10 ms·

It's not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring e

by Aloha 5y ago

It's not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples day to day misery. There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they're rarer.

mjevans 5y ago
Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around. The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Indeed. Many small businesses can't even afford sponsoring a sick leave directly AFAIK. At my location (in Europe) you pay a part of your monthly wage to the social security fund and once you get sick it covers your salary in the amount like if you kept working (and also pays you basic pension once you get too old).
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    In which country is this? In France, the "social security" (run by the state) doesn't cover the full salary, not even close. It only covers up to 50% [0], and only after three days (if you have 10 single sick days, you lose 10 days' pay). You have to have your own insurance ("mutuelle", usually chosen by your employer — which you cannot refuse, but can augment) to have a better deal. --- [0] It covers 50% of the salary, but the maximum salary taken into account is 1.8 times the minimum wage, which is 2 798,24 € before tax. https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journalieres/arret-maladie-salarie https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journa...
    - Arete314159 5y ago
      You write that 50% of nearly 3k Euros is bad. I can see where it would be bad. But in the US, you would have to fight tooth and nail for YEARS to get disability coverage that "good." US Disability payments average around $1500 or so a month, and you often get rejected your first application or for several rounds of appeals. Source: am on disability.
- martinmakesgame 5y ago
  Thanks for saying this. I feel that a lot of the time people forget about post scarcity. People can focus on the dystopia but I feel that it's important to remember there are other options. A lot of us are already living post scarcity and helping others. We are so close to limitless energy generation it is a matter of when not if it happens. Thanks
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Socializing those things would also make basic entrepreneurship much more practical and make failures of entrepreneurship much less harmful (such as the many restaurants that fail in their first year), hugely benefiting the economy as whole.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I'd like to see data from other parts of the world, but at least for France, this argument may hold some water. A crude comparison of business formation between France (with socialized healthcare / retirement) and the US (without those), shows that the numbers are fairly close. Data is for 2020, which saw a 4% rise for France, whereas in the US numbers were stable. France also doesn't have as much of an "entrepreneurial" culture as the US, meaning people are much more likely to "look for a job" rather than found their own business. France: Population: 67M, 850 000 new Business, 12 700 / 1M pop. US: Population: 331M, 3 600 000 Businesses, 11 000 / 1M pop. --- https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569
    - andrewlgood 5y ago
      Interesting statistic. The one year may be a bit of an outlier for the relationship. If you look at the 2010-2020 period in the data linked above, the US had a significantly higher growth rate in business formation (75% vs. 36%). This is not explained by growth in population which were identical over the period (7.2%, wikipedia).
- mythrwy 5y ago
  That's the dream, hopefully it comes to pass, but for now implementation remains problematic. How do you pay for it? Will it be run by the same entities that are having so much trouble balancing Social Security and preventing Medicare fraud?
  - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
    How does Germany do it?
    - rurban 5y ago
      In Germany it's reverse. In the typical case the waiter verbally abuses the paying customer. Like when are not friendly enough to the waiter. Or you only can pay with credit card
  - toxik 5y ago
    Is Medicare fraud really a meaningful amount compared to how much it pays out? Europeans have had the same issue for decades, you can’t give things away without some grifting. But that’s part of the cost. Usually not a very large one either.
    - andrewlgood 5y ago
      Just a quick looks suggests it is a big issue. Hard to get firm estimates (presumably because we only know about the people who get caught) but one estimate has it at 7% of total expenditures of $700 billion which puts it at around $49 billion / year. https://safeatlast.co/blog/medicare-fraud-statistics/ https://safeatlast.co/blog/medicare-fraud-statistics/
      - jatone 5y ago
        which is less than the fraud in private insurance industry, which is 10%. https://www.propublica.org/article/we-asked-prosecutors-if-health-insurance-companies-care-about-fraud-they-laughed-at-us https://www.propublica.org/article/we-asked-prosecutors-if-h...
chaostheory 5y ago
All of that costs money. Are we as customers willing to pay for it? While a lot of us on HN can afford the price increases, not everyone else can. I have a feeling that wage increases will come, but there will be less employees and the remaining better paid employees will be augmented with technology in order to serve more customers ie more automation
- AgentOrange1234 5y ago
  Businesses might ask customers to pay more. They might instead pay CEOs and investors less. Automation is coming regardless.
  - doopy1 5y ago
    Most businesses are small businesses, not ones run by mega millionaire CEOs.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      but where do most people actually work?
      - ryathal 5y ago
        Still small businesses.
