The "heart," but the only mention of pay is $10/hour, and advancement leads to more long nights as a chef in the volatile restaurant industry? Such respect
Edit: also, the lip service of the title "porter" - the electric company will surely except that as payment
My summer as a dishwasher made it clear tipping, already deeply stupid, is wildly unfair even to service workers.
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
I thought that tipping is mainly to enable the restaurant owner to avoid paying their workers properly.
No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you, even in the context of an organization managing the transaction. You tip people who are personally responding to your requests -- that's why the dishwasher and other people you're not directly interacting with don't usually get tipped.
So like the accountant filing your taxes, the person who fixes your bug in the bug report, the electrician adding power to a new room, the plumber fixing a leak?
No. Most of those people are self-employed, so you are usually already paying 100% of the compensation directly to them in the first place. Tipping is for when someone is doing work directly for you, but as an employee of another party.
Do people in the US tip flight attendants who serve them meal?
Tipping flight attendants happens often enough that it wouldn't be considered bizarre, especially in business/first class. But it's not the norm, no.
This comment made me gag.
"Tipping culture" has definitely gone too far.
What about the pilot and other members at front? Do the tipped flight attendants kick some bucks over to them?
It definitely feels like an abdication of responsibility (and obligations) of the company that those people work for.
Does one leave a flight attendant tip in the seat or in that envelope in the seat pocket? (Handing a tip to someone directly feels so gauche, like I'm pretending to be some fancy person.)
Do people choose to dine on airplanes? Do airlines even still serve meals?
Or the checkout workers at Walmart?
Do you tip your nurses and your bus drivers?
What exactly does a bus driver do directly for just you? Everyone tips private drivers though.
Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.
In my city, it is common courtesy and sometimes expected that you say 'thank you' to the bus driver when getting off at your stop. It's not too much of a stretch to the scenario where bus drivers are tipped, except that most bus riders (at least in the US) tend to be poor. Maybe we'll have bus drivers tipping well behaved passengers instead lol.
Do you tip the mortgage specialist at the bank that prepared the mortgage for you?
No -- it's also not customary to tip people who get a commission from your purchase.
I guess I will start tipping my dentist and dental hygienist. Also will tip at the DMV
Why is there a difference between somebody carrying a plate from the kitchen to my table and somebody preparing that plate just for me?
Most of those people are self-employed? Citation heavily needed.
I don't think I've ever had the electrician who showed up to my house or business be the owner. I guess it is possible, I've just never seen it.
No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you
From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?
if you ask professional wait staff in the US you'll find that tips are more popular than set wages. They wind up making more from tips than they would via salary. Occasionally you'll read about a restaurant trying to eliminate tips and they lose good servers to their competition. Was just reading about this somewhere else.
Seems like the problem here would be that employers tried to pay too little.
They don't like increasing menu costs because they think it scares customers away. The employees know how much they're getting paid.
Good wait staff make more. Bad it isn't clear. Do you give a bad tip for bad service - you should
There’s a history in the US (in, like… the 1930s) of attempting to dismantle tipping culture on the grounds that it sets up a degrading servant/master relationship (you choose whether to tip, and how much) that’s inappropriate for a free people.
They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason.
[edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.
Every couple of years someone attempts to tackle this but it usually goes nowhere. Just a few years ago it was Danny Meyer (one of the most well known restauranteurs in the country) trying to revive the no-tipping movement by eliminating tips at his restaurants. There was a big todo about it at the time but it seems to have fizzled out as I havent heard anything about it recently. Seems the tipping lobby (aka Big Tipping ie the workers receiving the tips) is too powerful on this one lol.
It’s also ludicrous and wildly inaccurate from an American point of view. I wouldn’t overindex on this take.
It's better to think of it as Americans being so wealthy that we just love paying everyone extra money. Compare US and UK wages sometime. It's not the American workers who are underpaid!
If that was actually true, minimum wage for tipped employees would be equal to the standard minimum wage.
Why? I'm not sure I see how that follows.
Because the employee tips are effectively taken by the restaurant up to the point where they make "normal" minimum wage. If tipped employee compensation was actually about compensating those folks for their effort, they should received the tips they earn. (Tipped minimum wage gets increased to standard minimum wage if you earn fewer than the difference in tips—which is functionally identical to having $5 and a bit of your tips withheld every hour)
As it stands today, if you're tipped and you work a shift where there are fewer customers, you implicitly get paid less (and have more of your tips soaked up by your employer) for exactly the same amount of effort. If you work a graveyard shift for eight hours and see $40 in tips from eight customers, you effectively worked minimum wage with $0 in tips, not minimum wage plus $40. For the people working those jobs, that's multiple meals or tank of gas.
There's no practical reason for having a lower minimum wage for tipped employees, it's literally just an excuse for employers to pay their tipped employees less. If we as a society actually believed that some professions should be compensated based on effort, there would be a different minimum wage for people compensated by commission. But that doesn't exist.
So to answer your question, you're not necessarily "directly compensating" the employee, because a non-trivial percentage of your tip goes towards subsidizing their employer.
This varies by state, though.
You don't seem to see a lot of things. If anyone ever tried to tip me when I was on-site I don't know what I'd do.
Whatever your job is or was, are you not a professional who already gets paid well for your work? You're at my office as a consultant already getting paid a good salary by your company, and I try to flip you a 50, you just take it? Oh right, that's why you laughed at all my jokes. Well good boy. I like that.
Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute. The only people who are ok with that are people who like the feeling of being on the top side of that power dynamic.
It is equal in 13/50 states, including everywhere on the west coast.
That doesn't change the fact that it's near-universally used as an excuse to underpay workers.
Why should I be favoring the specific workers that get within 5 feet of me?
And why should they be getting less indirect pay?
It's a combination of things, but it's similar to why online stores advertise a price, and then add charges at checkout (like shipping, or credit card charge, processing fee, etc).
You entice the customer with the lower price, and once they have committed, you can hit them with another charge or fee without as much ramification.
Restaurant customers can be price sensitive, so tipping is a way to advertise a lower price that isn't actually real. Also, it's pretty ubiquitous, so unless you heavily advertise a no-tipping policy like Kroger delivery, most people will assume tipping is required, and factor that into your now higher price.
Let me change that a bit: "it's pretty ubiquitous in the US". It's not common everywhere. My personal observation (in NL) is that with the transition from cash to contactless payment it seems to be becoming less common over time. Payment terminals here are not setup to ask for a tip (with very rare exceptions) - you just pay the amount on the receipt directly.
As someone also living in NL (Amsterdam though, may be different in other parts of NL), I have to partially disagree with you. It's not at the US level yet, but, my experience is that many if not most cafes/restaurants I go to now display a "Choose your tip %" screen on the payment terminal before paying, and anecdotally it feels like this is becoming more common over time with the newer payment terminals.
I'm in the UK and we have this system too, although half the time the servers will just press 0% for you before they even hand over the terminal just because tipping isn't really a big cultural thing over here (at least compared to the states).
Uks a bit odd since Service charge is a thing as well and sometimes it's always added (at bill calculation) and other places only add it when it's a large group.
Same. But I always just chose 0%
Is Square popular and/or growing? This is the biggest change I've seen in Canada and the US
In North America the growth of Square has pushed things the other way; tips are front and center for the most limited of "tippable service" - starting at 18% and up from there. Tipping on fast food or something like a latte were the extra labour is already priced in is ridiculous.
The drive through coffee shack that I get coffee from asks for a tip on its payment terminals.
I typically do tip because I'm never buying just drip coffee and I'd like to reward the person who took the time to make my drink.
In exchange there's typically some latte art which takes some skill to build up.
I'm glad you feel supported in your payment of the extra socially expected tax that should be included in item prices.
At a coffee shop I'm sort of a regular at, I hate how they spin around the Square tablet whatever thing and it starts at $1, $2, or $3 for a 2.50 Americano. I usually tip a dollar but honestly, an americano is just two shots and hot water. Basically drip coffee. Sometimes I wonder why I go there at all when I could just make crappy instant coffee at work that more or less tastes same.
I went to pick up my dog from the groomer and they asked me for a tip as soon as I said I was there to pick him up.
I replied "Can I see my dog first?"
It just shows that there's an expectation, and at that point it should simply be built into the advertised price.
10%+ "service charge" added to the bill is almost ubiquitous in London now
I feel tipping is still very common in Austria as well. Wife gives me a hard time when I don't tip a lot or at all but they're still very cash only here.
In Paris, the menu prices include tip and tax and—somewhat miraculously. it felt—the prices are generally less than a comparable meal in the U.S.
for some (stingy) people it IS a lower price.
Also a nice little tax dodge, at least back of the day when tipping was predominantly done in cash that I'm sure was never declared on the waiters taxes.
The thing with the no tax on tips thing pandered by both major condidates is that most waiters don’t make enough to be paying income tax in the first place. On the other hand, more regressive taxes on income (OASDI/Medicare/IL state income tax) would apply, but none of these would be covered.
That's not generally true. My friend worked at a waiter in the 90's and was making $200-$300 a night on tips on the weekend. Definitely not reported income either.
don’t make enough
That's not generally true. [...] in the 90's and was making
These are not contradictory?
The downvotes are perplexing. Could someone explain how a statement about income in the 1990s contradicts one about 2024?
professional wait staff sure make enough to pay income tax; it's a skilled trade. In Canada the tax authority would audit service industry people who don't declare other income, where tips get captured.
Culture is a complex thing and probably shouldn't be anthropomorphized like this. I see no reason to believe someone came up with this cultural norm for an identifiable purpose, as opposed to it having just evolved randomly in response to various factors.
Tipping seems terrible for restaurant owners since it lets waiters capture an unusually large share of the value of the product.
But you're just making that up. It evolved almost instantly after the US Civil War as a way to employ newly released slaves without paying them. It was described as a "new idea that had just come from Europe."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fac...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/minimum-wage-raci...
I bet that if this bit of history was more widely exposed, "tipping culture" would be exposed as the degrading practice that it actually is.
The actual origin would be hard to say but it took of in America for some very specific reasons https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...
The point of tipping is to incentivize good service. You're supposed to vary your tip according to the quality of the service. It stopped working when people got too nice. Now people still tip well even when the service sucks. It's just a holdover from a better time at this point.
Most of the people working in a restaurant don't actually get your tips.
That's a popular myth because people don't want to tip, but tipping definitely gets workers like bartenders and waiters paid much more than otherwise. It also wouldn't really work in several states (like all West Coast states) because there's no tipped minimum wage.
It's a cultural norm that would persist (and does) regardless of whether or not there is a genuine purpose to it. That some restaurant owners use it to avoid paying workers doesn't mean that's "its" purpose. Others use it to supplement revenue (like when Starbucks and Uber and those places just keep the tips for corporate). If it has any purpose at all, it's a social signaling protocol to say "I am a good person" that servers use guilt to amplify as much as possible.
From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-do-we-tip
I think that there are five basic motives for tipping. Some people tip to show off. Some people tip to help the server, to supplement their income and make them happy. Some people tip to get future service. And then other people tip to avoid disapproval: You don’t want the server to think badly of you. And some people tip out of a sense of duty.
So, it is complicated. The part about the owner to avoid paying their workers properly is a consequence of the tipping culture, not a cause.
Only in red states. Blue states don’t garnish a minimum wage for tips.
your dishwasher is definitely not tipped
I posted this elsewhere in here, but this is not true. They are often tipped out of a tip pool, especially in pricey ($100+ a head) restaurants with a lot of tip money to go around. People I know have made $40/hr this way, and I even know a guy who dish washed at age 17 at a counter service place and still made $20-35 an hour this way just off the tips that the little payment machine asked for when you picked up your food yourself.
It is a complicated topic though, as it is actually illegal to include BOH people in tip pools in some states. This is because it is often a sneaky way for owners to steal tips by underpaying BOH compared to how they would have to pay them without a tip pool. So you might live in such a state.
Your dishwasher might be tipped depending on the restaurant. My wife served at several restaurants where expo, dishwashers, and kitchen staff got a portion of tips from the service.
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
AIUI, front-end servers are supposed to kick some money into a pool for back-end staff.
Tip out is the restaurant practice where servers or bartenders share a portion of their collected tips with other staff members who contribute to the dining experience. This can include bussers, food runners, and sometimes even kitchen staff, depending on local regulations.
* https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-tipping-out-guide/
This could be legally regulated, or it could be social convention.
It wasn't recently but I was tipped out by the waitstaff when I was a dishwasher. So on top of my $7/hr I'd take home a hundred bucks or so.
What they paid me was totally up to them.
I was a dishwasher as a kid, it is how I bought my first computer. The front end staff had to put a percentage of their tips into a pool that we were all tipped out from.
I worked in a place where the waitresses tipped out to the kitchen, and everyone got some of the money - including the dishdogs. It was a union (UFCW) restaurant. Cheap health insurance and 2 weeks paid vacation after 2 years, 4 weeks paid after 7 years. Not bad benefits for restaurant work. This was a while back though.
A better restaurants the tips are pooled. In my experience front of house, and cleaners/dishwashers splits. Kitchen staff where in a separate pay bracket.
And both major party presidential candidates have expressed a desire to enshrine tipping into the tax code as the holy grail tax avoidance.
Professional kitchens are crazy so much drama and tips is like gasoline.
I've always found it amazing a cook makes a meal, a waiter carries it to the table. It can be a $10 hamburger or a $100 steak. The waiter gets a 10% or 20% tip of the total value of the meal. All just for carrying a plate with different food on it food which they never made. The cooks and dishwasher get squat of that. Granted cooks are paid more than dish washers.
I bussed at a place where the dishwashers made more than me. They had an hourly wage that was higher than what I got hourly + tips. Every place is different. Some do tip out the back of the house. At the end of the day, I want to get paid an honest amount. I don't know if I care where the money comes from.
I worked a restaurant with pooled tips, and the bussers got to split 15% of the total tips, and the dishwashers got some too (iirc, 5% but there was usually only one).
I don't recall if the chef/cooks got any but I also believe they were salaried.
Aren't there some places that "tip-out" back of the house staff from the waitstaff tip pool?
In my very brief foray into food service, it was my understanding that the front of the house shares 40% of tips with the back of the house...
