17 ms·

A nationwide shortage of public workers

94 points by wallflower 4y ago

tristor 4y ago
This is only going to get worse. Just look at a demographic graph, as Boomers retire and Zoomers delay entering the workforce expect a shortfall of millions of people to fill existing white collar jobs, the trades have already been decimated.
- tarr11 4y ago
  The birth replacement rate in the United States isn’t sufficient to fill all the jobs, and automation is still decades (or more) away from replacing them as well. I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Well, or automation just is less convenient/isn't as good. We'll probably see a lot more self-service at stores for example which (depending) I don't really like but if you have to wait 20 minutes in the one open cashier line, I guess you adjust. Repeat for ordering at restaurants, etc. And other tasks just get more expensive and you either just do them yourself, pay more, and/or wait longer.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
One of my jobs is public sector. Our project has maybe half the roles filled. A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled. And those more senior roles are still to be filled. But we are charging ahead anyway to give the idea of progress. People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  Why is the general public a bad boss?
  - Proven 4y ago
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    Combine the financial stingyness of pretty much every manager anywhere with the self righteousness of people who truly treat you like you are their Victorian era servant as in their minds they own you for paying you. Customer service people get treated like this all the time, public or private sector.
- eastbound 4y ago
  It sounds just like the private sector: Lack of staff everywhere. Perhaps talking too much about comfort of life led too many people to walk away; Meanwhile, well, we obviously generate enough wealth since they are walking away satisfied with their new standard of living. The danger is, as a society, perhaps the feedback look has inertia: WAY too many people have resigned from the “hustle life” and we are not yet feeling the effect of what happens when so few people work. Maybe, after 10 years, the Western countries will drop off the G8, and be replaced by cultures who are more willing to work.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    The pandemic had the effect of the wake-up call of "Why hustle all of your life, enjoy it more, for it may end sooner than you expect.", although I don't know how great that effect is. Maybe in the West/all over the world the workers have also noticed that the wealth is getting funneled more towards the top (Bezos can now send Captain Kirk up to the sky in a penis and buy a yacht that made headlines because a bridge in the Netherlands had to be allegedly disassembled so it would fit through...). Even in China the youth are (or they were, was it just a fad?) doing the "lie flat" movement that the government has made statements of "Everyone has to work hard for the greater good!".
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/P3yeR https://archive.ph/P3yeR
jszymborski 4y ago
My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which artificially limit movement. The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
- jlokier 4y ago
  That's surprising to me. Canada has a reputation where I am for being generally pro-immigration and friendly to immigrants. Is this not the case, or is it specifically different in Quebec?
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    Quebec is effectively a country within a country. Even our legal systems differ in some major ways (this is why you often see contests that aren't valid in Quebec)!
  - mikrl 4y ago
    You have to remember that Canada is not a monolith. Quebec is rather nationalistic for historical reasons. In ways both productive and pathological IMO. I won’t get into it as an Anglo and immigrant but I encourage you to visit QC some time and steep yourself in the culture. Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian. A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
  - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    Quebec enacts many policies to protect their culture — french language requirements, banning religious symbols and clothing in certain places and jobs, etc — which make it harder for immigrants (and Canadians from other provinces) to integrate. I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.
Ericson2314 4y ago
Public sector needs to stop paying shit wages.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  I have no idea why you were downvoted for the obvious answer.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses. Yes, the voters want their potholes filled but that doesn't mean they'll approve a bond issue or whatever to pay for it.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Let these voters suffer their decisions seems like the only option? They learn eventually. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansas-tax-cut-experiment/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansa... “Voters choose to withhold funding for public services they expect” would be a better headline.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        >Let these voters suffer their decisions seems like the only option? Seems perfectly fine. And maybe they decide that they don't actually want to pay for some public services or they're fine with more automated/online versions of certain things. For example, where I live you do a lot more associated with the DMV online than you used to and I assume significantly fewer people are employed. Of course there can be issues with access and those need to be dealt with. It's not clear to me that, in general, state governments are massively underfunded.
    - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      >Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses. I mean there clearly is one. Ukraine got billions within two days of asking. We've sent them what, $70 billion this year alone? Funnily enough no new outlet seems to be tracking the total, just covering each one individually so it doesn't look like we're doing what we're doing: Prioritizing Ukraine over US citizens.
colechristensen 4y ago
Yawn. Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all) It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.
ghiculescu 4y ago
Lots of comments saying more immigration is the answer. Perhaps historically that has helped. But it’s a worrying position, and here’s why: 1) implicitly you are saying that lots of public sector jobs are so bad they can/should only be done by “others” that move “here” to do them for us. 2) who will do the crappy jobs where the immigrants came from? Getting immigrants to do exclusively jobs that locals won’t do feels like a bandaid to me. Does anyone else worry about this?
- AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
  I'm worried about how this reality is leading to the formation of a modern slavery system. That might seem hyperbolic but I can assure all who read this, it is not. In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs. So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Astute observation, but at the same time it's the lesser evil to allow them to take that job. Let's not allow misguided compassion to do real world harm to the people to whom that compassion is directed.
