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Is it possible that the relative strength of the EU per hour worked results from the fact that the low end jobs were made non-existent by regulation and people

Is it possible that the relative strength of the EU per hour worked results from the fact that the low end jobs were made non-existent by regulation and people who work them in the US live off government handouts in the EU?

bigfudge 2y ago
I don't think so. UK and US have equivalent unemployment rates but vastly different welfare systems. Germany is more generous than the UK but has lower unemployment. Southern Europe has higher unemployment, but welfare typically less generous than Northern Europe. Low end jobs exist in the EU too — they just pay better than they do in the US. Low-end jobs that can be shifted in location (e.g. clothes production) have already left both US and EU. Low end jobs that need to be done in-country or are harder to offshore (cleaning, food factory work) remain in country (but perhaps eat into corporate profits, explaining the lower GINI coefficient of EU vs US.
feedforward 2y ago
As opposed to the US, where the heirs who don't work live in mansions, living on the handouts of expropriated surplus labor time of those who do work and create wealth.
- admissionsguy 2y ago
  You just have no idea. We have banks run by the same families since before the US was formed. We have whole sectors of economy structured to protect inherited privilege and prevent upward mobility. Take a look at any list of billionaires from the US vs EU…
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    And yet social mobility is higher in the EU vs the UK and US.
  - User23 2y ago
    Privatizing sovereign money creation was a heck of a trick.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  That's everywhere, not just the US.
neverrroot 2y ago
It definitely affects these figures, because they are filtered out of the income statistics. Just one of the many ways figures are skewed. Another is the low-paid jobs done without proper employee registration by immigrants.
- feedforward 2y ago
  > Another is the low-paid jobs done without proper employee registration by immigrants. Because construction, lawn care, and sweatshop jobs by immigrants is all registered in the US.
  - neverrroot 2y ago
    It’s all about the total numbers/math. The “lack” of social system in the US that hides in the EU millions upon millions of people who don’t work for various reasons (ranging from not wanting to down to not being able to or not being employable) is definitely something that makes EU look better than it should. In many cases, they don’t even appear in the officially unemployed statistics, because they are so called social cases. At the same time, many of them also work “unofficially”, so they often end up earning more than honest people, while working much less.
    - bigfudge 2y ago
      Can you provide some numbers to back this up. This plot suggests Germany and USA have equivalent rates of economic inactivity (which is the term to describe what you are talking about). Some Southern European countries have higher rates, but this is cultural as much as driven by economic policies.
stefanfisk 2y ago
Which kind of jobs would that be?
mrtksn 2y ago
Low end jobs definitely exist in EU, low end jobs are the stuff that run the society and were considered essential and were not allowed to stay at home during the pandemic. Also, the jobs not captured by the "essential workers" also still exist in EU as the wealth scale of EU is very wide, with the lower end being significantly lower than the US lower end in terms of pay.
cardy31 2y ago
Low-end jobs aren’t non-existent. The EU still has people working at fast food joints. But the EU mandates paying those people a reasonable amount of money. The US is much more guilty of forcing people in low-end jobs to require government handouts despite being employed. Anyone working in a full time job of any sort should be able to live without government assistance. The EU’s labour laws come much closer to that than American laws do.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > But the EU mandates paying those people a reasonable amount of money. Where? Austria, Denmark, and Italy don't even have minimum wages...
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    This is misleading. In Denmark at least wages are often set through collective bargaining. Wage inequality and rates of low pay are much lower in Denmark than US. They just achieve it by slightly different means. In this case it is state mandated labour laws which give real power to unions, rather than anti-union (and anti-democratic) labour policies in the US and UK.
lostlogin 2y ago
> low end jobs were made non-existent How would this work? Jobs were banned and no one does them? Are you saying that there are whole categories of work that just aren’t done in the EU? What are these jobs?
- bluGill 2y ago
  I don't have household servants, but if I moved to India that would be normal. I would like to save the several hours a day I spend cleaning my kitchen costs me, cleaning the other rooms, cooking, doing laundry (my family divides the work, but it is still hours spent every day - and we don't even have the neatest house). However the minimum wage here means I can't afford such servants so I do it myself. It is likely that even if there was no minimum wage I couldn't afford the pay servants would demand to do this - India has a very different economic situation with a lot of people who can't do anything else and so household servant is the best they could get. Humans cleaning the roads/sidewalks every day would keep things a lot cleaner than the machine that only comes every few months. However again we can't pay someone an affordable wage to do that work so we compromise - the machine lets one human do the work of around 2000 humans with a broom, even at $1/day (which would be a good wage in India where they do hire humans to do this work) a modern machine is paid for by labor savings after half a year of operation, but it will run for 5 years or more. (the machine also needs fuel and maintenance which I didn't calculate.)
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I thought this was a US/EU comparison?
    - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
      My mother cleaned people's houses in the US for to help defray living costs while going through medical school. It's not anywhere near as common of a job in the US as in SE Asia, but it's not at all unheard of in larger cities.
    - bluGill 2y ago
coldtea 2y ago
>the low end jobs were made non-existent by regulation and people who work them in the US live off government handouts in the EU? That's a very strange idea about how the EU economy is... People really thing we don't have tens of millions of people do "low end jobs"? What's the idea, that they were somehow automated by robots?
jijijijij 2y ago
Which low end jobs ceased to exist?

