Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
Eventually it just becomes a physics problem. If $100 exist in the world, and one guy has $99, and you need to fund something that takes $2, you have to get $1 out of the rich guy somehow.
However this point also helps your argument: When you borrow you pay interest to someone richer. In a sense a combination of whoever you sent the money to, and the bank.
Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
Based on the $49 charge for 5ml of sugar water to calm our newborn baby down so a nurse could draw his blood, probably not much.
(The nurse failed to draw his blood. After four or five failed attempts over several hours they eventually asked a nurse from the NICU to come over, who got it first try.)
Yes, that was the point. That the price of healthcare isn't based on the wages of the nurse.
Licensed vocational nurse don’t earn a huge amount.
Registered nurses (4 year degree+) make ok to good money.
Advanced practice nurses make good money overall. But they have post- graduate degrees and still don’t earn what a good senior developer does.
So change those unsustainable lifestyles then
The word "lifestyle" means more than beer, nice cars, and smoked-salmon-avocado-toast on vacation. It includes peoples' capability to invest in their future. I'm sure you can cite many examples of fools and their money being soon parted, but there are plenty of people doing everything right who are being screwed by inflation as well.
And if the prices are increasing 50%, then the low end pay increases must be a lot higher than 50%.
Your argument rests on an unspoken (and perhaps unrealized) premise that profits cannot be allowed to shrink; all costs must be passed to someone else.
So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.
If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
Penicillin distorts the growth of bacteria.
This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
This matters because it leads to a generally lower quality of life.
Importation of cheap foreign labor distorts in the sense of reducing the wages of low-skilled native residents.
The manipulative behavior around hours and time off traps people in jobs and makes them “dirty jobs”.
I have a high fulutin’ tech gig, but I worked on farms and in retail in high school and college. The laws don’t protect workers, and the people who were working in those jobs for a living were beaten down and exploited because the employers could.
That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!
This is how America treats its teachers. Teachers want to do the job, so skimp on their pay and call it a budgetary victory.
Other countries will choose to value teachers, and pay them well, and generate more competition for positions, and reach a higher general level of qualifications & abilities.
"who will do the unpleasant, demeaning work?"
"We only think it's unpleasant because we make it unpleasant. We can have clean, well lit factories. We just have to prioritize making that work more pleasant."
Giving people a real choice seems easier than regulating every possible kind of job.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Especially https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge...
There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to it. Septic sucking is a function of capital costs not labor costs.
I'm not sure any economic or legal arrangement could do away with weak positions like that entirely.
> the cycle of "I'll take whichever bad choice is least bad right now because I'm desperate."
Welfare covers the basics and provides for a modest life, no desperation included.
[1] Die Tafeln are a group of privately-run food banks in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafel_(Organisation) (no English Wikipedia article unfortunately)
If you work more, your benefits will be reduced until you earn enough to not get any benefits. Roughly 20% of people on benefits work, but make less than benefits, so they get the rest via benefits ("Aufstockung").
Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
> Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
In some cases, yes. But you can also view it as "we need to employ people, but their skills really aren't competitive, so it's better to give them some money from taxes than to give them 100% from taxes".
It is only complex if avoiding questions about the value of human dignity, and the inability of laissez faire capitalism to deliver that, need to be avoided.
> “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.”
Seriously, if you can't find people to do those jobs then you're simply not paying them enough. This whole idea of intentionally disadvantaging people in order to force them to do what you want them to do is some comic book super villain thinking.
Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding?
Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage?
Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and construction, in these examples), or - as quoted above - eliminated entirely.
I would be really interested to see how this would play out at scale.
The way this works is that the workers are commuting in from poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts, since they cannot afford to live in the rich communities that they serve because of the low salaries.
Robots.
> Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop. If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; many of the workers in Austria who wash dishes or clean hotel rooms are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and during the pandemic many of them went home, some for good. Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna who is evaluating the program in Gramatneusiedl, told me that pressure from employers could prevent its expansion across Austria. “Employers say, ‘There are so many unemployed. We have to have a tougher regime for them because we have jobs to fill.’ ”
>
> Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford who are evaluating data from Gramatneusiedl, argue that competition with the private sector is a good thing. “I think, from an economic perspective, that argument doesn’t make much sense,” Kasy said, of the dirty-jobs view. “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.” Kasy thinks that an important function of initiatives like job guarantees—and of universal basic incomes—is to improve the bargaining positions of people who want to change their lives. “Whether it’s abuse from an employment relationship, a bureaucrat in the welfare state, or a romantic relationship, the question is, What’s your outside option?” he said. “Having the safety of the basic income or a guaranteed job improves your outside option. If your boss is abusive, or doesn’t respect your hours, or is harassing you or whatever, you have the option to say no.”