    - datadata 4y ago
      If the US is supporting the worse conditions that make taking the job the lesser evil, and benefiting from the resultant labor (as parent comment claims), then it isn't really compassionate to support that system, as the system depends largely on suppressing quality of life elsewhere rather than creating opportunity. An analogy is that it might be the lessor evil for an African centuries ago to get on a slave ship rather than to be murdered on the spot. That doesn't make supporting slavery compassionate.
adjwilli 4y ago
- peteradio 4y ago
  Republicans operate differently at the federal level than they do at the State and Local level...
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Maybe this is region-dependent, but I haven't seen that to be the case. For example, Betsy DeVos pushed to defund public schools in favor of charter schools at the state level, to disastrous consequences [0], then pushed for the exact same policies at the national level. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-schools-education.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-...
    - peteradio 4y ago
      I can't read that article, so it would be difficult to discuss the solitary example you have.
    - ryan93 4y ago
      There is already a right to education in Detroit. What does a right to literacy look like? You can’t make people learn
- ajross 4y ago
  As cynical as that rhetoric is, it's not the problem. The article answers the question quite convincingly, though it takes eight paragraphs to get there: government jobs don't pay well and governments[1] are very slow to adjust worker pay to market conditions. So no one wants to work these jobs because they're working better jobs elsewhere. [1] Across the ideological spectrum. Sure, republicans might have a cynical reason to want to torpedo the government, but no bureaucrat wants to raise pay scales. It's all downsides from the perspective of middle management.
BMc2020 4y ago
“It’s on TV when the city is negotiating with the city manager to give them a 3 percent raise,” said National League of Cities CEO Clarence E. Anthony, describing a “fishbowl effect” that doesn’t exist for most private-employer wage negotiations. “People call in, saying, ‘Why do they deserve an increase? They’re public servants!’” Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts. I dug up the lede from where it was buried.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  the fattest, laziest, most 401k retirement gold plated health care bureaucrats I have ever met in real life, say exactly "you don't pay well enough, we need budget increases" as a reply to almost every problem. Their leaders rise in the ranks by making this statement with ever-more removal of details, essentially no accountability, no efficiency designs, no program changes.. Calling out a single unfair, one-sided statement as your rallying cry, is negotiations 101. all sides are guilty here
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    I hear you, but let's circle back to the part where EMS staff is being poached by Dunkin fucking Donuts. That should not even be possible. A pizza delivery driver in a decent delivery area can make multiples (!!!) of the median salary for EMS staff.
    - MikePlacid 4y ago
      > private firms are rapidly raising compensation. Government employers have been slower to adapt Reads like someone has discovered that the government sector has a hard time competing with the capitalist sector.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        The government offers stability and post retirement benefits, as opposed to cash remuneration. Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today, so this type of remuneration is useful for campaigning on “keeping taxes low today”.
tobyjsullivan 4y ago
I suspect this can be generalized beyond the public sector. How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.) As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards. Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain. The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions. And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years). I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.
- danaris 4y ago
  > Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. Where are salaries higher? That doesn't seem to be the case in real terms in most places.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    The article literally talked about Dunkin’ Donuts and Amazon being higher paying.
    - danaris 4y ago
      Higher paying than what? Than other places you can get jobs now? The most conservative estimate I've seen shows that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the past 50 years, it would be over $21/hour now. The minimum wage. From what I've seen, Dunkin and Amazon* pay a $15 minimum wage—which, yes, is better than many other places now, but not compared to what you could expect to get for similar jobs several decades ago (adjusted for inflation). And I haven't heard anything one way or the other about Dunkin, but Amazon is actively hostile to unions, which were the strong sword and shield of blue collar workers like them back when they could expect pensions and such—not at all coincidentally. * For those actually designated employees; I'm given to understand that Amazon also does all sorts of shenanigans to designate various people who work for them as contractors of some type.
globalreset 4y ago
Lack of people to work should be the norm. Getting enough humans to work should be the bottleneck of the system to force treating them well and optimize everything around them. The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
- criley2 4y ago
  The working class will get a larger chunk of the pie only if they organize into powerful unions and directly negotiate with the wealthy to dramatically reduce corporate profits. Right now all that pie that should go to workers goes to investors. Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that. Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    Unions don’t work the way you think they do. If they are large unions they actually actively negotiate against the workers as well. Take a look at the railroad union as an example. Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      ok, lets go with smaller unions then.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      Using one union as a stand-in for all is pretty silly... Should we understand large corporations entirely on the basis of Enron?
      - rdtwo 4y ago
nixnax 4y ago
antiquark 4y ago
[flagged]
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Define 'many'
  - antiquark 4y ago
    For example: "The New York City Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and aides for not complying with its vaccine mandate, bringing the total to nearly 2,000, the New York Post reported Saturday." https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/850-more-unvaxxed-nyc-teachers-school-aides-fired/ https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/850-more-unvaxxed-nyc-teachers...
igtztorrero 4y ago
- bombcar 4y ago
  Rust and lead in the water can be solved by Rust!
ShredKazoo 4y ago
