My reading of that was it was hard to hire younger people for the later shift, as they can’t work the whole late shift due to labor laws. And the older people want to work the day shift because presumably they have kids and what not. Not that it was hard to follow the law. (Though are they talking <16 or > 16? Over 16 I didn’t have restrictions on how late I worked. Unless they changed the law. <16 no one would hire me due to that fact that I would have to leave early.)
“Sir, you may take your complaint to the Complaint Oni. He will… take care of you.”
Mmmm sounds like you’re also making an anti-immigration argument - that if we keep them out, labor is in more demand, and workers can demands a higher wage. Literally a right wing talking point against immigration.
Note: even with lower demand, workers could work together and demand higher wages - it has happened in the past.
Meanwhile people escaping poverty and violence can just… deal with it?
Wait wait, I thought the youth of America were just entitled and lazy. You’re telling me it’s just the mean ol’ government standing in the way of letting them work?
I have seen a lot of people complain about lack of workers, primarily for service jobs. Heck the local KFC/Taco Bell is only a KFC after 3pm or something like that. People want to blame this or that, but it appears to me this is just growing pains of a recovering economy.
You had the whole service industry shut down, and if open, manned by skeleton crews. Now they want people they previously had back? Those people aren’t NPCs ready to be hired at a moments notice. They went on. They pivoted, shifted. Some went back to school. Some got different jobs. They didn’t sit on their hands for a year and a half. Low wages are one issue, but even in places offering ~$15/hr, they are having problems filling hiring needs. Every other industry has also been ramping up. People are finding new jobs out of the service industry.
It is hubris to think labor markets are a switch that you can flip to fill a need or not.
This, exactly. Does the restaurant industry think it’s somehow uniquely immune to the Baumol effect?
Being unable to fill positions is a good sign that labor market conditions are such that people have choices about what conditions they will and won’t tolerate (or that conditions are so bad people would rather stay out of the labor market than tolerate them). Honestly, I think I’m missing something imoprtant (beyond the standard “politicians depend on rich donors”) because I would think our elected officials could easily spin a positive campaign message out of the fact that businesses are finding out they need to offer employees a better deal in order to continue to operate at all.
Or, you know, companies could invest in buying or inventing tools to improve productivity so you can make do with fewer workers. That’s also an option. Lots of the big food chains are investing in robotics, but it’s all still small scale tests. I want to see Pepsi throw a few billion at the problem and then roll something out to all their restaurant chains. Or have the various national labs around the world start a consortium (or several) for food service robotics development the way we do for sexier fields.
Back in the 90s, I remember reading a paper about one of the big chains working with a university to create a totally automated limited menu restaurant, mostly just to show it could be done. The machines operated perfectly, but it turned out that after just a couple of hours of operation there was trash, grafitti, and vandalism requiring a constant human presence to keep the place clean and working. Searching is failing me, sadly, but it does raise the question: if you have to have a staff anyways to keep the machines fed, the area clean, and guarded from vandals, how much does the automation really save you?
Oh, sure, I wouldn’t expect to get to truly human-free restaurants for a long time (you’d need janitorial robots, guard robots, it’s not just food). But having a manager and two staff members per shift for cleaning and maintenance and monitoring and resolving customer problems that come up would still be a huge reduction in labor. I read the average McDonalds has about 15 employees working at a time?
It doesn’t take too much more automation to have some telepresence robots so people at a central facility with AR/VR can “work” at multiple locations for dealing with these problems (or to provide additional support when needed) (and those people don’t need to live in any specific geography) - that’s something the 1990s didn’t have the telecom, display, sensors, robotics, and haptic feedback systems to support (heck, 2010 didn’t have all those either).
And even without that - start with the locations where this is least likely to be a problem, like maybe airport locations. Faster service, lower prices, no needing to get people through security to get to work, and plenty of other people working to clean the area clean and safe already. Have all the restaurants in an airport food court do this and jointly hire a manager and a technician to keep the systems running. Then figure out how to make it better bit by bit and expand from there.
Insurance companies make things infuriating, but they stick pharmacists and doctors with explaining their deficits. It can be hard to stay calm when you realize you’re on the hook for something like that.
Several years ago, I ordered food from a restaurant, was kept waiting a while so they could search for my order, and then we realized I’d ordered from their other location. I was rude, and left, but came back and apologized, put a twenty in their tip jar. And had no lunch, though I’d paid for a meal across town. In my defense, I was very upset about love and work situations at the time, but there’s really no excuse for taking your angst out on anyone else.
A high minimum wage only helps those who are working. We’re on the cusp of automating a significant percentage of our workforce out of existence- To a degree I don’t think most people quite understand.
Look at the industries being hit hardest here: A robot can flip a burger. Hell- It can wrap and bag food, deliver it to a window, and mop the floor. A touchscreen can do the job of the cashier. With the right setup, I’m willing to bet that 5 people could run a 24 hour fast food place typically staffed by 20 or 30 employees.
Take a look at where we’re at with self-driving cars. They’re not quite there, but they’re close. They aren’t some theoretical concept design- They’re on the road right now. How many truckers, deliver drivers, taxis drivers, messengers is this going to put out of work?
And more importantly, why shouldn’t the goal of automation be reduced labor and increased leisure time?
It’s that or just keep increasing the divide between the haves and the have nots.
Right now, with the current environment, all automation is going to do is further impoverish millions, if not billions of people. The current system is not about creating a better life for workers, but about enriching the capitalist class. That’s ALL. Until THAT core fact changes, most of us are on the road to serfdom. You want a highly automated society, where we all have ample leisure time to pursue what we love? Then you got to change that first. There really is no over path forward, whatever technology emerges. Right now, that technology is only going to be used to replace workers who, if they’re lucky, will get barely enough to scrap by.
That is absolutely true. And it’s not something we’re going to fix.
I mean, we live in the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare. We throw out half the food we produce while 10% of our population goes hungry. We have literally 30 times more vacant houses than we do homeless people. Why?
Because all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
We as a people are simply not inclined to improve on any situation which hasn’t already killed off everyone likely to oppose doing anything about it. I mean, we just had a fucking plague, and there’s still people fighting over whether they should get vaccinated.
Then we’re all fucked. We work on fixing this shit or humanity is done. That’s our choices. “Autonomous” vehicles and jobs done by robots are ONLY going to make this shit worse UNTIL we fix these bigger issues.
Frankly, I’m SICK of being told we can’t fix it, because we can. No more of this TINA bullshit.
And yet you just said that every single other industrialized nation…you know, a pretty decent chunk of humankind…has universal healthcare anyway. It’s not some law of nature that America can’t get there. It is something being blocked by a handful of rich people in a gilded age of the same sort that has been dismantled before. People pretending it’s impossible is the main thing making it so.
I would tend toward people being told it is impossible when it clearly isn’t; seeing as the ones with the wealth and means to change it are so often the ones doing the telling.
Oh, I was for sure counting them. They know it’s not really true…nobody puts so much effort toward trying to convince people things can’t be done unless there’s a real chance that they could.
Clearly, you haven’t been to a McDonalds lately. A non-robotic machine can’t reliably make ice cream anymore. The fancy select-any-flavor soda machines are worse. And the touchscreen kiosks they put in a few years ago work less than half the time already.
Automation is a lot further out from working reliably than most realize.
There really is no over path forward, whatever technology emerges. Right now, that technology is only going to be used to replace workers who, if they’re lucky, will get barely enough to scrap by.
