Re:Poll: 1.8M Americans have turned down jobs due to unemplo...
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Friday July 16, 2021 @05:01PM
(#27861173)
> 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.
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).