People are saying that states and cities just need to raise wages, but that's not always possible... >...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt. https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1295391401463750661 https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506... Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them? Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low. https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-government/ https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Our little town has privatized garbagemen and you have something like five+ companies to choose from. It seems to be working decently well. But we also have a very local town power and water utility that is also working well, too. So perhaps it’s something else.
  - jawns 4y ago
    In Delaware, where I live, garbage and recycling pickup are done by private companies, rather than municipal governments. The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      That is definitely the downside. And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract. I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.
JoyfulTurkey 4y ago
My wife is looking to change jobs in the midwest of the US. When we search, however, the majority of openings are less than full time and have no health insurance benefits. And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  The jobs can't afford to provide healthcare either. The underlying harsh truths of health care in the United States is that it became bloated by design (incentives for high base prices), and also that the US population is incredibly unhealthy. And that a few million of health care workers (mostly in insurance companies) will have to lose their jobs to make it fair for the rest of us. But because unhealthy people are lumped together with healthier ones, it tends to lower the costs to a tolerable (still very high) level. Also, many workers don't pay their full premiums, which again helps mask the true costs of health care. Eventually it will all come crashing down and there will be far more suffering than there had to be, had we addressed the problem earlier and in full (Gut the insurance companies, Single-Payer, Cost ceilings on critical medication).
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    I agree with your assessment that single payer is necessary, but as for the millions of job losses claim, I don’t agree. Those millions of jobs are for doing something right now, so do you think that something will be eliminated just because the government took over and what is that something? I don’t believe that many jobs could be effectively useless, but I stand to be corrected.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      If they all get jobs with Government Healthcare inc, where are the actual savings coming from? Who is going to be earning less? The profit margins of healthcare insurance companies are almost nothing. Look at Humana for instance... 2.5% net margins. Cut that out and every american saves $5 a month.
renewiltord 4y ago
It's okay. It's not the end of the world. Many organizations eventually need to die. In the private sector, companies just collapse. In the public sector because we will prop them up no matter what, we'll need to take some short term pain as we defund the department.
mothsonasloth 4y ago
Same here in the UK with local council (government) and NHS (healthcare) jobs. The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere. These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish. No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay". Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK. Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  > Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it > "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay". You're saying fixing the root cause of this sentiment, wont fix the sentiment?
  - mothsonasloth 4y ago
    Would you still work in an organisation if they gave you more money but they still didn't help you with: - Work hours / shifts - Holidays - Micromanagement of your workload - Having orders given down but taking full responsibility if it goes wrong? - Miscommunication and resources not being available or sent to the wrong place?
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Me? No. But enough people to solve a worker shortage? Maybe.
    - rdtwo 4y ago
      Ask the railroad workers… that’s what they are striking about
nine_zeros 4y ago
REDUCE RED TAPE. You won't need as many public workers. Pay more to the remaining irreplaceable workers like teachers.
- fastaguy88 4y ago
  This is the problem with the classification “public workers”. While I haven’t been able to find the statistics, my understanding is that most local government budgets are dominated by school and police/fire department personnel. Indeed, I suspect that at the local level, there are very few bureaucrats to fire (perhaps building inspectors). Red tape may have its costs (as well as benefits), but bureaucrats do not add a lot of tax burden at the local level, which is where most public sector jobs are.
  - nine_zeros 4y ago
    Reducing red tape doesn't mean just reducing the number of personnel. It also means utilizing existing personnel effectively. Often government processes have SO MANY steps (often meaningless) that the total amount of work done by existing people is much lower than what they are capable of. When you go into the bowels of government, you realize how many steps are "Send X document by USPS, an employee evaluates for 6 weeks and sends Yes, No, Invalid, Request for more docs by USPS again." Then you send more documents and they take 8 weeks to evaluate again.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  This. Fire 50% of the administration and use the money to increase salaries for teachers/hire more teachers.
tchaffee 4y ago
The root of the problem is lack of market forces. When a union organizes against company owners for better salaries and benefits, they have to leave something on the table for the business owners who will otherwise just close their doors and open some other type of business, maybe even elsewhere. With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners. Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient. And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons. So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.
christkv 4y ago
We’ve got plenty here in Spain would be happy to ship you a couple hundred thousand might help our budgets and reduce red tape at the same time over here.
Jemm 4y ago
Shortage of jobs that pay and treat people with respect. Employers have enjoyed exploiting workers for much too long and now they feel entitled. Productivity has greatly increased. Pay and respect have not.
malandrew 4y ago
Do those jobs really pay less when you take into account pension benefits? Pension benefits are worth a LOT and continue to increase in value as people are living longer.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  In my state, no one hired after 2014 can be enrolled in the state pension system. It is all 401k/457.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
How many of these shortages were caused by the unconscienable "vaccine" mandates? Biden said the pandemic is over, but the administrative/bureaucratic controls remain in place, keeping people out of jobs in the federal and state sectors. Considering we've known for 2+ years these mRNA shots don't prevent transmission or infection, it's truly absurd that this was used to deny people jobs.

