It's an escalating problem in Eastern Europe in general. Our politicians are way too greedy. They lost all perspective. They try being a bit more insolent since the last year, they sit and wait -- no revolts, no fires, no pitchforks. So hey, these people don't mind! Let's get EVEN MORE money from them! Sadly it's how it has been going ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many elderly people say: "It was not all sunshine and rainbows back then either but at least the people had everything necessary to live respectful lives". They do have a point.
Thank the gods for internet and for me being a programmer ever since teenager. Otherwise I would probably live off social benefits as well.
It's very easy to demean people for being lazy or unmotivated or non-ambitious. But the reality is, the best career advancement ~85% of the people around here can hope for is an awful job with 2-3 hours of commuting in total for the day, for an income that exceeds the bare minimum needs with 5-10%. So it's pretty normal many decide not to bother, or to turn to petty crime.
Nobody in Budapest expects to make even a Berlin salary, but the difference is big enough now that lots of people say screw it, better to live abroad at least long enough to buy an apartment and so on at home. But I doubt many of those people will be coming back.
Ironically enough you could make a killing as a plumber anywhere in Germany right now, or in Vienna, or in Budapest, as per your choice. But a ton of Hungarian plumbers left when it wasn't like that, and now they have lives in Dinkelacker or wherever.
I’m even seeing that in IT. Back in the day you could start out as tech support, or an operator (as I did - long story) and be given a chance to program and move up. Now even those jobs are outsourced. It’s just as easy to hire someone from a foreign country to admin your AWS hosted instances as it is to hire someone locally.
And I believe the maximum amount of time where you can be eligible for unemployment benefits over here in Greece is a year or so.
I believe a large cause for the apathy in people who you'd expect to work these jobs is the fact that working a job like that doesn't move you forward in any way.
Back in the day, you could work for a few years and survive on your salary and hope to open your own business.
Now what's the dream for these workers? They can never afford to save up on their 500 euro a month. They can never get a loan to open their own business.
The best they can hope is that they won't be discarded and their job given to a more young-looking person down the line.
Work harder. Make more money if you want to do your own thing. Surely there are professionals in Greece making good money working as employees for others. What are they doing that the lazy uneducated worker is not?
Do more of that and less complaining that you're making 500 euro a month.
Let's simply discuss why people might not always go for the highest paying job they could get.
What most people that aren't doing everything optimally to improve their situation is that they're succumbing to common human logical fallacies.
People don't see that there are jobs that can potentially lead them out of that class of salaries, not because they're lazy but because they're uninformed about these possibilities.
Or they might gauge that the small chance they have to get such a job isn't worth doing something they don't enjoy at all, and would rather survive doing something they find bearable.
For a lot of younger people however, things are even more depressing. A lot of the "lazy uneducated" workers you mentioned spent years getting a university education, up to the PhD level frequently, and they feel they're invested in a thing they might be good at or they might enjoy practicing.
Objectively, they should give it up. Subjectively, I can understand wanting to hold on to a small hope that you might eventually get to do the thing you enjoy doing for a living.
If I'm allowed to be frank I find the characterization "lazy" very offensive, despite not having been in their shoes, because I have countless peers that are in this exact situation.
And all it takes is one(!) bad/uninformed decision in your past: skip STEM.
One of most cirurgic comments I read in HN. It's a pity that is buried in the thread.
As an anecdote, on average, a masonry assistant(!) earns more than an architect (buildings, not IT) where I live.
Not only are you still not upright, but you just ruined your shoes, and have to pay yet another $3 to replace them.
This is the argument for Universal Basic Income.
Give everyone something less that 400s euro, whether they work or not.
Let's say its 300 euros. Then the decision is don't work and take home 300 euros, or work and take home 800 or 1100 euros. There is a much greater incentive to work.
There are always people who don't just want to live off the dole.
Also a lot of the people who complain about crappy entry level wages (that they're unwilling to accept) also complain that they are rejected from higher jobs because they don't have any work experience.
> ... get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do,
That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?
> ... and get treated awfully.
That's not acceptable period though specifics matter.
Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do.
I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world.
Edit1: Fixed typo, thanks PaulRobinson
Edit2: Added Anecdote
Even a commune where workers "decide on their own", has bosses. They are just not called bosses. See any of the '70 and '80 communes.
Ever read about Sun Hydraulics?
"At Sun, we have no job titles, no hierarchy, no formal job descriptions, no departments, no budgets, no direct sales channel, no close supervision, and only some work instructions."
https://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2016/09/15/sun-hydraulics-sh...
All for a differential of 200 or 400 euros?
> That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?
Did you ever work in the hotel industry as a low-level worker ?
If they offer you a $800 wage, when your unemployment is $400, your effective earning rate for the work you are doing is just $400/mo. Cost-benefit analysis isn't in favor of working. The employers either have to offer something on top of the starting wage (like clear path to advancement), or raise the wage. Otherwise it's a fairly logical choice for people to stay home and draw unemployment.
Is there a limit to how long you can collect unemployment? In Finland if you still haven't found a job in about a year, you stop getting payments altogether. And while getting payments, you still have to prove that you're actually searching for a job and not just trying to scam taxpayers.
The subsidy is ~32€ per day, which is the same as the minimum basic unemployment benefit.
I think they may even force you in to unpaid/extremely low paid work if you cant get something yourself.
I think society would be a better place if people were paid based on the value they delivered, and not coerced into work based on the need to subsist. When employers/owners have to absorb long-term costs, they make changes.
