For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming.

Then they cut their hours to part-time for all but two workers. At minimum wage it was barely livable on 40 hours per week.

They also ask the night worker to come in the next day with less than a seven hour gap from the previous shift.

Even at the punch clock they were scolded for punching in or out a mere 1 minute off from the time to work or end.

I could tell when talking to the staff many of them felt defeated and this was the only job they could do. They just had to sit there and take it.

Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.

This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be able to live until they find another job. Being able to do that should prevent a fair amount of abuse in the first place.

Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone. I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.

How? Why would it not just inflate us like all these payments during COVID?

Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any possible benefit but for those already in a non-vulnerable position.

Same with the telecommunications pseudo-monopolies: you really think they won't try and tap into that resource even if a little? Communications has become almost as vital as housing the last decade.

Companies will do everything they can and the public is capable of paying to increase their revenue.

Also: depends on how you define 'rent control'

One of the reason some people do not move is due to being comfortable and at travel distance to their job.

Under this light you can see what happened to several European cities with high rent due to University: as soon as Covid made students go home to their parents as classes were online, there was a huge drop in rent prices.

It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.

We have inflation because of sustained fiscal and monetary stimulus through a period of sharp restrictions on economic activity being sustained after most of the restrictions ended; the fiscal stimulus has already been withdrawn, and monetary stimulus is slowly unwinding.

But that really doesn't have much bearing on a tax-funded UBI, which—unlike deficit-funded airdrops—is redistribution, not general stimulus.

Do we have any sort of evidence for that claim?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/corona...

ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.

So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/migrant-worker-lured-to-...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/usadom0501-04.htm#P3...

We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.

You have that luxury because of savings.

One example is delivery workers. Everyone expects their packages to be tracked which resulted in total surveillance of delivery workers with extremely tight time slots. Competitors that didn't expand here were soon left behind because the profit margin of that industry is extremely low.

Janitors are similar. People will take the cheapest option and the companies that exploit the best with prevail.

This is a selfishness that cannot be denied and in my opinion would make a basic income impossible. Prices would just soar to a level where this income is of little consequence.

Sensible laws for worker protection to restrict selfishness can better the situation more efficiently.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/10/14/employ...

Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?

While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions.

Having higher cost of labor will incentivize more capital solutions to menial jobs (automation, substitutions), which will change societal patterns a lot (maybe you should expect a machine to take orders at every restaurant) but could certainly lead to a happier 'steady state' long term.

From that moment on it was very clear to me what my value to the company was. Combine that with the long hours, low pay and constant watching over my clock in times made it very easy to just "walk" from that job with no notice.

The worst part was knowing that there were people who had been there 20 years and had (seemingly) no upward mobility during the entire time. After 6mos I was moved up to QA (with an insignificant pay increase) and I realized that I was as high in the company as I was going to get without someone dying.

I have no issue working...but if I am going to be poor while working 56hr weeks...why do it?

"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

[1]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.

The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.

Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.

Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.

If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.

I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.

A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?

We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Fewer workers means fewer goods and services. If demand remains constant or increases, you get inflation. The pandemic caused supply chain issues, but this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had demand been artificially pumped with the stimulus. In many places, such as the ports, productivity is at an all-time high, but they're still bottlenecking consumers.

The more power you give to employees the faster people will jump ship from bad bosses to good ones - and the awful ones will have a harder time keeping their positions.

Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.

Private property can coexist with government supplied housing for instance.

In the "capitalist" USA a lot of the military industrial complex lives off government handouts. Why not the people too? The cakes and cookies we should earn ourselves, the meat and potatoes (and housing) should be a right for every citizen

Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it. I only think they should be taxed if they try to distribute those gains exclusively to the executives and shareholders.

why would the remaining employees, who have no invested capital into the business (with which the automation is driven by), receive any of the gains from said automation?

The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit. In this case, it's often the shareholders in the end.

Yes, that's how it works today. That's not how I'd like it to work.

Many people here get a significant portion of their compensation via RSUs, ESPPs, and other profit-sharing initiatives, and any company that decides to extend these benefits to lower level workers should be treated favourably by the tax system.

Maybe we should leave terms like capitalism and socialism out of the discussion because no one can agree on their meanings so they just become fighting words and their usefulness to the conversations are less than meaningless.

Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.

Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.

All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.

Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.

At least 10 years earlier. Probably more but that's outside my memory range.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in...

There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out.

It is just going a bit slow right now.

Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.

I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)

Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...

Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present...

So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...

https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/

Looks like it's a work in progress.

It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.

I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)

I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.

Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.

The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.

If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.

I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).

The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.

Full time WFH since significantly before covid, it's B2B so even though I'm nominally on call, that's just a nice chunk of extra pay for maybe 1-2 calls a year. I do work hard when required, but it's not as required any longer, so I end up with a lot of free time when there are no issues to solve and I use that to go the extra mile to keep my customers happy.

You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)

Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).

If the worker gets X from the state, they employer can pay them X less for status quo, which obviously was an amount of money that worked out earlier.

I.e. the cost of living in cities is what prevent workers from undercutting each other in cities.

The worker would only continue a "shitty" job, if they get a better deal than before. So it makes sense to conclude that wages would cost more to entice a worker if said worker was able to obtain a UBI.

Jobs that would be popular and enjoyable, would be sought after - and those wages would drop.

With a UBI there is less incentive due to hunger but those same wages look much more attractive. There is still an incentive to work.

The money for the UBI does imply that profits go down, taxes go up (a mixture).

But importantly those workers, previously on the edge of starvation, will start consuming services initiating a virtuous cycle. That is the theory.

But a sensible housing policy (hello San Francisco) is very important or landlords will simply hover up all the surplus.

Wait until you hear about healthcare. Not sure how you would staff an hospital floor once UBI is introduced.

I agree, but is this feasible or wishful thinking?

As a society, we’re decidedly split on whether we should wear masks or should or should not get vaccines, despite the science or despite whatever seems like a rational decision. (Admittedly I’m introducing my bias here).

Would raising pay for retail workers or people acknowledging that we need to treat them with respect - would either of these actually lead to the right outcome? Or would it fuel another voice that vehemently sees these jobs as a stepping stone and not entitled to respect and dignity?

But I think the overall idea that companies would have to put a little more effort into their employee’s well being would be borne out if a country could commit to a basic income for long enough for the effects to shake out.

This is good behavior that companies would be forced into, not because of morals like respects and dignity, but because a mass exodus of employees would eventually hurt profits more than keeping unreasonable customers around.

Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.

I don't think anyone in retail is asking for an undo burden by the rest of society when demanding humane treatment in their workplace.

By law in most situations you must comply with the police officer. Not really the same.

If we always chose not to do something because it would be met with resistance, then nothing would happen ever. The US passing the civil rights act was met with vicious resistance as it was happening, should it not have happened because there were critics of the law? Ultimately, I think we do need to raise pay and facilitate a higher level of discourse in those kinds of environments., regardless of what detractors will say.