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> Coast Guard culinary specialists are critical afloat. But, on bases, contractors have taken away many shore billets culinary specialists need to recharge afte

> Coast Guard culinary specialists are critical afloat. But, on bases, contractors have taken away many shore billets culinary specialists need to recharge after a stint at sea. Lacking spots at kitchens ashore, Coast Guard culinary specialists have little choice but to spend their career constantly at sea, struggling to keep old or under-designed ship kitchens operational. And when they are lucky enough to find a shoreside job, they’re usually snatched away to temporarily fill in for an understaffed vessel. The problem, as we are seeing in many other parts of the economy right now, is that if you treat your employees badly, they will eventually all quit, regardless of how good the pay is. Especially so if they are highly-trained professionals that are in high demand elsewhere, as in this case.

rsj_hn 4y ago
There are many situations where jobs suck, or are dangerous, etc. In that case, the employer can make them suck less or pay a lot more. At some point, they will find people to staff those jobs. So I am not a big fan of employers talking about "labor shortages". What they mean is "we have this role, and can't afford to pay the market clearing rate for the role. Therefore there is a shortage." This is as much true for a government employer, non-profit employer, or private sector worker, as they are all hiring from the same labor pool, and workers have a choice as to who to work for. Before you say that "no amount of money is enough", just think that if for some reason they can't have the workers be cooks on shore, they can just pay them a vacation for that same shore period. The cooks on shore could then travel, or take a class, or do whatever they want. If you could find cooks who would work on a mix of shore and sea, but not sea only, then rotate the staff and pay the cooks to do nothing. Obviously an extreme example, but I'm giving it to illustrate the point that yes, it does boil down to money in the end. It usually does.
- citizenkeen 4y ago
  Anytime someone uses the phrase "labor shortage", remind them that what they have is a "salary shortage".
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    It’s amazing how often a salary shortage coexists with a significant profit surplus.
    - pooper 4y ago
      Not just that, salary refuses to go up but prices refuses to go down. From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-profits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-prof... archived at https://archive.ph/B1cjX https://archive.ph/B1cjX » Although food companies are prominent examples of how rapid inflation is being passed from producers to consumers, the trend is evident across a wide variety of industries. Executives from banks, airlines, hotels, consumer goods companies and other firms have said they are finding that customers have money to spend and can tolerate higher prices. [...] » Over the last year, the price of food eaten at home has soared 13 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with some items spiking even higher. Cereals and bakery goods are up 16.2 percent from a year ago, closely followed by dairy, which has risen 15.9 percent.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    In this case it might be more literal since line cook was one of the jobs with the highest covid casualty rate. IIRC higher than frontline medical workers in the US.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Yep, in my country, we have a "labour shortage" in various industries... ...because those industries relied on migrants, offshore seasonal workers, and working holiday visa holders, to maintain staffing levels, at the lowest wages possible, with often shite working conditions - to the point of exploitation - because seasonal workers who paid a broker to get that job, and don't speak English, don't feel able to complain. When Covid kicked the teeth in of these industries addicted to low wage labour, did they re-evaluate their approach and improve the working conditions and wages they offeredto attract domestic workers? Haha no, they just complained about the government restricting international travel during a pandemic, and demanded special treatment. Sucks when the free market sends you signals about your price point.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is the dirty side of the "open immigration" - both illegal and legal. It's a modern form of indentured servitude trending to slavery.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > This is the dirty side of the "open immigration" - both illegal and legal. At least legal immigrants can be reached by the government and have their rights explained to them in a language they can understand. Unfortunately, most countries don't do that by default, and if people are lucky some sort of NGO (usually unions) steps up. The core problem anyway is a lack of enforcement of labor regulations, first by a lack of employer audits, followed by a subsequent lack of punitive actions against employers found to violate regulations.
