> If a job is paying less than what the government deems the minimum amount of money you need per month to survive

Unemployment benefits are designed to pay less than what people earned during their recent employment. Traditionally, it wouldn't make sense for someone to turn down a job offer in favor of unemployment unless the new job offer had drastically lower compensation than their previous job.

The pandemic unemployment assistance change this with additional $300/week payments, but that still adds up to less than typical entry-level wages in many locations.

This isn't really about jobs not paying people enough to survive. The survey responses included "I receive enough money from unemployment insurance without having to work" and a separate response for "I was not given enough money to return to work" with similar response rates.

> but that still adds up to less than typical entry-level wages in many locations

But that's assuming someone would be working full time, right? When I was working on a restaurant (as dishwasher), I wouldn't get more than 20 hours in a week, usually around 15 hours iirc

It’s $16.55/Hr in my state. About $7 more than minimum wage.

Those jobs should have been paying more to begin with. That's the problem.

But it's probably worth it for a lot of people to earn ~$2500 a month working 0 hours per week vs say $3000 a month putting in 40 hours.

Employers are competing with the government to buy people's time, and the government is willing and has the means to push the price to infinity.

This is a bit of a strawman. There are a lot of factors influencing the decision on both sides. That $2500 will leave a gap in your resume, both literally and from an experience perspective. The $3000 on the other hand ignores a ton of externalities: Cost of commuting, childcare, etc. plus the associated hours. In a real sense it could be $2500 a month raising your kids, or $1500 a month in real income after childcare/commuting for 50 hours all in.

A business has a number of levers to pull if they want to suppress wages; outsourcing (nationally and internationally) is usually the primary means. How do you suggest we increase the value of people's time without the Government setting the floor? (not to say the Government is the only way - just 'A' way).

A lot of the jobs in question don't care about resume gaps (especially during a pandemic) and are not outsourceable. For instance, restaurant, customer service, and retail is hard-hit right now. (I am in this line of work). You cant hire someone in Bangladesh to work those jobs, and you don't care if they were unemployed last year.

But it's also impossible to pay them $10k a month. It's literally not mathematically possible. It's not a case of greed. The profit margins simply aren't fat enough. Around me, they're paying $15 to $16 an hour which is pretty generous and about what I'm making right now.

At the end of the day, there is a huge shortage of labor. We know this because the workforce participation rate is at multidecade record lows. You can tell employers just to pay more, but it's not going to solve the fundamental issue. That's like trying to resolve the housing crisis by telling home shoppers to simply pay more and then wringing your hands of it.

Funny that all the news articles I read where a restaurant or business increases their starting wage to north of $13/hour, they get thousands of applicants.

I think it's amazing that all the free market advocates don't want a free market for labor. If employers want more employees, they simply have to pay more.

Workforce participation is at a low because workers in low paying jobs have looked around and realized their jobs suck, are low paying, and are looking to change to a better career.

> … "and are looking to change to a better career."

Lotta folks done or are in process of exactly that. I know folks who learned or improved various computer skills during the lockdown time and now have zero plans of goin' back to their crappy job from before.

Even that's pretty generous; average monthly wage for $15/h is about $2600. So the marginal income is as low as $100 for 40 hours of work in places with the highest minimum wage. Combined with the fact that the poll sums to over 130%, a significant number of respondents had multiple reasons to turn down work, this story is a bit of a nothingburger.

The government has neither the means nor desire to push the price to infinity. It normally pays starvation wages and for another 6 weeks will continue to pay a barely livable wage before returning to starvation wages.

Most the jobs they can't fill are 24 hours per week 8-12 bucks an hour slog fests for the not so princely sum of 800-1200 whereas people are getting paid 2500 in unemployment benefits NOT full time jobs paying substantially more than unemployment.

Your concerns are fanciful.

I make $15.60 an hour at my job. These 'concerns' are my day-to-day life.

As an employee making 15.60 what precisely is your concern with any temporary distortion of the price of low wage labor? I don't see how you could lose exactly?

Something that is good for me at the expense of everyone else probably shouldn't be happening.

People are getting $2,500?