94 points by wallflower 4y ago

This is only going to get worse. Just look at a demographic graph, as Boomers retire and Zoomers delay entering the workforce expect a shortfall of millions of people to fill existing white collar jobs, the trades have already been decimated.

tarr11 4y ago
The birth replacement rate in the United States isn’t sufficient to fill all the jobs, and automation is still decades (or more) away from replacing them as well. I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Well, or automation just is less convenient/isn't as good. We'll probably see a lot more self-service at stores for example which (depending) I don't really like but if you have to wait 20 minutes in the one open cashier line, I guess you adjust. Repeat for ordering at restaurants, etc. And other tasks just get more expensive and you either just do them yourself, pay more, and/or wait longer.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

One of my jobs is public sector. Our project has maybe half the roles filled. A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled. And those more senior roles are still to be filled. But we are charging ahead anyway to give the idea of progress. People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.

ghiculescu 4y ago
Why is the general public a bad boss?
- Proven 4y ago
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Combine the financial stingyness of pretty much every manager anywhere with the self righteousness of people who truly treat you like you are their Victorian era servant as in their minds they own you for paying you. Customer service people get treated like this all the time, public or private sector.
eastbound 4y ago
It sounds just like the private sector: Lack of staff everywhere. Perhaps talking too much about comfort of life led too many people to walk away; Meanwhile, well, we obviously generate enough wealth since they are walking away satisfied with their new standard of living. The danger is, as a society, perhaps the feedback look has inertia: WAY too many people have resigned from the “hustle life” and we are not yet feeling the effect of what happens when so few people work. Maybe, after 10 years, the Western countries will drop off the G8, and be replaced by cultures who are more willing to work.
- netsharc 4y ago
  The pandemic had the effect of the wake-up call of "Why hustle all of your life, enjoy it more, for it may end sooner than you expect.", although I don't know how great that effect is. Maybe in the West/all over the world the workers have also noticed that the wealth is getting funneled more towards the top (Bezos can now send Captain Kirk up to the sky in a penis and buy a yacht that made headlines because a bridge in the Netherlands had to be allegedly disassembled so it would fit through...). Even in China the youth are (or they were, was it just a fad?) doing the "lie flat" movement that the government has made statements of "Everyone has to work hard for the greater good!".