Too late to edit but what I've learned is that apparently my restaurant was crap and dishwashers in other restaurants do get tipped out. Oh well.
I had a summer job as a dishwasher, which paid minimum wage. I was required to join the union, so after union dues, I was paid less than the minimum wage! Being a union member provided no benefits whatsoever for temporary employees such as myself.
This reminds me, the artist Gregory Blackstock retired with a union pension at 55 after 25 years' service as a dishwasher[0]. His art provided another source of income, but apparently he was swindled out of his estate.
I think that the give-away that the union wasn't beneficial is that you were forced to join. If there is value add to parties, it would have to be voluntary.
For instance, in financial industry, there is a certified financial analyst (CFA) designation that some choose to get. Employers normally pay those with a CFA higher wages and people sign up to get this certification and pay dues, all without anyone being forced.
Mandatory unions seem bizarre to me, essentially just rent seeking.
All effective unions are mandatory. They represent the interests of the mass of workers there, and they wield that collective power against two groups who would be happy to take food out of their mouths if they could get away with it: their employer and new employees who need a job enough that they are willing to work for less money or worse conditions.
So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.
It seems like you don't really understand the meaning of "rent seeking". For something to be rent seeking, it must not provide any additional value. Unions do generally provide value, and in fact one of those values is a protection against actual "rent seeking" from employers, such as pay and benefit cuts (one of the easiest ways to earn more money with no extra value produced).
All effective unions are mandatory.
That's a very US centric view. Unions are ample powerful in other countries without requiring mandatory membership. Previous places I've worked in Europe it's not unusual to have multiple unions represented in a company, and even collaborating together on various negotiations. It wasn't unusual for employees to change unions based on what the union was or wasn't doing for them as a member. Monopolies are absolutely awful, and that applies to unions too.
So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.
That's a really bizarre quirk of US mindset. So what if someone else gets the benefits of a better working conditions? Great for them, that's a fellow human being who's life now doesn't suck quite so much. That should be celebrated.
If better working conditions is the only value the union provides you, your union sucks.
I've joined unions in the past because of the access to all the other stuff that they can provide, like free legal support, representation in disciplinary situations etc, just as much as working conditions.
That's a very US centric view
It is of course however it can be argued that the US is somewhat of a unique case here.
To quote wikipedia (which itself is citing three other sources in this quote's case)
According to labor historians, the US has the most violent labor history of any industrialized nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
So the US has a bit of a unique history here. A less than fun example of this is that the organized labor holiday "May Day" is celebrated in many countries notably excluding the US.
This of course being despite the fact that the date was selected by the AFL (now AFL-CIO, one of the main union federations in the US) to memorialize the general strike in Chicago that ended in the Haymarket Massacre (May 1st 1886 - May 4th 1886).
A less than fun example of this is that the organized labor holiday "May Day" is celebrated in many countries notably excluding the US.
Because the US already had Labor Day in September, which predates the May 1 celebration.
That's quite a simplification.
Labor day didn't become a holiday until after the May Day vs Labor Day debate started. It started as a concept in 1882 but it was not yet celebrated in any significant capacity and most unions pushed to change the day to May day after the Haymarket massacre in 1886. The first state to make it a holiday (Oregon) didn't do so until a year after the debate was already ongoing and it wouldn't become a federal holiday until 1894.
Specifically the federal government pushed for Labor day over May day and chose to commemorate the one and not the other with a federal holiday because of fears that memorialising the Haymarket massacre would further empower the labor movement which was at its peak in the US at the time.
And then in the 1950s the US government would then try to further overwrite May Day with "Loyalty Day" in a McCarthyian attempt to limit May Day's celebration.
Let's see, where to start.
Specifically the federal government pushed for Labor day over May day and chose to commemorate the one and not the other with a federal holiday because of fears that memorialising the Haymarket massacre would further empower the labor movement which was at its peak in the US at the time.
It's absolutely absurd to argue that the labor movement was at its peak in the US in the 1890s. This was the era of the Pullman strike--which the government infamously ended by force--and the Sherman Antitrust Act being used against unions under the theory that they were an illegal monopoly on labor. Labor in the US probably reached its peak after WWII. The 1890s were extremely business friendly.
September Labor day preceded May day in both concept (1882 vs 1886) and legal observance. As you noted, the US made September labor day a public holiday in 1894. If you are aware of any country that made May day a public holiday before that time please tell me; I haven't done an exhaustive search, but here's a sampling of when European countries started observing May 1 as a public holiday:
Austria: 1919
France: 1919
Germany: 1933
Russia: 1917
Spain: 1931
Sweden: 1938
UK: 1978
It's absolutely absurd to argue that the labor movement was at its peak in the US in the 1890s. This was the era of the Pullman strike--which the government infamously ended by force--
This wasn't just the era of the Pullman strike. This was during the Pullman strike. The federal government specifically tried to push through a labor day federal holiday as a concession to ease tensions during the Pullman strike. They would not push forward May Day as a federal holiday because they saw memorialising the Haymarket Massacre as inflammatory both in general and at that moment in particular given the volatile situation (even though in practice acknowledging the labor struggle's marred history would have been a better bridge towards peace than a concession and a following violent strike break).
and the Sherman Antitrust Act being used against unions under the theory that they were an illegal monopoly on labor. Labor in the US probably reached its peak after WWII. The 1890s were extremely business friendly.
Yeah the establishment was extremely anti-union. That's why it was the peak of the labor movement at the time. This is exactly the same reason why the late 50s and the 60s were the peak of the civil rights movement at the time. Things were very bad and it was a painful bloody period where the people were rallying with all their might to try and force progress in the right direction. This is the exact time when everyone was out throwing themselves into the gears to try and make the powers that be listen.
If you are aware of any country that made May day a public holiday before that time please tell me
I don't know of specific countries however the call for May Day to be made a public holiday in all countries was in 1904 and even before that there were demonstrations on May Day in the US and across Europe in the 1890s (in 1890 in particular).
However that's not the important part. The important part is that in the US, even before legal observance, May Day was being observed by unions and those unions would strike on May Day if they weren't willingly given the day off to observe it. Hell the year that Labor day was made a federal holiday, that May Day (before the Pullman Strike had started) there were the May Day riots of 1894 in Cleveland.
And it's not like I'm claiming that May Day was already established outside the US at that point. It grew outside the US later but it was very much an American labor movement holiday and had at that point replaced labor day as the holiday of the worker. Labor day started as a holiday of the worker but the events of the era quickly shifted that date to May Day and Labor day instead became a minor concession from the government and businesses so as to appease workers without giving them the thing they were actively asking for.
Non-Americans thinking their opinion on American politics is wanted or relevant will never stop being funny.
I've joined unions in the past because of the access to all the other stuff that they can provide, like free legal support, representation in disciplinary situations etc, just as much as working conditions.
Apologies if English isn't your first language, but those things are "working conditions"
I'm an American and I think having some union that you never chose to join dock their fees from your pay is the most anti-American thing I can think of.
Given that America's history of organized labor mostly began with massacres of striking workers, I would actually agree with you there.
Ahh yes, that's right. I can live here and get to have no opinion of any value whatsoever on what surrounds me.
It's hilarious in a kind of tragic way, how Americans continually tell me things are impossible or can't possibly work the way that other countries manage to make them work.
No, no, it's everyone else that's wrong.
their employer and new employees who need a job enough that they are willing to work for less money or worse conditions.
What if I want to work for my employer but only for more money? Suppose I'm a rockstar and my employer agrees, but their hands are tied because they can't pay me more and have to instead pay off the pension funds of people that retired a decade ago and older employees
Unions exist to redistribute income. From capital to labor, and from workers with higher market wages to those with lower market wages. That management can't award an outsized pay package to a valuable employee without buying everyone else's assent is a feature - that's why people with left-leaning economic politics like them.
> What if I want to work for my employer but only for more money? Suppose I'm a rockstar and my employer agrees, but their hands are tied because they can't pay me more and have to instead pay off the pension funds of people that retired a decade ago and older employees
Eventually situations like this bankrupt a company, sadly due to decisions made decades ago. Just because a company's hands are tied does not mean that current employees need to take sub-market wages. They can, if they are being compensated in some other way (unique experience, growth potential, etc) but normally people see the writing on the wall and walk away. Also, company management needs to negotiate contracts which are fair to all three parties -- owners, current union members, future employees who will bear the burden. It is a tough but important balancing act.
So if you want to join a company and enjoy the benefits that a union has fought for without contributing to their continued push for better conditions, you are a parasite and their enemy, and they are justified in locking you out of that job via collective action.
When this becomes the norm, the union stops working for the workers and work only for itself, its usefulness is gone and can be disbanded.
It has always been the norm. The only difference is that the way it used to work is that if you tried to undercut them by skipping out on fees or undercutting their members' salaries, then a couple guys had a sock party with you in the parking lot. Nowadays we have a lot of political machinery around organized labor to replace physical application of power with organizational application of power. Every now and then the union does indeed stop working for them, which is when things like wildcat strikes occur.
When you're calling workers "parasites", you shouldn't be surprised if people dislike unions. In my experience the unions is just another layer of scammers stealing money from young workers after the employer and the government.
Organized labor does not exist to stoke the ego of people trying to harm their cause. They do much worse than call them "parasites", I promise lol. For example, ruining someone's career with a board complaint is extremely satisfying.
In my experience
Really doubt this is significant, meh.
The Teachers Unions of America add value? I mean this respectively: are you a Democrat shill?
How on Earth can you generalize that? Look at the kids math literacy and obesity in CA. How is this bringing value to the team?
are you a Democrat shill?
Surely we can be adults enough to discuss this without the partisan edge.
I'm not anti-union at all, but I do think there is a very common experience that sours people against them early in their career: that of a mandatory union that docks your already meager pay without any obvious benefits. It of course overlooks the things you enjoy as an employee that the union won and fights to retain (breaks, safety standards, etc). I think anyone who wants unions to succeed needs to think about solving that problem, because unions only succeed on collective action.
Is joining a union in your country mandatory? (or can be made mandatory?). I am not talking about peer pressure but legal requirements.
This sounds quite crazy. What if there are 5 unions like we have in France?
Not at the Country level, but unions have been able to make it mandatory in certain industries and companies.
It is how they hold their power. If it was optional, they would whither away over time.
If it was optional, they would whither away over time.
In France unions are optional (in the sense of adhering to one, their presence is highly regulated and a company cannot do anything against that). They are quite strong (depending on the industry), and representatives are elected.
If a union does not do anything then it indeed whither away.
Now - in our case, some situations are a parody (especially in some places like positions in the administration, the famous fonctionnaires where everybody is on the street when the post office is required to be open outside the times "10:30 to 12:30, except on Mondays", for which their ancestors fought :))
We have a love-hate relationship with unions (which of the love or hate depends on whether you need to take a train and you forgot that there are only 126 days in the year when they are not on strike :))
Unions encode the rather insane idea that if you're stuck negotiating against a monopoly then you should become a labor monopoly yourself. It's stepping backwards for short term comfort.
The other option is trying to fight a bigger opponent as an individual - what do you recommend, changing all the laws by yourself?
changing all the laws by yourself?
Laws change every day. There must be a working process for that.
Historically, here in the US, things like 40 hour weeks, two-day weekends, overtime pay, safety protections, etc. came about because of union actions and the political climate they created.
small example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Friday_(Minneapolis)
English allows your "must be" to be interpreted two common ways.
1. A comment about how in general there should be a way to do that, but not engaging in the topic, ceding all power to the corporations which would be glad to take it, giving none back, and just mildly sneering at anyone foolish enough to join such a basal endeavor as a union.
2. A comment about how we would need to accomplish that goal and that establishing the working process should come before unionizing as it is the proper solution to the problem, ceding all power to the corporations which would be glad to take it until we solved the problem that is effectively created by corporations to be unsolveable.
Collective action works, it solves problems, it gives workers space to live and have basic rights, and we don't have to throw up our hands and say "there must be a better way!"
For sufficiently narrow interpretations of "working", perhaps.
Otherwise, I think you might be a little optimistic here.
It's stepping backwards for short term comfort.
Hmmm...can you elaborate? Because I've always thought the "right to work" (ie, not be forced to join a union in a unionized industry) is an example of sacrificing short term comfort. In that case, weakening the union provides a short-term benefit (no paying dues) at the cost of long-term benefit (higher wages, better benefits, improved safety etc.).
I'm trying to find a generous interpretation of your comment, but it comes across as one of those overly libertarian theoretical perspectives that tends to break down in practice.
of long-term benefit (higher wages, better benefits, improved safety etc.).
If the labor market functioned correctly you wouldn't need unions to enforce any of this, which is obvious, because these benefits exist in almost every non-unionized industry as well.
The only reason to engage with a union is because the employer is so large they not only monopolize the consumer market but the labor market as well. The correct solution is to break up the monopoly.
Labor markets are difficult. If low wages go down further, people will offer more Labor, not less, and your microeconomic equilibrium goes out of the window very quickly. Also, while demand for work is not monopolistic per se, the employer has usually a structural advantage when closing a contract with a single employee, and in some industries only a few very big employers compete on the labor market.
If every employer would be allowed to hire exactly one worker, then you could probably do without unions, but that would yield a totally inefficient economic system I wouldn’t want to live in. And therefore modern economies allow unions as an exception from the rule. Otherwise, at least in some trades, wages will go down to the absolute bare minimum, which will lead to political instability, which leads to less economic activity.
If the labor market functioned correctly
See my previous comment about theory breaking down in practice. There are all kinds of asymmetries that make economies not function correctly in a theoretical sense and we (as a society) develop policies to mitigate those dysfunctions.
I don't know that the scales operate in ways that allow for every corporate (pseudo)monopoly to be broken up and still have viable industries. Especially in countries that succumb to regulatory capture. That means there would need to be some countervailing balance to that power, and that's where unions come in.
In the US, labor unions are required by federal law to negotiate pay and benefits on behalf of all employees at a particular workplace, rather than just their own members.
Because of this requirement, some people argue in favor of permitting mandatory union membership, on the basis that without it, individual workers can free-ride, enjoying the superior pay and benefits the union negotiates on their behalf without joining and paying union dues.
