If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.
Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.
What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.
Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?
What does it contribute?
The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.
By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.
I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."
I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.
OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.
>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
combination of:
1. stubbornness/price stickiness
2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.
3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.
>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.