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/P3yeR https://archive.ph/P3yeR

jszymborski 4y ago

My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which artificially limit movement. The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.

jlokier 4y ago
That's surprising to me. Canada has a reputation where I am for being generally pro-immigration and friendly to immigrants. Is this not the case, or is it specifically different in Quebec?
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Quebec is effectively a country within a country. Even our legal systems differ in some major ways (this is why you often see contests that aren't valid in Quebec)!
- mikrl 4y ago
  You have to remember that Canada is not a monolith. Quebec is rather nationalistic for historical reasons. In ways both productive and pathological IMO. I won’t get into it as an Anglo and immigrant but I encourage you to visit QC some time and steep yourself in the culture. Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian. A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
- __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Quebec enacts many policies to protect their culture — french language requirements, banning religious symbols and clothing in certain places and jobs, etc — which make it harder for immigrants (and Canadians from other provinces) to integrate. I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.

Ericson2314 4y ago

Public sector needs to stop paying shit wages.

geraldwhen 4y ago
I have no idea why you were downvoted for the obvious answer.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses. Yes, the voters want their potholes filled but that doesn't mean they'll approve a bond issue or whatever to pay for it.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Let these voters suffer their decisions seems like the only option? They learn eventually. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansas-tax-cut-experiment/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansa... “Voters choose to withhold funding for public services they expect” would be a better headline.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >Let these voters suffer their decisions seems like the only option? Seems perfectly fine. And maybe they decide that they don't actually want to pay for some public services or they're fine with more automated/online versions of certain things. For example, where I live you do a lot more associated with the DMV online than you used to and I assume significantly fewer people are employed. Of course there can be issues with access and those need to be dealt with. It's not clear to me that, in general, state governments are massively underfunded.
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    >Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses. I mean there clearly is one. Ukraine got billions within two days of asking. We've sent them what, $70 billion this year alone? Funnily enough no new outlet seems to be tracking the total, just covering each one individually so it doesn't look like we're doing what we're doing: Prioritizing Ukraine over US citizens.

colechristensen 4y ago

Yawn. Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all) It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.

ghiculescu 4y ago

Lots of comments saying more immigration is the answer. Perhaps historically that has helped. But it’s a worrying position, and here’s why: 1) implicitly you are saying that lots of public sector jobs are so bad they can/should only be done by “others” that move “here” to do them for us. 2) who will do the crappy jobs where the immigrants came from? Getting immigrants to do exclusively jobs that locals won’t do feels like a bandaid to me. Does anyone else worry about this?

AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
I'm worried about how this reality is leading to the formation of a modern slavery system. That might seem hyperbolic but I can assure all who read this, it is not. In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs. So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Astute observation, but at the same time it's the lesser evil to allow them to take that job. Let's not allow misguided compassion to do real world harm to the people to whom that compassion is directed.
  - datadata 4y ago
    If the US is supporting the worse conditions that make taking the job the lesser evil, and benefiting from the resultant labor (as parent comment claims), then it isn't really compassionate to support that system, as the system depends largely on suppressing quality of life elsewhere rather than creating opportunity. An analogy is that it might be the lessor evil for an African centuries ago to get on a slave ship rather than to be murdered on the spot. That doesn't make supporting slavery compassionate.

adjwilli 4y ago

peteradio 4y ago
Republicans operate differently at the federal level than they do at the State and Local level...
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Maybe this is region-dependent, but I haven't seen that to be the case. For example, Betsy DeVos pushed to defund public schools in favor of charter schools at the state level, to disastrous consequences [0], then pushed for the exact same policies at the national level. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-schools-education.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-...
  - peteradio 4y ago
    I can't read that article, so it would be difficult to discuss the solitary example you have.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    There is already a right to education in Detroit. What does a right to literacy look like? You can’t make people learn
ajross 4y ago
As cynical as that rhetoric is, it's not the problem. The article answers the question quite convincingly, though it takes eight paragraphs to get there: government jobs don't pay well and governments[1] are very slow to adjust worker pay to market conditions. So no one wants to work these jobs because they're working better jobs elsewhere. [1] Across the ideological spectrum. Sure, republicans might have a cynical reason to want to torpedo the government, but no bureaucrat wants to raise pay scales. It's all downsides from the perspective of middle management.