    - smcl 4y ago
      If you have a relatively humane set of worker protections in addition to the a straight-forward path to legal immigration, it's nothing like indentured servitude or slavery. It's just ... work.
      - EdwardDiego 4y ago
        Technically yes, but in reality, greed... greed never changes. And immigration regulations that are intended to protect against abuse of the system, are often abused to extort people. E.g., you're from country X, living in a new country, Y, where you've bought a small business. Y is a desirable country to live in if you are from X. Your business is very low margin. You work very long hours to keep afloat. But, an immigration broker also from country X gets in touch. They have many clients back home who would love to be in country Y. They just need a work visa, but the job has to be a) skilled and b) not able to be easily filled by an existing citizen or permanent resident of Y. So here's the deal. The client pays the broker to be introduce to you. The client then agrees to pay you for a job - often there's a lump sum up-front, and often there's ongoing payments made under the table to the employer. You have to create a position that's suitably skilled of course, and you have to prove you couldn't fill the role locally. So your corner store is now recruiting for a "retail and marketing manager", and you placed one advert in the situations vacant in a local newspaper, no-one replied. You are now able to recruit your retail and marketing manager from X, and they can move here knowing that they have a work visa. It's a great deal - your worker got to move from X to Y, and you got an employee who, after their below-table payments to you, is likely working for far below minimum wage. And here's the best bit - if you treat them like crap, and they decide to complain to the authorities, well, given that they knowingly participated in immigration fraud, which you have proof of, they're very likely to be deported and banned from returning. So they have a very strong disincentive to complain, no matter how you treat them. And thus you continue to have a good source of revenue and cheap labour until they've been in the country long enough to apply for residence. And then, gosh well, you'll need another retail and marketing manager, won't you? Who pays a lump-sum upfront, and then kickbacks for two years. Here's some examples from my country: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/122467368/vicious-cycle-why-are-some-indian-migrants-so-badly-exploited-in-nz https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/122467368/vicious-cycle-why... https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411939/samoan-chief-joseph-auga-matamata-found-guilty-of-human-trafficking-and-slavery-charges https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411939/samoan-chief-jose... https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123020969/tauranga-man-charged-with-migrant-worker-exploitation-in-the-kiwifruit-industry https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123020969/tauranga-man-char... Fixing this is a hard question - yes, we want workers being exploited to be able to complain, but we also don't want people lying and falsifying documentation to get a visa. So what do you do in these scenarios? Where do you find a balance?
- 8note 4y ago
  Paying people to not work leads people to leave so they can work more to maintain and grow their skills for their next-level-up job. My parents company does that for pilots, and they eventually all quit saying they want to fly more
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If your parents are employing pilots on the treadmill towards 1500 hours where they qualify for an ATP and airline job, I can easily understand that.
  - rdtwo 4y ago
    The only jobs that pay for pilots are airlines. Of course they all quit. They would be stupid to stay
  - cjrp 4y ago
    Why is the company paying pilots to not fly? Seems like bad business?
    - ilyt 4y ago
      So when they will they won't have to hire
shagie 4y ago
