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In some Bay Area counties, college grads have higher unemployment
- nradov 8y agoApparently journalists still don't understand the meaning of the word "shortage". There is no shortage. The supply and demand curves still meet. The government hasn't imposed any wage controls or banned raises. If employers want more workers then they can just pay more, or offer better working conditions. If raising wages means that some businesses will lose money then that's a different problem. But it's not a shortage.
- jjeaff 8y agoMore precisely, and the article alludes to this, there is a shortage of workers willing to work for entry level wages.
- crooked-v 8y agoIt sounds like businesses in the area need to learn that they aren't guaranteed a supply of minimum-wage workers.
- walshemj 8y agoWhich a lot of Uk companies are finding out in the run up to Brexit - they have been able to hire a higher quality of worker from Europe and not pay the real rate or contribute to training in the UK.
- ddingus 8y agoOr able to do that. Their cost may simply be too high, and people working at a loss eventually stop showing up for work.
- kurthr 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the big tech companies started bussing in some of their contract labor outside of the bay. The commutes (>1hr each way) are really terrible and there's no way to really live on less than $20/hr full time as a single person... much less care for children. Plenty of those people have an associates/bachelors degree, but without local family support they can't survive.
- maxxxxx 8y ago" wouldn't be surprised if the big tech companies started bussing in some of their contract labor outside of the bay. " When I did a project with Apple in the 90s I often stayed late during my stay and got to chat with some of the cleaners that came in. A lot of them had bus rides of 2-3 hours each way every day to get to their job.
- floatingatoll 8y agoI believe if they were to provide bus commute as a benefit to contractors, the state would force-convert those contractors into employees.
- wutbrodo 8y agoI had a friend who worked at Google as a contractor and took the shuttle in to work. I think there was some detail about having to badge in so her rides could be reported and deducted from her pay[1]? The details are fuzzy, but as I recall she just ignored the rule and nobody seemed to care much. The upshot was that she used the cafe and ride services much the same as I (an FTE) did. The existence of those hoops to jump through makes me think that you're probably right that an official service for contractors would probably violate their contractor status, legally speaking. [1] I'm pretty sure I'm remembering part of this incorrectly, because us FTEs were supposed to badge in too to avoid non-Googlers from riding.
- floatingatoll 8y agoYou’re right about having it deducted from pay, by one other human report to NYT anyways: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html
- nradov 8y agoThere is a "shortage" of 1 ounce gold bars. I want to buy lots of them at $100 each. Why won't anyone sell them to me? It's terribly unfair.
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- freyir 8y ago> There is no shortage. The article claims that employment offices do not have enough job seekers to fill the roles. If true, this would suggest a shortage, and an Econ 101 notion of supply-and-demand that disregards time isn't evidence to the contrary. > If employers want more workers then they can just pay more, or offer better working conditions. This is irrelevant. For example, if low-wage or middle-wage workers have left the area, and the remaining workers have full employment, this would cause a shortage at the present time. Raising wages may attract new workers to move to the area over time, but until that happens, there will be a shortage.
- nradov 8y agoEmpty employment offices are not evidence of a shortage. Plenty of workers will appear right now, today if you offer sufficient wages. If you don't believe me then post a help wanted ad with a >$50 hourly wage for unskilled work and watch the applications roll in.
- freyir 8y ago> If you don't believe me then post a help wanted ad with a >$50 hourly wage for unskilled work and watch the applications roll in. This proves nothing. For example, if a >$50 hourly wage is well above market rate, it may lead currently-employed people to apply. If they leave their current job to take your offer, then you've just shifted the job vacancy from one employer to another. This is clearly not evidence that a labor shortage does or does not exist.
- nradov 8y agoThis absolutely disproves the existence of a shortage. The labor participation rate is currently only 63%, which is relatively low for the post-war era. Let me know when it reaches a historic high. Until then there is zero hard evidence of any labor shortage. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/lns11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/lns11300000
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- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI see this posted all the time when talking about worker shortages, and while I think the overall premise is true, it's also a mischaracterization of what is possible. Many businesses become uneconomic if labor costs are too high. It's not just that employers don't want to pay more, but that it is customers who don't want to bear the cost of these higher wages. If all baristas were paid $20 an hour in SF, the higher cost of a latte would have a lot of folks switching to Folger's. So the real issue is what the article brings up, in that housing costs everywhere are so high that it is making lots of businesses uneconomic, and they will continue to be uneconomic unless housing prices fall.