Others argue that forcing people to join a union and pay dues is illiberal, and should be outlawed.
This is the crux of the "right-to-work law" debate, where "right-to-work" describes laws that make it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment.
Personally, I find it odd that federal law requires labor unions to negotiate on behalf of non-members, but I am also not particularly well informed on the topic.
It is of course odd but no sane employer will treat non-members worse than members, otherwise there would be a direct incentive to join the union.
In France all unions negotiate joinly for all employees. It is strictly forbidden for an employer to have different treatment of an employee depending on whether they are members of a union. Membership is not public anyway.
About 10% of the workforce is unionized and only a few percent of the unions funds come from the members. The rest is from companies (mandatory fund), the region, ...
What if there are 5 unions like we have in France?
So it's important to remember that European Unions and American Unions are NOT the same thing! Despite having the same name.
In the US the union is directly tied to the job, you can't pick your union. In Europe you can chose your union.
This "little" difference dramatically changes the unions, and is the reason why a majority of Americans hate unions.
You can't really choose any union, it has to be something that supports your type of work. But you don't have to join the union, and the union have very different functions. What americans call Unions isn't really what we mean when we talk about Unions. This is why american companies tries to fight unions in europe so hard. When they finaly realize the difference they accept the unions of europe. Some just take a bit longer to come to understanding.
You can't really choose any union, it has to be something that supports your type of work
It depends on the work. In my high tech company there are I think 5 unions, all more or less equal (one of them is more "blue collar" oriented but still). When there are elections, it is usually a matter of preference of people who are in the union, more than whet they will do.
When a shop votes to unionize, the vote is binding on all the in-scope employees; you can't individually opt out unless you're in a "right to work" state. Allowing some employees to negotiate their contracts individually is seen as basically defeating the power of collective bargaining; right-to-work states are more conservative and business-friendly.
You joined a union workforce as a temporary employee and were shocked to find that you didn't benefit? Who do you think the union is there to benefit? It is there to protect the people working there for their living wage, and one of the biggest threats to that is replacing them with younger workers more willing to be exploited. A good union is acting in their interests, not yours, so it sounds like it was working as intended! If you had stayed there and worked full time, you would have been in a position to benefit from their negotiations around hours, benefits, and wages.
I think you misunderstood the parent: they were paying into the union.
No, I understand that. Union dues are not a transaction any more than taxes or insurance premiums. Part time or temporary employees will always be deprioritized under people who have built lives and families working for that company and continue to do so.
Being a union member provided no benefits whatsoever for temporary employees
In my union we very much care. What we do now is advocate for a reduction I the number of outsourced positions, and hire directly, so wage and conditions are improved.
It's true unions optimise for certain things too (they also have limited sway and time), as I experienced as an expat. Especially when you know it's temporary, it's unlikely you'll ever see a personal benefit.
OTOH, a union just managed to negotiate 10+% higher wages in my first year in current job, unbeknownst to me, so that's nice.
I was a dishy for years in a few different restaurants and hotels. It's hard work but if you do your best to help out the kitchen and wait staff wherever you can (picking up ingredients, helping mise en place, fetching dish carts yourself, stocking bar) then you can really make a difference in the day to day. Sometimes I miss the camaraderie. It's an easy industry to get stuck in though, and there's usually a lot of alcohol involved. It took me a while but eventually decided it's not for me.
I got stuck a long time in restaurants from around 18 years old to right at 30. Finally got out and move to the construction industry. I'm just wondering what exactly Aguilar did in construction that's definitely harder than some high volume fast paced kitchens. Only thing I can come up with is most likely roofing, especially during the summer, because everything else I've been through in construction is easier.
"I ask Aguilar: How does this compare to the construction work you did back home? 'It’s easy,' he says."
The difference between construction and the kitchen is that if I mess up in the kitchen we're out probably less than $100. If I mess up in construction we're out significantly more in particular if it's a commercial construction job.
There is another kind of mistake than can be made besides procedural.
My worst safety screwups in foodservice were 2 things: cutting through my fingernail and about 2/3 of my entire fingertip with a brand new chefs knife (looked away at somebody barking something in my ear while rapidly chiffonading basil) and plunging my entire hand into a deep fryer (slipped while wiping down the edge of the oil vat–again, rushing).
I’ve heard way worse stories coming out of construction. People breaking backs, having hands pulled into machinery… my mistakes have healed, theirs are permanently disfiguring.
The framing people I knew were all mostly deaf from the saws and nail guns.
Plus bad knees by 40
I got this: https://www.harborfreight.com/foam-kneeling-pad-56572.html?e.... For $6.99 cheap at twice the price.
I just use a piece of styrofoam that was padding in a package.
I have a couple pairs of Fjallraven Vidda Pros, and they have double knees with an opening to slip a foam pad inside (which they also sell). Carhartt has a similar method with their work jeans. I’m sure this could be DIY’d as well for the sewing-machine-inclined.
Had a childhood friend die when a frame wall fell on him. Dishwasing is hard but it makes your skin soft, and you probably won't die from the job.
That's not a meaningful difference from the employee's perspective. If you mess up in either job then the worst that they can do is fire you (unless you engage in some sort of malicious sabotage that could be proven in court).
That's not a meaningful difference from the employee's perspective.
Perhaps for certain types of employees. I know that if the cost of my mistake is much higher then the level of preparation and study I'm going to do before committing to action is going to be greater. I guess some people just can't be made to work that way.
the worst that they can do is fire you
If I lose a job in a kitchen, I can find work tomorrow, if I lose a job in construction, it's going to be harder to replace that salary. The zero sum analysis doesn't really work here.
Huh? It's not hard to find construction jobs at all. Contractors are constantly hiring.
Meanwhile there's the Disney lawsuit about the woman dying from allergy in a restaurant.
If you mess up in construction, you (or others) might get killed. Less likely in a kitchen.
man that is a super informative comment. I worked a shitty fast food job back in the day and I always felt like that was the hardest job I ever did. Literally just non stop work.
I worked about 12 years in restaurants, held every job besides mgmt level, including one of the hardest being an upscale dive bar with actually decent food and a sparkling kitchen (read: lots of elbow grease), where the cooks also had to wash dishes, there was no dedicated position for that. I’ve worked in kitchens that maintained over 100°F ambient temps next to pizza ovens wearing long sleeved chef jackets. Kitchens where we dragged pieces of ovens, stoves and entire coolers/shelves outside after every Sunday brunch to power wash them.
I also worked for a week one summer with an uncle who laid brick. We built a chimney on a two story house. Mixing concrete and mortar in mixers and wheelbarrows and getting it to the work spots, carrying bricks around, carrying 100 lb sections of flue up half finished stairs and ladders.
No comparison. I never slept better in my life than that week. Hardest work I’ve ever experienced.
I’m sure construction, like foodservice, has easier and harder jobs. But I’d be willing to bet the hardest construction job is way harder than the hardest foodservice job. Not to mention more dangerous.
I wouldn't be surprised if the construction business in Guatemala is a lot harder than in the US. Probably longer hours, no breaks, harder work, few to no worker protections.
I washed dishes in a downtown tower with four restaurants, all sharing one kitchen. The output of the dishwasher took four people, mostly because delivering the dishes across the huge kitchen distances was time consuming. I had a lot of generalized anxiety, and so I liked complex physical challenges. I eventually replaced all four dishwashers. Took a lot of intense speed and strategic dish delivery. I came very close to the dishes coming out going back into the loading area again, and that's where I needed the greatest speed. Over the years I've found other people also dealt with their anxiety by seeking out intense sports or sports-like physical activities that facilitated seeking higher and higher levels of mastery.
Did you feel guilty about the other 4 guys losing their jobs?
Three others, and none were lost. One was the nephew of my boss, who was allowed to just go sit in a break room pretty much any time. The other two just hung around looking busy whenever the boss came by. The cooks knew what was going on but didn't say anything. Eventually, my boss figured it out and assigned me to clean pots and baking racks in the bakery. Dysfunctional place for dishwashers.
She told me I could be an assistant baker and get a raise if I learned everything the two bakers could teach. When they day came they said "there's nothing more to teach you" (there was a lot more, but not for an "assistant"). I told my boss and she literally ran out of her office, me running after her, ran into the bakery shouting "he thinks he knows everything!".
No assistant baker job for me. I moved on the next day.
"He thinks he knows everything!"
God, this is crazy. If she relies on proficient people, she must trust them. I cannot understand her motivation—just for fun or cruel?
I've met some employers who dangle these sorts of things in front of people, probably telling themselves that they are being sincere, but when the time comes to deliver there's always a new goalpost. They have the same motivation as any manipulator, to take from you as much time and energy as you can be cajoled into giving.
Obviously I wasn't there, but that would be my suspicion. GP responded to being shamed appropriately. There are times in my life when I have been the sucker who feels compelled to double down. Perhaps it's a form of sunk cost falacy.
Her position was due to nepotism, I believe, and so her personality problems weren't disqualifying. The other person who cleaned trays was a kind of diversity hire, an adult with the maturity of a four year old or so. So I don't think "motivated employee does good work" was in her common experience. The bakers and cooks knew to keep their heads down around her. I was playing in the U.S. Open (chess) at the time, so I welcomed some time off (and then pursued other work).
I came very close to the dishes coming out going back into the loading area again, and that's where I needed the greatest speed.
I had trouble parsing this and got a vision of you meeting yourself coming out of the loading area.
Dunkin Donuts commercial
"Time to make the donuts"
"I already made the donuts"
Very cool comment.
Sometimes I miss the camaraderie.
I also worked as a dishpig and kitchen hand in my early 20s before I got a job programming. The feeling of the kitchen humming during service is something I’ve never come close to in office jobs. The flip side of course when everything collapses, getting screamed at, shit pay and horrible hours.
I wash dishes by hand as we've got a small kitchen, but one thing I've noticed is that dishwasher machines leave a unique taste/smell that can be noticed when drinking water from washed glasses. It's so much nicer to use a glass that's been hand-washed.
The taste is usually the Rinsing Aid, aka Drying Agent, not the detergent. It's an additional chemical is sprayed on the dishes towards the end of the cycle, to aid drying without creating spots. The chemical remains on the dishes.
I'm quite surprised the majority of people are fine with drinking that stuff. Not just because it noticeably changes the taste of beverages but because it's covered in chemicals and people are fine with it mixing together with their beverage.
Our rinse aid is disabled on our dishwasher.
I have never had to use rinse aid until recently. I needed to buy a new dishwashers, and it didn't have a heated element for drying (for energy efficiency reasons). Without rinseaid, things stay wet.
I tried to do some research on the safety of the chemical, but couldn't find anything online
Searching for "rinse aid epithelial lining" tends to turn up a bunch of relevant results and research.
Commercial rinse aids at commercial application levels
a lot of domestic Rinse Aid contains alcohol ethoxylate, have a look at that https://www.ewg.org/cleaners/subcategories/26-RinseAid/?sort...
Not at the same concentration
Thanks, now to figure out how much rinse aid my dishwasher dispenses....
There usually is some initial setup where you can set how much salt (to help with hard water) and rinse aid the dishwasher should use. You can set the rinse aid to zero.
You were not kidding, it is toxic up to a dilution of 1:20,000 v/v . I will stop using rinse aid containing alcohol ethoxylate immediately!
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(22)01477-4/ful...
It doesn't noticeably change the taste of beverages to me. As to the chemical argument, that doesn't matter to me. I'm willing to trust that people have done the homework and that it's safe to drink.
That is wishful thinking, no one is looking out for the things you think they are.
These products all have surfactants as the main ingredient, and surface tension is what literally define us.
Given the history of how we consume stuff like forever chemicals, BPA, roundup pesticides, carcinogenic makeup, and the negligence involved in the Ohio chemical spill and perhaps Boeing, you are very trusting.
It's evident that some of those trusting people are willing to make or save a buck while putting you at risk.
At the end of it, people should probably make their own assessment as to whether they should put themselves at risk. And I don't mind drying a handful of dishes if the alternative is to lace them all with surfactant.
Surely this would depend on the detergent?
Still, going to put this in my stack of lifestyle choices next to film photography and vinyl records
If you have soap residue:
- Try running the dishwasher a second time with no soap, or on a rinse cycle
- If you use soap pods, try putting it not in the soap tray, but directly in with the dishes. [0]
[0] This video (starting at 11:40) explains how soap is used in a dishwasher. This guy (who has an excellent channel) gives tips to maximize soap exposure in your dishwasher, but you can do the opposite to minimize it instead. If you have a good machine, your dishes might still come out clean.
Unfortunately, it's other people's dishwashers (I don't own one) that are the problem and it comes across as rude if you accept a glass of water from a friend and then complain that it tastes nasty.
If I was your friend then I would love to know if the water tasted funky so I can do something about it, but maybe that’s just me.
Possibly, but it seems common to most dishwashers and never happens with hand-washed glasses.
Dishwashers are all designed not to 'waste water', so they don't end up fully rinsing the dishes.
When I hand wash glasses, dishes etc, I don't always fully rinse the items as I consider that the washing up liquid reduces surface tension and so should drain off the items quicker than just water. I can't say that I've ever noticed any flavour residue of the washing up liquid.
I think you should really fully rinse the items. Eating and drinking soap is no bueno for your epithelial linings.
Also they need to be cleaned. Not all dishwashers are created equal. Some leave gunk behind on the bottom. It could be drainage and or poor design. Some have a built in garbage disposal and you have to clean the bin out every once and awhile. If you have never done it. It is not a fun task.
Maybe they used those pods or the no streak additive.
I use the dishwasher for glasses most of the time and haven't noticed any difference, but all i use is the cheapest powder/gel and only half of what fills up that little slot.
Industrial dishwashers, which can clean plates and silverware in 90 seconds, do not use detergent pods.
I have a PhD in Physics from Berkeley. Still, in the strictest real estate sense, my best and highest use is as a dishwasher.
I was managing a small optics factory in Livermore. We made laser mirrors to order there — any wavelength, any reflectivity, any angle, any polarization, you name it. I was working my ass off and was unmarried at the time. Thanksgiving came around and I had nowhere to go. But I hooked up with a church in San Jose that had a dinner for poor people and went as a volunteer. After serving the dinner, I wandered back into the dish room. I immediately went over to the sink and kicked out the lady who was pretending to work. I then washed all the dishes and left.
