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There is no such thing as labor shortage. There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an e

There is no such thing as labor shortage. There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse. Treat workers like humans, pay them fairly so they can live a meaningful life, give them a good place to work, and they WILL work.

throwaway75787 5y ago
I am holding out for a professional position where I will work 24-32 hours per week with benefits. I am not doing the full-time "you own me" rodeo again.
- User23 5y ago
  Get a full time remote job from a company that treats their employees like adults. You can easily get whatever their equivalent of a "meets expectations" rating is on 4-5 hours of work a day. And ethically you're doing nothing wrong, because the company is formally saying it's satisfied with your work which means they're getting what they bargained for.
  - sirspacey 5y ago
    As someone hiring engineers remotely, this is explicitly our offer. About 4 hours is peak productivity. We don’t need you to work extra to satisfy our god complex.
    - Retric 5y ago
      No need to self censor the company name in that comment.
    - Infernal 5y ago
      Where can one apply?
  - throwaway75787 5y ago
    It has to be official from now on. There is going to be no potential for a slippery slope of after-hours messages or pizza party overtime. I have even set up a VoIP number with a 9-5 M-F time condition for use with applications and employers. I don't have it in me to to work in front of a screen all day, although I understand that works for many on this site. I don't care if the workplace is an open office, a cashier's stool at a supermarket checkout, or a train driver's cab.
    - ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
      I agree with you, and I hope this attitude becomes more widely held.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      For other non-native speakers: M-F in this context doesn't have its usual meaning, but means "Monday to Friday". Although the common use would be funny here :)
  - artursapek 5y ago
    This is an interesting ethics question that has crossed my mind a lot. I also remember an internet post years ago about someone who had automated 95% of their job and kept it a secret from their employer, who continued to be satisfied with their output. Where do you draw the line?
    - api 5y ago
      If I were employing that person and found out about this I would promote them to an executive position… that is if the work was good and they were doing it successfully.
      - artursapek 5y ago
        How many people have you promoted to executive positions in your career?
    - passerby1 5y ago
      It always depends on bargain and deal conditions. And KPIs. When swe work conditions discussion reaches this point I always remember Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" book. He writes about KPIs a bit, just enough to not treating it too seriously.
  - VLM 5y ago
    > And ethically you're doing nothing wrong We don't pay firemen to put out as many huge fires as possible all day long, because that would lead to very peculiar and unwanted behavior incentives to max out those metrics. Firemen hiring pyromaniacs to make them look good, etc. Plenty of jobs out there where the metric you're trying to maximize is internal/external customer satisfaction, usually something like maximize service uptime. If your assigned responsibility is the accounting dept, and the accounting dept loves you because when they report a problem its rapidly fixed, then you're doing what the company needs. Some companies refuse to metric stuff like implementing change, because it results in I (heart) change for the sake of change. I quickly close a ticket to tweak the background color on an internal app but that doesn't make the company any money. There are jobs like mining coal or farm work, where paying you to not produce makes the owners very angry. Sometimes being in a non-productive cost-center has its privileges. "You're paying me so IT is never in the way of production dept" or IT never gets in the way of accounting so accounting never gets in the way of the production dept, etc. Big industrial factories usually have a maint department whom do nothing but fix machines. If none of the machines are fixed you don't punish the maint dept LOL. Usually they have pointless busywork if nothing else is going on "go repaint the milling machine". Such things exist in IT "go update the reverse DNS records".
- whartung 5y ago
  The question is, what are you doing during this "holding out" phase. Living on savings? Working a different job? Some other support system?
  - throwaway75787 5y ago
    I've been making sacrifices, bettering myself, and applying to jobs at a relaxed pace (I have turned down a few that insisted that things would be done the Old Way). Thank God that I am in the relatively luxurious position to do so. Just now I've noticed that downvotes have started to pour in. I am convinced that there is a troll army from a foreign nation-state sent to sow discord, or maybe the Pinktertons, who still have a sophisticated union-busting intelligence group, and get paid tons of money for it by "Great Place To Work" companies you might not expect.
- VLM 5y ago
  Contract life "Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you" You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ... My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility. At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    Contract life requires one of: a) Dependence on recruiters/headhunters who take a cut (20-50%+ of your 1099 income) b) A strong, solid network so broad as to always have leads and offers to keep you busy throughout the year, year after year c) A giant's reputation: you're well-known elite in one of the FAANGs and built something a lot of people use; you've published books or make speeches at conferences. You're the inventor of some open source tool everyone uses. Since c is out of my range, I attempted b and find I didn't have that type of skill (or energy) to schmooze and booze my way to a vast network. My past connections from previous jobs are OK, but reasonably loose and they tend to hail from large corporations where there's no contract possibility for my skillset anyway. I was left with A, which meant that I didn't truly feel independent, but also in the last 3 months of my contracts I would be scrambling and not exactly able to take those 3 months or 6 months off to travel the world like I dreamt. Instead there are lease renewal, healthcare (in the U.S.), and other headaches. I'm happy to be proven wrong or be offered a "d" option.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/
  - philmcp 5y ago
    Thanks for the shoutout :)
    - erikerikson 5y ago
