There’s no such thing as a labor shortage.
There’s only a shortage of wages worth working for.
Employers are the only ones who can fix this issue.
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McDonald’s hasn’t owned Boston Market since 2007.
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The people who warn about automation of things like burger flippers forget that it’s much easier to automate things like guillotines…
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Honestly, I don’t think they care. They’re not even thinking about those kinds of issues, probably, in defense of the status quo. So what that wealth disparity in the US is already significantly worse than it was in pre-revolutionary France…
Also, the absurdity is that the kind of physical labor that’s easily automated already got automated a long time ago. What’s left is actually really complicated from a computing/robotics point of view, making it either incredibly difficult/impossible to accomplish and/or so expensive it’s cheaper to pay even much higher wages. On the other hand, what is relatively easy to automate is some information-processing jobs whose current workers enjoy much-higher-than-minimum wages, but the people threatening automation never mention that…
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It is insane to me how “spreadsheet drone” is essentially the highest paid labor in America.
An entirely automatable job.
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They started sending me email promotions almost daily since the beginning of October - probably because of an order placed for the holidays last year. I was running an errand near their location early last week, and was stunned to see the place was closed. Not closed early, but completely shut down. They’d removed the logo from the building and shopping center signs.
I’m in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and they were still sending me messages on November 20. Good thing I didn’t place an order…
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It will be interesting to see if this sways anyone’s opinion about wages, or if they just double down on the idea of lazy, entitled youths who ruined other people’s holidays for the lulz.
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It’s arguably a matter of what is rhetorically convenient, not so much of any real hesitation to target white collar work where possible: if something is actually pretty tricky to automate it’s worth talking up as an automation candidate as hard as possible because you really care about the cost of the labor that you probably won’t be able to get rid of; that’s more or less where the restaurant industry is. Tons of trade association chest thumping because they don’t have an ETA to getting rid of staff and delivery drivers and such; but sure don’t want to pay $15/hr for them.
If something is readily automated there’s no reason to talk about it; since bragging about firing people isn’t worth PR points in itself; and the salary expectations of people you no longer employ are no longer relevant to you(and, if you do still need a skeleton crew to keep an eye on the bots, the actual mass automation that really happened will send convincing price signals to an entire genre of now un or underemployed people without you having to say a word). That’s where, say, the lower rungs of legal and financial services are. No reason to do a PR blitz to try to convince all those bank tellers and paralegals that they’d best be grateful for the scraps or it will get worse; because it has more or less already gotten worse.
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Well sure, exactly. And I also include in this discussion the white collar apologists who don’t think minimum wage workers should get any more money (and who themselves base their self worth on their relative salary) and are quite happy to argue that “the market” would and should keep the pay for these workers low and replace them with machines if they demand more; they would not, however, even begin to countenance having their own jobs automated away or start paying less…
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Unlikely. There are a few pro-Capitalism, definitely not leftist/progressives who have been yelling that the labor shortage is not because people don’t want to work or because of pandemic unemployment increases, like Louis Rossmann, but I see no evidence that anyone on the right is listening to them. They’re mostly more interested in saying such helpful and clever things as “Let’s go, Brandon.”
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When I worked at Kroger (up north with the decent union) it was time and a half. Some of the employees had been there since before a strike and were on the “old contract” so they may have gotten more.
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Without a working water heater, a single call to the health dept would close it down.
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Atlas Shrugged
That’s interesting - I hadn’t really thought about where on the political spectrum Louis Rossmann would reside. But there he is - staunch entrepreneur, capitalist, almost libertarian, but also one of the most visible proponents of Right To Repair, arguing for, of all things, increased regulation. I guess (a) he doesn’t fit well on a single point on the political spectrum (just like everyone else), and (b) in the end he’s only fighting for his own niche in the economy, but at least it will be interesting to see who beats who and consequently joins the other.
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Seems like a lot of people don’t earn enough or have enough flexibility at their jobs to have any time to cook a holiday meal. It would be lovely if jobs paid enough that you could have a household running well on the full-time income of one person.
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I think “left wing of capitalism” or mild mixed economy is a clearly defined area, not socialism but also not AynCap.
Some of us do fit well on a single point on the political spectrum, it’s just that they aren’t points that the media want us to know about (in my case it’s Communalist influenced anarcho-communism). It’s more profitable for them to confuse the matter than to clear it up, in case people realise that there are options that they thought didn’t exist.
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