thing in the general sense.

nilkn 10y ago

How do you know they can afford to do either? Many businesses are barely scraping by. I think many folks used to startups flush with VC cash are very disconnected from this reality.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

And conversely, the people who say they can't find work should accept lower wages and move to where the work is. Meanwhile, all of these people should keep their hands out of the pockets of the rest of us. (To be fair, the non-workers are far more likely to take my money than the non-employers.)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

randomdata 10y ago

I live in a small town myself, which has its own struggles finding enough people for all the jobs. The biggest thing I've noticed when having conversations with out-of-towners is that those people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point. Somehow we've collectively built up this idea that there are simply no jobs to be found outside of the cities, period. With that, nobody outside the local region even thinks to see what jobs are available in these places while on the job hunt. I have a feeling this idea of no jobs really was, more or less, true at one point in time and the preconceived notions simply haven't kept up with the ever changing landscape of the world. This isn't the only example of where information seems to severely lag reality.

scarmig 10y ago
I'm sure that a job exists for me in Smallville, USA. But I don't need a job; I want lots of jobs. In my city, there are, within a 30 minute commute (Muni willing!), tens of thousands of well-paying, interesting jobs I can jump to if my current company goes south. Having options empowers workers. It's no surprise that most workers gravitate to places where they're empowered.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Bingo. I've lived in Smallville, USA. Single tech job within a 60 minute commute. Maybe 10 in the surrounding counties. In a city, if you lose your job or voluntarily want to move on, there are at least a few others nearby. In small town USA, you have to move--likely to another state! Too risky. No way I'd move back.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    It seems a little myopic to only look at tech jobs. In fact, I'll be surprised if anyone interested in working in tech struggles to find a job at all. But in terms of the number of people employed, tech is not that big of an employer, and software development specifically only accounts for about 0.8% of the workforce. There are more farmers than that. Back to the topic at hand, there are 7,635,000 unemployed Americans. There are 5,040,000 vacant jobs. The vast majority of those counted as unemployed theoretically could have a job, but for various reasons they don't. A big reason, as we've been discussing, is that they live in cities while the jobs are often in small towns. Your story is sound for a tech professional who can jump around from job to job on a whim, but someone who is already struggling with unemployment has proven that the city cannot offer them what it can offer you. At the same time they don't even realize that other options exist (again, not rejecting the job, but not realizing that they exist at all).

amyjess 10y ago

I'm just curious: what would it take, in terms of wages and working conditions, for you to move to a town in the middle of nowhere with 4200 people, 98% of whom are white, and where poverty and drug abuse are rampant? I can't imagine taking a job there for anything less than upper seven figures, and even then I'd just work there for a year or two and then move back home and retire young. I'm a Jewish atheist lesbian trans woman. In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words. I can't imagine anyone who's not white moving to any place that's 98% white, and even most of my white friends would balk once they realized they wouldn't be able to get good sushi there. And of course, there's nothing to do, very few people to talk to who aren't on meth... Jesus, I'm a pretty big fan of living in sparse places, but I still don't want to live any further away from civilization than an exurb of a major city.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
People shouldn't downvote you. I'm a Jewish non-theist straight male, and I share a lot of the same concerns. Mind, a small town without rampant poverty and drug abuse, and particularly in a non-religious area... that's another thing. It's easy to skip the stupid sushi shops, and if you live somewhere within driving distance of the sea you can buy fish and make your own damn sushi. It's especially easy to skip if a reasonable professional salary goes so much further, speeding up a timeline towards personal financial freedom. But no, I definitely don't feel safe about living in a place where only the church-men are holding back violence born of altered minds and raw despair.
krakensden 10y ago
> In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words. These places have problems, and I understand that you are being hyperbolic, but it's a bit much. It's like a demographics-inverted version of Trump's inner city warzone stuff. They're just people, and they aren't that different.

LordKano 10y ago

The wages are a part of it. Scottdale is less than 30 miles from where I live. I know Western Pennsylvania. Experienced tradesmen can make really good money in this area but the downside is that they have to work long hours in harsh conditions. If they were paying more money, they'd be able to pull in qualified candidates from further away but they'd also attract more undesirables. They'd still have to separate the wheat from a lot of chaff. Monetary compensation isn't all of it though. There is a surprisingly extensive problem with opiate addiction here in Western Pennsylvania. In the past 5 years, I have had four friends or acquaintances die from definite overdoses and several who are possible(likely) overdoses. I'm from a suburban, middle-income area and we have heroin addicts all over the place. Ten years ago they were eating pills but with the crackdown on prescription pill mills, they have moved on to heroin.