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        JP Morgan Chase don't agree with you in 2014: "48 percent of all US employees work for small businesses, down from 52 percent in the early 2000s." https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-business/small-business-dashboard/economic-activity https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin... The NYSSCPA didn't agree with you in 2017 either: "Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, this is no longer the case. At this point, 39.2 percent were employed at either a large or very large company, while 26.5 percent worked at mid-sized companies and 34.3 percent worked at small companies." https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/more-americans-work-at-big-firms-than-small-ones-040717 https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes... Atkinson & Lind ("Big is Beautiful") didn't agree with you in 2019 either, specifically taking on what they call the "myth of small business as the engine of job creation" https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creation-myth/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creati... The Small Business Administration didn't agree with you in 2020: "According to small business statistics from SBA, small businesses make 99.9% of US businesses and employ 47.1% of US employees." https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics
14 5y ago
I think I get 15 paid sick days a year, 15 vacation days with an extra day added each year, and 12 lieu days that I get off but no pay. This was the first year having it. What a difference it makes to my mental well being. I spread my days off out so I get lots of 3 day weekends and I feel a lot less burnt out. The sick days are a big one. If my kid is sick or I hurt myself or I have a bad tooth or just feeling down or something just call in at least half hour before my shift and it’s all good.
- vanviegen 5y ago
  From a European perspective, it boggles my mind that sick days can be limited. What happens when you run out? You get fired for not coming into work, I imagine?
  - ISL 5y ago
    Sometimes, yes.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    There's a few possibilities I can think of: * Unpaid sick days * The limitation is the other way around, they don't want to give a single pool of 30 paid days off, you're limited to 15 vacation days * If you have a good relationship with your manager, it's a soft limit and they'll allow you to go over as long as it's not abused * If you're part-time/hourly, trading days/hours with a co-worker Our HR department combined vacation days and sick days into one pool several years ago when they realized most of us were faking sick days to get more vacation time.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      In Europe typically there are unlimited sick days, but the company has insurance to cover your salary after a certain number of days per year. You typically need a doctor's note after 3 consecutive days, and if you are abusing the system the insurance company (who is a pro at this) will quickly investigate and terminate / claw back their coverage.
acituan 5y ago
All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry. I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is "They're just yelling the entire time". I find it interesting that this hasn't been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were that high maintenance customer? Maybe there is a general culture problem we all have regarding how we treat strangers, especially those who are bound to serve us to an extent. And looking at that need for transformation might be hard on our ego than the transformation of structural non-industry-specific inequities.
- Valkhyr 5y ago
  I highly second this. I've worked retail before (Apple Retail, Genius Bar specifically, so probably one of the more decent and better paid retail jobs in the grand scheme of things), and dealing with customers was one of the primary reasons I changed careers. You only need so many people looking down on you because of nothing other than your job, to make you want to do something else.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  A purely introspective approach is fundamentally limited to addressing the cases where the problem is within ourselves. It cannot address cases where the problem is within other customers or within business practices.
- square_usual 5y ago
  Is that a cultural thing? I'm always surprised when I see American service workers complain about abusive customers, because in my region in South India I've very very rarely seen anyone abuse their servers. A few complaints, maybe, but no yelling or pressure. IME the class divide in India is wider, so it makes me even more confused.
  - bkav 5y ago
    I believe so. When I was working in customer service, I had an English coworker. He said that the way customers treated us regularly would probably never have happened in England. Not once. Things haven’t gotten better since then.
Gustomaximus 5y ago
> There used to be some sort of a trade-off, there used to be a ton of jobs that didn't pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, I think protecting this enviroment is also important for middle class if only for selfish reasons. As if you have the fall-back of 'stuff it I'll go flip burgers for a while' then middle class jobs are more protected as employees know some people will walk out for the lower paid but stress free job as its an option, which in turn flows up the chain at each level.
throwaway210222 5y ago
> Its not just about wages … insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare. That is exactly the same as raising wages. Outside the USA (or at least HN), its common for companies to negotiate remuneration on the total cost to company [1]. This includes wages, taxes (e.g. training taxes), pension, health-care, phone, etc, etc. Its weird that commentators here somehow think that companies don't incur these freebies you want as real costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_to_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_to_company
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  The problem I have with that is getting the actual number. Employers aren’t sharing that and I don’t know how much I actually cost my employer per year. I can guess by summing my salary, PTO, healthcare, taxes, etc. but that’s probably grossly inaccurate. Is also Very hard to comparison shop companies benefits packages when many are very reticent to hand out the official rate and coverage documents including their contributions.
BizarroLand 5y ago
Even letting cashiers & staff sit down would be something, but apparently business owners want modern day humans with the mentality of Victorian era maids and butlers cleaning the silverware for minimum wage and working unpaid overtime as if they expect that is what the customer wants for some reason. As a customer, I want to see that the people who provide me the goods and services I need and want to function in society are as well treated as I would treat myself and nothing less. If they're sitting down but upbeat and attentive, I'm satisfied.