Another branch - Sealift Command in the Navy - Chief Cook posting ( https://sealiftcommand.com/departments/culinary/chief-cook/25 https://sealiftcommand.com/departments/culinary/chief-cook/2... ) has > Salary: $44,866 - $48,453 + $8,973 This isn't too far off from the median pay of a head cook ( https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/chefs-and-head-cooks.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/chefs-a... ) though, there are variations out there ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm )
- scarecrowbob 4y ago
  True, but most of the cooks I know don't have to live in the basement of their kitchens.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    But that pay includes room and board (I think? Hope? I assume you don't have to bring your own boat) but it's also darn close to some of the McDonald's ads I've seen. I think the real kicker is there is/was a group of people who would do 6 months on the boat, 6 on shore and were happy with that setup, but now they can only do on the boat or just give up and go work on land.
    - causi 4y ago
      Not to mention pretty insane post-career benefits. I've had to hire more than one wildly unqualified person because higher-ups have a hardon for veterans.
      - vkou 4y ago
        > Not to mention pretty insane post-career benefits. VA healthcare is garbage, and pensions are heavily backloaded for people who have done the full 20.
        causi 4y ago
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Indeed, and the surprise is that... it's a surprise to many. I think inertia allowed things to go sideways for a long time in a lot of professions, without paying the price for it soon enough. It stayed unseen for long because those jobs are often not affecting directly the structure main goals, like sales, manufacturing or field agents. They are support jobs, and help the structure maintain its integrity on the long run. So it takes time for the problem to be detected, and for the top to even become motivated to fix it. It's quite possible they didn't even know it was a problem, or didn't think it was important. Hell, the person currently in charge have likely arrive at the post way after the decisions to destroy those jobs has been taken, years after years. Each year, one small increment at a time. We are seeing an extreme version phenomenon in the health system in France. Extreme because it touches more than support jobs. Hospitals are full of exhausted staff that are asked to make yet another effort, "just this once". Getting appointments for specialists now take months, even for repeated sessions. Doctors are making much less money than I do in IT, for much more work, responsibility and administrative pressure. This frog has been boiling for quite some time.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  It was an easy to predict consequences of the shift of paradigm in the last thirty to forty years. With the removal of companies middle layers, paths from operational positions to top management have basically disappeared. That means that at most companies, top managers have made their whole career there often starting in corporate finance jobs or at management consulting firms and have no experience whatsoever of what working for them as an employee is like. Usually the army fares better here because it still promote from inside its own ranks but apparently it was not enough to avoid this.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    The Boomers climbed the ladder then cut all the opportunities out from below them and pocketed and spent the money and didn’t save for retirement. As a whole, they are clearly going senile and mentally declining a lot faster than their parents. Also they’re selfish whiners. Most of em deserve cattle call retirement line up take your meds in run down projects they never bothered to upgrade. Prison not pensions for a bunch of them.
etempleton 4y ago
And then people act like it is an unsolvable problem. Maybe we just treat people better and make their job more tenable? No? Okay. It will keep being a problem then.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  It's hard to convince people to treat each other well when they've made it part of their identity that some types of people shouldn't be allowed to get ahead, or exist, and that you shouldn't be allowed to NOT have an unwanted pregnancy and therefore child. They see a labor force gaining power and they decide the "correct response" is to just decimate any power the labor force might gain. I don't understand it. This is america. We are ungodly wealthy. You can have your cake and eat it too, you can treat employees well and still make stupid amounts of money!