Comes one year later. I’m in the exact same situation. I call up that church. The lady says, “Oh, that’s very nice of you. But we don’t need any more volunteers, we have enough.” Oh shit. What to do. I found my old replica army parka I had bought in a Cambridge surplus store 20 years earlier. I went as a poor person. I didn’t want to be alone.
The first thing I found out is that poor people are herded, controlled, treated like children. We had to wait outside the church in the mild cold until permitted to enter, in a kind of line. So I sit down. I will never forget the beatific smiles of the volunteers that served us. This was performance art, and they were the stars. Everyone on the supplicant end noticed this, I’m sure. So the meal ends. I walk back into the dish room, survey the situation, once again kick out whoever was pretending to do the dishes, do the dishes, and leave.
Loved reading this. I admire your courage and ingenuity to dress as a poor person. If you haven’t already read it you might enjoy Orwell’s autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London, your story tangentially reminded me of it.
Coincidentally I have just finished this book, and the article and the comment you're replying to definitely reminded me of it. Great book - I was expecting the incisive social commentary and humanity that Orwell is known for (and it delivered) but it's also just a very entertaining read.
This book is so unexpectedly funny! Once I was reading it on the train and couldn't help but laugh loudly a couple of times. People in the compartment were perplexed.
Similarly, Jack London's /People of the Abyss/
Took zero courage. Was in character. Now as an “upper-class” retiree— now there’s a tiny bit of imposter syndrome.
Great book!
Everyone on the supplicant end noticed this
I’ve downright gotten philosophical about it. The way my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories.
The way I see it, if some people get personal satisfaction and a good reputation from being the stars, and their stardom leads to them helping people, I shrug. If you’re in a desperate situation you use the resources you have in front of you, and even say whatever it takes for them to help you more. I just don’t trust their motivations as people who “help the disadvantaged” can have INSANE saviour complexes and hurt those around them so they can heal them. Because they don’t actually care about you - they care about saving and being seen saving.
You’re perceptive to have caught on to the game so quickly. It took me years.
On the other hand there is almost always a somewhat selfish motivation behind any extensive action. I would rather prefer someone being seen helping the poor rather than being paid to do the same.
Besides, in some regard the helpers might also be in need, even though not in a material sense.
There's actually a name for this - stunt philantropy.
https://restofworld.org/2024/nigeria-philanthropy-asherkine/
At least you caught on eventually. I was completely unaware until now.
my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories
I'm gathering material for a possible book (or series of blog posts) on the role of stories in people's identities and sense of meaning in their lives, and I'd be interested in hearing more about your perspective on this if you fancy talking about it? fromhn at demersal dot net
Hungry people tend to not care at all who smiles for show and who actually cares, as long as the food is served. Just my 2 cents, but I get where you're coming from.
When going to foodbanks as a kid, I could 100% tell.
you could tell, but did you care?
As a person whose been on both sides, it makes a difference if you truly interact with someone.
So if you were just able to walk into the dish room and start washing dishes, why dress up like a poor person?
Just walk up to the church and say you're the guy who volunteered to wash dishes that day. Of course the people who volunteer get something out of it, something you should have noticed when you were volunteering!
I’m not as smooth as you.
This story has it all, even from the first sentence - you should start a cult.
For several years, I lived next to a small church that operated a soup kitchen. The thinly veiled disgust many neighbors had for the kitchen's clientelle was unfortunate, but I was bewildered to learn that the Eastern Orthodox bishop of that church had no more respect for his diners than my calloused neighbors.
I immediately went over to the sink and kicked out the lady who was pretending to work. I then washed all the dishes and left.
OT, but I'm very jealous of people with this mindset and work ethic. I'm much too lazy to have done something like this, but have always looked up to people who see things this way.
but unfortunately the speedy commercial ones aren’t removing the all the chemicals properly – https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2022/Geschirrspuel...
another reason to eat at home.
I think the article refers to the actual human(s) doing the work, not machines. Quite confusing, not sure if it's intentional or not.
Interesting, I was called a busboy when I was working in a restaurant washing the dishes, not a dishwasher. Never heard it be used for anything but the device.
No, busboy clears tables and delivers it to the dishwasher, who cleans the items using a dishwasher.
In practice, at least in the US Midwest where my experience is, there is not always a clear line between the two jobs. I washed dishes as a busboy and bussed dishes as a dishwasher.
It was a bit tongue in cheek. I've bussed, served dishes, pulled coffee, mixed cocktails and washed dishes as a waiter all in the same day.
Humans use the machines
They obviously still use the machines. From the article:
I push a full rack into the dishwashing machine, where it gets blasted with 160-degree water and a solution of detergent and a drying agent, emerging 30 seconds later. Well, most of the time. When I send a large cutting board into the washer sans rack, it brings the machine to a halt and forces my teammates to open a metal door in the center to remove the obstacle.
What about household ones?
Research is regarding commercial dishwashers only
Probably not as much of a concern. IIRC the issue comes from the sani solution and rinsing aids.
You also get to choose what chemicals you use and whether you run additional rinse in the machine or simply in a sink.
The paper mentions them and they didn't find toxicity at concentrations that are typical of a household dishwasher.
https://www.jacionline.org/action/showPdf?pii=S0091-6749%282...
This article is talking about humans that wash dishes in restaurants.
This as good a place as any to mention one of my favorite authors, Dishwasher Pete[0], who wrote a zine about dishwashing and dishwashers[1], and a memoir about his quest to wash dishes in all 50 states[2].
0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete
When I was a teenager and I had just got heavily into martial arts - my Professor was teaching us about perception. (1992)
One of the examples he used, was to ask us
"Who is the most important people in a restaurant?"
"The dishwasher, and the Janitor"
>"Do you think you'll go to a restaurant again if its bathrooms are filthy and your dishes are dirty?"
His point was that you have to look beyond whats in front of your face, and look at things as a whole, as a system, identify all the components, even if you cant seem them - you can see their impact on the situation.
I think if you're asking "Who are the most important people in a restaurant?" then you're already on the wrong path.
The janitor and dishwasher are vital, but so too are most of the roles. It's a collective effort. Which of the legs of a chair is most important? Silly question imo.
Which person is least important, usually the one that makes the most money. Their capital is important, but with a more distributed wealth in society the workers would be able to own the restaurant without an overlord.
I'm really interested in the idea of flat wage structures. The cleaner is possibly one of the lowest paid people at my office, but they give up just as much time to be there for an hour as the CEO does.
they give up just as much time to be there for an hour as the CEO does.
I think this misunderstands a fundamental economic idea: people aren’t paid commensurate to their time or sweat invested; they are paid (in theory) with their differential contribution to the economy. Therefore, people who get paid well tend to have at least two things: 1) a rare skill and 2) a relatively high contribution to the economy. Sometimes those are correlated with effort and time, but they don’t have to be.
Isn't this a circular explanation? You are paid for your contribution to the economy. What is your contribution to the economy? Well, it is the amount you are paid.
In theory the more difficult to replace you are, the more you are paid.
Not necessarily. Just because they are (somewhat) proportional does not mean they are equal, or even easy to measure. Clergy, for example, don’t usually contribute much to the economy in raw terms, but they are paid because of what they add to the quality of someone’s life.
On a bigger scale, look anywhere garbage collection people have gone on strike.
There are tons of jobs many take for granted and are much more important than we give them credit for.
The True Story Of The Fake Dishwasher Pete
That was such a wild story. Such a delight, on so many levels. Thanks for sharing this.
"The dishwasher" is a great take of working as a dishwasher. It's from "the ice cream man and other short stores", you can read the whole section on Google books.
I have fond memories of checking out the local comic store in Berkeley, CA in the 90's, after lunch once a week, to see if the new Dishwasher was in. If it was, I knew I'd have a great time that evening reading his exploits and learning a lot of history. He'd often include a history lesson about local labor relations over the last century. Not always, but sometimes.
I have all of them in a box somewhere. I, of course, also have his book on my shelf.
IMO, Dishwasher Pete is a national treasure.
I worked part time as a dishwasher for around 6 years in middle/high school, at a restaurant with no machine, just three sinks and a huge counter. It's definitely a good way to get into the restaurant industry, but also a great way to learn if you hate working at a restaurant.
Related to the importance and underappreciated status of dishwashers...
I only sometimes washed dishes at middle school. If you wanted the cafeteria "hot lunch", but your parents didn't pay for it, you could get it that day by volunteering to wash everyone's trays, in lieu of recess.
Personally, I think this wasn't a great lesson. In the current very inequitable US environment, I support simply giving nutritious food to all kids, and choosing some other occasions to teach whatever other values. Also, it's possible to too readily "know your station in life", and endure things you really shouldn't, so I don't think kids should be conditioned to do that automatically.)
And in restaurant kitchens, I've heard in many cases the rates paid for work are dragged down because undocumented workers don't have a lot of options, and so in some sense are exploited. Which seems especially class-oriented when they're working in a pricey restaurant, serving people who probably aren't working any harder than they are.
Your last point is rarely discussed and incredibly unfortunate. We’re creating a lower class of citizen who must exist in the shadows, constantly fear being relocated, and can easily be exploited for labor or worse. Then somehow this is packaged as being humane in some way.
...while being simultaneously vilified for "taking our jobs" and being "dangerous" (whereas they are being very deliberately used to generate profits).
You are making a solid case to issue permanent residence permits to all undocumented workers (since our economy would, at this point, collapse without them), and - most importantly - punish employers with prison time for hiring people unauthorized to work going forward.
That's it, illegal immigration problem solved.
Employers like that are having their cake and eating it, too. The undocumented workers are the ones who get punished for their employer's crimes. Sorry, I'm not going to cite sources, as I've yet to hear about anyone going behind bars for hiring illegal immigrants.
EDIT: never mind, here's a source[1]. It wasn't hard to find.
For example, the latest available data show that during the last twelve months (April 2018 - March 2019) only 11 individuals (and no companies) were prosecuted in just 7 cases. There were no prosecutions during either of the last two months.
Corporate employers aren't even being prosecuted. This tells you everything about the hypocrisy of the entire system (and anti-immigration rhetoric in particular, whether legal or illegal).
EDIT 2: "sporadically" hiring illegal workers isn't even a crime punished by prison [2]. Yay.
[1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/559/
[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
I always go back to the Tyson Chicken raids a few years ago to show just how broken this is.
ICE officials raided a few facilities a few years ago, and actually found about 900 undocumented workers.
Many of them gave evidence to officials, including written instructions from the company that advised them how to fill out employment, banking, taxation paperwork if they "didn't have documentation", i.e. Tyson didn't just know this was the case, they were actively enabling it.
And in press conferences, when journalists asked "Are there any plans to investigate the company or issue fines or charges?", the response? "We are not considering that at this time."
What it actually ended up looking like, with some other safety issues raised around that time is that Tyson perhaps decided their undocumented workers were getting a little too angry about poor safety standards, and making waves. It would be entirely unsurprising if Tyson made a sweetheart deal with ICE that said "Hey, if you come to these plants, you'll get to make this big stink about undocumented workers" (and remember, this was during the Trump administration), "but in return, can you leave us out of it?", shades of "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
I think this is terrible mostly because it is inequitable.
In Japan, it is customary for elementary school children, all of them, to be doing the food distribution and cleaning. (who is doing what rotates.)
I think I like this idea in general, especially if children rotate through all the chores.
And in moderation, so children have lots of unstructured time to play and learn and socialize on their own.
It’s just for lunch.
Part of why this works is because Japanese school is structured differently from American school. In the US the class of students moves between teachers’ rooms; in Japan the teachers move between classrooms. So things like lunchroom coats that fit the particular students are always in the same place, and the lunch is served in the classroom so you’re only serving a few dozen people.
simply giving nutritious food to all kids
That's becoming more common. My school district just announced they have funding to give all students free breakfast and lunch for the next three years. They got that funding through the government (and I think it may have come all the way from the feds). We're not a low income district, so I assume that funding is easily available.
Even before then, it was mostly a "pay if you can" policy. The kids have accounts and they punch in their ID number when they go through the lunch line, but it would never refuse even if the account balance was negative. They'd ask parents to bring the balance positive, but it was never revealed at the student level that someone did not have adequate funds.
Slowly but surely we're trying to make sure students can focus on school. Hard to make everyone's home life ideal, but we do what we can. Hopefully this translates to their increased success in life and each successive generation will improve.
When I was in school, if you didn't have funds to pay for lunch (and you weren't formally on the free lunch program) you got a white bread peanut butter sandwich instead of the hot lunch.
They don't do that anymore, but stuff like that was commonplace in the past.
I worked as a dishwasher in the '90s at a fancy hotel for a couple years as a teen. I was in high school, was from a single parent household, my mom needed financial help, I had no skills, and had to learn the language (English).
This particular kitchen though was enormous since it serviced 3 restaurants and a lounge. So the days were long and I had to work pretty much every major holiday and/or especial day. The worst was Mother's Day. It was brutal. Always a Sunday morning and unrelenting.
It was a sweaty, tough, smelly, and undignified, at times, kind of job. The chemicals in the soap used by the machine were abrasive as hell. Burned your freaking fingertips over time.
Only good thing about the job was lunch time. Having access to a lot of good food. But you never wanted to eat your meal around other people since everyone else thought you smelled and were put off by your sweaty appearance. Again, the job was not dignified, not in appearance anyway.
And I don't care what label or euphemistic title employers come up with for the job. (e.g. dishie, dishy, etc) It still doesn't change the job. It does not make it dignified until they start paying more money and more and more people want to do it cause it pays more. Until then, job freaking sucks.
A dishwasher by any other name would still have smelly, peeled and cracked hands.
Why did you not wear gloves? When I did dishwashing at Mc Donald's I wore gloves they worked fine. Maybe my stint was shorter at only a year, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds is using plenty hard chemicals too.
When I worked at Lyon’s Restaurant (a slightly upscale Denny’s, to my mind) as a dishwasher, the heavy-duty rubber gloves they provided were frequently wet enough inside that mold formed rapidly. Only put the awful things on once or twice before giving up on them because they were so unpleasant!