People who work on pipes or other buried things used to often get killed or injured by collapses of mud or stone. Worker's compensation costs forced employers to put reinforced steel safety devices in the holes to mitigate.
Parts of these "youngsters" are probably off doing something related to self-development and fulfilling which might provide benefits for society later on.
In this case they (seemingly) aren't getting any more money from working extra, compared to not working either, since their social benefits are stripped away if they start working. If this was basic income, they would be left with something extra at the end.
In this case there's no incentive to work?
Yeah, let's compensate them for being insured and at the worst case scenario lose 500 euros a month every now and then when a shadier employee comes around and leaves quickly. Poor them. Whatever will they do, 1 million euros a year can barely get your ends meet!
That is just off the top of my head.
Of course as has been pointed out, your suppliers could demand more money than you have left in your budget (employees are a form of suppler - the human aspect has been intentionally ignored)
There's risk in the construction (that budgets/timelines will blow out, contractors will be unable to complete the work to specifications), in whether the hotel will be appealing to customers, in the possibility of a recession or natural disaster or civic crisis that will keep tourists away.
There's a few of the more obvious ones.
Here's a thought experiment - those (tourism businesses) owners are making lots of money, so why not create such a business yourself (maybe with help of some external capital) and pay better wages and treat your staff better and pay taxes? Your clients will be much happier with you while having to pay the same. Other capitalists are probably happy to get a piece of the cake.
Of course, you cannot blame workers to not work in this industry right now, but obviously there are still enough people accepting that type of employment, otherwise salaries would have improved already.
Yes. Either yourself or maybe find someone else who does.
But if you find no one who solves it for you, the question stands whether the employer is indeed an evil guy or just doesn't have a lot of margin to hand out higher salaries. It's easy and lazy to assume evilness without ever having been there.
> and single-handedly change the labour market of an entire country. Great suggestion. Why didn't I think of that?
No.
Not many people have €5M to build their own hotel, particularly those who are unemployed. Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.
There are evil rich guys waiting to invest into a promising venture. Interest rates are at a record low. VCs are everywhere.
> particularly those who are unemployed
You just added that element to the discussion.
> Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.
That's an interesting point, maybe it's not so easy after all and maybe the risks and costs of operating the business is higher than the employee thinks.
Do it yourself and the you can complain and prove you have cash left over and hand it out. Then you can complain the guy is evil, the rest is mere speculation.
Note I am not saying it's easy (I know for a fact that it's hard). I'm just saying it's lazy and non-constructive to just assume the other guy being evil without knowing even 10% of what's going on and where the problems of the business lie.
At the scale of publically held companies, your bossy evilness is virtue signalling that tells the market that you are viable in the era of Uber and Amazon. Right now, as things stand, wrecking things and your own employees is expected and you will get no support and no investment from breaking ranks. That's just how it is.
In my field, I ended up just flipping the table and switching to Patreon so I could dump free competitive product and better serve my own userbase. My income got literally decimated by this decision but has rebounded to about a third or half of what it would have been, but I'm totally exempt from having to behave like a vulture: it suits my market positioning quite well, though if I was a really serious threat to the market leaders in my sector, I'm pretty sure they would come up with a way to sabotage me. That's also why I MIT license: I can funnel good stuff to poor musicians if I also let already-rich people steal it in exchange for only publicity. The alternate is they steal it anyway but with no publicity, or simply try to wreck my operation so there's less competition.
The narrative of the evil capitalist overlord persists for good reason: in the absence of a working society it's down to power and power alone, and only winning and getting the most capital allows you to continue to win and get more capital. It's a feedback loop and there's no reason 'salaries would improve' barring outside interference, which is less likely by the year.
Go ahead and do your thought experiment, but it doesn't map to the real world of 2018. To survive you've got to think more disruptively: your axioms here are pretty naive. For instance, what is actually important: your clients being happy, or your clients paying more money?
Dan took a thought and turned it into a real experiment. I believe the results are very positive in terms of profits, much higher wages for workers, higher customer retention, and deservedly good PR. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2018/01/24/what-...
Just to reduce my point to the basics:
Either the evil guy makes lots of money (in the sense of profit) -> You start your own business in the same sector -> get some of that market share and profit -> pay your workers better -> everyone is happy except evil guy
Or the evil guy doesn't make a lot of money -> He cannot pay his workers more -> He's not the evil guy.
Sure, this isn't black and white but as long as there isn't a monopoly on anything involved, the above holds.
Let's just stop complaining and force evil guys to press the pause button by competing with them.
As a side note, it is an open question whether truly evil guys have a pause button (I assume Sauron and Darth Vader don't have one) or whether there are other things at work.
Maybe those guys just spent years living close to poverty to make their start-up a huge success. Maybe not. Just saying there are somewhat understandable reasons that don't necessarily mean the guy is evil.
People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work.
The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the minimum salary available... which is somewhat 500 euros. It varies from 500 to 900 euros and 1200 in best cases. The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do, and get treated awfully. There is just no point. And then all I hear from those guys owning massive hotels making 1m+ revenue in their pockets per year saying : 'Cant find anyone good to work for you nowadays, its all youngsters fault'. Well ok I'll admit that prolly youngsters dont have the nerves that older people had in their age, but at the same time you are not helping the situation at all when you are offering money that someone will just pass by and you are making 1m+ euros in your pocket a year, and then the only way to keep profiting is to steal a bit on tax and of course not fully insure your employees. AWFUL system!