      Thank you for helping normalize it. I get bored of companies being insistent that they want "smart", "data driven" people who will nonetheless ignore the research to everyone's detriment.
fivea 5y ago
> There is no such thing as labor shortage. The conspiracy theory going around reddit is that US companies are complaining about labour shortage to try to get their COVID payroll subsidies pardoned.
- fundad 5y ago
  The funny thing is the forgivable payroll loans are the reason many businesses are around to hire now.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    Good point. I guess that assistance would have been better off spent elsewhere so that those business would fail and the owners would re-enter the labor market. That would solve the labor shortage.
    - fundad 5y ago
      It may be that the size of precent of businesses that went under in the US and other large economies isn't that significant. It could be that this is how large economies grow. The realignment of spending and reopening was growth on top of growth. On top of that more remote jobs opened up and I want to hear about people who moved to LCOL areas or moved to a bigger job center because they could finally afford to.
kyrra 5y ago
I disagree. There are two potential causes for the labor shortage: paying people not to work (ie increased government handout), and people retiring early. Both of these things have happened during the pandemic. I recommend looking at the labor participation rate over the last 5 years. We dropped from 63% to 61.5 %. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...
- popcube 5y ago
  do this means companies should pay more to attract people ?
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  You haven’t defended your “disagreement.” Even if your points did hold up, they still don’t counter parent’s claims. American wages have been stagnant for over 30 years while benefits, pensions, job security, and working conditions have continued to erode. If you think that’s not going to have any consequences, you’re lying to yourself. Unemployment insurance only lasts 6 months, is very difficult to live on for low wage workers, and people just generally know that not working is very bad because it wrecks your job history and resume. Additionally, the majority of Americans’ finances are in very poor shape, which is why Biden was forced to extend the moratorium on student loan payments. To take your word for it, we would also have to explain why employment was ever so high to begin with.
  - kyrra 5y ago
    What do you mean by stagnant? Do you mean and individual is stuck at a certain pay level their entire life? Or do you mean that a given quintile of income has been stagnant over time? Here's a quote from basic economics (chapter 10): > The University of Michigan study found that, among working Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975, approximately 95 percent had risen out of that bracket by 1991—including 29 percent who had reached the top quintile by 1991, compared to only 5 percent who still remained in the bottom quintile. The largest absolute amount of increase in income between 1975 and 1991 was among those people who were initially in the bottom quintile in 1975 and the least absolute increase in income was among those who were initially in the top quintile in 1975. > In other words, the incomes of people who were initially at the bottom rose more than the incomes of people who were initially at the top. This is the direct opposite of the picture presented by Census data, based on following income brackets over time, instead of following the people who are moving in and out of those brackets. > Similar patterns appeared in statistics from the Internal Revenue Service, which also followed given individuals. The IRS found that between 1996 and 2005 the income of individuals who had been in the bottom 20 percent of income tax filers in 1996 had increased by 91 percent by 2005, and the income of those individuals who were in the top one percent in 1996 had fallen by 26 percent.{316} It may seem almost impossible that the data from the Bureau of the Census and the data from the IRS and the University of Michigan can all be correct, but they are. Studies of income brackets over time and studies of individual people over time are measuring fundamentally different things that are often confused with one another.
adventured 5y ago
> There is no such thing as labor shortage. Of course there can be such a thing as a labor shortage, under many different scenarios (during sustained high rates of real economic expansion, specialized types of labor that are difficult to train enough of, fading-away segments that aren't being replenished with new labor due to lack of interest (yet still require active labor), not enough manual labor, not enough immigration, not enough population growth, and so on). Low wages can make a labor shortage worse, is the actual context.
- akagusu 5y ago
  As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse. If workers need training, why don't companies train them? The majority of workers can't afford training, they barely afford home and food. Why companies don't train workers? Because they don't want to pay, so they blame workers for not having enough training thus shifting the labor shortage cause to workers, not to themselves.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse. Would you also say that as long as there are more housing units than people, there's no housing shortage?
  - greggman3 5y ago
    It doesn't take much imagination to see that this won't work. Have you ever tried running a company? Let's say you have a band (which is a form of a company. They sell entertainment). You can't find a drummer. Would you train one? How many years are you going to able to wait before you start your band for real while your new drummer trains? In the mean time you aren't able to make any money because the band can't perform. The average size of a company is 1-4 people. They aren't Walmart size etc.. They don't have the budget to train an employee https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/
    - 5y ago
kevingadd 5y ago
Don't forget mass death - the pandemic has claimed millions of lives. That's going to deplete the workforce no matter what. Of course, most of the 'labor shortage' complaints are from people who pay bad wages and don't offer benefits, and most of that 'shortage' is from people who quit, not people who died.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I'm not sure mass death is really a major factor. The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce. Maybe it's a small factor both directly and in the transfer of wealth allowing the next generation to retire slightly early, but certainly only a small effect. The quitting you mentioned is a bigger driver.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    It's sufficient but the causality tends to be secondary. America, as currently patterned, is a fragile society. People balance work and family through ad-hoc systems with few redundancies. Now a pandemic comes around that killed a bunch of people who were providing informal support for the main workforce. A man in Georgia can't do full-time anymore because he's a single dad and the daycare shut down for the duration of the pandemic. A mom exits the workforce because the grandparents who were watching the kids after school are now dead. Someone loses someone dear to them and re-thinks their life direction. These things add up.