Would disposable gloves (like the kind you can get 100 for $5-10) not withstand the heat or chemicals?
Water will just get in at the wrist and then the moisture is trapped in the glove, which could be worse.
Versions with longer sleeves exist for this exact reason.
Not when I was a kid, or at least that my parents were willing to buy. Plus I had to clean all the fucking ashtrays. Those gloves got gross af by day 2.
We had a dishwasher but I wasn’t allowed to use it. Too loud.
I expect disposable gloves would have worked, but they weren't provided, and as a naive 17-year old I was way too dumb to ask.
For reference on my stupidity, around the same time I mixed chlorine bleach and hydrogen peroxide to make a stronger cleaning agent and independently discovered that chlorine gas is really nasty stuff! Wow -- only did that once!
It wasn't all bad. Several times I got to fill a 2'x2'x3' bin with strawberries after cutting off the bad bits, and ate several pounds of them each time. For non-Americans, that's around 40 kilos, but as an American I don't know much about the metric system, so that might be a few grams off :)
Wondering the same thing, I also wore gloves when I was on dishes in the cafeteria kitchen I worked at in high school.
The robotic version: Nala Spotless: [1]
It's a service - $3000/month includes hardware and support.
3k a month plus what you have to pay to have someone babysit and feed it. this is wild.
I think in a very high cost of living country (Switzerland) this would be good economics if you trained your staff to put stuff in front of it as part of its workflow. I think this would work best if the robot was typically had an empty queue and you could just clear a table and place it directly in front of the robot and walk away.
There's lots of brief moments of downtime in a restaurant to do stuff like shuffle a tray or two over for the robot.
This is just the first version of the technology. It could get much cheaper if manufactured in volume, and it can get faster as well. Rule of thumb is that 10x the volume cuts the price by half.
I don't really think that this is really possible.
Robots like this are pretty common in the industry (like the mechanical industry) and one costs around 50k and we already produce them at scale.
How much can they lease it for, in your opinion?
Consider PV solar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...
In 2003, PV panels were a pretty darn mature technology. The technology was decades old. Modules cost about $5 a watt, one twenty fifth the price they were in 1975. More than two gigawatts of them had been installed worldwide. (Millions of panels!) No way could they fall in price by half, right?
Surprise. By 2010 another 38 gigawatts of solar had been installed, and the price per watt was down to $2.32. No way could they fall in price by half again, right?
Surprise. $1.02 per watt in 2012, and another 61 gigawatts installed. $0.52 a watt in 2017. $0.26 a watt today.
Just in 2022, the world installed 86 times as much solar as existed on the entire planet in 2003.
If you build a lot of something, it can get very cheap indeed.
I'm not talking about mature technology or not, we already mass produce then, that's my point.
The components inside them are pretty standard too
Cobot prices are dropping. This article claims $20K for a mid-range unit.[1] Nala shows two robots, one at the dirty end and one at the clean end of the dishwasher. Dishwashing is a good opportunity for robots. There are many potential customers for a relatively standardized product. It's much easier than automated cooking.
There are other dishwashing robots. Useful for cafeterias, maybe.[2] Cute, but not too useful.[3] So far, none seem to be deployed much. But that will come.
[1] https://standardbots.com/blog/collaborative-robot-prices-the...
Even according to the link you posted [1], you need computer vision so the price would start at 35k
The 20k cobot would be the "blind" kind that is only useful in fully automated lines thst deal with the same type of product, not a dishwasher with a lot of variables
Back in the late 90s I was working in a nightclub in the UK. It was my first time when I had to use a 'professional' dishwasher. That thing could wash 50-70 glasses in 3-4 mins and I remember that when I was pulling out that tray it was hotter than the sun. We had 5-6 trays for each dishwasher of them and at any given time 1-2 trays were out filled with glasses cooling down.
These were like tiny ovens (same horizontal dimensions but only 40-50cm tall)
I haven't worked in a restaurant so I don't know about that complexity (cutlery, porcelain wearing out) but glasses.. oh man we had 99% mostly pint glasses (beer/UK) and shot glasses and 1% wine and champagne glasses, and considering people breaking them we had to restock (replace broken or replace worn out) every week.
At one point West Virginia had a very large glass industry, including production of drinking glasses for eastern cities. Sustained breakage ensured a large steady market.
https://www.glassonline.com/usa-opinions-differ-on-decline-o...
"One hundred years ago, by one historian's estimate, the bars, hotels and restaurants of New York City broke 500,000 glass tumblers every day." (2003)
I’ve never worked at a place where we broke 1 glas a day on average, let alone 1 tumbler.
That would put my estimate at over a million bars, hotels and restaurants in New York in 1903.
I'm guessing there must have been significant deliberate breakage.
You could work at plenty of places that don't break 1 glass a day and the average could still be 1 glass/day.
The article is about people, actual human beings washing the dishes by hand.
Yes, and yet...
Guzman says he's a better chef for having cleaned pots and pans and worked his way up in the kitchen. “Cooking school doesn’t prepare you for a broken dishwasher,” he says.
Recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173177
East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses
I kept my dishwashing job on my resume for far too long under the title “hydro ceramics engineer.”
It was grueling work, but I met a lot of interesting people, one in particular turned me on to studying Chinese which changed the whole path of my life. Also gave me entre into bussing then waitstaff. Paid my way through high school car insurance and college surviving. Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.
Definitely under appreciated and under paid, but I learned a ton about working for a living.
a lot of the discussion about wages ignores the value of experience; students pay to spend their days learning but it's somehow unfair for someone to get paid to learn job skills that transfer to other jobs
Experience doesn't put food on the table today.
neither does education, what's your point?
I've searched 'Orwell' on this page with no results. Feel like someone should mention the first half of Down and Out in Paris and London. His first book about life as a 'plongeur' in twenties Paris is very memorable.
The comment just above yours for me is exactly this. A recommendation to read Orwell's Down and Out. Posted seemingly 1 minute before this post. Probablt not important but i thought it was interesting
I saw that too. Same thought at the same time. They should date.
I'm a little late to conversation.
As a chef for 17 years, here is the advice I was given when I asked someone at age 16 what I should do to become a chef. He said I should get a job as a dishwasher. His reasoning is I needed to learn to appreciate and respect the restaurant's dishwasher because, in his words, 'when shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong, it is the dishwasher who will save your ass.'
At 17, I walked into one of the best restaurants in the California and told them I was looking for a job as a dishwasher and why. I was very lucky because it lead to working in the best restaurants in the world. It took another 5 years, age 22, before I learned the power of telling an employee out loud I can't succeed without them. They didn't even want a raise, they only wanted me to say those words.
when shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong, it is the dishwasher who will save your ass
I'm 100% sure I have already read this exact phrase before.
I'm paraphrasing.
Funny. My family moved in the summer between 5th and 6th grade. But they didn’t have enough money to pay for my school lunches — my dad was a poorly paid teacher at the local University, and I don’t remember what poorly paid work my mom had.
But I discovered that they allowed students to work as dishwashers, and if you did that, then you got your lunch for free — and even allowed to get seconds. That also kept me off the playground, where I tended to get bullied a lot.
So, for me, that was actually a good experience in grade school.
Sure, I had to deal with the super hot water and the super high pressure sprayer, but that didn’t take long. And I could quickly and efficiently load the trays into the commercial grade steamer that sanitized everything. I felt good about doing that job well, and I felt like I got a good reward for it.
Thinking back, I don’t know why they allowed a 6th grader to work as a dishwasher. That was probably illegal according to the child labor laws. But I think it worked well for me.
I think as a society we've come quite far, but if a kid wants to wash some dishes at school under adult supervision for a limited amount of time, I don't see a lot wrong with it. Obviously, it would be better if we could just not make families pay for school lunches, but that's another topic that isn't terribly relevant to this discussion.
Do you think you learned any valuable lessons that carried into adulthood? I started working in 9th grade as a busboy/washer and look fondly back on those memories; not only as a way of getting out of the house (bad family situation) but also as a look into the lives of the adults that worked there. As an adult now, I feel sorry for the middle age people who worked there because they obviously didn't really want to be there, but they needed a job and frying eggs as the local greasy spoon was apparently what was available. But I'm happy now and I get a small amount of comfort knowing that I can go back to that line of work if I ever found myself in a bind and needed to make an extra $2k. I'm sure my adult body won't handle it as well, but mentally, I think I'd be prepared.
At least where we were, you needed a special permit to work if you were under 18, and at the time that would allow kids as young as 14 into the workforce. But, they could only work part-time. I did that later during the summer between my sophomore and junior high school years, to buy a car from my parents.
But as a dishwasher in 6th grade, I didn’t have any adult supervision. I worked alone in there. And I don’t think that kids 16 or under should be working without supervision. And I didn’t have a youth work permit, which was most likely illegal.
I don’t know that I learned a great deal as a dishwasher that would be useful in the adult workplace, other than how to efficiently and quickly load a dishwasher. I guess if I had to go back to that kind of work, I could do it again.
Ironically, the car I bought from my parents was a 1974 Chevy Malibu Classic with a 350ci V8 engine, and if I had been inclined to do street racing, that would have been a perfect car to use for that. But I was a straight arrow and I had no flipping idea what I had in my hands, so I just drove it calmly (well, mostly calmly) to and from school and nothing else.
A couple years later, when I was in college, I wasn’t driving it at all, because there was no reasonable parking on campus, and was effectively forced to take the campus bus. So, I ended up letting the car rot, and we ended up paying a towing company $50 to get it out of the driveway and haul it off for scrap.
A related story ("WHEN IN THE HISTORY OF THIS RESTAURANT HAS ANYONE EATEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF THESE PLATES?"):
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130313143038-5434591-best-a...
What a great read!
This article came out in 2017, five years before the release of "The Bear", a currently hot TV show about fine dining. In this show one of the main characters polishes forks for an entire day and is rebuked for doing a bad job and not respecting the work. Previously this character offers to wash dishes and is told the restaurant has the best dishwashers in the business and can't afford to have someone like him screwing it up.
Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8XSIVhsE4
Arguably the best episode of the show. Way better than anything in season three that’s for sure lol
Can't resist sharing my own experience as a dishwasher though given the number of comments no one's going to read this... I was a dishwasher (and everything else) at your standard suburban Italian deli for a couple years in high school. Italian delis are famous for their cold deli sandwiches, but also for things like bacon, egg and cheeses for the breakfast crowd, and chicken cutlet, chicken parm, sausage and pepper, meatball, etc. sandwiches for lunch. And the great thing about it is that these things, historically anyway, are cooked on-site, starting first thing in the morning, using your standard baking sheets/pots/pans, which (surprise) creates a lot of dishes each day.
Now this deli I worked at had no machine so all those pots and pans stack up and by afternoon, when the cooking is done, there's a huge stack of dirty dishes. My first day working there, I show up after school and since they know I'm coming there's the huge stack of dishes waiting for me, the new guy. They tell me to get cracking on it and so I don the apron and get going. This is maybe at 2pm.
As I'm working away, folks periodically check in with me, kind of with these quizzical looks, but they don't really say anything other than an "all good?" type of vibe. And I'm sweating my ass off because the amount of char/build up on these stainless steel pans/pots/etc. is off the charts. But I'm diligently working away getting them absolutely friggin' spotless! Like restoring them back to their brand-new state.
Well, you see where this is going. The guy who got me the job, a friend who's also a high school guy but a bit older, comes in the back, as I'm finishing up, maybe 4 or 5 hours later. The two owners of the deli also come around the corner. My friend's like "dude, those have never looked like that," pointing at the huge stack of cleaned pots and pans. And I'm like "whattaya mean?" And he's like "all of that black stuff? Just stays on there!" I'd literally cleaned off years of charring that had built up. He slaps me on the back, starts laughing his ass off. One of the two owners, when he stopped laughing, was like "I didn't know why the hell it was taking you so long but... they look great!"
Thanks for sharing that
Starting at the bottom and working your way up to the top definitely produces a different quality of leader. I used to work in research labs where everyone had to do a bit of everything. I'm currently in a silicon valley startup where leadership is quite proud and will enthusiastically tell anyone who will listen that they were born rich, their parents got them into Stanford, and they've only ever been c-suite. And they're incompetent as hell and I'm job hunting.
I have had the same experience working in Big Tech. Lots of people who have only had an internship (in their field) and no real life experience doing any sort of hard work. Of the friends that I gravitated towards in those big companies, only the folks that actually had real jobs, did we form any sort of long term connection.
Not only do they have a tendency to incompetent, they can very unsympathetic and dismissive towards people viewed as below them.
I only worked a single restaurant for about 7 weeks. I'd leave with my ears ringing, everything outside sounded muffled at the end of the night.
I understand the appeal some people see in the work (it is honest work after all), but I literally could not hear what people said in there. I just nodded and assumed it wasn't profane!
I dont feel like a dishwasher can wash and make sure the dishes are perfectly clean. at least i havent seen one perform that well. a human can at the end see if it is cleaned or not in the first attempt. then they can clean it properly. machine cant do it
I know this article is about people who wash dishes (plongeur), but the machines are equally critical. A few days ago we were in line at the cafeteria in the IKEA in Stoughton, Mass., and they had paper cups and plates and bendy plastic forks because their dishwashers were "waiting for spare parts".
and a week’s paid vacation after a year of service
Meanwhile in Europe, four weeks guaranteed by EU law, and many states go above that, and many companies top that off. Oh and a truckload of public holidays on top.
Working at the corner hours of the day, in a backbreaking job, for 20k a year and just one week of vacation? JFC.
I read the title and I assumed it was talking about a dishwashing machine. Why hand wash dishes? Just let the machine do the job.
"A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant"... so can putting items with non-trivial amounts of raw egg on them in the dishwasher.
My apprentice asked "If I see a typo in the training materials can I make a PR to fix it?"
This is the IT version of dishwashing!
Being a dishwasher “was the first time I went home proud of myself after a day's work.”
Any reasonably-sized restaurant needs a dishwashing machine of some kind though, eg a conveyor - I don't see anything in those photos.
Some may be interested in the movie 'Dish Dogs' from 2000, starring Sean Astin
An army marches on its stomach
Dishwasher as in computer or dishwasher as in computer?