by Aloha 5y ago

mjevans 5y ago

Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around. The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.

qwerty456127 5y ago
> Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Indeed. Many small businesses can't even afford sponsoring a sick leave directly AFAIK. At my location (in Europe) you pay a part of your monthly wage to the social security fund and once you get sick it covers your salary in the amount like if you kept working (and also pays you basic pension once you get too old).
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  In which country is this? In France, the "social security" (run by the state) doesn't cover the full salary, not even close. It only covers up to 50% [0], and only after three days (if you have 10 single sick days, you lose 10 days' pay). You have to have your own insurance ("mutuelle", usually chosen by your employer — which you cannot refuse, but can augment) to have a better deal. --- [0] It covers 50% of the salary, but the maximum salary taken into account is 1.8 times the minimum wage, which is 2 798,24 € before tax. https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journalieres/arret-maladie-salarie https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journa...
  - Arete314159 5y ago
    You write that 50% of nearly 3k Euros is bad. I can see where it would be bad. But in the US, you would have to fight tooth and nail for YEARS to get disability coverage that "good." US Disability payments average around $1500 or so a month, and you often get rejected your first application or for several rounds of appeals. Source: am on disability.
martinmakesgame 5y ago
Thanks for saying this. I feel that a lot of the time people forget about post scarcity. People can focus on the dystopia but I feel that it's important to remember there are other options. A lot of us are already living post scarcity and helping others. We are so close to limitless energy generation it is a matter of when not if it happens. Thanks
crooked-v 5y ago
Socializing those things would also make basic entrepreneurship much more practical and make failures of entrepreneurship much less harmful (such as the many restaurants that fail in their first year), hugely benefiting the economy as whole.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I'd like to see data from other parts of the world, but at least for France, this argument may hold some water. A crude comparison of business formation between France (with socialized healthcare / retirement) and the US (without those), shows that the numbers are fairly close. Data is for 2020, which saw a 4% rise for France, whereas in the US numbers were stable. France also doesn't have as much of an "entrepreneurial" culture as the US, meaning people are much more likely to "look for a job" rather than found their own business. France: Population: 67M, 850 000 new Business, 12 700 / 1M pop. US: Population: 331M, 3 600 000 Businesses, 11 000 / 1M pop. --- https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569
  - andrewlgood 5y ago
    Interesting statistic. The one year may be a bit of an outlier for the relationship. If you look at the 2010-2020 period in the data linked above, the US had a significantly higher growth rate in business formation (75% vs. 36%). This is not explained by growth in population which were identical over the period (7.2%, wikipedia).
mythrwy 5y ago
That's the dream, hopefully it comes to pass, but for now implementation remains problematic. How do you pay for it? Will it be run by the same entities that are having so much trouble balancing Social Security and preventing Medicare fraud?
- aaronblohowiak 5y ago
  How does Germany do it?
  - rurban 5y ago
    In Germany it's reverse. In the typical case the waiter verbally abuses the paying customer. Like when are not friendly enough to the waiter. Or you only can pay with credit card
- toxik 5y ago
  Is Medicare fraud really a meaningful amount compared to how much it pays out? Europeans have had the same issue for decades, you can’t give things away without some grifting. But that’s part of the cost. Usually not a very large one either.
  - andrewlgood 5y ago
    Just a quick looks suggests it is a big issue. Hard to get firm estimates (presumably because we only know about the people who get caught) but one estimate has it at 7% of total expenditures of $700 billion which puts it at around $49 billion / year. https://safeatlast.co/blog/medicare-fraud-statistics/ https://safeatlast.co/blog/medicare-fraud-statistics/
    - jatone 5y ago
      which is less than the fraud in private insurance industry, which is 10%. https://www.propublica.org/article/we-asked-prosecutors-if-health-insurance-companies-care-about-fraud-they-laughed-at-us https://www.propublica.org/article/we-asked-prosecutors-if-h...

chaostheory 5y ago

All of that costs money. Are we as customers willing to pay for it? While a lot of us on HN can afford the price increases, not everyone else can. I have a feeling that wage increases will come, but there will be less employees and the remaining better paid employees will be augmented with technology in order to serve more customers ie more automation

AgentOrange1234 5y ago
Businesses might ask customers to pay more. They might instead pay CEOs and investors less. Automation is coming regardless.
- doopy1 5y ago
  Most businesses are small businesses, not ones run by mega millionaire CEOs.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    but where do most people actually work?
    - ryathal 5y ago
      Still small businesses.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        JP Morgan Chase don't agree with you in 2014: "48 percent of all US employees work for small businesses, down from 52 percent in the early 2000s." https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-business/small-business-dashboard/economic-activity https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin... The NYSSCPA didn't agree with you in 2017 either: "Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, this is no longer the case. At this point, 39.2 percent were employed at either a large or very large company, while 26.5 percent worked at mid-sized companies and 34.3 percent worked at small companies." https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/more-americans-work-at-big-firms-than-small-ones-040717 https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes... Atkinson & Lind ("Big is Beautiful") didn't agree with you in 2019 either, specifically taking on what they call the "myth of small business as the engine of job creation" https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creation-myth/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creati... The Small Business Administration didn't agree with you in 2020: "According to small business statistics from SBA, small businesses make 99.9% of US businesses and employ 47.1% of US employees." https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics

