5 ms·

> I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come. "A 2010 longitudinal study of homeless men conducted in Birmingham, Alabama, found that

> I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come. "A 2010 longitudinal study of homeless men conducted in Birmingham, Alabama, found that most earned an average of ninety dollars per week while working an average of thirty hours per week[192]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S... "Employees at Amazon's base in Dunfermline, Fife, were apparently so worried they’d lose their jobs if they were late they decided to sleep rough in the woods nearby." https://metro.co.uk/2016/12/10/desperate-amazon-workers-forced-to-sleep-in-tents-so-they-can-be-at-work-on-time-6314899/ https://metro.co.uk/2016/12/10/desperate-amazon-workers-forc...

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
And it's highly disturbing to me that people will defend these situations on this site. An alarming amount of HN commenters seem to believe that the cost of labor is a function of the money created by the labor. In other words, a job will only pay $X/hr because it creates $Y/hr in revenue where Y > X + some margin. They pretend that if Y goes up, then it brings X up and if X is low, then it means Y MUST be low as well. It has nothing to do with the greed of shareholders. This line of thinking is what leads to managers firing the entire IT team because they don't generate revenue, and then panicking when the email server crashes.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  The more logical claim reads more like "employers will logically try not to employ unprofitable labor", meaning that the wage paid to a worker will generally be no higher than the variable profit enabled by that worker.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    Certainly, but that's nothing more than a truism.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Yet proponents of raising the minimum wage seem to disregard this truism when it comes to the case of workers who for whatever reason can only create variable profit at a rate between the old and new minimum wage. These workers can easily be moved from “profitable to employ” to “unprofitable to employ” by the increase in minimum wage, either entirely or by cutting those hours which would become unprofitable.
  - bb88 7y ago
    I think the truism really is this: In a micro sense: each company will try to reduce labor costs as much as possible, since costs are the enemy of profit. But when we look at the macro situation then: employees are much of the demand curve. Less income means less demand. This is the reason for much of the talk about UBI and job automation.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago

And it's highly disturbing to me that people will defend these situations on this site. An alarming amount of HN commenters seem to believe that the cost of labor is a function of the money created by the labor. In other words, a job will only pay $X/hr because it creates $Y/hr in revenue where Y > X + some margin. They pretend that if Y goes up, then it brings X up and if X is low, then it means Y MUST be low as well. It has nothing to do with the greed of shareholders. This line of thinking is what leads to managers firing the entire IT team because they don't generate revenue, and then panicking when the email server crashes.

sokoloff 7y ago
The more logical claim reads more like "employers will logically try not to employ unprofitable labor", meaning that the wage paid to a worker will generally be no higher than the variable profit enabled by that worker.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  Certainly, but that's nothing more than a truism.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Yet proponents of raising the minimum wage seem to disregard this truism when it comes to the case of workers who for whatever reason can only create variable profit at a rate between the old and new minimum wage. These workers can easily be moved from “profitable to employ” to “unprofitable to employ” by the increase in minimum wage, either entirely or by cutting those hours which would become unprofitable.
- bb88 7y ago
  I think the truism really is this: In a micro sense: each company will try to reduce labor costs as much as possible, since costs are the enemy of profit. But when we look at the macro situation then: employees are much of the demand curve. Less income means less demand. This is the reason for much of the talk about UBI and job automation.