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The 'obvious choice' is to not take money from the government/community that you're not supposed to be taking. How on earth did we just just dropped all preten

The 'obvious choice' is to not take money from the government/community that you're not supposed to be taking. How on earth did we just just dropped all pretense at being civic? And also: "It's also obvious what employers need to do if they are short-staffed." That's actually not obvious. Have you owned a small business? Like a cafe, especially through a pandemic? Do they just have magic pools of profit from which to pay people more? Some places do, but usually they're the big chains. These kinds of situations just push regular owners further downhill vis-a-vis the Starbucks down the street which some might argue is 'good for efficiency' but I'd argue that we lose in choice and authenticity quite a lot.

michaelmrose 5y ago
If labor is 30% of your costs then you could pay 20% more by charging 6% more for your finished goods or services. For a lot of such companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages and their financial stability. Take a fake employee named Susan. Presently you pay her $12 an hour for an average of 24 hours per week. In a normal month Susan receives 4 weekly paychecks for a grand total of 1152 before taxes or deductions with which to pay per bills. Susan is serving you a plate of food for $15 Now imagine you raised her wages to $14.40 and offered her full time. Her wages are now 2304. She is making twice as much money and now the food sadly must cost... $15.90. But you say Susan doesn't want to work full time she has other responsibilities, other jobs for example! This is because you and your industry have specialized in each paying Susan to run around between her 2-3 jobs so she can afford to live so she can get enough hours to live without any of you having to pay benefits. It could also be because your industry pays too little for anyone to afford to live so you have collected workers who have lesser need because for example they are spouses of well paid workers earning supplemental income. As the cost of living rises faster than incomes this isn't a stable equilibrium. Even Sam spare time may find he needs to earn more to live and if Sam moves on to a real job, graduates college, moves out of his parents home etc you can't be sure you can replace him at your less than survival wage. The service industry isn't a benefit to America its a diseased kidney and if the entire industry as it is died not much of value would be lost.
- jollybean 5y ago
  I'm sorry but your math doesn't add up. "companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages" ? So the company will 'trivially' have 2x more revenue to be able to offer everyone full time jobs? While raising prices by 'only 6%' - you understand how Supply and Demand works? You are the one paying for those services. If you were willing to pay any material amount more, there'd be higher wages. In addition to Supply and Demand you have 'competitiveness' - service industries run on razor thin margins not by choice (!!), it's the nature of competition. By having tons of illegal workers, willing to work for less, you guarantee lower wages. The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages. But all of this is moot: It's immoral (and probably illegal) to collect unemployment benefits if you can be working. In addition, smaller service industry companies cannot afford to pay substantially more, and they will be hit much harder by 'worker subsidies' than Starbucks across the street who will put them out of business.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    I'm sorry you haven't thought this through. The service industry isn't fully staffed and manifestly makes use of a large portion of part time labor. If are able to staff 100 hours of labor per week of part time labor but need 160 you can indeed make up the difference by converting some of your part time labor into full time labor. This doesn't require earning twice as much revenue because we are talking about filling existing labor shortfalls which is to say hours you would staff tomorrow if you could hire the bodies. We are merely talking about increasing the hours of your existing labor instead of lamenting that nobody else wants to work for so little per month that you cannot rent an apartment with all of your wages. Supply and demand pushes a market towards an equilibrium state it isn't gravity the market is still made up of human choices. It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics. Just because you have chosen to value a labor hour at $11 an hour and a burger at $14.99 doesn't mean its fate. You CAN pay more and you can charge more and because wages aren't most of your labor costs the price doesn't rise linearly with the cost of labor. This is also complete bubkis "The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages." Please feel free to back it up.

michaelmrose 5y ago

If labor is 30% of your costs then you could pay 20% more by charging 6% more for your finished goods or services. For a lot of such companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages and their financial stability. Take a fake employee named Susan. Presently you pay her $12 an hour for an average of 24 hours per week. In a normal month Susan receives 4 weekly paychecks for a grand total of 1152 before taxes or deductions with which to pay per bills. Susan is serving you a plate of food for $15 Now imagine you raised her wages to $14.40 and offered her full time. Her wages are now 2304. She is making twice as much money and now the food sadly must cost... $15.90. But you say Susan doesn't want to work full time she has other responsibilities, other jobs for example! This is because you and your industry have specialized in each paying Susan to run around between her 2-3 jobs so she can afford to live so she can get enough hours to live without any of you having to pay benefits. It could also be because your industry pays too little for anyone to afford to live so you have collected workers who have lesser need because for example they are spouses of well paid workers earning supplemental income. As the cost of living rises faster than incomes this isn't a stable equilibrium. Even Sam spare time may find he needs to earn more to live and if Sam moves on to a real job, graduates college, moves out of his parents home etc you can't be sure you can replace him at your less than survival wage. The service industry isn't a benefit to America its a diseased kidney and if the entire industry as it is died not much of value would be lost.

jollybean 5y ago
I'm sorry but your math doesn't add up. "companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages" ? So the company will 'trivially' have 2x more revenue to be able to offer everyone full time jobs? While raising prices by 'only 6%' - you understand how Supply and Demand works? You are the one paying for those services. If you were willing to pay any material amount more, there'd be higher wages. In addition to Supply and Demand you have 'competitiveness' - service industries run on razor thin margins not by choice (!!), it's the nature of competition. By having tons of illegal workers, willing to work for less, you guarantee lower wages. The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages. But all of this is moot: It's immoral (and probably illegal) to collect unemployment benefits if you can be working. In addition, smaller service industry companies cannot afford to pay substantially more, and they will be hit much harder by 'worker subsidies' than Starbucks across the street who will put them out of business.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  I'm sorry you haven't thought this through. The service industry isn't fully staffed and manifestly makes use of a large portion of part time labor. If are able to staff 100 hours of labor per week of part time labor but need 160 you can indeed make up the difference by converting some of your part time labor into full time labor. This doesn't require earning twice as much revenue because we are talking about filling existing labor shortfalls which is to say hours you would staff tomorrow if you could hire the bodies. We are merely talking about increasing the hours of your existing labor instead of lamenting that nobody else wants to work for so little per month that you cannot rent an apartment with all of your wages. Supply and demand pushes a market towards an equilibrium state it isn't gravity the market is still made up of human choices. It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics. Just because you have chosen to value a labor hour at $11 an hour and a burger at $14.99 doesn't mean its fate. You CAN pay more and you can charge more and because wages aren't most of your labor costs the price doesn't rise linearly with the cost of labor. This is also complete bubkis "The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages." Please feel free to back it up.