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    26% of people 65 and older were working in 2019. Between Feb 2020 and Feb 2021 the labor force participation rate for that age bracket dropped 11.2%, while the younger brackets dropped 1-2%. That's a significant number of people who didn't die but either lost their jobs or felt unsafe continuing to work and decided to retire rather than looking for a new job.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Exactly, the quitting is the bigger factor. It's not that the labor force has died in mass.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Not to disagree with you -- of course I agree with you -- but in your scenario a MacDo burger now costs $20.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  How much does a McDonalds burger cost right now in the places with the best worker protections and pay?
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Pretty sure it's not $20 dollars adjusted for inflation and exchange rates. Who would by them? May $5?
    - Arainach 5y ago
      You've missed the point. McDonalds here in Seattle starts workers at $16+. A Big Mac is still within a dollar or two of what it is in the rest of the country. It's not $20. Dick's Deluxe starts pay at $19 and has benefits. Their burger is $1.80.
      - hungryforcodes 5y ago
        And yet these are all the people that are apparently missing in action in the economy. Or are they? Perhaps it's just small businesses that are unable to compete.
      - ybessyehs6542 5y ago
        It's misleading to say "a dollar or two" cheaper when that's almost 50% cheaper. "Customers may pay anywhere from $3.75 for a Big Mac in Austin, Texas, to $6.39 in Seattle. For Cheeseburgers, the variation was even greater, from $1 in places like Chicago and Houston to $2.29 in New York City." https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-mac-costs-more-seattle-austin https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-m...
will4274 5y ago
> There is no such thing as labor shortage. I'll be sure to tell my history professor. He'll be interested to know that all those textbooks he wrote about Europe immediately after the bubonic plague were wrong.
- akagusu 5y ago
  I think we are not in the same context as Europe after bubonic plague.
  - will4274 5y ago
    ?? Parent didn't say we aren't in a labor shortage right now. Parent said labor shortages weren't a real thing. "There is no Ferrari in my garage" vs "there is no such thing as Ferrari"
dominotw 5y ago
> There is no such thing as labor shortage. I assume most of the ppl here either held a h1b or a worked with ppl on h1b. Strange thing to say on here.
- thrower123 5y ago
  I don't quite understand what it is you are implying. Labor shortages and H1-B visas have very little to do with each other.
  - tbrownaw 5y ago
    The nominal reason for h1-b to be a thing is for cases where you can't find someone locally with the skills you need. How exactly do you define "shortage" to be unrelated to that?
    - DrewRWx 5y ago
      Because those H1B requirements are pro-forma and the visa itself gives the company access to another easily controlled and underpaid immigrant to drive down wages.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      So there is no labour shortage, there is a local labour shortage.
    - lucian1900 5y ago
      That’s not how they’re used. We immigrants get hired because companies get away with paying us less. There’s a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
zenonu 5y ago
Additionally, companies do not have a right to exist. If your business needs to pay minimum wage, profits are thin, and employees are quitting to find something better, it probably shouldn't be a thing any more. There isn't a labor shortage - your business isn't providing enough value for the labor it requires.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- newbamboo 5y ago
  A world without musicians? No thanks.
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    You can pay musicians fairly by streaming and buying through other channels like Bandcamp and resonate.is, which if we all did it would make the profession far more viable.
  - rybosworld 5y ago
    That is... quite a leap
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    A world without corporate musicians? A-OK. I'm not clear why there would be no musicians if it requires minimum wage, razor thin profit margins, etc.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Music and art existed before currency was a thing. It will continue to exist as long as humans exis.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    Most musicians and artist make nothing from their music and art, yet folks are still making it.
- 5y ago
api 5y ago
The inflation isn’t new either. We have had loony inflation in real estate (by far the worst), stocks, speculative assets, tuition, etc. for well over a decade. Nobody cared until we started to get inflation in the one area we actually need it: wages. Now we have an “inflation crisis.”
- cudgy 5y ago
  Don’t forget healthcare, property insurance, rent, and autos/transportation.
thrower123 5y ago
There's an ever-increasing issue of people who are not able to provide value sufficient to justify their wages as those wages increase.
- carapace 5y ago
  That may well be true (FWIW I agree that it's a problem and it's getting worse), however, that's not a "labor shortage" or low supply of labor, eh?
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  So the company was designed to fail if wages increased?
  - quesera 5y ago
    All companies would fail, if wages were increased beyond a point. The argument is about where that point lies with respect to a minimum, living, or worthwhile, wage.
chmod600 5y ago
You use the loaded word "shortage" without defining it, and you don't appear to be using the typical definition.
synergy20 5y ago
Easy said than done. Capitalism is imperfect, but socialism is worse, much worse. Let the market decide, and let the welfare to help those truly in need(those disabled or mentally ill, but not the lazy), use tax as a way to mitigate the gap. It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. The government actually did its part(food stamps, free lunch, section 8 housing, no tax or low tax for low income families,etc), doing more will lead all of us to poverty(been there seen that).