I started work at a restaurant washing dishes. That's work. My main takeaways were learning that eggs are the worst thing in world to deal with and getting really annoyed with the servers who would put the water in the glasses in the trashcan.
I mean who had to take out the trash and lift the the damn thing into the dumpster when it was filled with water? So annoying.
That said it was fun job in it's own way, the variety of the people working there made the place a hoot.
I was a dishwasher to six-figs remote eng.
One thing I hated was power spraying ramekins and the sauce would hit you in the face... But yeah I remember those days listening to changelog while I washed plates.
I was trained as a cook when I was sixteen at a world class Perkins restaurant. My trainer was a highly experienced chef and restauranteur.
I had to master the dish tank first. Everyone did and everyone dished and cooked. I had to be able to run the dish tank by myself with the restaurant at full bedlam before I was able to progress as a line cook.
We were doing $40-50k a week in the early 1990s. I love doing dishes to this day.
Reminds me of Dishwasher Pete -
Professional Dish-Washer Shares Tales From the Pit [2007] https://www.npr.org/2007/06/12/10991537/professional-dish-wa...
Dish Out Of Water https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/conventions/act-two-17
Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States [book] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060896426?ie=UTF8&tag=thi...
A day in the life of a dishwasher in NYC
The paywall of this website breaks chrome on iOS because you can't scroll down and then you can't get access back to either the address bar or the navigation controls. You get locked to it.
On the other hand you could argument that a dishwasher ain't worth all that much. You can basically toss them back out on the street and grab the next yokol and the operation contiues just fine. Chef and waiter? Not so much.
Honest question, what should they be paid? Its purely manual labor, there is not much if anything to innovate or be creative. The output is fairly binary, clean or not clean. I am all for fair wages but how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low?
Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself is fairly low value. Line cooks, chefs and most of the rest of the crew are not making much money themselves. Most Michelin restaurants are happy to breakeven for dinner service but make lots of profit on the catering, special events, books, branding area. I am not saying $10 is the right price only asking how do you price it when the industry as a whole does not pay well for back of house. We could say raise labor costs but most are already running razor thin margins.
If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little.
Edit: Check out https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for examples based on real-world data.
If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough.
It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost.
Sure, divide and conquer is the prerequisite to allow the non-working-class to exploit actual labor.
I say human dignity is non-negotiable. So there should be a legal minimum wage which is automatically adjusted to the living prices of wherever the person you hire is expected to work.
If you are unable (or worse: unwilling) to pay people enough to survive of your work, you are irresponsible and a leech on society that should be out of business anyways.
I understand that some have been brain-washed into believing that leveraging your education, inherited wealth or position of power to exploit others is a sign of being smart or some sort other conclusion that coincidentally justifies the desirable outcome — but that doesn't change the self serving nature of anybody discussing for that kind of exploitation. And as markets have shown to suck at respecting any externalities, be it nature, culture, the rights of future generations or human dignity, they have to be regulated to do so.
If your business is unable to survive that, it wasn't for the benefit of society anyways.
So the solution is to throw many of the people who currently make $10/hour out of a job and onto welfare? That's what you're proposing.
If we raised the minimum wage to $20/hour, some businesses would raise their wages, and some will fire those workers.
And once on welfare it is extremely hard to get off welfare because of claw-backs and because once you have a gap in your resume it's really hard to get a full time $20/hour job. There might be employers willing to take a chance on you for a lower salary part-time.
The solution isn't to raise minimum wage, it's to eliminate minimum wage and put in an equitable UBI/welfare system. It'll raise wages naturally, because if they have a decent safety net, most people will feel comfortable quitting / not accepting an unjustly low salary. OTOH, if companies make massive profits through paying low salaries then we should tax those profits to pay for the UBI/welfare.
I have a slightly different take: if your business is only profitable by the taxpayer subsidizing a relatively large number of employees wages with welfare benefits, you should be capped on how profitable your business is. In other words, you can be as profitable as you want but as soon as your business model relies on taxpayers to be viable, those taxpayers have a say in just how much profit is considered reasonable.
The majority of new restaurants aren't profitable and go bankrupt within a few years.
I don't think that adds much to the conversation. That says nothing of the existing (and profitable) restaurants that exist and still pay people wages that qualify them for taxpayer subsidies. You can easily reword my point to say "your business plan should not rely on paying people a wage that requires them to be subsidized by taxpayers without additional oversight". I also don't think the point needs to be constrained to restaurants.
Your point still makes no sense. Everyone is subsidized by taxpayers to some extent. We all receive a variety of government benefits, tax credits, etc.
As for a "business plan", that's a total joke. In the real world most small businesses have no real plan. They just make it up as they go and try to survive another day.
If you think that unskilled workers should be paid more then how much exactly? Please be specific. And if paying that much would cause the business to go bankrupt and leave those workers with no jobs, is that a preferable outcome?
I worked in a restaurant for a while as a youth and made minimum wage. It sucked and I hated it, but that was good motivation to learn some actual job skills.
This is one of those pushbacks you see on social media that is used like a gotcha but it’s fairly useless because you and I know it can’t be encapsulated into a forum-sized answer any more than the question “what should a company charge for it’s product, and be specific.” The answer is it depends.
At the risk of sounding as glib as your question, I’ll refer back to earlier comments: an amount that allows employers to “afford life”. That means these two things should not be happening at the same time: 1) a relatively high percentage of the employees rely on the taxpayer to “afford life” in the form of welfare benefits and 2) the company is turning a relatively high profit. Now I know “relatively” needs to be defined, but that’s what crafted policy does, and a forum like HN probably isn’t the place to get into those kinds of weeds. It can probably be pegged to CPI in some way, or limiting executive pay as a multiple of median employee pay when they do rely on taxpayers, as a starting point for the discussion.
It’s odd to me that you want to give a business a free pass for incompetence for lacking a viable plan, and then holding the employees to a high level of responsibility/accountability to “motivate” themselves to “just do better”. What you’re advocating is a kind of semi-permanent underclass since your understanding ignores all kinds of social and psychological barriers that prevent some people from getting “actual job skills.”
The estimated living wage in Manhattan is about $43 per hour. So are you proposing that restaurants in Manhattan should be required to pay that much for unskilled labor, regardless of the value they generate?
Where someone works != where someone lives. If I work remotely for a SV firm, I don’t necessarily have to be paid SV wages. I’m proposing Manhattan restaurants should not be subsidized by taxpayers when they don’t pay a livable wage in order to make a profit. What I’ve said before is that profits should be capped to a reasonable amount if taxpayers are subsidizing a business to a reasonable degree through welfare benefits. That doesn’t require paying $43/hr unless the owners want uncapped profits.
To use your own turn of phrase, get some “actual skills” at creating a profitable business.
Welfare does not subsidize employers, it is a subsidy /against/ employers. Giving employees welfare increases their wages because it increases their negotiating power.
If it wasn't clear, my point was that it allows employers to arbitrarily lower their wage rate where the business is viable.
Example:
-Employee needs $15/hour to 'afford life'.
-Business is only profit-positive if it pays $12/hour or less
-Assuming the employee will only accept a job if it allows them to 'afford life', as long as the government subsidizes the equivalent of $3/hour, business is able to turn a profit. Anything less than that, the employee does not accept the position and the business is not viable.
This was laughably on display a few years back when McDonald's received blowback by publishing their training that teach their employees how to apply for government assistance while they were posting outsized profits.
But it doesn't do that, in fact it requires the employers to raise their wages.
Your model has a single employer (a monopsony) who doesn't need to negotiate. That's a case where minimum wages cause both wages and employment to rise.
McDonald's (mainly) doesn't have employees, it has franchisers and those have employees. Different companies.
More importantly, if you're on the left then you should think welfare is good. It's good that they're telling people that! We should require it in fact!
If you're saying that telling someone to get welfare is bad, you're making an argument that welfare is bad. In your model signing up for welfare makes employees poorer. That doesn't make sense.
Is there evidence to this claim? Even the most recent UBI studies seem to run contrary to this point.
This otherwise borders on a bad-faith post. Yes, McDonalds corporation is different than a franchise, but the profits of the former are obviously tightly coupled to the operations of the latter.
And it’s not a left/right political argument on whether welfare is “bad”. That’s an overly simplistic perspective. It’s about how a particular system is structured and whether that leads to desirable outcomes for society as a whole.
Or phrased differently: If people don't starve when they won't let others exploit themselves they won't be likely to let others exploit themselves.
If we apply market logic to that this would just mean that employers have to offer better deals.
I'm not sure this follows. By this logic, do you think UBI would cause employers to increase wages?
I think (given sufficient UBI), you would see some industries increase wages but many businesses fold because they are only viable by suppressing wages (which are then subsidized by taxpayers). So, yes, on one hand the remaining employers would be paying more but the overall employer base would be smaller.
Another way to think about it is that as forms of welfare go up like disability, those workers tend to fall out of the labor market. They are using that as a tool for negotiating higher wages. (granted, there many complications in this point)
It's not an either / or. If the US were to invest more in education and developing the economy everywhere, there would be more jobs beyond low paid "unskilled" labour. That is, at the moment there's too much demand in low paid jobs, too little in e.g. college or uni level positions, and too much supply of people desperate enough for a job to take something below the standards of living.
Compare with my country, which during the pandemic saw a large amount of people in the service industry change jobs, because during the pandemic a lot of restaurants and the like were closed. When those opened up again, they found themselves with a shortage of staff, leading to the ones that still worked in the industry to be in a strong negotiating position and have their wages increased significantly.
Take away the supply - by increasing supply of higher-paid and diverse jobs everywhere - and low wage jobs become higher paid jobs automatically. In theory.
How would you propose to increase the supply of higher-paid and diverse jobs? The USA already spends enormous amounts on education subsidies and Keynesian economic stimulus. And what is a "diverse" job anyway?
The USA and many other countries already have a surplus of people with college degrees that have no real value from a job skills perspective (elite overproduction). Future job growth is likely to be concentrated in skilled labor fields as we re-industrialize. We should probably shift some funding away from universities, and towards community colleges and trade schools.
I don't know how far this extends, though. I live in an area where nearly anyone who wants to can get an affordable college education (and, I'd venture to guess, very close to free in most cases). And yet the graduation rate is abysmal. The fact is the higher ed path is a round hole and many people are square pegs. We can't just turn everyone into a highly educated skilled worker. I agree with the other posters that a wealthy country should have a dignity threshold for the members of their society, but I'm come to realize education may not be the main pathway to get there.
No need to compare, that happened in the US.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010
No that is not what I am proposing. I have lived through the introduction of minimum wage in 2015 in Germany. Maybe you lived through more such transitions, but I did not observe what you (maliciously?) claimed to be for.
Sure the US is always different (and solution working elsewhere can't possibly be applied to it), but granted: a UBI might be a better choice ultimately. But the question is if that is really within the set of realistic choices. A UBI is a hard sell even in comparably "socialist" countries in Europe. In the US it would be dead on arrival. Consider that maybe this is the idea.
You know, a bit like what the Hyperloop did for intercontinental trains, proposed by a guy who wanted to sell more cars.
This is not an accurate description of the empirical evidence for either minimum wage or UBI.
The evidence is that minimum wages do not reduce employment up to 60% of local median wage and can increase employment - so there's no reason to get rid of it. And UBI doesn't have much effect in either direction - so it's not really that important and the main reason to do it is that it's much simpler than welfare alternatives.
Anyway, UBI isn't an alternative to minimum wage because the point of UBI and other welfare systems is to support non-workers, namely children and the elderly.
This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage since I either lived with my parents or with roommates (admittedly funded by a combination of work and student loans). During that phase of my life, I didn't require a living wage. I just needed some extra money, and so I was willing to accept lower paying jobs that wouldn't necessarily support every expense. Someone who required a living wage couldn't have worked those jobs, but they were perfect for me, so I was glad they existed at the time.
It doesn't matter if you require the living wage or not — there will always be people who don't strictly need it in any society. Just like there will be people on the beach who won't ever need a life guard. Everybody needing a thing is not a precondition for it making sense to exist.
If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploitation within the given context. Not being able to live off your full time job is certainly exploitation.
If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.
We could establish UBI, and then we wouldn't need a minimum wage. We could decide as a society that we want everyone to have a baseline level of support, rather than doing it indirectly (and less effectively) by forcing the nonexistence of low-paying jobs.
Minimum wages are good on their own and do not appear to have downsides in practice. You don't need to "not need" them.
Basically think of it as banning wasting people's time by offering them really bad jobs. (This is the "search theory" explanation, but there's also the "monopsony theory" explanation, which is that they can increase employment!)
Of course, wage boards and sectoral bargaining systems are probably better since they're more flexible.
Minimum wages are not "good on their own"; they're a solution to a specific problem: making sure people can survive with at most a relatively reasonable amount of work, though they're currently failing at that goal. If we stop having that problem we stop needing a solution to it. Making it so people don't need to work to survive is strictly better.
And if people have a guaranteed level of support, then yes, there is a downside to saying "you're not allowed to exchange sub-self-supporting amounts of work for money". You don't need to ban wasting people's time; if people don't have to work to live, the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them, or figuring out how to automate them when previously it was cheaper to pay minimum wage.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of things people might want to do that aren't valued enough by society to pay even subsistence wages for. In a minimum wage world, those things either don't happen or they happen as side hobbies for people with other means of support. If you have UBI, you create the perverse situation of "I might do that for free because I don't have to work to live, but I can't take any money for it unless I can get someone to give me a lot of money for it".
They do /eventually/, but because working takes time, working a bad job reduces the time you have available to find a better one, which has the effect of giving everyone less than ideal work situations. That's why it's called search theory.
With UBI, people don't have to worry as much about lining up the certainty of a better job before quitting a worse one, and people aren't likely to take those worse jobs in the first place unless offered substantially higher pay than they'd have settled for if they needed the job. That and other factors seem likely to make search theory around the minimum wage boundary much less of a problem with UBI.
Sure, that would also be a way to address the problem. Quite frankly I haven't read up on the UBI enough to give a qualified answer about it, but given the observation that many places appear to try it out we will probably have very conclusive data soon.
