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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 val

by 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.
VLM 10y ago
A side issue that all those funny links have is they always randomly intermix requiring years of experience and they won't hire anyone without a degree or years of experience, which mostly fake claims about hiring anyone off the street... who also happens to have a Mech Eng degree and be willing to take $1/hr more than McDonalds and given those criteria not be involved in drugs or prison. And as a side note it stereotypically required in all employer anecdotes about alcohol and drug abuse to point out that the drunks are trivially detectable as non-functioning but the painkiller addicts are extremely high functioning and indistinguishable in performance from sober people yet we have to discriminate against them anyway, just for fun apparently.
- eropple 10y ago
  From experience: it's not that difficult to tell from very brief interaction when someone is drunk. It's a lot harder to tell when someone is using narcotics to the point where you can't trust them with dangerous machinery and the lives of their fellow workers. If you think this is "discrimination", I very strongly question whether you've any experience at all dealing with semi-functional narcotics abusers. Because your superficial dismissiveness does not track with the seriousness of the problem.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    I don't think narcotics are the issue. Nobody wants to hire an addict, yeah. The trouble is, as he said, trying to get a trained mechanical engineer to live and work in an area with few other employers, for $1/hour more than McDonalds. That's just not a very good return on the skillset investment.
    - eropple 10y ago
      The employer who said he wouldn't hire narcotics users is not hiring mechanical engineers, though, he's hiring factory workers for steel-drawing machines. They're operators and tradesmen, not engineers. It doesn't require a degree--it requires the ability to learn and the ability to not mis-handle machines to the (potentially fatal) detriment of your coworkers. Which narcotics (and other drugs) kind of screw with.

by x0x0 10y ago

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.

VLM 10y ago

A side issue that all those funny links have is they always randomly intermix requiring years of experience and they won't hire anyone without a degree or years of experience, which mostly fake claims about hiring anyone off the street... who also happens to have a Mech Eng degree and be willing to take $1/hr more than McDonalds and given those criteria not be involved in drugs or prison. And as a side note it stereotypically required in all employer anecdotes about alcohol and drug abuse to point out that the drunks are trivially detectable as non-functioning but the painkiller addicts are extremely high functioning and indistinguishable in performance from sober people yet we have to discriminate against them anyway, just for fun apparently.

eropple 10y ago
From experience: it's not that difficult to tell from very brief interaction when someone is drunk. It's a lot harder to tell when someone is using narcotics to the point where you can't trust them with dangerous machinery and the lives of their fellow workers. If you think this is "discrimination", I very strongly question whether you've any experience at all dealing with semi-functional narcotics abusers. Because your superficial dismissiveness does not track with the seriousness of the problem.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I don't think narcotics are the issue. Nobody wants to hire an addict, yeah. The trouble is, as he said, trying to get a trained mechanical engineer to live and work in an area with few other employers, for $1/hour more than McDonalds. That's just not a very good return on the skillset investment.
  - eropple 10y ago
    The employer who said he wouldn't hire narcotics users is not hiring mechanical engineers, though, he's hiring factory workers for steel-drawing machines. They're operators and tradesmen, not engineers. It doesn't require a degree--it requires the ability to learn and the ability to not mis-handle machines to the (potentially fatal) detriment of your coworkers. Which narcotics (and other drugs) kind of screw with.