14 5y ago

I think I get 15 paid sick days a year, 15 vacation days with an extra day added each year, and 12 lieu days that I get off but no pay. This was the first year having it. What a difference it makes to my mental well being. I spread my days off out so I get lots of 3 day weekends and I feel a lot less burnt out. The sick days are a big one. If my kid is sick or I hurt myself or I have a bad tooth or just feeling down or something just call in at least half hour before my shift and it’s all good.

vanviegen 5y ago
From a European perspective, it boggles my mind that sick days can be limited. What happens when you run out? You get fired for not coming into work, I imagine?
- ISL 5y ago
  Sometimes, yes.
- Izkata 5y ago
  There's a few possibilities I can think of: * Unpaid sick days * The limitation is the other way around, they don't want to give a single pool of 30 paid days off, you're limited to 15 vacation days * If you have a good relationship with your manager, it's a soft limit and they'll allow you to go over as long as it's not abused * If you're part-time/hourly, trading days/hours with a co-worker Our HR department combined vacation days and sick days into one pool several years ago when they realized most of us were faking sick days to get more vacation time.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    In Europe typically there are unlimited sick days, but the company has insurance to cover your salary after a certain number of days per year. You typically need a doctor's note after 3 consecutive days, and if you are abusing the system the insurance company (who is a pro at this) will quickly investigate and terminate / claw back their coverage.

acituan 5y ago

All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry. I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is "They're just yelling the entire time". I find it interesting that this hasn't been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were that high maintenance customer? Maybe there is a general culture problem we all have regarding how we treat strangers, especially those who are bound to serve us to an extent. And looking at that need for transformation might be hard on our ego than the transformation of structural non-industry-specific inequities.

Valkhyr 5y ago
I highly second this. I've worked retail before (Apple Retail, Genius Bar specifically, so probably one of the more decent and better paid retail jobs in the grand scheme of things), and dealing with customers was one of the primary reasons I changed careers. You only need so many people looking down on you because of nothing other than your job, to make you want to do something else.
jjoonathan 5y ago
A purely introspective approach is fundamentally limited to addressing the cases where the problem is within ourselves. It cannot address cases where the problem is within other customers or within business practices.
square_usual 5y ago
Is that a cultural thing? I'm always surprised when I see American service workers complain about abusive customers, because in my region in South India I've very very rarely seen anyone abuse their servers. A few complaints, maybe, but no yelling or pressure. IME the class divide in India is wider, so it makes me even more confused.
- bkav 5y ago
  I believe so. When I was working in customer service, I had an English coworker. He said that the way customers treated us regularly would probably never have happened in England. Not once. Things haven’t gotten better since then.

Gustomaximus 5y ago

> There used to be some sort of a trade-off, there used to be a ton of jobs that didn't pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, I think protecting this enviroment is also important for middle class if only for selfish reasons. As if you have the fall-back of 'stuff it I'll go flip burgers for a while' then middle class jobs are more protected as employees know some people will walk out for the lower paid but stress free job as its an option, which in turn flows up the chain at each level.

throwaway210222 5y ago

> Its not just about wages … insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare. That is exactly the same as raising wages. Outside the USA (or at least HN), its common for companies to negotiate remuneration on the total cost to company [1]. This includes wages, taxes (e.g. training taxes), pension, health-care, phone, etc, etc. Its weird that commentators here somehow think that companies don't incur these freebies you want as real costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_to_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_to_company

Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
The problem I have with that is getting the actual number. Employers aren’t sharing that and I don’t know how much I actually cost my employer per year. I can guess by summing my salary, PTO, healthcare, taxes, etc. but that’s probably grossly inaccurate. Is also Very hard to comparison shop companies benefits packages when many are very reticent to hand out the official rate and coverage documents including their contributions.

BizarroLand 5y ago

Even letting cashiers & staff sit down would be something, but apparently business owners want modern day humans with the mentality of Victorian era maids and butlers cleaning the silverware for minimum wage and working unpaid overtime as if they expect that is what the customer wants for some reason. As a customer, I want to see that the people who provide me the goods and services I need and want to function in society are as well treated as I would treat myself and nothing less. If they're sitting down but upbeat and attentive, I'm satisfied.