rsj_hn 4y ago

There are many situations where jobs suck, or are dangerous, etc. In that case, the employer can make them suck less or pay a lot more. At some point, they will find people to staff those jobs. So I am not a big fan of employers talking about "labor shortages". What they mean is "we have this role, and can't afford to pay the market clearing rate for the role. Therefore there is a shortage." This is as much true for a government employer, non-profit employer, or private sector worker, as they are all hiring from the same labor pool, and workers have a choice as to who to work for. Before you say that "no amount of money is enough", just think that if for some reason they can't have the workers be cooks on shore, they can just pay them a vacation for that same shore period. The cooks on shore could then travel, or take a class, or do whatever they want. If you could find cooks who would work on a mix of shore and sea, but not sea only, then rotate the staff and pay the cooks to do nothing. Obviously an extreme example, but I'm giving it to illustrate the point that yes, it does boil down to money in the end. It usually does.

citizenkeen 4y ago
Anytime someone uses the phrase "labor shortage", remind them that what they have is a "salary shortage".
- jacobolus 4y ago
  It’s amazing how often a salary shortage coexists with a significant profit surplus.
  - pooper 4y ago
    Not just that, salary refuses to go up but prices refuses to go down. From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-profits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-prof... archived at https://archive.ph/B1cjX https://archive.ph/B1cjX » Although food companies are prominent examples of how rapid inflation is being passed from producers to consumers, the trend is evident across a wide variety of industries. Executives from banks, airlines, hotels, consumer goods companies and other firms have said they are finding that customers have money to spend and can tolerate higher prices. [...] » Over the last year, the price of food eaten at home has soared 13 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with some items spiking even higher. Cereals and bakery goods are up 16.2 percent from a year ago, closely followed by dairy, which has risen 15.9 percent.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  In this case it might be more literal since line cook was one of the jobs with the highest covid casualty rate. IIRC higher than frontline medical workers in the US.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Yep, in my country, we have a "labour shortage" in various industries... ...because those industries relied on migrants, offshore seasonal workers, and working holiday visa holders, to maintain staffing levels, at the lowest wages possible, with often shite working conditions - to the point of exploitation - because seasonal workers who paid a broker to get that job, and don't speak English, don't feel able to complain. When Covid kicked the teeth in of these industries addicted to low wage labour, did they re-evaluate their approach and improve the working conditions and wages they offeredto attract domestic workers? Haha no, they just complained about the government restricting international travel during a pandemic, and demanded special treatment. Sucks when the free market sends you signals about your price point.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the dirty side of the "open immigration" - both illegal and legal. It's a modern form of indentured servitude trending to slavery.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > This is the dirty side of the "open immigration" - both illegal and legal. At least legal immigrants can be reached by the government and have their rights explained to them in a language they can understand. Unfortunately, most countries don't do that by default, and if people are lucky some sort of NGO (usually unions) steps up. The core problem anyway is a lack of enforcement of labor regulations, first by a lack of employer audits, followed by a subsequent lack of punitive actions against employers found to violate regulations.
  - smcl 4y ago
    If you have a relatively humane set of worker protections in addition to the a straight-forward path to legal immigration, it's nothing like indentured servitude or slavery. It's just ... work.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      Technically yes, but in reality, greed... greed never changes. And immigration regulations that are intended to protect against abuse of the system, are often abused to extort people. E.g., you're from country X, living in a new country, Y, where you've bought a small business. Y is a desirable country to live in if you are from X. Your business is very low margin. You work very long hours to keep afloat. But, an immigration broker also from country X gets in touch. They have many clients back home who would love to be in country Y. They just need a work visa, but the job has to be a) skilled and b) not able to be easily filled by an existing citizen or permanent resident of Y. So here's the deal. The client pays the broker to be introduce to you. The client then agrees to pay you for a job - often there's a lump sum up-front, and often there's ongoing payments made under the table to the employer. You have to create a position that's suitably skilled of course, and you have to prove you couldn't fill the role locally. So your corner store is now recruiting for a "retail and marketing manager", and you placed one advert in the situations vacant in a local newspaper, no-one replied. You are now able to recruit your retail and marketing manager from X, and they can move here knowing that they have a work visa. It's a great deal - your worker got to move from X to Y, and you got an employee who, after their below-table payments to you, is likely working for far below minimum wage. And here's the best bit - if you treat them like crap, and they decide to complain to the authorities, well, given that they knowingly participated in immigration fraud, which you have proof of, they're very likely to be deported and banned from returning. So they have a very strong disincentive to complain, no matter how you treat them. And thus you continue to have a good source of revenue and cheap labour until they've been in the country long enough to apply for residence. And then, gosh well, you'll need another retail and marketing manager, won't you? Who pays a lump-sum upfront, and then kickbacks for two years. Here's some examples from my country: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/122467368/vicious-cycle-why-are-some-indian-migrants-so-badly-exploited-in-nz https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/122467368/vicious-cycle-why... https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411939/samoan-chief-joseph-auga-matamata-found-guilty-of-human-trafficking-and-slavery-charges https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/411939/samoan-chief-jose... https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123020969/tauranga-man-charged-with-migrant-worker-exploitation-in-the-kiwifruit-industry https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123020969/tauranga-man-char... Fixing this is a hard question - yes, we want workers being exploited to be able to complain, but we also don't want people lying and falsifying documentation to get a visa. So what do you do in these scenarios? Where do you find a balance?
8note 4y ago
Paying people to not work leads people to leave so they can work more to maintain and grow their skills for their next-level-up job. My parents company does that for pilots, and they eventually all quit saying they want to fly more
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If your parents are employing pilots on the treadmill towards 1500 hours where they qualify for an ATP and airline job, I can easily understand that.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  The only jobs that pay for pilots are airlines. Of course they all quit. They would be stupid to stay
- cjrp 4y ago
  Why is the company paying pilots to not fly? Seems like bad business?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    So when they will they won't have to hire