- rbanffy 5y ago
  You imply a false dichotomy. There are numerous systems between the barely regulated capitalism of the US that pushes so many people into poverty in the richest country on the planet while enriching billionaires as if they provided a huge benefit for society, and traditional by-the-book socialism that was never implemented except in Star Trek (except it’s never mentioned). Europe has pretty much everything in the spectrum and, so far, it hasn’t led us to poverty.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  You didn't explain how Socialism is worse, much worse. It might be but you assume we know this to be a fact? Many in the U.S look envious to the social support that is offered in European countries. > and let the welfare to help those truly indeed That's more like Socialism than Capitalism, that's for sure. > use tax as a way to mitigate the gap This is Capitalism? > It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. You could just as well be defending Socialism with that comment.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Someone equated capitalism to freedom the other day and I asked which one is more free: choosing what you study so you can work and have a large and comfortable house for your family or work on what you want, knowing that your basic needs (including a house, even if not large) will always be provided for.
  - synergy20 5y ago
    Since capitalism is imperfect so adding some socialism for the poor as stated is OK, going too far on the socialism side will ruin us all. This is my point. They're not black and white binary choices, keeping capitalism as the backbone is key. If you really like socialism, welcome to Venezuela.
makomk 5y ago
I'm pretty sure it's not possible for companies to simply decide to pay everyone across the economy better in real terms so they can "live a meaningful life", for the simple reason that all of the things those workers want to buy need to be produced, which in turn is constrained by the availability of workers (amongst other things). If a whole bunch of businesses become non-viable due to not being able to get labour, that actually decreases the supply of stuff to buy which means people's pay has to become worse in real terms. Now, of course there are ways to reduce the number of workers required, but the easy options will have been taken by now leaving only capital-intensive choices that require taking other scarce resources (like, say, chips) away from being used to create things people buy directly. There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That's inherently limited by the availability of actual stuff, and the super-wealthy just aren't a high enough proportion of overall consumption that there's any way for them to that. Maybe if we were in a 2008-style crisis where unemployment was high and the problem was the financial system there'd be clever solutions involving redistributing money or something, but that's not the reality we're living.
- cudgy 5y ago
  “ There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms.” Sure there is. The hoard of money is called “profits”. Companies pay higher wages and have less profits or possibly (if they can) raise the prices of their goods to compensate.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  That depends on how you measure things. I think what people want most of all is to have access to the stability of production guaranteed by modern industrial practices. Our society converts stability and abundance in the production process into precarity and reward/punish incentive structures in the access controls to consumption. These represent fundamentally different modes of interaction with the economy and social environment. They're different worlds. And what does talk about production in "real terms" say about the value of one over the other?
- 5y ago
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse. Well, that's in theory. In practice every single country prefer thousands of minimum wage workers employed by Amazon than thousands of unemployed people because Amazon doesn't really need them and hiring a lot of people that do not provide actual value to the company is simply their part of the deal with governments. Now imagine that there are literally hundreds of smaller Amazons that employ millions of workers. It's an hard problem to solve, shortage of labor does exist and appear in many forms, one of them is not enough qualified workers for the job. Where worker protection laws are stronger than US, conditions are better for employed people, but worse for unemployed ones,because the job market is blocked. Salaries are lower because a stiff market guarantees that workers will have a harder time switching job, they'll accept a lower salary for a job that's safer and protected by the State and work there as long ad they can. Also: a very limited number of businesses are competing for talents in the job market. Most of them will only make sure they fill the positions they need at the price they are willing to pay, they won't start offering higher salaries to everybody.
- narag 5y ago
  [deleted] Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments. I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > Not every single country works like that They do. Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians? > Unemployment is more expensive, It is not a financial issue. Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates. Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries. EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.
dominotw 5y ago
Millions of people become american residents on the 'labor shortage' permise. Quite silly to say there is no such thing as labor shortage. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm... > The DOL must certify to the USCIS that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment dol literally has a certification for 'labor shortage'
trixie_ 5y ago
People will work to survive. The article states people left the work force primarily due to ‘generous government stimulus’
cmarschner 5y ago
Well there is labor shortage for the exact same reason - if paying workers fairly means it is not worth hiring them then there is no business, hence no demand for workers. Labor shortage just means that the market is not in equilibrium where for all the conditions labor is asked for there is an offer available on the market. It goes both ways.
new_realist 5y ago
Retirement is a near universal human goal. Why would people work instead of retire? That seems at odds with observed behavior.
disambiguation 5y ago
Sure those are all feel good platitudes, but we both know that's not how the world works. Consider the device you used to post your comment, where did it come from?