OpenResearch's recent UBI example didn't appear to be a resounding success. While people receiving the higher income appeared to have more interest in starting a business or continuing education, it didn't actually significantly translate to those getting accomplished.
To the GP point, though, if it's unilaterally applied there may be unintentional consequences. Their example was working as a teenager; relatively high minimum wages may end up cutting most teenagers out of the workforce. If an employer has the choice between a 35 year old and a 15 year old for the same pay, they are generally going to hire the 35 y.o. That isn't to say minimum wage can't be raised for heads-of-households or some other administrative distinction, but a one-size-fits-all approach may cause a bunch of other issues.
It may. Buy are those issues worse than the current issues?
I don't think so — especially if you are inclined to look at countries where the minimum wage is close to (or above) the living wage.
That's what I consider the correct way to think about this. So do you have thought on what metrics you'd use to measure the net effect?
One of the nagging facts that bothers me is that, even as we see increases in minimum wage, there seems to be certain segments of society (particularly young men) who are disproportionately dropping out of the labor pool.
What if you are a lonely oldster who'd love to slowly sweep away dust and cigarette butts in front of the local store for 5$ an hour. It doesn't seem obvious that outlawing this is good for society.
I mean, there are ways to go about this without being an employee. You can start an LLC and contract yourself out if you really want to. I'm just not sure keeping that option open as an employee is a net-positive given all the downsides for people who don't fall into such a narrow example.
If you find a person that is offended by earning too much I am pretty sure you'll find volunteers to help.
But next time add sarcasm tags if you making that point.
So you want a dying wage. How can a dying wage exist? Two ways:
1 - someone else is subsidising the business, I.e. parents are paying the rent/mortgage, and food of the teenager
2 - the person is literally slowly dying, living in a caravan or a tent as ‘working homeless’ unable to afford healthcare or racking up debt, and it’s only a matter of time until they literally kick the buckets and cease to function. Or they will become birdedfor the taxpayer, with food stamps and other kinds of aid.
A business needs to pay for its inputs, labour is one of them. The cost of labour is whatever is costs to take care of basic needs of a human, the exact number is debatable but it does exist.
If we are going to provide subsidies, why don’t we subsidise healthy food, or planting trees or solar panels for example, for both businesses and individuals? Why should my tax money subsidise cheap labour, often for corporation that avoid paying tax themselves?
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/summary-inflation-re...
so work part time
And that's fine; the problem is that a lot of people don't have a choice, because there's not enough jobs at their level of education, their willingness to work, etc.
I'm thinking of a reddit post copied off facebook describing college or uni graduates in biology who could only get a job at Starbucks because there wasn't enough demand for their specialism.
There will always be people desperate enough to race to the bottom, but that doesn't make it a good thing for society at scale.
Especially when we import millions of low-skill / no-skill people every year to compete with the poor people who were born here.
Works great for the upper classes - keeps the price down for those fancy Michelin dinners.
Immigrants do not compete with native workers because they have complementary skills (like different native languages). The evidence is very very strong that immigration does not decrease wages. It generally increases them because it provides new demand, though that's not guaranteed.
Demand is limitless and makes no benefit. Only production is beneficial.
That's certainly what Xi Jinping thinks.
Our immigrant ancestors were almost all unskilled. I’d rather the government not tell me where I can or cannot live, as a matter of basic human freedom.
It doesn’t matter how easy a job is to learn. What matters is how many people are willing to do it and how important it is to society. Trash collection may be mostly driving trucks and throwing bags in the back but very few people are willing to do it and society grinds to a halt without it so those folks should be making way more than some Facebook coder who adjusts ad pixels all day.
The problem is the US economic system is so backwards it values the ad pixel pusher more than the trash collector. At least until there’s a communicable disease going around and suddenly the trash collector is recognized as an essential worker and forced to come to work while the ad pixel pusher “works” from home.
I heard rumours that trash collectors in the US earn pretty good money, in part due to being unionized. I've experienced what happens if binmen go on strike firsthand and / or seen it on the news, it's not pretty.
Whereas industries where there's plenty of supply, like the service industry, cannot get a union off the ground because for every unionized employee, there's plenty of un-unionized people waiting to get a job that doesn't pay them enough, but it's a job and that's good enough.
>If the job is unskilled (i.e. you can train the next person to do it in less than one hour) and you have several people standing in line to take it if the person doing it, quits; then the current wage is clearly enough.
Enough for whom and for what?
For a society with slavery, absolutely. Also for a GULAG.
If that's the environment you want to live in, North Korea is the best country! Everyone is getting wages that are enough.
>It is just like the price of the meal. If it costs more than people are willing to pay, then it is too expensive; regardless of what you personally think it should cost
Yes, meals that people can't afford are too expensive regardless of what you personally think it should cost.
And wages that don't support living are too low regardless of what you personally think is enough.
That’s like saying because slaves do as they’re told, they don’t mind doing it. After all, if they didn’t want to do it, they would refuse.
Those people are lining up to take a job that doesn’t pay enough because it’s better than no job or whatever worse job they currently have.
We could restructure society so that $5/hour is “enough” for some people and then the rest of could enjoy even cheaper meals. /s
If the person doing it (and the role can make or break the business) quits on short notice, then the current wage is clearly not enough.
I’m under the impression that this isn’t the case; restaurants always seem to be hiring, and service is quite poor nowadays due, I guess(?) to understaffing.
Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things?
Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing.
Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment.
Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids.
So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job?
Because they are afraid of being homeless?
Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.
Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.
I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips).
And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.
I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.”
A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units.
I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors.
1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations.
2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star).
3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro.
At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords.
We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.
Unless there is a deficit of housing, then they don't have to compete because you pay their price or you live on the street.
With a housing crisis as in the UK the cost of housing rises to soak up everyone's income after other essentials (food, water, energy). Rents are higher than mortgages because you pay the landlord's mortgage, then pay the costs of leasing (such as the landlord's insurance and their property managers fees) and the landlord's profits. Very few want to rent, but most can't afford a mortgage (because 'I'm paying way more than that in rent' isn't proof you can pay a mortgage, apparently).
If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?
In a perfect world…wait, we’re clearly not in a perfect world…
“Wouldn’t it be nice” is no way to live a life…FWIW…
I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).
Are you saying that there is massive numbers of empty housing stock in areas in high demand?
Because when there are 15 people wanting to live somewhere and only 10 places, then the lowest the price will go is higher than 5 people are able/willing to pay.
If not, then you need to ration the housing in some other means. What would you prefer? Nepotism? Lottery? Sexual Favours?
Not due to landlords, it's because the amount that people can pay for housing has increased -- higher wages, more multiple-earner households, easier credit, secondary income sources, investment gains. Plus there are more "households" competing for the limited number of available housing units.
I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless:
- commuting from a lower cost area >60m away
- using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off)
- begging or selling themselves on the internet
- negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction
None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
Not to mention crime like theft, fraud, burglaries. But yes, a perpetual underclass has giant negative externalities. The status quo is deeply ingrained to the American psyche - the risk of someone taking advantage of handouts trumps all other concerns.
Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex.
Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.
I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
there's also the "everyone is essential to maintain society"
Because any job is better than no job; if nobody will hire you for whatever reason, your standards for income will drop until someone does.
That said, in my country (Netherlands), a lot of service industry jobs (waiting, dishwashing, store restocking, etc) are jobs that people have temporarily or part-time during their studies. But it's a crooked comparison as tipping culture is still very much optional over here and staff gets paid more.
As for your update, in a free capitalist economy, no, you don't need to pay Carol more than the others, you pay her a fair wage according to laws, hours paid, etc; if that is not enough for her to cover the cost of living + raising kids, the government needs to compensate. As an employer you can support her private life by offering flexible hours, of course.
That said, in an idealized, socialist country, people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody has to work to make ends meet. Unfortunately, this is often not compatible with capitalism or government policies / expenditure.
Which means that other people who do go to work support those who sit around and do nothing. As someone who works, I have no desire to support people who don't work because they don't have to.
Please notice that you are responding to a position the GP did not take. He said
Parents who leave paid employment to raise children are far from "sit[ing] around and do[ing] nothing". If we value future conditions (even restricting that calculation only to economic productivity, though I'd argue other considerations also matter) then investing resources in raising and educating children is rational, even for those of us who don't have them ourselves.
How come socialist countries have the lowest birth rates in the history of the world? Even Netherlands. Words are only words, reality is reality.
For the same reason that desperately impoverished nations with the harshest living conditions and highest child mortality have the highest birth rates in the world.
And what is that reason?
In the US we have a Child Tax Credit which is available to almost all parents regardless of employment status. This is a direct credit, not just an income tax deduction. So as a society we are investing resources in raising children, although I suppose you could argue that the amount ought to be higher.
https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/938
It's $1000. I would not expect that to effect even the most-impoverished family's life choices.
Why would you assume that people who don't have full time work sit around and do nothing?
I'm the breadwinner for someone who stays at home and she's immensely valuable. A fact I'm quite aware of as she just left for a few weeks on a trip and now I'm working and doing what she does. She does all the house chores, picks up medications/runs errands, is trying to get a business of her own off the ground (is making ~500/mo with potential to scale if she's allowed time to actually do it), etc. She also contributes a lot to making sure our household is embedded in our community, which in turn enables us to both more efficiently help others (when we can) and to receive help when we need it without relying more on the government/taxpayers. She does the work required to do things like help our parents when needed (we're siblings), which would otherwise be paid caregiving paid by, you guessed it, the taxpayers! She also makes me a way better worker because I'm the one person on my team who actually can focus on work all day and doesn't have to frequently step out for life things.
And this is without children in the home.
Not to mention students, people with disabilities (some of whom may end up being a greater boon to society if they're allowed to reskill or be pickier about jobs rather than being forced to work themselves to the bone until they can contribute nothing + their medical needs end up being worse than they would have been if they were accommodated in the beginning), etc.
The idea that the only way people can contribute to society is via paid employment is a sign of a lack of creativity.
The idea that socialism or whatever government system would mean that nobody has to do any work is only appealing to downwardly-mobile elite children, which America has a lot of, and who mainly like to live in Brooklyn, start political podcasts and do drugs.
People really actually have to grow food and clean the bathroom - the point of economic systems is to get them to do it, not to get them to not do it.
Because renting a room is cheaper than renting an apartment, because ramen for 2 meals a day will cause medical problems that show up later than hunger, because some medicine is better than no medicine, because there’s an entire gradation of misery between “paid a living wage” and dying tomorrow.
In theory, that's where govt subsidies come in.
They all get the same wage. The minimum is set to be enough for a chosen living situation, and everyone gets at least that much.
(Though some subsidies to help with kids would be reasonable.)
I have seen this meme repeated a lot, e.g. any full time job should automatically provide for a LOT of shit that used to require 2 incomes, or a stay-at-home mom to take care of it.
Now the goalposts have moved to provide for food and housing and for "a kid or two".
Do you have any evidence that our societal productivity has advanced so far that we can simply pay this "living wage" to everyone working 2000 hours a year, regardless of their profession?
is your alternative that someone washing dishes is not entitled to have and support kids?
I would ask you - do you have evidence to show that lowering wages benefits anyone other than the employer?
Look at the Nordic countries. Paying everyone a minimum wage and creating a societal safety where education is free and everyone has access to the tools to better themselves results in staggeringly good outcomes.
While I agree with your sentiments, I must correct you in that Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, never had! Our societal safety also isn't all that it was, but to be sure it's much stronger than the US. For the other nordic countries I can't tell, though I seem to remember that Denmark has a minimum wage and Norway doesn't. As for Finland I have no idea.
Finland has none either. It is all done by employee unions negotiating with employer unions.
The safety net from social security does ensure that it is pretty hard to starve and not have at least some accommodation.
Public K-12 education is free in the United States. Any thoughts on why the outcomes aren't "staggeringly good?"
Those two scenarios are pretty different.
Let's say a stay-at-home mom makes "a kid or two" reasonable. If I look up living wage charts for my state, that would require tripling the minimum wage.
We're nowhere near that level. The "two income" level is a lot lower and we're not even close to that one either.
A single parent with one child would fit right in between those stay-at-home numbers too, so that's not a goalpost move. Single with two children takes enough money that it would require a goalpost move, but single with one child does not.
While I agree with your sentiment, that logic doesn't hold.
If the wage for a job is too low to afford life, then we can say either the job is underpaid or the job is fairly compensated but simply not worth doing. If dishwashers quit in numbers for other jobs, dishwasher pay would have to rise if restaurants can afford it, or the restaurant industry would wither, and from an economic point of view, deservedly so.
Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction.
This assumption is akin to a spherical cow, frictionless surface, etc.
In the real world capital and people won't ever move around with a minimum amount of friction, nor will people retrain for other jobs easily.
Spherical cows are more or less a natural impossibility. The economic system in the US is designed to add friction for people like those in these types of situations to switch jobs, retrain, etc. That's an important distinction.
Dishwashers can easily move to other low-wage jobs if they exist
The parent comment said nothing about the job, they commented on a full-time wage.
Their point stands.
This also simplifies the scenario to assume that wages are the only income. It would be like building a mental model around people who live at home with their parents and concluding whatever money they make is obviously sufficient to 'afford life'. It ignores all the extraneous ways their life is being subsidized by others. Whether or not those external subsidies are desirable or sustainable are intrinsically related to this problem.
What standard of housing, food, etc? The linked MIT project uses a bunch of median- or near-median costs; it's obviously not reasonable to call 40th-percentile housing costs the basic standard of living, when 40% of the population in fact manage to get by paying less. There are similar objections for other components of their index, such as transportation costs and "civic participation", which appear to take median expenditure in these categories.
This is pretty spot-on for where I live (suffolk MA.) Note that there's no saving category, so the 190k/year with 3 kids dual income is to get by comfortably but never retire.
Food is based off https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan...
Housing 40th percentile is a pretty good metric for living wage. What would your metric be, 20th percentile, 10th percentile, something else?
Transportation is the true cost of mobility, including insurance, gas, motor oil, basic maintenance of vehicle.
