In our case, it wasn't the "refusing to go back to work to make a better life" narrative that's getting pushed; it's more the, she had to stay home with our son while he's in school, but what does she do while he's in school all day? You only have to be sort of involved. You might as well be productive, but you have trouble being productive enough to really work.

People don’t want to work for absolute minimum wage on a temporary contract picking fruit? Colour me surprised!

30 years ago, I managed a Burger King, and even then, they had us send people home if it got really slow, or.. call up people and cancel their shift an hour before, because of bad weather, etc. Someone's already arranged childcare or transportation for their shift, then cancelling it same day is just not a way to work.

I would imagine that a lot of places are still like that today.

$15/hr sounds great, but if it's 20 hrs one week, then 7 the next, then 24, then 4... that's still a bit unstable for a lot of folks. For someone who has no dependents, or has a stable partner... it's probably doable.

Norwegian link: https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/regelverk/lover/arbeidsmiljol...

So if Norway were having the same issues with employee shortages you could add the reason that maybe the employees are tired of having the company steal from them.

And maybe that's a factor common to other countries

Also, I used to manage a McDonalds. Paying a bonus to have people come in on short notice to cover no-shows, sick calls, or unexpected business volume was not uncommon.

The problem is McDonald's Corporate only owns 5% of McDonald's locations, the rest are franchise locations, thus a "McDonald's" crew member at a non-company store is not working for McDonald's but the Franchisee.. This is where you get the lower wages..

This allows McDonald's to get headlines about offering a "$15 min wage" while 95% of wearing an McDonald's uniform do not work for McDonald's thus do not get this wage

Also, have you seen inflation lately?

On the other hand, traffic during rush hour seems to have returned to as bad as it ever was.

I don't know how true this is: are these people not concerned if their employer decides to reopen offices and require employees to work in the office again when the pandemic inevitably ends?

This is the primary trick that journalists use in these stories: They find a couple examples of people doing something, interview them, and then pretend those people are a sample of a much larger movement. They don’t cite statistics or numbers, however easy to find, because putting a number on these movements would make the reader realize they’re nowhere near as large as the author wants you to think.

Using the “people moved to the countryside” example: Did we have a surplus of empty houses in the countryside before the pandemic? As far as I’m aware, we did not have huge numbers of empty houses just waiting for a pandemic for people to fill them up (except maybe Detroit, but I’m pretty sure people didn’t flock to Detroit).

Also, home prices and rents in cities didn’t fall dramatically during this period, which would be expected during an exodus event.

Even the stories about San Francisco population declines have been overblown, with many of the people leaving being quickly replaced by people looking for an opportunity to move in.

Journalists played up the countryside exodus stories because they’re romantic and people like to believe fantasies about people leaving the concrete jungle behind and living idyllic countryside lives, separated from their employers by miles of broadband connectivity. Yet none of the numbers support such supposed exoduses. Obviously a few people did it here and there, but pretending it was a common event and writing dramatic articles is dishonest.

This means there must be more than just a handful of people leaving.

However, I do agree with GP's point about companies ending the WFH arrangements, especially given France's work culture. But then again, I've always found people around here to have a tendency of thinking fairly short-term.

Actually yes. Before the pandemic, in the area I grew up in (Southern Appalachians) it was common for a house sale to take years, because there was indeed a surplus.

Remember ten years ago all the articles about urbanization and the young people leaving the country and suburbs to live in the city? That was real and the more remote places did in fact have a surplus of housing stock

I've personally seen one family move to the absolute boonies from a large metro and they just guessed that the breadwinner would be able to stay remote or find a new remote friendly employer if forced to move back. The latter happens

I'd probably have more anecdotes if I knew more than like five people

The small town I live in has seen a large influx of Bay Area remote workers as well. Again - all anecdata, but it is noticeable.

I get that I'm very lucky to have landed such a gig. I hope many more do. Because when a worker has to bear the personal cost of sitting in traffic for 2+ hrs per day (burning gasoline and polluting the world while doing so), because his boss is uncomfortable with not being able to physically scrutinize his underlings - that's bullshit.

This is going to be an issue if you move anywhere within a country with a federal system of government. For EU residents I imagine this also gets tricky for people who decide to WFH from other countries.

I'd also bet that many individuals are making long-term bets that they can continue working remote even if it means (slightly) less pay.