throwaway75787 5y ago

I am holding out for a professional position where I will work 24-32 hours per week with benefits. I am not doing the full-time "you own me" rodeo again.

User23 5y ago
Get a full time remote job from a company that treats their employees like adults. You can easily get whatever their equivalent of a "meets expectations" rating is on 4-5 hours of work a day. And ethically you're doing nothing wrong, because the company is formally saying it's satisfied with your work which means they're getting what they bargained for.
- sirspacey 5y ago
  As someone hiring engineers remotely, this is explicitly our offer. About 4 hours is peak productivity. We don’t need you to work extra to satisfy our god complex.
  - Retric 5y ago
    No need to self censor the company name in that comment.
  - Infernal 5y ago
    Where can one apply?
- throwaway75787 5y ago
  It has to be official from now on. There is going to be no potential for a slippery slope of after-hours messages or pizza party overtime. I have even set up a VoIP number with a 9-5 M-F time condition for use with applications and employers. I don't have it in me to to work in front of a screen all day, although I understand that works for many on this site. I don't care if the workplace is an open office, a cashier's stool at a supermarket checkout, or a train driver's cab.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
    I agree with you, and I hope this attitude becomes more widely held.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    For other non-native speakers: M-F in this context doesn't have its usual meaning, but means "Monday to Friday". Although the common use would be funny here :)
- artursapek 5y ago
  This is an interesting ethics question that has crossed my mind a lot. I also remember an internet post years ago about someone who had automated 95% of their job and kept it a secret from their employer, who continued to be satisfied with their output. Where do you draw the line?
  - api 5y ago
    If I were employing that person and found out about this I would promote them to an executive position… that is if the work was good and they were doing it successfully.
    - artursapek 5y ago
      How many people have you promoted to executive positions in your career?
  - passerby1 5y ago
    It always depends on bargain and deal conditions. And KPIs. When swe work conditions discussion reaches this point I always remember Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" book. He writes about KPIs a bit, just enough to not treating it too seriously.
- VLM 5y ago
  > And ethically you're doing nothing wrong We don't pay firemen to put out as many huge fires as possible all day long, because that would lead to very peculiar and unwanted behavior incentives to max out those metrics. Firemen hiring pyromaniacs to make them look good, etc. Plenty of jobs out there where the metric you're trying to maximize is internal/external customer satisfaction, usually something like maximize service uptime. If your assigned responsibility is the accounting dept, and the accounting dept loves you because when they report a problem its rapidly fixed, then you're doing what the company needs. Some companies refuse to metric stuff like implementing change, because it results in I (heart) change for the sake of change. I quickly close a ticket to tweak the background color on an internal app but that doesn't make the company any money. There are jobs like mining coal or farm work, where paying you to not produce makes the owners very angry. Sometimes being in a non-productive cost-center has its privileges. "You're paying me so IT is never in the way of production dept" or IT never gets in the way of accounting so accounting never gets in the way of the production dept, etc. Big industrial factories usually have a maint department whom do nothing but fix machines. If none of the machines are fixed you don't punish the maint dept LOL. Usually they have pointless busywork if nothing else is going on "go repaint the milling machine". Such things exist in IT "go update the reverse DNS records".
whartung 5y ago
The question is, what are you doing during this "holding out" phase. Living on savings? Working a different job? Some other support system?
- throwaway75787 5y ago
  I've been making sacrifices, bettering myself, and applying to jobs at a relaxed pace (I have turned down a few that insisted that things would be done the Old Way). Thank God that I am in the relatively luxurious position to do so. Just now I've noticed that downvotes have started to pour in. I am convinced that there is a troll army from a foreign nation-state sent to sow discord, or maybe the Pinktertons, who still have a sophisticated union-busting intelligence group, and get paid tons of money for it by "Great Place To Work" companies you might not expect.
VLM 5y ago
Contract life "Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you" You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ... My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility. At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  Contract life requires one of: a) Dependence on recruiters/headhunters who take a cut (20-50%+ of your 1099 income) b) A strong, solid network so broad as to always have leads and offers to keep you busy throughout the year, year after year c) A giant's reputation: you're well-known elite in one of the FAANGs and built something a lot of people use; you've published books or make speeches at conferences. You're the inventor of some open source tool everyone uses. Since c is out of my range, I attempted b and find I didn't have that type of skill (or energy) to schmooze and booze my way to a vast network. My past connections from previous jobs are OK, but reasonably loose and they tend to hail from large corporations where there's no contract possibility for my skillset anyway. I was left with A, which meant that I didn't truly feel independent, but also in the last 3 months of my contracts I would be scrambling and not exactly able to take those 3 months or 6 months off to travel the world like I dreamt. Instead there are lease renewal, healthcare (in the U.S.), and other headaches. I'm happy to be proven wrong or be offered a "d" option.
erikerikson 5y ago
https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/
- philmcp 5y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout :)
  - erikerikson 5y ago
    Thank you for helping normalize it. I get bored of companies being insistent that they want "smart", "data driven" people who will nonetheless ignore the research to everyone's detriment.

