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> Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs Sounds like a signal from the market
by pfisherman 4y ago
> Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs
Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
- euroderf 4y agoI thought society was supposed to have learned its lesson during the pandemic, that the "low-end" jobs are often the most critical. But it seems that John Q Public has the memory of a goddamned fruit fly. So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything. If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
- luckylion 4y agoIt is that signal, but are we ready to pay everyone more, even for low-skill jobs? How much more is everyone willing to pay for groceries? How much more for health care? For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
- mgbmtl 4y agoWhile many large corporations declare record profits, I doubt that the person cleaning the toilets is really a major issue.
- luckylion 4y agoIt's not only about the person cleaning the toilets, companies often have more than one employee that's paid too little. Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
- zozbot234 4y agoNurses are highly skilled and highly paid workers, they do however have nursing aides for the grunt work.
- alistairSH 4y agoDepends on the nurses qualifications and specialty. Licensed vocational nurse don’t earn a huge amount. Registered nurses (4 year degree+) make ok to good money. Advanced practice nurses make good money overall. But they have post- graduate degrees and still don’t earn what a good senior developer does.
- luckylion 4y agoThat may be the case in the US, but not in Germany and Austria. Nurses are paid pretty bad, and, surprise surprise, they're having problems finding people to choose that career.
- soco 4y agoYeah there's this huge demand, for which they blame blame the nurses "ungrateful snobs" or get upset that immigrants are hired "taking away our jobs" or...
- imoverclocked 4y agoIn some places they may be highly paid. In many, they are not. I know this because of close family who have worked as managers of multiple hospitals and hospice that have extremely uneven pay scales even in a single region. You might even assert that the people with less pay have more/sufficient staffing on hand but you would be wrong. The amount of WTF/hospital in the US never ceases to surprise me.
- scottLobster 4y agoExactly, wealth is being concentrated at the top to such extremes that there is no more excess money in the lower/middle classes to tap. So somehow or other the increase in wages will have to come from the wealthy, whether through intentional redistribution, market forces, or peasant uprisings. Likely some combination of all three. Eventually it just becomes a physics problem. If $100 exist in the world, and one guy has $99, and you need to fund something that takes $2, you have to get $1 out of the rich guy somehow.
- raincom 4y agoOr devalue the dollar to the extent that $1 becomes $2. In which case, the person who holds $99 doesn't hold $99 as "raw cash"(nominal asset), but holds $99 worth of real assets. With this inflation or devaluation, his $99 will become $198 + delta. This delta comes as rent extraction from the ordinary people.
- quickthrower2 4y agoYour comment assumes that like energy, money cannot be created or destroyed. Which is false. Anyone can create new money by talking a loan from the bank. However this point also helps your argument: When you borrow you pay interest to someone richer. In a sense a combination of whoever you sent the money to, and the bank.
- sin7 4y agoCan poor people take out a loan and create new money?
- loa_in_ 4y agoThey don't, and in times where there's most need for that, banks squeeze their wallet close even tighter.
- quickthrower2 4y agoMy understanding is any loan from a bank creates new money. However not sure about the types of loans that poor people use such as payday loans and pay-in-4 services. Maybe that us too since an investor may use bank borrowed money to fund them?
- selestify 4y ago> But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles. So change those unsustainable lifestyles then
- scottLobster 4y agoYes, if you can't painlessly absorb a 50% increase in most peoples' second biggest expense after housing, it's all your fault and you're just being a spoiled child. /s The word "lifestyle" means more than beer, nice cars, and smoked-salmon-avocado-toast on vacation. It includes peoples' capability to invest in their future. I'm sure you can cite many examples of fools and their money being soon parted, but there are plenty of people doing everything right who are being screwed by inflation as well.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIn this hypothetical, the people that can't just absorb it are in the group getting paid more. And if the prices are increasing 50%, then the low end pay increases must be a lot higher than 50%.
- swearwolf 4y agoMaybe that’s the point though - maybe we should kill some lifestyles because they aren’t sustainable at scale.
- anigbrowl 4y ago'The market has spoken, but suddenly we'd rather not listen.' Your argument rests on an unspoken (and perhaps unrealized) premise that profits cannot be allowed to shrink; all costs must be passed to someone else.
- luckylion 4y agoTotally, but it's a society-wide conspiracy. You could try a policy proposal asking people to pay 22% instead of 18% of their income for health insurance, and 4% instead of 3% for long-term care insurance, but I doubt that you'll be very successful.
- lordnacho 4y agoWhat does distort mean? Penicillin distorts the growth of bacteria. This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
- ETH_start 4y agoSocial welfare programs distort in the sense that it turns people who could be contributing to the economy into drags on the economy by becoming unemployed welfare recipients. This matters because it leads to a generally lower quality of life. Importation of cheap foreign labor distorts in the sense of reducing the wages of low-skilled native residents.
- snapplebobapple 4y agoThats not the trick. The trick was and is underplaying the market power these guys have in specific labor segments because market power in labor can be a lot more localized than one would expect in certain situations and stuff like minimum wages give a tacit signal for what all the big employers in, for example, fast food should pay coordinating them like how a cartel would but without the illegal coordination meetings.
- kaushikc 4y agoWhatever doesn't suit our cartels agenda is considered as a distortion.