Around 10 years ago I was in the labour market willing to do pretty much anything and these kinds of jobs accounted for most of what was available.

Since I wasn't 'on benefits' I was at the other end of the equation. What I really wanted was a chance to work my way out of financial trouble - these kind of jobs only offered the opposite of this.

The situation is temporary and has obviously causal factors that are coming to an end soon (unemployment benefits, school out for summer).

Journalists seem to be going out of their way to ignore these and pretend that something else is happening.

Those states that cut people off unemployment didn’t see a boost in employment rates. Sooo now what?

I don't think so. Zeta variant is coming.

Or maybe I misunderstood.

It's possible to contribute to society by making art, writing, cooking, spending time with family, caring for others, etc. as well as self-actualizing via exercise, reading, meditation, and so on.

From most classical philosophers, to Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless other, their work was nothing else than an act of self-actualization.

And because this is HN, shall I include Torvalds? The FLOSS movement started from volunteers.

No one capable of working should be taking unemployment, ever.

This is how social safety nets get demonized by politicians, and it works. A factory worker and mother of three who was making car parts from the start of COVID-19 until now and was never laid off and who never had the option of quitting work, fucking hates someone who sits on their ass collecting unemployment playing Xbox games all day. That's the relatively young Hispanic woman who lives down the road from me. I was fortunate; I already work remote so the only thing COVID did for me was restrict my dining choices temporarily here in Texas.

The answer to every problem we seem to face in America always ends up being, "Just throw some fucking money at it!"

I'm sick of it. Many of our problems couldn't be solved if we had literally quadrillions of dollars of cash. Sometimes - many times - it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, in the arenas of careful thinking, and then careful doing. Neither of which it seems either political party is particularly interested.

However, it may not (always) be that simple. The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees, with not enough people applying and even employees who were there before Covid hit leaving.

I don't know how actually true this is, but when they (the media) ask people why they won't go back, the main reason doesn't seem to be a preference for sitting on ass, but rather a realization that given the wages, those jobs were a terrible proposition. They claim instead to be looking at how they can improve their situation, like looking for work in other industries, going back to school, etc. Which I think is a good thing. How many random empty bars does a country really need?

Now maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I hope that that's true and that this will at least increase wages for those jobs.

But I can't help but think that all this soul-searching is helped by government aid and that, sooner or later, when that runs out, the people will have to get back to those jobs and then, whatever rise there might have been, will be swept away.

But obviously it's just that no one wants to work, it couldn't possibly be because no one wants part-time (especially because they change your days/hours and wait till the last minute to give you the next week's schedule so you can't plan around it and get another job). It couldn't possibly be because part-time minimum wage day-shifting jobs are literally worthless as these places are finding out.

I keep hearing owners whine and bemoan their lack of workers. What I have never heard of, not once, is an owner making less profit to pay their workers better to get the loyalty and hard work they want but refuse to pay for.

I agree with you, but do those places actually make a lot of profit? Over here they seem to be pretty fragile operations, so I don't think there's that much they can shave off their profit and give to the workers.

I'm wondering whether, maybe, there are simply too many of those restaurants?

The reasoning goes "yeah, but if I raise my prices, people will go next door". Which is probably true for your random restaurant. But then maybe the issue is there's too many of them?

But of course, up until now, this was workable because many people were willing to put up with the bad conditions you've described for a low wage.

Less entertainment, vacations, eating out for many who previously enjoyed it will be the result.

But then, the question becomes: what will become of these employees? Less eating out means less restaurant staff. But said staff are people who need to eat. Will they all go on social security?

Maybe, maybe not. But it's a question we should ask, as a society.

That seems right on the face of it. But then there's another issue: are you sure that the same number of people would continue eating out? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it.

I don't often eat out, mostly because it's not something I particularly enjoy, but also because I find it expensive for what it is. If the prices were to rise, I would eat out even less. I doubt I'm the only one thinking like this.

It's not clear to me that raising the minimum wage, and therefore the price of a restaurant meal, would not have less people go out. And by less people I mean a drop high enough such that the sum of money spent eating out would drop. Which would mean there would be less restaurants which could afford to stay in business.

This study[1] specifically looks at the effect of raising the minimum wage on restaurant prices.