bigfudge 2y ago

I don't think so. UK and US have equivalent unemployment rates but vastly different welfare systems. Germany is more generous than the UK but has lower unemployment. Southern Europe has higher unemployment, but welfare typically less generous than Northern Europe. Low end jobs exist in the EU too — they just pay better than they do in the US. Low-end jobs that can be shifted in location (e.g. clothes production) have already left both US and EU. Low end jobs that need to be done in-country or are harder to offshore (cleaning, food factory work) remain in country (but perhaps eat into corporate profits, explaining the lower GINI coefficient of EU vs US.

feedforward 2y ago

As opposed to the US, where the heirs who don't work live in mansions, living on the handouts of expropriated surplus labor time of those who do work and create wealth.

admissionsguy 2y ago
You just have no idea. We have banks run by the same families since before the US was formed. We have whole sectors of economy structured to protect inherited privilege and prevent upward mobility. Take a look at any list of billionaires from the US vs EU…
- bigfudge 2y ago
  And yet social mobility is higher in the EU vs the UK and US.
- User23 2y ago
  Privatizing sovereign money creation was a heck of a trick.
Rinzler89 2y ago
That's everywhere, not just the US.

neverrroot 2y ago

It definitely affects these figures, because they are filtered out of the income statistics. Just one of the many ways figures are skewed. Another is the low-paid jobs done without proper employee registration by immigrants.

feedforward 2y ago
> Another is the low-paid jobs done without proper employee registration by immigrants. Because construction, lawn care, and sweatshop jobs by immigrants is all registered in the US.
- neverrroot 2y ago
  It’s all about the total numbers/math. The “lack” of social system in the US that hides in the EU millions upon millions of people who don’t work for various reasons (ranging from not wanting to down to not being able to or not being employable) is definitely something that makes EU look better than it should. In many cases, they don’t even appear in the officially unemployed statistics, because they are so called social cases. At the same time, many of them also work “unofficially”, so they often end up earning more than honest people, while working much less.
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    Can you provide some numbers to back this up. This plot suggests Germany and USA have equivalent rates of economic inactivity (which is the term to describe what you are talking about). Some Southern European countries have higher rates, but this is cultural as much as driven by economic policies.

stefanfisk 2y ago

Which kind of jobs would that be?

mrtksn 2y ago

Low end jobs definitely exist in EU, low end jobs are the stuff that run the society and were considered essential and were not allowed to stay at home during the pandemic. Also, the jobs not captured by the "essential workers" also still exist in EU as the wealth scale of EU is very wide, with the lower end being significantly lower than the US lower end in terms of pay.

cardy31 2y ago

Low-end jobs aren’t non-existent. The EU still has people working at fast food joints. But the EU mandates paying those people a reasonable amount of money. The US is much more guilty of forcing people in low-end jobs to require government handouts despite being employed. Anyone working in a full time job of any sort should be able to live without government assistance. The EU’s labour laws come much closer to that than American laws do.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> But the EU mandates paying those people a reasonable amount of money. Where? Austria, Denmark, and Italy don't even have minimum wages...
- bigfudge 2y ago
  This is misleading. In Denmark at least wages are often set through collective bargaining. Wage inequality and rates of low pay are much lower in Denmark than US. They just achieve it by slightly different means. In this case it is state mandated labour laws which give real power to unions, rather than anti-union (and anti-democratic) labour policies in the US and UK.

lostlogin 2y ago

> low end jobs were made non-existent How would this work? Jobs were banned and no one does them? Are you saying that there are whole categories of work that just aren’t done in the EU? What are these jobs?

bluGill 2y ago
I don't have household servants, but if I moved to India that would be normal. I would like to save the several hours a day I spend cleaning my kitchen costs me, cleaning the other rooms, cooking, doing laundry (my family divides the work, but it is still hours spent every day - and we don't even have the neatest house). However the minimum wage here means I can't afford such servants so I do it myself. It is likely that even if there was no minimum wage I couldn't afford the pay servants would demand to do this - India has a very different economic situation with a lot of people who can't do anything else and so household servant is the best they could get. Humans cleaning the roads/sidewalks every day would keep things a lot cleaner than the machine that only comes every few months. However again we can't pay someone an affordable wage to do that work so we compromise - the machine lets one human do the work of around 2000 humans with a broom, even at $1/day (which would be a good wage in India where they do hire humans to do this work) a modern machine is paid for by labor savings after half a year of operation, but it will run for 5 years or more. (the machine also needs fuel and maintenance which I didn't calculate.)
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I thought this was a US/EU comparison?
  - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
    My mother cleaned people's houses in the US for to help defray living costs while going through medical school. It's not anywhere near as common of a job in the US as in SE Asia, but it's not at all unheard of in larger cities.
  - bluGill 2y ago

coldtea 2y ago

>the low end jobs were made non-existent by regulation and people who work them in the US live off government handouts in the EU? That's a very strange idea about how the EU economy is... People really thing we don't have tens of millions of people do "low end jobs"? What's the idea, that they were somehow automated by robots?

jijijijij 2y ago

Which low end jobs ceased to exist?