fivea 5y ago

> There is no such thing as labor shortage. The conspiracy theory going around reddit is that US companies are complaining about labour shortage to try to get their COVID payroll subsidies pardoned.

fundad 5y ago
The funny thing is the forgivable payroll loans are the reason many businesses are around to hire now.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  Good point. I guess that assistance would have been better off spent elsewhere so that those business would fail and the owners would re-enter the labor market. That would solve the labor shortage.
  - fundad 5y ago
    It may be that the size of precent of businesses that went under in the US and other large economies isn't that significant. It could be that this is how large economies grow. The realignment of spending and reopening was growth on top of growth. On top of that more remote jobs opened up and I want to hear about people who moved to LCOL areas or moved to a bigger job center because they could finally afford to.

kyrra 5y ago

I disagree. There are two potential causes for the labor shortage: paying people not to work (ie increased government handout), and people retiring early. Both of these things have happened during the pandemic. I recommend looking at the labor participation rate over the last 5 years. We dropped from 63% to 61.5 %. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...

popcube 5y ago
do this means companies should pay more to attract people ?
nopenopenopeno 5y ago
You haven’t defended your “disagreement.” Even if your points did hold up, they still don’t counter parent’s claims. American wages have been stagnant for over 30 years while benefits, pensions, job security, and working conditions have continued to erode. If you think that’s not going to have any consequences, you’re lying to yourself. Unemployment insurance only lasts 6 months, is very difficult to live on for low wage workers, and people just generally know that not working is very bad because it wrecks your job history and resume. Additionally, the majority of Americans’ finances are in very poor shape, which is why Biden was forced to extend the moratorium on student loan payments. To take your word for it, we would also have to explain why employment was ever so high to begin with.
- kyrra 5y ago
  What do you mean by stagnant? Do you mean and individual is stuck at a certain pay level their entire life? Or do you mean that a given quintile of income has been stagnant over time? Here's a quote from basic economics (chapter 10): > The University of Michigan study found that, among working Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975, approximately 95 percent had risen out of that bracket by 1991—including 29 percent who had reached the top quintile by 1991, compared to only 5 percent who still remained in the bottom quintile. The largest absolute amount of increase in income between 1975 and 1991 was among those people who were initially in the bottom quintile in 1975 and the least absolute increase in income was among those who were initially in the top quintile in 1975. > In other words, the incomes of people who were initially at the bottom rose more than the incomes of people who were initially at the top. This is the direct opposite of the picture presented by Census data, based on following income brackets over time, instead of following the people who are moving in and out of those brackets. > Similar patterns appeared in statistics from the Internal Revenue Service, which also followed given individuals. The IRS found that between 1996 and 2005 the income of individuals who had been in the bottom 20 percent of income tax filers in 1996 had increased by 91 percent by 2005, and the income of those individuals who were in the top one percent in 1996 had fallen by 26 percent.{316} It may seem almost impossible that the data from the Bureau of the Census and the data from the IRS and the University of Michigan can all be correct, but they are. Studies of income brackets over time and studies of individual people over time are measuring fundamentally different things that are often confused with one another.

adventured 5y ago

> There is no such thing as labor shortage. Of course there can be such a thing as a labor shortage, under many different scenarios (during sustained high rates of real economic expansion, specialized types of labor that are difficult to train enough of, fading-away segments that aren't being replenished with new labor due to lack of interest (yet still require active labor), not enough manual labor, not enough immigration, not enough population growth, and so on). Low wages can make a labor shortage worse, is the actual context.

akagusu 5y ago
As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse. If workers need training, why don't companies train them? The majority of workers can't afford training, they barely afford home and food. Why companies don't train workers? Because they don't want to pay, so they blame workers for not having enough training thus shifting the labor shortage cause to workers, not to themselves.
- gruez 5y ago
  > As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse. Would you also say that as long as there are more housing units than people, there's no housing shortage?
- greggman3 5y ago
  It doesn't take much imagination to see that this won't work. Have you ever tried running a company? Let's say you have a band (which is a form of a company. They sell entertainment). You can't find a drummer. Would you train one? How many years are you going to able to wait before you start your band for real while your new drummer trains? In the mean time you aren't able to make any money because the band can't perform. The average size of a company is 1-4 people. They aren't Walmart size etc.. They don't have the budget to train an employee https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/
  - 5y ago

kevingadd 5y ago

Don't forget mass death - the pandemic has claimed millions of lives. That's going to deplete the workforce no matter what. Of course, most of the 'labor shortage' complaints are from people who pay bad wages and don't offer benefits, and most of that 'shortage' is from people who quit, not people who died.