My brother is fully disabled and unable to work, and he gets $1,200.

If you file for unemployment in my state right now, you'll get around $650 every week. Some states such as Massachusetts were paying as much as $1800 weekly with the federal bonus added in.

Is this 2500 taxed or tax free?

Imo after all taxes, a lot of 40 hr/wk salaries are a meaningless gain over $2500

UI income is taxable.

Sort of. Currently there is a huge temporary? exclusion.

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/new-exclusion-of-up-to-10200-...

Also, don't know if it's still going on now but when all these extra federal unemployment payments started, they were an extra $600 per week no matter how much state unemployment you qualified for. So, e.g. if you were a student who worked 10 hr/week part time, you received an extra $600/wk on top of your state money (which wouldn't be much because you worked so few hours).

https://www.dol.gov/coronavirus/unemployment-insurance#:~:te....

Unemployment insurance was a godsend for desperate full-time service workers who lost their jobs in the pandemic, but it was also an insane boondoggle for part timers.

Yeah honestly it's a bit wild to me that this is a controversial take, and the proposals to "solve" this problem have largely been to cut people off from benefits.

I wonder if somewhat incorrectly calling it a benefit is part of the reason it's so controversial. It's insurance, not a handout. Are people not going to call their car insurance if in a wreck? Are people not going to use their home insurance if someone breaks in and robs some expensive item? Use what you pay for, people! This goes for public utilities. Go to your library. Call your representative. Sign up for food stamps. Demand better roads. This is your stuff you pay for.

Right it's supposed to protect you from an unforseen/unpreventable job loss. It's not supposed to encourage/allow you to not work.

Did they really pay for it, though?

It seems like the people that have the highest risk of unemployment payouts pay the least (in taxes or premiums), which is not how insurance works.

They also receive the least benefits.

But I think it's reasonable to assume (though I'd be interested in a study on this), that over a lifetime a person will have paid for all of its unemployment benefits.

You can't be on unemployment forever, and you can't just go on it year over year, because there is a minimum amount of wage/work-hour you'll need to meet to be able to go back on unemployment if you're laid off again and have expired your allocated benefits (as I understand).

That means that any worker going on unemployment can only get so much benefits per amount of time working or wages accrued.

That's why I think over a lifetime, most people pay-back all of their benefits.

The difference in risk profile from other types of insurance doesn't necessarily mean it's not insurance.

The parent wants it both ways: the connotation of entitlement in collecting a product that was paid for (by calling it "insurance"), but without actually paying for it.

Definitely not.

The answer to the question makes it clear that the money is a disincentive to work, which is not what the 'insurance' is for.

It's not a pool you pay into and claim from 'because you can' - you claim it 'if you must'.

If someone claimed insurance 'because they could, not because they must' in most scenarios we'd call it fraud.

So yes - collect if you must, but then the answer to the question should be 0% for those implying that the benefit is a disincentive to return to work.

You don't consider being laid off "a must" ?

Of course being laid off is a must. The question is how long, before you find a new job, does it remain a must? An individual's reasons for passing on a new job sometimes stretch the idea of "must".

What would be your threshold in this case?

Would you take any job even if it pays less and has worse conditions then the one your were laid off from?

Would you take any job no matter what? Even it it has terrible work conditions and doesn't even pay as much as your employment insurance?

Would you take any job that pays more then your current unemployment even if it doesn't interest you in the slightest or seems to have bad conditions?

Would you take any job that seems a good fit for you long term, that interests you, seem to offer conditions you find reasonable, and pays better than your current unemployment?

Would you take the opportunity to train yourself in something new so that you can find work in new domains that might pay better and have less chance of being laid off again in the future?

Which of these would you consider "cheating" the unemployment insurance and which would you say is "in the spirit" of what it's suppose to afford you as a person recently laid off?

Also, on the topic of how long, the benefits in most state end after around 26 weeks, so there is a hard cut off that was chosen for some reason. I guess you could argue to make it shorter or longer, but I think that needs answering my previous question about what is "in spirit" and what isn't so we can set the right length of time given that.