- epicureanideal 8y agoIt would be great if someone would make a website where I could adjust the hourly rate of a worker in various businesses and see the result in the cost of common items they sell. I wonder if $20/hr barista pay really would cause the price to become unreasonable. At $20/hr it's also possible you could interest some slightly better baristas, slightly faster baristas, and who would have longer retention... Also the prices wouldn't necessarily go up uniformly on everything. Lattes might go up $1 but coffee might only go up $0.25 because it doesn't take as much time for the barista to give it to the customer. This discussion on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/barista/comments/2qv2kb/question_how_many_cups_can_a_barista_make_a_day/ https://www.reddit.com/r/barista/comments/2qv2kb/question_ho...) is 1st hand information and says that 2 baristas can make 450 drinks per day in a 7 hour day. That's 225 per barista / 7 hours, 32 drinks per hour. So if the wage increased to $20/hr (from let's say $10/hr), it would increase the price of drinks by $0.31, which I don't think is enough to cause people to massively switch to instant coffee.
- ams6110 8y agoExcept they don't make 32 drinks an hour for 7 hours straight. They might do that at the busiest times, but that's likely a minor part of their day. Edit: Labor cost in fast food is typically about 20% and most places would consider that on the high side. Not sure how well that translates to coffee shops, but assuming a 100% increase in cost of labor, prices would go up about 20% to cover that. So a $5 latte becomes $6.
- neonate 8y agoBy that logic, the only time you could say "shortage" is when there's zero of a thing left anywhere. That's a non-standard interpretation of the word.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> By that logic, the only time you could say "shortage" is when there's zero of a thing left anywhere. Well, sure, shortage requires that the quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied at all possible prices, which implies (barring some external constraint preventing trades) that the maximum quantity producible should be produced and sold, with no idle capacity. Genuine shortages are unusual. > That's a non-standard interpretation of the word. It's the standard use is market economics. It's true that that in non-technical use, a common (and perhaps the most common) use of “shortage” is “higher market clearing price than I would prefer”. It's just important to be clear what sense of “shortage” one is referring to. Because very often the latter sense is in play, but given the significance of the former.
- nradov 8y agoShortages generally only occur when some external force (like the government) fixes prices below the market clearing price. So for example there is a shortage of doctors who will take new Medicaid patients in many areas because that program doesn't pay doctors very much. (I'm not trying to start a debate on healthcare policy here, just giving an example of how shortages can exist even when there is supply.)
- username90 8y ago> Shortages generally only occur when some external force (like the government) fixes prices below the market clearing price. Or when some external force artificially constraints the supply by limiting trade (or immigration for workers).
- jseliger 8y agoTerrible headline but useful article. The real answer is about housing cost and bad zoning policy: “We’re seeing out-migration of many people from Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, presumably because of the high housing costs,” Benner said. “That out-migration is disproportionately from lower income residents.” He added that housing costs driving out lower-wage workers “would have become much more pronounced in the last year or two.” Lemus, who said he makes a little more than $30 an hour now, is saving to buy a home — in Arizona, where the cost of living is far lower. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ and https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/california-affordable-housing-is-no-mystery-just-build-more https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi... are relevant and will remain evergreen until we see state-level policy change.
- fmajid 8y agoA better title would be "college grads with useless majors like sociology can't get jobs, but feel manual labor is beneath them".
- achillesheels 8y agoTo be fair, many vocational employers may be skittish hiring someone who appears on paper to be aiming for a white collar job. I know there’s the possibility of dropping the diploma off a resume, but then what explains those 4 years doing nothing since high school?
- yellowapple 8y agoGiven that for quite a big chunk of today's workforce those four years coincided with a recession and resulting spike in unemployment, a gap is probably not all that unusual and could easily be explained away.
- beatpanda 8y agoWild how after years of scandal involving tech companies not thinking through the impact of their products on society, people are still saying sociology is a useless major.
- geezerjay 8y agoIn your opinion what could be contributed by a sociology major to realistically avoid any of those scandals?
- beatpanda 8y agoBy working with a product team to develop worst-case scenarios for non-technical abuse of a tool, like trolling, harassment, manipulation via misinformation, blackmail, and so on. Especially as it concerns a tool developed by people mostly embedded in one culture and releasing it to an audience embedded in another. Soliciting feedback from people who study society and social problems, to understand how a tool might be used by people who are not like the people who are building it, might have helped to avoid a lot of problems.