BMc2020 4y ago

“It’s on TV when the city is negotiating with the city manager to give them a 3 percent raise,” said National League of Cities CEO Clarence E. Anthony, describing a “fishbowl effect” that doesn’t exist for most private-employer wage negotiations. “People call in, saying, ‘Why do they deserve an increase? They’re public servants!’” Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts. I dug up the lede from where it was buried.

mistrial9 4y ago
the fattest, laziest, most 401k retirement gold plated health care bureaucrats I have ever met in real life, say exactly "you don't pay well enough, we need budget increases" as a reply to almost every problem. Their leaders rise in the ranks by making this statement with ever-more removal of details, essentially no accountability, no efficiency designs, no program changes.. Calling out a single unfair, one-sided statement as your rallying cry, is negotiations 101. all sides are guilty here
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  I hear you, but let's circle back to the part where EMS staff is being poached by Dunkin fucking Donuts. That should not even be possible. A pizza delivery driver in a decent delivery area can make multiples (!!!) of the median salary for EMS staff.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    > private firms are rapidly raising compensation. Government employers have been slower to adapt Reads like someone has discovered that the government sector has a hard time competing with the capitalist sector.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      The government offers stability and post retirement benefits, as opposed to cash remuneration. Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today, so this type of remuneration is useful for campaigning on “keeping taxes low today”.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago

I suspect this can be generalized beyond the public sector. How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.) As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards. Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain. The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions. And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years). I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.

danaris 4y ago
> Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. Where are salaries higher? That doesn't seem to be the case in real terms in most places.
- azinman2 4y ago
  The article literally talked about Dunkin’ Donuts and Amazon being higher paying.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Higher paying than what? Than other places you can get jobs now? The most conservative estimate I've seen shows that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the past 50 years, it would be over $21/hour now. The minimum wage. From what I've seen, Dunkin and Amazon* pay a $15 minimum wage—which, yes, is better than many other places now, but not compared to what you could expect to get for similar jobs several decades ago (adjusted for inflation). And I haven't heard anything one way or the other about Dunkin, but Amazon is actively hostile to unions, which were the strong sword and shield of blue collar workers like them back when they could expect pensions and such—not at all coincidentally. * For those actually designated employees; I'm given to understand that Amazon also does all sorts of shenanigans to designate various people who work for them as contractors of some type.

globalreset 4y ago

Lack of people to work should be the norm. Getting enough humans to work should be the bottleneck of the system to force treating them well and optimize everything around them. The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.

criley2 4y ago
The working class will get a larger chunk of the pie only if they organize into powerful unions and directly negotiate with the wealthy to dramatically reduce corporate profits. Right now all that pie that should go to workers goes to investors. Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that. Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Unions don’t work the way you think they do. If they are large unions they actually actively negotiate against the workers as well. Take a look at the railroad union as an example. Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    ok, lets go with smaller unions then.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    Using one union as a stand-in for all is pretty silly... Should we understand large corporations entirely on the basis of Enron?
    - rdtwo 4y ago

nixnax 4y ago

antiquark 4y ago

[flagged]

wildrhythms 4y ago
Define 'many'
- antiquark 4y ago
  For example: "The New York City Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and aides for not complying with its vaccine mandate, bringing the total to nearly 2,000, the New York Post reported Saturday." https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/850-more-unvaxxed-nyc-teachers-school-aides-fired/ https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/850-more-unvaxxed-nyc-teachers...

igtztorrero 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
Rust and lead in the water can be solved by Rust!

ShredKazoo 4y ago

People are saying that states and cities just need to raise wages, but that's not always possible... >...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt. https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1295391401463750661 https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506... Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them? Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low. https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-government/ https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...

bombcar 4y ago
Our little town has privatized garbagemen and you have something like five+ companies to choose from. It seems to be working decently well. But we also have a very local town power and water utility that is also working well, too. So perhaps it’s something else.
- jawns 4y ago
  In Delaware, where I live, garbage and recycling pickup are done by private companies, rather than municipal governments. The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That is definitely the downside. And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract. I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.