Being laid off is a reasonable basis for claiming unemployment benefits for a short time—long enough to find another job. It's not a reason to stay on unemployment indefinitely when there are jobs available comparable to the one you had before.

The United States is a cruel place to live if you’re poor. Businesses think they are entitled to desperate labor at rock bottom prices, and a large part of the country’s leadership is happy to help.

So cruel that 1.8m are living off government payments for a year while being able to turn down offers of work.

Yeah those employers managed to pull wages down so much they cant even compete with unemployment benefits.

Government benefits are so good they're better than working for a living

And yet university enrollment is down 25% at my local uni. If you’re poor and have nothing to do for months and aren’t making your labor worth more by gaining skills, why should people have sympathy. Are people born entitled to live off society without contributing if they can?

>Are people born entitled to live off society without contributing if they can?

If that is what the current state of society demands. Yes, absolutely. We could change it but there is a reason why things are the way they are and they have absolutely nothing to do with calm and rational thinking.

> And yet university enrollment is down 25% at my local uni. If you’re poor and have nothing to do for months and aren’t making your labor worth more by gaining skills, why should people have sympathy

Doesn't that mean taking on serious debt? Maybe people are reluctant to do that in a difficult economic situation. Not to mention there are other ways to gain skills other than going to a university.

Perhaps because the cost/benefit analysis of universities continues to go in the wrong direction?

Suddenly workers have leverage and corps don't know what to do about it. That's why I think a UBI would be a good idea. It would give leverage to individual workers without a union, now that unions are so weak.

You can't fund a UBI with income taxes though. It only works if you fund the UBI with taxes on regressive behavior.

The moderation on HackerNews has gotten worse over the last five years. Reflexive downvoting for simple disagreement without the effort of a written response is the go-to short circuited brain-dead, ideological response I came to HN to avoid. Now down vote this as off-topic.

It’s harder to exploit people with options, so it’s necessary to remove those options.

It’s just cutting off the $600 extra from the federal government

Business owners are still getting over their low wage entitlement complex and adapting to new market conditions.

It doesn’t mean that the job pays less, it just means it doesn’t pay to sufficiently provide an incentive to take it.

People simply might not take what is likely a physically demanding job if the compensation isn’t sufficiently high.

There can be also other reasons like the fact that they might be looking for a better opportunity and not simply taking on any job.

Other things like the hidden cost of having a job which can include things like commuting costs, loss of other employment opportunities like part time jobs or side gigs or added costs due to having to pay for child care can also be a good reason why one might not take a job even if it does pay above minimum wage and even above the local living wage.

It's not always that obvious. A lot of employers in California would get at least as much bang for their buck by building workforce housing.

Fast food in my area starts at $20/hr in a flyover state. They still cannot get employees.

Liar

Don't know what to tell ya; I wont be running into town to grab a pic for you. Local McDonald's is currently advertising on a big sign $17/hr with vacation time. My kid reported that another fast food shop in town is now to $20/hr. I was talking with a roofer a bit north of me two weeks ago. His starting pay is also $20/hr and he can't get anyone. Anyone. He is now down to just himself because he can't get folks.

The 'obvious choice' is to not take money from the government/community that you're not supposed to be taking.

How on earth did we just just dropped all pretense at being civic?

And also: "It's also obvious what employers need to do if they are short-staffed."

That's actually not obvious. Have you owned a small business? Like a cafe, especially through a pandemic? Do they just have magic pools of profit from which to pay people more? Some places do, but usually they're the big chains. These kinds of situations just push regular owners further downhill vis-a-vis the Starbucks down the street which some might argue is 'good for efficiency' but I'd argue that we lose in choice and authenticity quite a lot.

If labor is 30% of your costs then you could pay 20% more by charging 6% more for your finished goods or services. For a lot of such companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages and their financial stability.

Take a fake employee named Susan. Presently you pay her $12 an hour for an average of 24 hours per week. In a normal month Susan receives 4 weekly paychecks for a grand total of 1152 before taxes or deductions with which to pay per bills.

Susan is serving you a plate of food for $15

Now imagine you raised her wages to $14.40 and offered her full time. Her wages are now 2304. She is making twice as much money and now the food sadly must cost... $15.90.