shagie 4y ago

Another branch - Sealift Command in the Navy - Chief Cook posting ( https://sealiftcommand.com/departments/culinary/chief-cook/25 https://sealiftcommand.com/departments/culinary/chief-cook/2... ) has > Salary: $44,866 - $48,453 + $8,973 This isn't too far off from the median pay of a head cook ( https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/chefs-and-head-cooks.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/chefs-a... ) though, there are variations out there ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm )

scarecrowbob 4y ago
True, but most of the cooks I know don't have to live in the basement of their kitchens.
- bombcar 4y ago
  But that pay includes room and board (I think? Hope? I assume you don't have to bring your own boat) but it's also darn close to some of the McDonald's ads I've seen. I think the real kicker is there is/was a group of people who would do 6 months on the boat, 6 on shore and were happy with that setup, but now they can only do on the boat or just give up and go work on land.
  - causi 4y ago
    Not to mention pretty insane post-career benefits. I've had to hire more than one wildly unqualified person because higher-ups have a hardon for veterans.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > Not to mention pretty insane post-career benefits. VA healthcare is garbage, and pensions are heavily backloaded for people who have done the full 20.
      - causi 4y ago

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Indeed, and the surprise is that... it's a surprise to many. I think inertia allowed things to go sideways for a long time in a lot of professions, without paying the price for it soon enough. It stayed unseen for long because those jobs are often not affecting directly the structure main goals, like sales, manufacturing or field agents. They are support jobs, and help the structure maintain its integrity on the long run. So it takes time for the problem to be detected, and for the top to even become motivated to fix it. It's quite possible they didn't even know it was a problem, or didn't think it was important. Hell, the person currently in charge have likely arrive at the post way after the decisions to destroy those jobs has been taken, years after years. Each year, one small increment at a time. We are seeing an extreme version phenomenon in the health system in France. Extreme because it touches more than support jobs. Hospitals are full of exhausted staff that are asked to make yet another effort, "just this once". Getting appointments for specialists now take months, even for repeated sessions. Doctors are making much less money than I do in IT, for much more work, responsibility and administrative pressure. This frog has been boiling for quite some time.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
It was an easy to predict consequences of the shift of paradigm in the last thirty to forty years. With the removal of companies middle layers, paths from operational positions to top management have basically disappeared. That means that at most companies, top managers have made their whole career there often starting in corporate finance jobs or at management consulting firms and have no experience whatsoever of what working for them as an employee is like. Usually the army fares better here because it still promote from inside its own ranks but apparently it was not enough to avoid this.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  The Boomers climbed the ladder then cut all the opportunities out from below them and pocketed and spent the money and didn’t save for retirement. As a whole, they are clearly going senile and mentally declining a lot faster than their parents. Also they’re selfish whiners. Most of em deserve cattle call retirement line up take your meds in run down projects they never bothered to upgrade. Prison not pensions for a bunch of them.

etempleton 4y ago

And then people act like it is an unsolvable problem. Maybe we just treat people better and make their job more tenable? No? Okay. It will keep being a problem then.

mrguyorama 4y ago
It's hard to convince people to treat each other well when they've made it part of their identity that some types of people shouldn't be allowed to get ahead, or exist, and that you shouldn't be allowed to NOT have an unwanted pregnancy and therefore child. They see a labor force gaining power and they decide the "correct response" is to just decimate any power the labor force might gain. I don't understand it. This is america. We are ungodly wealthy. You can have your cake and eat it too, you can treat employees well and still make stupid amounts of money!