giantg2 5y ago
I'm not sure mass death is really a major factor. The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce. Maybe it's a small factor both directly and in the transfer of wealth allowing the next generation to retire slightly early, but certainly only a small effect. The quitting you mentioned is a bigger driver.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It's sufficient but the causality tends to be secondary. America, as currently patterned, is a fragile society. People balance work and family through ad-hoc systems with few redundancies. Now a pandemic comes around that killed a bunch of people who were providing informal support for the main workforce. A man in Georgia can't do full-time anymore because he's a single dad and the daycare shut down for the duration of the pandemic. A mom exits the workforce because the grandparents who were watching the kids after school are now dead. Someone loses someone dear to them and re-thinks their life direction. These things add up.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  26% of people 65 and older were working in 2019. Between Feb 2020 and Feb 2021 the labor force participation rate for that age bracket dropped 11.2%, while the younger brackets dropped 1-2%. That's a significant number of people who didn't die but either lost their jobs or felt unsafe continuing to work and decided to retire rather than looking for a new job.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Exactly, the quitting is the bigger factor. It's not that the labor force has died in mass.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

Not to disagree with you -- of course I agree with you -- but in your scenario a MacDo burger now costs $20.

Schiendelman 5y ago
How much does a McDonalds burger cost right now in the places with the best worker protections and pay?
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Pretty sure it's not $20 dollars adjusted for inflation and exchange rates. Who would by them? May $5?
  - Arainach 5y ago
    You've missed the point. McDonalds here in Seattle starts workers at $16+. A Big Mac is still within a dollar or two of what it is in the rest of the country. It's not $20. Dick's Deluxe starts pay at $19 and has benefits. Their burger is $1.80.
    - hungryforcodes 5y ago
      And yet these are all the people that are apparently missing in action in the economy. Or are they? Perhaps it's just small businesses that are unable to compete.
    - ybessyehs6542 5y ago
      It's misleading to say "a dollar or two" cheaper when that's almost 50% cheaper. "Customers may pay anywhere from $3.75 for a Big Mac in Austin, Texas, to $6.39 in Seattle. For Cheeseburgers, the variation was even greater, from $1 in places like Chicago and Houston to $2.29 in New York City." https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-mac-costs-more-seattle-austin https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-m...

will4274 5y ago

> There is no such thing as labor shortage. I'll be sure to tell my history professor. He'll be interested to know that all those textbooks he wrote about Europe immediately after the bubonic plague were wrong.

akagusu 5y ago
I think we are not in the same context as Europe after bubonic plague.
- will4274 5y ago
  ?? Parent didn't say we aren't in a labor shortage right now. Parent said labor shortages weren't a real thing. "There is no Ferrari in my garage" vs "there is no such thing as Ferrari"

dominotw 5y ago

> There is no such thing as labor shortage. I assume most of the ppl here either held a h1b or a worked with ppl on h1b. Strange thing to say on here.

thrower123 5y ago
I don't quite understand what it is you are implying. Labor shortages and H1-B visas have very little to do with each other.
- tbrownaw 5y ago
  The nominal reason for h1-b to be a thing is for cases where you can't find someone locally with the skills you need. How exactly do you define "shortage" to be unrelated to that?
  - DrewRWx 5y ago
    Because those H1B requirements are pro-forma and the visa itself gives the company access to another easily controlled and underpaid immigrant to drive down wages.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    So there is no labour shortage, there is a local labour shortage.
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    That’s not how they’re used. We immigrants get hired because companies get away with paying us less. There’s a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

zenonu 5y ago

Additionally, companies do not have a right to exist. If your business needs to pay minimum wage, profits are thin, and employees are quitting to find something better, it probably shouldn't be a thing any more. There isn't a labor shortage - your business isn't providing enough value for the labor it requires.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
newbamboo 5y ago
A world without musicians? No thanks.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  You can pay musicians fairly by streaming and buying through other channels like Bandcamp and resonate.is, which if we all did it would make the profession far more viable.
- rybosworld 5y ago
  That is... quite a leap
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  A world without corporate musicians? A-OK. I'm not clear why there would be no musicians if it requires minimum wage, razor thin profit margins, etc.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Music and art existed before currency was a thing. It will continue to exist as long as humans exis.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Most musicians and artist make nothing from their music and art, yet folks are still making it.
5y ago

api 5y ago

The inflation isn’t new either. We have had loony inflation in real estate (by far the worst), stocks, speculative assets, tuition, etc. for well over a decade. Nobody cared until we started to get inflation in the one area we actually need it: wages. Now we have an “inflation crisis.”

cudgy 5y ago
Don’t forget healthcare, property insurance, rent, and autos/transportation.

thrower123 5y ago

There's an ever-increasing issue of people who are not able to provide value sufficient to justify their wages as those wages increase.

carapace 5y ago
That may well be true (FWIW I agree that it's a problem and it's getting worse), however, that's not a "labor shortage" or low supply of labor, eh?
JKCalhoun 5y ago
So the company was designed to fail if wages increased?
- quesera 5y ago
  All companies would fail, if wages were increased beyond a point. The argument is about where that point lies with respect to a minimum, living, or worthwhile, wage.

chmod600 5y ago

You use the loaded word "shortage" without defining it, and you don't appear to be using the typical definition.