What they found is that increases of 10% to the minimum wage are correlated with only a 0.36% increase of prices, and minimum wage increases may cause some prices to decrease, too:

> Many business leaders fear that any increase in the minimum wage will be passed on to consumers through price increases thereby slowing spending and economic growth, but that may not be the case. New research shows that the pass-through effect on prices is fleeting and much smaller than previously thought.

> By looking at changes in restaurant food pricing during the period of 1978–2015, MacDonald and Nilsson find that prices rose by just 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, which is only about half the size reported in previous studies. They also observe that small minimum wage increases do not lead to higher prices and may actually reduce prices. Furthermore, it is also possible that small minimum wage increases could lead to increased employment in low-wage labor market.

[1] https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/does-increasing-m...

Post Covid I am down to 2 Lunches and Dinner ever other week...

I am considering dropping to 1 lunch as lunches with tip are now climbing to $15-20 where 4 years ago I could easily get out of the door at most places for under $12 with tip for a lunch.

if Lunches go above $20... I cease it completely

Further Inflation has the common effect of hurting the lower and middle classes the worst and increasing wealth disparity. There is multiple ways this occurs but one thing that is trending of late is that as the wage floor is raising you are not seeing the same levels of raise in other area's of income until you get into the top 10% or higher of wage earners. Today we are seeing inflation outstrip wages in many skilled labor categories.

In a lot of cases, they don't make as much as people think they do. Take supermarkets for instance. Many of them are hiring cashiers and shelf stockers right now, and they can't hire anybody because they can't pay enough to make the job attractive. Supermarkets and grocery stories have some of the thinnest profit margins in any business.

People around here talk a lot about unsustainable business models. I don't think it's really any better if it's offloading its unsustainability onto its workforce, which is what's being described here.

From where I stand, as somebody whose career can be described (cynically but not incorrectly) as largely rendering people unemployed, there's a tension here that's only going to be resolved through the acknowledgement that there isn't actually a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go", and unsustainably poor work with poverty as the retribution for refusing to participate (as well as the reward for participating) is not a politically stable position.

So what is the proposal? Pay people to stay home forever? Who determines who gets a free ride paid for by productive people, and who has to be the ones that provide that free ride to others.

be sure to sign me up for the free ride, but I sure as hell do not want to work 50+ hours a week so other people can play Call of Duty all day.... I would rather let other people work and I play Call of Duty

And their lies the rub / problem with socialism... If everyone can have a free ride no one works

More recently, they had removed some tax breaks on overtime, but it turned out that that only hurt the people needing to work overtime; still no effect on unemployment. At least some of the breaks are now back.

I think the broader issue is that most people having to work crazy hours with multiple jobs don't do it because they're workaholics, but because they have to, as in they can't get a single "normal" job that pays well enough for whatever reason. I'm not sure that putting random limits on the number of hours worked will increase the hourly wages.

At some point crimes of desperation will become rampant.

This is completely anecdotal, but I know three different restaurant owners and all three of them live very very comfortably. Again, that’s just anecdotal so probably not worth much.

While I don’t think anyone would suggest that a restaurant owner should live in poverty, at the same time I don’t think we would suggest a restaurant worker should be poverty levels of poor to ensure the owner lives the high life.

If a business cant supply both its owner and workers a livable wage, then we should expect the business to go under rather than expect (or demand) the workers descend into poverty.

I see hiring signs with dollar amounts on them all the time.

It's the same in the UK. Farmers cannot harvest some crops because the cheap EU labour is no longer present and locals won't do it.

Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.

Imagine, as a kind of empathetic thought exercise, that instead of someone taking handouts and playing Xbox all day, they were taking handouts and then doing online coursework to try and learn a new skill to make themselves more employable in the future. Does that still imply a lack of self-respect?

We're all effectively taking handouts to some degree or another just by participating in collective society. It's just a question of how much we're contributing back, and how. I try not to judge people too aggressively in terms of how they are contributing back; they may be doing so in ways that I cannot see.

"The self-respect that comes with working." Read this like you are nursing a hangover.

Americans are fed up with lousy jobs that treat them like crap.

Kentucky and the rest of those moocher states should pull themselves up by their boot straps, stand on their own two feet and sink or swim.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-proj...

FWIW, I agree with you. But this is a moral take, not an economist’s. I think most economists would say people act to maximize utility. In the real world I think it’s both but it’s very hard to regulate/incentivize morals

I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.