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> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more rem
by Boxbot 9y ago
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour.
So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
- cglace 9y agoThey would have a significantly lower cost of living. So they should be able to save much more.
- dclowd9901 9y agoLower cost of living _and_ lower quality of life. People, believe it or not, are actually weighing that in their job hunting equation these days.
- SwellJoe 9y agoAlso, their likelihood of dying young is among the highest in the developed world, so they may not need to save at all! What a deal.
- cglace 9y agoI never said it was a good deal. Just that cost of living is lower. No need to snark.
- SwellJoe 9y agoMy snark is directed upstream, at the folks who believe paying $18/hour for one of the most deadly jobs in the country is reasonable while also having the gall to complain about not being able to hire enough people to do it. You were just in the line of fire; it wasn't intentional.
- antisthenes 9y agoOregon iirc, isn't a particularly cheap state. Even then, you're still making less in absolute terms, which reduces your mobility and long-term ability to move to another state if/when your logging job disappears. At $18/hr, it's hard to argue that any of those risks are built into the compensation. That is approx. ~37,000/yr for the most dangerous job in the country, apparently. If one is inclined towards the trades, it's not hard to see why they would pick something other than logging.
- notadoc 9y agoYou haven't spent much time on the west coast if you think the cost of living anywhere out there is low. If you want low cost of living, you need to move to the midwest or south, or throughout the NE in upstate or western NY.
- cglace 9y agoI used to live in the bay area.
- cowsandmilk 9y agoexcept that not all of California is large cities. The automatic minimum wage increases will occur even in parts of the state with cost of living very similar to rural Oregon.
- notadoc 9y agoCost of living in the rural west is not cheap. The pacific states are uniquely expensive. It's not at all like western NY or upstate NY, or the midwest, or the south, where everything is dirt cheap, and gets very cheap in rural areas.
- dclowd9901 9y agoRight? What the hell did this industry think was going to happen if they busted up unions and insisted on paying pittance for one of the most dangerous jobs in the world?
- beebmam 9y agoThis is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low. There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
- coralreef 9y agoWhat about highly specific technical roles for which there are few paths to fulfilling? Wouldn't that qualify as a shortage in labour supply?
- rhizome 9y agoPeople will acquire those skills if there are positions and pay for them. Employers simply don't like a demand surplus on labor.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoYes, in the short term. That's actually the original goal of the H1B program, to address immediate labor shortages in fields where the time it takes to become fully trained is very long (PhDs and the like.) In the long term the problem solves itself with things like high salaries for statisticians, actuaries, programmers and so on.
- notadoc 9y agoThe only true 'labor shortage' is when very high skilled positions are not being filled because there is literally nobody qualified to fill them. That is exceptionally rare, it usually only applies to doctors, surgeons, etc.
- deft 9y agoThere's always been work and there have always been people looking for work. The problem is the people 'in charge' would rather scalp people's wages and lives instead.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blahblab 9y agoExactly. The oil companies got tons of workers in the middle of the frozen hellhole Alberta tar sands, and the mining companies got tons of workers in the middle of scorching desert Australia.
- theDoug 9y agoAs a lifelong Albertan (until recently), this is an accurate description of Northern Alberta.
- mirkules 9y agoI'm going to take an unpopular opinion here, but with the increases in minimum wage in California to $15/hr by 2020 - driven by increased cost of living - these jobs will be paying slightly more than minimum wage. No doubt, the answer is "increase the logging wage", which, in reality, will happen across all skilled occupations which are now suddenly just above the minwage line. And what will be the result? Increased cost of living again. I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.
- georgeecollins 9y agoCalifornia minimum wage is $10.50, it is supposed to go to $15 in 2022. What the heck that has to do with loggers in Oregon in 2017 I have no idea. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/SB3_FAQ.htm https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/SB3_FAQ.htm
- paultopia 9y agoSERIOUSLY. Terrible pay + dangerous work = a "labor shortage?" Whodathunkit?
- notadoc 9y agoIs there a "labor shortage" or is this just too low of a wage for the labor? If these jobs paid a lot more, I am guessing they would be filled. If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages. But neither is happening. So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.