synergy20 5y ago

Easy said than done. Capitalism is imperfect, but socialism is worse, much worse. Let the market decide, and let the welfare to help those truly in need(those disabled or mentally ill, but not the lazy), use tax as a way to mitigate the gap. It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. The government actually did its part(food stamps, free lunch, section 8 housing, no tax or low tax for low income families,etc), doing more will lead all of us to poverty(been there seen that).

rbanffy 5y ago
You imply a false dichotomy. There are numerous systems between the barely regulated capitalism of the US that pushes so many people into poverty in the richest country on the planet while enriching billionaires as if they provided a huge benefit for society, and traditional by-the-book socialism that was never implemented except in Star Trek (except it’s never mentioned). Europe has pretty much everything in the spectrum and, so far, it hasn’t led us to poverty.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
You didn't explain how Socialism is worse, much worse. It might be but you assume we know this to be a fact? Many in the U.S look envious to the social support that is offered in European countries. > and let the welfare to help those truly indeed That's more like Socialism than Capitalism, that's for sure. > use tax as a way to mitigate the gap This is Capitalism? > It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. You could just as well be defending Socialism with that comment.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Someone equated capitalism to freedom the other day and I asked which one is more free: choosing what you study so you can work and have a large and comfortable house for your family or work on what you want, knowing that your basic needs (including a house, even if not large) will always be provided for.
- synergy20 5y ago
  Since capitalism is imperfect so adding some socialism for the poor as stated is OK, going too far on the socialism side will ruin us all. This is my point. They're not black and white binary choices, keeping capitalism as the backbone is key. If you really like socialism, welcome to Venezuela.

makomk 5y ago

I'm pretty sure it's not possible for companies to simply decide to pay everyone across the economy better in real terms so they can "live a meaningful life", for the simple reason that all of the things those workers want to buy need to be produced, which in turn is constrained by the availability of workers (amongst other things). If a whole bunch of businesses become non-viable due to not being able to get labour, that actually decreases the supply of stuff to buy which means people's pay has to become worse in real terms. Now, of course there are ways to reduce the number of workers required, but the easy options will have been taken by now leaving only capital-intensive choices that require taking other scarce resources (like, say, chips) away from being used to create things people buy directly. There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That's inherently limited by the availability of actual stuff, and the super-wealthy just aren't a high enough proportion of overall consumption that there's any way for them to that. Maybe if we were in a 2008-style crisis where unemployment was high and the problem was the financial system there'd be clever solutions involving redistributing money or something, but that's not the reality we're living.

cudgy 5y ago
“ There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms.” Sure there is. The hoard of money is called “profits”. Companies pay higher wages and have less profits or possibly (if they can) raise the prices of their goods to compensate.
DarylZero 5y ago
That depends on how you measure things. I think what people want most of all is to have access to the stability of production guaranteed by modern industrial practices. Our society converts stability and abundance in the production process into precarity and reward/punish incentive structures in the access controls to consumption. These represent fundamentally different modes of interaction with the economy and social environment. They're different worlds. And what does talk about production in "real terms" say about the value of one over the other?
5y ago

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse. Well, that's in theory. In practice every single country prefer thousands of minimum wage workers employed by Amazon than thousands of unemployed people because Amazon doesn't really need them and hiring a lot of people that do not provide actual value to the company is simply their part of the deal with governments. Now imagine that there are literally hundreds of smaller Amazons that employ millions of workers. It's an hard problem to solve, shortage of labor does exist and appear in many forms, one of them is not enough qualified workers for the job. Where worker protection laws are stronger than US, conditions are better for employed people, but worse for unemployed ones,because the job market is blocked. Salaries are lower because a stiff market guarantees that workers will have a harder time switching job, they'll accept a lower salary for a job that's safer and protected by the State and work there as long ad they can. Also: a very limited number of businesses are competing for talents in the job market. Most of them will only make sure they fill the positions they need at the price they are willing to pay, they won't start offering higher salaries to everybody.

narag 5y ago
[deleted] Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments. I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Not every single country works like that They do. Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians? > Unemployment is more expensive, It is not a financial issue. Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates. Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries. EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.

dominotw 5y ago

Millions of people become american residents on the 'labor shortage' permise. Quite silly to say there is no such thing as labor shortage. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm... > The DOL must certify to the USCIS that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment dol literally has a certification for 'labor shortage'

trixie_ 5y ago

People will work to survive. The article states people left the work force primarily due to ‘generous government stimulus’

cmarschner 5y ago

Well there is labor shortage for the exact same reason - if paying workers fairly means it is not worth hiring them then there is no business, hence no demand for workers. Labor shortage just means that the market is not in equilibrium where for all the conditions labor is asked for there is an offer available on the market. It goes both ways.

new_realist 5y ago

Retirement is a near universal human goal. Why would people work instead of retire? That seems at odds with observed behavior.

disambiguation 5y ago

Sure those are all feel good platitudes, but we both know that's not how the world works. Consider the device you used to post your comment, where did it come from?