But you say Susan doesn't want to work full time she has other responsibilities, other jobs for example!

This is because you and your industry have specialized in each paying Susan to run around between her 2-3 jobs so she can afford to live so she can get enough hours to live without any of you having to pay benefits. It could also be because your industry pays too little for anyone to afford to live so you have collected workers who have lesser need because for example they are spouses of well paid workers earning supplemental income. As the cost of living rises faster than incomes this isn't a stable equilibrium. Even Sam spare time may find he needs to earn more to live and if Sam moves on to a real job, graduates college, moves out of his parents home etc you can't be sure you can replace him at your less than survival wage.

The service industry isn't a benefit to America its a diseased kidney and if the entire industry as it is died not much of value would be lost.

> If labor is 30% of your costs then you could pay 20% more by charging 6% more for your finished goods or services.

right, businesses are all malign and evil, and they could raise their prices by 6% (without losing any business), but they just haven't, because they prefer to... have an excuse to pay less?

> But you say Susan doesn't want to work full time she has other responsibilities, other jobs for example!

any of my staff who didn't want to work full-time usually wanted to spend more time with their kids. or take classes.

> right, businesses are all malign and evil, and they could raise their prices by 6% (without losing any business), but they just haven't, because they prefer to... have an excuse to pay less?

Let's assume that the reason you'd supposedly lose business with higher prices is due to competition not raising their prices. If you're struggling to find workers such that you have to raise prices to cover better wages, then it stands to reason your competitors are in the same boat, so either they keep struggling due to lack of labor or they raise their prices to match. Alternatively, they have a much more efficient business than you and you should go under anyway. Nobody owes you a successful business.

Now let's assume that the reason you'd supposedly lose business with higher prices is due to people not being willing to pay that much for your product. Well, if your business revenue can't even afford to pay the labor that keeps it running than your business is a failure and should go under. Nobody owes you a successful business.

I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that the purpose of society should be to ensure there are enough desperate people to fill labor positions for untenable businesses.

"I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that the purpose of society"

Your moral impetus isn't an important factor in trying to understand underlying dynamic of the situation.

There's a basic operating competitive dynamic going in small business & services that is almost as old as time, or at least it goes back to even before antiquity before we even had the language to describe the economics of it all.

Huge swaths of the economy operate on this basis.

Most small business owners are not particularly rich, and if you add up the risk premium they take on, they're probably not that far ahead at all, if at all.

Wages are what they are due to input costs (including labour) beyond their control.

They have no market power and they are 'price takers' not 'price setters'.

There's generally no situation in which they can magically raise wages and give longer hours as the OP fantasized.

The only thing they can do is hope to be especially prudent, intelligent, conscientious and of course lucky.

Larger entities & chains (i.e. Starbucks) probably could raise wages a bit. Regulations such as minimum wage will obviously have an affect but have side effects. And of course large pools of illegal migrants who's presence hugely skews the above board market for labour (this is major factor in Texas and Cali).

> Your moral impetus isn't an important factor in trying to understand underlying dynamic of the situation.

No, but I read the implication of all this whining about business having small margins and not being able to find workers as a call to action to, well, intentionally make people's situation more desperate so they'll work shitty jobs for shitty pay so these business owners can make more money.

> Most small business owners are not particularly rich, and if you add up the risk premium they take on, they're probably not that far ahead at all, if at all.

How is this my problem? They started a business, they accepted the risk, it's their problem.

They are in a local equilibrium where changing it even in a fashion that would be beneficial to all would risk of loss. Some will avoid risk even when increasing loss for doing nothing is all but sure. People will continue to pay too little to obtain workers losing more money as their number and quality of workers declines while demanding cuts to benefits like food, childcare, and health which are often the only way most of their workers can possibly afford to work there AND eat and live indoors.

If allowed they will continue to do this until they go out of business then insist that the government destroyed their business. Then the banks will lend more money to the next round of idiots who will happily do the same.

I'm sorry but your math doesn't add up.

"companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages" ?

So the company will 'trivially' have 2x more revenue to be able to offer everyone full time jobs?