JoyfulTurkey 4y ago

My wife is looking to change jobs in the midwest of the US. When we search, however, the majority of openings are less than full time and have no health insurance benefits. And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.

antisthenes 4y ago
The jobs can't afford to provide healthcare either. The underlying harsh truths of health care in the United States is that it became bloated by design (incentives for high base prices), and also that the US population is incredibly unhealthy. And that a few million of health care workers (mostly in insurance companies) will have to lose their jobs to make it fair for the rest of us. But because unhealthy people are lumped together with healthier ones, it tends to lower the costs to a tolerable (still very high) level. Also, many workers don't pay their full premiums, which again helps mask the true costs of health care. Eventually it will all come crashing down and there will be far more suffering than there had to be, had we addressed the problem earlier and in full (Gut the insurance companies, Single-Payer, Cost ceilings on critical medication).
- ok_dad 4y ago
  I agree with your assessment that single payer is necessary, but as for the millions of job losses claim, I don’t agree. Those millions of jobs are for doing something right now, so do you think that something will be eliminated just because the government took over and what is that something? I don’t believe that many jobs could be effectively useless, but I stand to be corrected.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    If they all get jobs with Government Healthcare inc, where are the actual savings coming from? Who is going to be earning less? The profit margins of healthcare insurance companies are almost nothing. Look at Humana for instance... 2.5% net margins. Cut that out and every american saves $5 a month.

renewiltord 4y ago

It's okay. It's not the end of the world. Many organizations eventually need to die. In the private sector, companies just collapse. In the public sector because we will prop them up no matter what, we'll need to take some short term pain as we defund the department.

mothsonasloth 4y ago

Same here in the UK with local council (government) and NHS (healthcare) jobs. The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere. These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish. No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay". Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK. Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.

RobotToaster 4y ago
> Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it > "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay". You're saying fixing the root cause of this sentiment, wont fix the sentiment?
- mothsonasloth 4y ago
  Would you still work in an organisation if they gave you more money but they still didn't help you with: - Work hours / shifts - Holidays - Micromanagement of your workload - Having orders given down but taking full responsibility if it goes wrong? - Miscommunication and resources not being available or sent to the wrong place?
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Me? No. But enough people to solve a worker shortage? Maybe.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    Ask the railroad workers… that’s what they are striking about

nine_zeros 4y ago

REDUCE RED TAPE. You won't need as many public workers. Pay more to the remaining irreplaceable workers like teachers.

fastaguy88 4y ago
This is the problem with the classification “public workers”. While I haven’t been able to find the statistics, my understanding is that most local government budgets are dominated by school and police/fire department personnel. Indeed, I suspect that at the local level, there are very few bureaucrats to fire (perhaps building inspectors). Red tape may have its costs (as well as benefits), but bureaucrats do not add a lot of tax burden at the local level, which is where most public sector jobs are.
- nine_zeros 4y ago
  Reducing red tape doesn't mean just reducing the number of personnel. It also means utilizing existing personnel effectively. Often government processes have SO MANY steps (often meaningless) that the total amount of work done by existing people is much lower than what they are capable of. When you go into the bowels of government, you realize how many steps are "Send X document by USPS, an employee evaluates for 6 weeks and sends Yes, No, Invalid, Request for more docs by USPS again." Then you send more documents and they take 8 weeks to evaluate again.
mbrodersen 4y ago
This. Fire 50% of the administration and use the money to increase salaries for teachers/hire more teachers.

tchaffee 4y ago

The root of the problem is lack of market forces. When a union organizes against company owners for better salaries and benefits, they have to leave something on the table for the business owners who will otherwise just close their doors and open some other type of business, maybe even elsewhere. With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners. Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient. And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons. So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.

christkv 4y ago

We’ve got plenty here in Spain would be happy to ship you a couple hundred thousand might help our budgets and reduce red tape at the same time over here.

Jemm 4y ago

Shortage of jobs that pay and treat people with respect. Employers have enjoyed exploiting workers for much too long and now they feel entitled. Productivity has greatly increased. Pay and respect have not.

malandrew 4y ago

Do those jobs really pay less when you take into account pension benefits? Pension benefits are worth a LOT and continue to increase in value as people are living longer.

Tangurena2 4y ago
In my state, no one hired after 2014 can be enrolled in the state pension system. It is all 401k/457.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

How many of these shortages were caused by the unconscienable "vaccine" mandates? Biden said the pandemic is over, but the administrative/bureaucratic controls remain in place, keeping people out of jobs in the federal and state sectors. Considering we've known for 2+ years these mRNA shots don't prevent transmission or infection, it's truly absurd that this was used to deny people jobs.