Unemployment is at a 60 year low. 10k Boomers retire a day, almost 3 million a year. About a million folks permanently exited the labor force during the pandemic, for a variety of reasons. Wage gains are wrestling with inflation. The benchmark rate increasing will continue to push down equities and real estate while providing risk free return for cash. In the Fed’s attempt to cool the economy, they have arrived at a soft landing.
If workers want wages to accelerate (or job security), they will have to organize and unionize as there is a lot of corporate and political momentum attempting to maintain the status quo of an extraction environment.
Expect to see profits decline as labor power increases and Boomer consumption declines (half of all people over 55 in the US have no retirement savings per the GAO, 1.8 million of them die every year per the CDC, but those folks clinging on to labor participation is also what’s preventing unemployment from declining further). The stock market is not the economy. Structural demographics have the wheel for the next decade. There is no labor shortage, just a shortage of people willing to work for poverty wages.
> Iowa has a stubborn, worsening labor shortage. Burt we don’t believe a bill advancing in the Iowa Legislature loosening child labor laws is a smart or prudent way to address it.
> Under the bill, 14-year-old Iowans would be allowed to work in industrial freezers and meat lockers, unloading vehicles and in laundry facilities. Fifteen-year-olds could work in light manufacturing and could work up to six hours daily. Sixteen-year-olds could work as bartenders with parents’ permission.
> But find two other provisions of the bill are the most troubling. One would permit businesses that conduct on-the-job training programs to seek state waivers allowing 14-17-year-olds to work in jobs related to manufacturing, mining, construction and processing.
Interestingly, the bill would not raise the minimum wage from $7.25/hr or improve worker benefits/working conditions.
Aside from being tragically disturbing, this is the stress you want to see if you care about workers. They are grasping at straws.
https://www.thegazette.com/staff-editorials/lawmakers-should...
In Seattle, renting a studio in a not-terrible part of town costs over $1500 a month. With prices like that, there is no room for "low paying" jobs.
Accordingly, everyone has had to raise wages, which means some types of businesses are no longer viable. Child care is a good example, between housing prices and higher wages, daycare in Seattle now starts at $22k a year, with well rated daycares charging around 30k a year, and at those prices many daycares are struggling to stay open! Staff turnover is high, employees cannot afford to live within commute distance of their jobs, but wages cannot go up any more because customers can barely afford prices as they are.
The answer is a royal-shit-ton of construction. The answer is the complete demolition of existing zoning laws and a dramatic rethinking of building codes[1]. We need to allow more in-home businesses[2], and allow a wide variety of different styles of housing to be built. The city needs to stop encouraging tall and narrow townhomes that are not livable by families, or really anyone over the age of 40, and stop mixing middle class morality with housing options[3].
If housing goes back to being an 8k a year expense rather than a 20k+ a year expense, wages can stop shooting up.
[1] As an example, if I wanted to add a new bedroom to my current, well insulated house, I'd have to get the entire structure of my roof replaced so I could fit in additional couple inches of insulation. I already had an energy assessment done and they confirmed that this change would have, quite literally, 0 impact on my home's energy usage. The law as it stands prevents me from adding more density to my existing house, so good job there city.
[2] Why can't I buy breakfast sandwiches out of the front of someone's garage as I walk to the bus stop? Why aren't more barbers working out of their house?
[3] Boarding houses and such are famously illegal in most US cities, even though they provide affordable, dense, housing.
I’m also a 47 year old who lives in a three story Ballard townhome. 3 of these replaced 1 SFH, so it’s a good deal for density.
I’m still paying $950/month for my kids before and after school care, so that’s high compared to what we were getting before, but it is tough out there. Im also paying $1100/month for my niece’s daycare in…Spokane.
The causation direction is usually that rising wages cause housing price increases (assuming a tight housing market where houses are in high demand).
People bid against each other for a house, as much as they can just afford the mortgage repayments. If wages go up, then people can get a bigger mortgage, so they bid up to the amount the limit they can mortgage.
I presume a similar effect occurs with rentals - renters compete for limited rental properties and bid up the price to what they can only just manage.
Of course, when you have a huge mortgage (or rental bill), you presumably fight to earn more money, but that is a secondary effect.
40k people move to Seattle each year. 20k new housing units are built. It is sadistic musical chairs, the losers end up moving out of the city at best, or homeless at worst. The winners are stuck paying a huge % of their salary to keep a roof over their head.
When I was looking to buy in 2020, around 10-15 new properties came up for sale in "desirable" neighborhoods (e.g. schools aren't trash) each week. You got to know the same people visiting the open houses each week.
It is a complete cluster fuck around here.
Drop 100k houses on the market and watch prices go down.
Retail jobs or similar roles with a lower hazard rating? Sure, why not. But mining, construction, or processing facilities? Probably not.
https://time.com/6256728/meatpacking-child-labor/
> More than 100 children—some as young as 13—were employed in hazardous jobs cleaning equipment like skull splitters, brisket saws, and bone cutters in meatpacking plants in eight states over the course of three years, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) says.
> Last November, DOL first accused PSSI of employing 30 minors, and a court granted the government a temporary restraining order to stop what a judge called “oppressive child labor.”
Read the link, it’s too much to cite it all here, but it’s damning.
It is 100% designed as a gift to a major industry in the state to avoid fines[0] when they knowingly employee underage immigrants, primarily Hispanics from Central American, who are easily exploited both in pay and safety.
"On top of that, Senate File 167 would also free businesses from civil liability if a teen gets sick, is injured or killed on the job due to the company's negligence or the teen's negligence. The businesses would only be liable for "gross negligence and willful misconduct"—a much more difficult thing to prove in court."[1]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/17/child-lab...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/iowa-bill-relaxing-back-child-labor...
I went to college after a summer doing day labor. I knew I was unwilling to do that work for those wages long. It also paid for much of my first year.
It may only seem like that at the low end because of artificially high minimum wages in some states ($15/hr) which basically makes multiple skill levels of labor all pay the same when they used to pay different.
Also these two statements are in conflict:
> Unemployment is at a 60 year low.
> just a shortage of people willing to work for poverty wages
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/its-long-past-time-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/16/minimum-wage-many-workers-st...
Unions are not just for wages. They are also to counter at will employment and abusive labor practices. To believe they only serve to improve wages is short sighted when looking at the greater macro labor situation, where workers are treated as replaceable and disposable.
Also the definition of "living wage" varies wildly depending on what kitchen sink people want to throw into it. People seem to think that everyone deserves to make enough money for luxuries whereas that shouldn't be the case in general.
Yes, of course. The income taxes are almost zero (or negative), and for one person living by themselves in a studio apartment that's $400 for rent for a cheap studio apartment and $800 a month in groceries and gas, which is quite a lot.
And that's assuming you can't live out of your parents house as you work, which is the suggested way of doing this kind of thing. There's zero reason to move out if you can't afford it. It allows you to save up money and gain skills with less stress.
The "living wage" myth gets repeated way too often.
The U6 indicates there is increasingly a labor shortgage. It's hovering around 6.5-6.6%. That's lower than the hot economy of the 1990s and it's lower than the rate achieved just prior to the pandemic. That general level has been reached only a few times in decades and only briefly.
> Due to the transient nature of pandemic inflation...
Real wages, overall, are decreasing: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
> Real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.2 percent from December to January, seasonally adjusted
> Real average hourly earnings decreased 1.8 percent, seasonally adjusted, from January 2022 to January 2023