While raising prices by 'only 6%' - you understand how Supply and Demand works?

You are the one paying for those services. If you were willing to pay any material amount more, there'd be higher wages.

In addition to Supply and Demand you have 'competitiveness' - service industries run on razor thin margins not by choice (!!), it's the nature of competition.

By having tons of illegal workers, willing to work for less, you guarantee lower wages.

The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages.

But all of this is moot: It's immoral (and probably illegal) to collect unemployment benefits if you can be working. In addition, smaller service industry companies cannot afford to pay substantially more, and they will be hit much harder by 'worker subsidies' than Starbucks across the street who will put them out of business.

I'm sorry you haven't thought this through. The service industry isn't fully staffed and manifestly makes use of a large portion of part time labor. If are able to staff 100 hours of labor per week of part time labor but need 160 you can indeed make up the difference by converting some of your part time labor into full time labor. This doesn't require earning twice as much revenue because we are talking about filling existing labor shortfalls which is to say hours you would staff tomorrow if you could hire the bodies. We are merely talking about increasing the hours of your existing labor instead of lamenting that nobody else wants to work for so little per month that you cannot rent an apartment with all of your wages.

Supply and demand pushes a market towards an equilibrium state it isn't gravity the market is still made up of human choices. It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics.

Just because you have chosen to value a labor hour at $11 an hour and a burger at $14.99 doesn't mean its fate. You CAN pay more and you can charge more and because wages aren't most of your labor costs the price doesn't rise linearly with the cost of labor.

This is also complete bubkis

"The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages."

Please feel free to back it up.

'Offering more hours' to part time workers, as opposed to 'hiring more workers' , as a proposed solution to a problem that is essentially global (and perennial) has to be one of the most glib proposals I've read in a long while.

Millions of managers and CEOs will be ever grateful for that deep insight they couldn't otherwise fathom themselves ... if only they could read HN!

Or maybe we can assume 'They Have Thought of That' and that it's a dynamic already in play. Obviously.

"Supply and demand ... It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics."

If you understood economics, you would realize they fundamentally constrains your choices. They are literally 'the biggest constraints'.

Small businesses are competitive, and generally keenly aware of what their margins and pricing pressures are. If they could magically create worker stability with a simple price increase -> wage increase function, they'd do it.

Raising prices by 6% across the board is not a solution to anything, it's just inflationary.

FYI California has 3 million illegal aliens [1]. That's about 8% of the population. If you consider that they have no benefits, are slightly younger, they're more likely to be working, that's a 'very solid and probably greater than 12% of the labour market'. Given that they are likely in the lower income bracket, it's probably well more than 20% of working class jobs.

That's a massive proportion and it will fundamentally affect prices for everything.

California's wealth is derived as much from illegal labour practices, paying illegal wages, and illegally not providing worker benefits.

The surpluses go into the pockets of every Californian in the form of cheap prices all the way through the value chain.

A solution could be to work very hard to ensure that every business was ruthlessly enforcing labour standards, wages, conditions and benefits. But that would price those illegal workers out of the market (the only reason they are employed is because they are very inexpensive) and they'd likely have to return home - or be permanent wards of the state. Hence the giant and obvious hypocritical paradox of the California economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...

" Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics."

The situation I've described would involve raising prices 6% and doubling the money many workers actually earn. Inflation wont rob this workers of these gains.

Nobody is interested in you proving that minimum wage is the primary force driving down pay by virtue of you making up the numbers for what portion of the labor force immigrants make up and then concluding since its a really big number of workers it MUST have the effect you describe and then busting out the wikipedia entry on illegal immigration.

This isn't moving the discussion forward.

If you want to avoid a billion businesses paying shitty wages for mostly unnecessarily part time jobs the path forward is simple.

Increase minimum wage and make it a function of total dollars AND hourly. The greater of 600 per week or 15 per hour. Make it expensive to rely on part timers. Meanwhile we can make benefits especially health benefits not the employers problem by rolling out universal health care.

Everyone's costs WILL go up but they will go up evenly and if we end up with a few less Taco bells the world will probably be a better not a worse place.