Civic Engagement category isn't what you think it is and the methodology spells it out:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1400 (Entertainment: fees and admissions; Audio and visual equipment and services; Pets; Toys, hobbies, and playground equipment; Entertainment: other supplies, equip., & services; Reading; and Education)
I mean sure, cross that category out completely, but humans can't live on bread alone and this is exactly what this is measuring: living wage, not depression wage.
You can argue about whether median is a good measure, but the fact that this living wage allocates 0 dollars towards retirement and holidays, for me, is still not truly living wage. Any adjustment to the categories you take umbrage to is washed out by a basic savings plan for retirement.
The real answer is that we are super over indexed on service jobs. The only work our economy provides at a scale sufficient to support a population with various levels of skill and ability is service work, and businesses in that space are famously difficult to run profitably.
What if a person isn't capable or willing to do work that justifies such a wage?
I'd rather see the answer on the other end closer to a UBI then making basic jobs uneconomical by making a "minimum wage" higher then the value of the labor.
Dang, this was a humbling experience.
I was kinda upset today that my raise I just found out I was getting will barely beat inflation, but according to this MIT site, I make enough, by myself, to support another adult and 3 children, based on where I live.
Thats a very different perspective for me today.
That's a very weird assumption. Living on your own is not cheat, and having a kid, let alone two, certainly shouldn't be cheap. Why would you expect a person who works the easiest manual labour possible to be able to afford this?
I get paid six figures to fart in a chair and occasionally type. The idea that I'm more deserving than a dishwasher is insane. Of course I won't turn down the paycheck, but the idea that $10 is anywhere in the ballpark of what the dishwasher deserves is delusional. Certainly they deserve the paycheck more than the vast majority of the people on this forum who get paid orders of magnitude more while doing barely any work (if that).
Where do you get this idea?
What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
The next thing to keep in mind is - if we trained up all the dishwashers, could they do your job? Perhaps we'll find your job is not that easy after all.
The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
Yes, it's a lovely fantasy—but the real world doesn't work like that. The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me. The "free market" is just sucking off rich people with bad taste.
Read Capital and get back to me. We need to open the schools!
I'm quite disappointed that you're willing to lift your ideas wholesale from a French communist [0] unless of course by "Capital" you mean "Das Kapital" in which case it's the original, German one [1].
Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and read up on the theory of people who disagree with you.
Specifically:
Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized.
I fully agree. But to say all labor is alike is wrong. Some labor is worth more. That doesn't mean the people doing it are better people. Their work is just higher quality / on a larger scale / better / faster / in the right place / at the right time / all of the above.
True, but they won't stay rich unless you make them much more money than they pay you. Do they stay rich? (Interestingly, the restaurant industry is notorious for ruining unsophisticated investors)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
Not if the benefits of this marginal productivity increase are hoarded by a small subset of society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... You don't need to listen to communists to figure this out—you can just read Schumpeter.
I agree there's an issue with wages vs productivity. However:
- The decoupling is not equal for all the countries examined. For the US, wages as a fraction of GDP has been roughly steady, declining from 49% in 1942 to 43% today [0]
- We're going through major demographic changes - we have two huge cohorts in the boomers and the millennials entering different life stages in huge numbers. We're also living much longer. This will mess with asset prices and wages in weird ways. Lots of old people holding on to their assets much longer than before, and lots more young people entering the workforce all at once.
- Some of the above issues are getting straightened out. Millennials were behind in wealth creation for a very long time, but for the first time are ahead and are now on our way to become the richest generation in history. [1]
- Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded. Scrooge McDuck may have a hoard of gold coins, but real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...
I very strongly disagree with this—the more wealth you have, the more you can afford to manipulate society (both public and private spheres) to create favorable conditions for retaining or increasing your wealth. This is just the concept of Buffet's "moat" broadened to apply to the rest of society rather than a market segment.
"Productive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What actually might provide value to society and what might generate returns are wildly different things and are often diametrically opposed. Actual democratic control over the economy would yield a very different society than the one we live in, and it's very difficult to see how a capital-driven society doesn't create poverty and the long laundry list of associated evils (homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, widespread mental health issues, malnutrition, violence, etc etc).
Not to mention—more relevantly to our discussion here—technology's potential is woefully, woefully, woefully hamstrung by our insistence on using it to extract wealth from each other. Imagine what a smartphone could be capable of if it wasn't viewed as a profit center well outside the control of its users. Imagine what kind of internet we could have if people weren't obligated to sell ads to keep it running. Etc. This devotion to the "free market" (as if such a thing could actually exist outside of a textbook) has destroyed liberals' ability to imagine humanity's actual potential, and the demand for continual returns creeps into all our lives in the form of lower quality products, constant ads, drowning in plastic waste and roasting all summer. If the market is going to course-correct towards rational use of resources I have no clue what this would even look like.
The best way to make this argument will be to show when this fails (as it does, occasionally, do). Currently it's really only failing where global warming is literally washing real estate out to sea. Judging by who owns the real estate in this country—mostly, the richest generation to ever have existed and very possibly to ever exist—being a NIMBY is evidently a great way to grow your wealth. Crassus was known for making money by withholding his firemen from burning buildings until they handed the deed over. Joe Manchin's daughter makes money by exploiting an insulin monopoly at insane profit margins while people regularly have to choose between food, insulin, and rent. Etc. Markets are only able to correct these dynamics over the long term, much longer term than a human life. Hell, some of Europe's aristocracy are still clinging on to money and power that their family acquired a millennium ago for reasons completely lost to memory, and the "failures" famous in European history occur over centuries (e.g. see the Fugger family). The easiest way to make wealth is to already be wealthy.
Of course! Trying to pass down what money I can is certainly why I took the job over, say, being a dishwasher. However, this is not an opportunity for most folks, and by any definition of making this an opportunity for everyone (not just a subset of society) is directly contradictory to the fundamentals of investment, which relies solely on using wealth inequality to drive productivity increases.
Look, all I'm saying is that investment is really useful for driving economic improvements... until it's not, at which point whatever service the invested-in thing provides should be nationalized and run at zero margin to avoid inevitable enshittification. I strongly, strongly recommend reading Schumpeter. For being the father of our industry I'm flabbergasted with how few people actually read him. It's easy to look at the 20th century and confuse the economic boom that came with industrialization and exploitation of virgin frontiers with the natural course of market forces, but the latter is coming to a close. Buckle up!
This only looks at wages, not total compensation. Benefits increases have made up much of the difference.
When you look at productivity vs total compensation, there may have been a small decoupling but its far less.
Does the random pair of apple trees growing in a field or the stream that supplies food and water have no value? Human labor didn't produce either of these, so by your definition they cannot have any value. Clearly that can't be the case.
I'm going to assume that you're using the communist definition of value, which is a bit more nuanced, as it determines value from the amount of human labor that went into producing a good. While human labor certainly can create value, it can also destroy value, so simply measuring human labor in terms of hours cannot reflect the actual usefulness that time provided. Hitting a bike in random places with a hammer for eight hours does not produce a more valuable bike; it probably destroys the bike, and no sane person would pay a higher price for that bike. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of communist economic systems.
Contrast this with the capitalist definition of value, which is simply to measure the price one is willing to pay for a good. If the price a consumer is willing to pay exceeds the price for which a seller is willing to sell, then you have a mutually beneficial exchange. Only time will tell whether or not the seller or buyer will actually benefit, but numerous experiments throughout history have shown this to trend upward in terms of improving the standard of living for the poorest in society.
I disagree with the idea that a job should pay in proportion to the value it generates. In a just world, the dishwasher would be paid way more than me because his job sucks, but mine is something that I literally do for fun in my free time. I accept that we do not live in a just world, nor do I know what sort of economic system could achieve my desired outcome. So maybe the current paradigm is the best we can do. But it's not very fair.
You're able to rectify the "injustice" for at least one dishwasher by writing a check... if you truly believe this
The origin of the gripe is that there's a lot of people collecting paychecks for good thoughts that steer a product/company when their most notable contribution is shit into the company toilet that somehow takes 20 minutes to push out. If they are working hard, many people aren't going to respect busting ass on adtech or consulting shakedowns. Since the uptick in work-from-home, I've been astonished at the number of people I know collecting a paycheck for generating completely negligible value. There's a lot of well-paid positions that are almost certainly contributing less value to society than a dishwasher, and it doesn't have much to do with the dishwasher having a prodigious impact.
Can you take a person off the street and have them washing dishes competently by this afternoon? Can you take a person off the street and have them doing your job competently by this afternoon?
The fable of the plumber captures the essence of this.
I literally did this. At the end of Chaos Communication Camp last year I had no reason to immediately leave, so I went to see if they needed some extra help and ended up drying and stacking dishes for an hour.
I hope you realize this mostly just reveals you have no clue how hard and skill-intensive kitchen work is. Yes, even dishwashing. The average person is not going to be able to drop into a kitchen and wash thousands of dishes a night.
I have work lots in kitchen. Your post just shows you’re full of it. We have hired people off the street to wash dishes. Yeah of course people quit on the first day sometimes. Same goes for working other entry level jobs.
They are, but it's exhausting. I thought the complaint was that it required skills and training, not that it was exhausting?
How much? Enough to live within 10 miles of the place they are working at sithout having to pinch pennies, while being able to safe something for the future.
Sure it isn't a complicated job — but without it the likes of us would not be able to enjoy going to a restaurant. And it is a job that would be both mentally and physically too exhausting for many people.
Let's stop doing as if jobs like these are not real jobs. When push comes to shove some of these jobs are way, way more essential than whatever white collar job it is the high brow people who love to reap the results of that labor are doing.
People who say dish washer isn't a respectable job are essentially saying Restaurants shouldn't exist without them being able to profit from exploitation. I am not saying this is your position, but if it is I hope you do realize that this is a anti-humanist position.
How did we go from asking what is the proper wage to suggesting its "not a real job"?
All jobs are real but some are less valuable than others. There is nothing wrong with being a grocery store stocker your whole life but I am not sure how you set the wage for a 5+ year worker that never moved on/up from stocking shelves. I think its a fairly difficult problem to answer and throwing in classism and white collar vs blue collar is just deflection on accepting its hard to come to the right answer here.
That 5+ year grocery store stocker is the lynchpin that allows them to quickly hire teenagers who are only going to work there for a year at most before moving on. Without the institutional knowledge of the long-term workers, the store would have to spend much longer training new employees, or employ a magnitude more supervisors.
This kind of role exists but not in the store stocker or dishwasher side. Those are for better/worse roles that take a few hours to learn. Maybe some things you pickup on the way but by no means a role where it helps to have experienced folks in.
A really long time ago, I had once visited a police station in Tamil Nadu (India). One of the lower level officials there had the rank "SSI". I was perplexed as I had never heard of this rank before. So I asked the Inspector about it. He said it stood for "Special Sub Inspector". He then smiled and added, "There was some court case involving some government official or union who complained about not being promoted even after serving for many years in the same post. The court ultimately ruled that was unfair, and said even if an official doesn't get promoted by virtue of merits, their experience also matters. Thus, any official who serves a certain number of years (I think it was 5-10 years or so), and doesn't get a promotion on merit during those years, should automatically be promoted by virtue of their experience. Ofcourse, some government bureaucrat in the Tamil Nadu civil service and police service weren't happy with this ruling as police officials who don't get promoted don't because they are either corrupt and / or incompetent. Thus, the government created a new rank (in between the ranks of Head Constable and Assistant Sub Inspector) to "comply" with the court ruling but cheekily called it "Special Sub Inspector" to convey their own disagreement with the ruling."
It was funny but it did make me think - Perhaps in the mid-levels, experience can compensate for the lack of special skills or motivations as an employee will know enough to do his immediate superior's job "well enough" (average or slightly below average) too.
I don't think answering that problem isn't at all especially if you feel human dignity is a value that should be honored above all other rights. And I don't think many people disagree that to work a full time job and be unable to live off it in the area it is located in is undignified.
Now markets have shown time and time again that precisely that human dignity is ignored within market logic (just as other externalities like air quality, a unpoisioned environment or the rights of future generations). Given the markets inability to honor human dignity I suggest regulating this part of it by mandating a minimum wage that is a living wage and keep that wage updated at least on a yearly basis. Not a radical thing to demand.
A real job is one that allows you to lead a dignified life. Being okay with essential jobs being paid below that wage is a problematic stance to take for various reasons and comes across as an egoistic stance to me (e.g. imagine someone saying: "While I enjoy cheap and good coffee, I don't want the batista who made it to afford to live off it.")
There are not many reasons to say that, but all of them are to some degree egoistic. You might be a star bucks manager that makes a good living off your workers earning less. You might be a customer that wants to pay as little as possible and is okay to ignore the exploitation. Or you might think this is market logic and go like "they simply have to find another job" (thus admitting it is not a real job anybody should expect to live from).
Now my stance — just like yours if I got that right — is that all jobs are real jobs.
A lot of "serious questions" asked on the internet include assumptions and assertions that may or may not be true. These questions are often downvoted when people object to those assumptions and assertions.
Why are you speaking in generalities when we are discussing a specific question: this one. Your comment seems akin to saying "asking questions is suspicious, especially when I disagree with the premise."
Well it's not.
My apologies I should have made it more clear. Were you advocating against "serious questions" or just explaining why they might have been downvoted?
Just explaining. It's a factual statement which I agree with. It's not making my position any way polarised or argumentative, in a way that I can see.
We don't. It's the market's job to determine the wage. If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.
If the wage is too low, then businesses won't be able to find the people they need.
Or complain that "no one is willing to work".
That’s the worst excuse that I think the vocal uneducated minority use. I wish it would stop though.
You're making an assumption there that the educational/opportunity systems in the country aren't designed specifically to feed these jobs in particular.
i dunno where this idea of manual labor being treated as something so simple it shouldn't deserve a decent pay... i worked as a dishy also as a bicycle courier & i bet i'm ballparks more efficient than anyone who never had to these jobs
we have a heck of a hard time emulating or creating navigational system for robots, specially if we don't train them million of times for extremely simple tasks like grabbing boxes in a controlled enviroment. let not mention energy usage these things need; point is: maybe reaching a plato of being a dishy is easier than coding/programming C for embedded systems, but we can't deny that a lot of people in tech don't learn or get into different fields projects all the time, so there isn't a "keep learning/tinkering hard all the time" type of thing...
is it easier to build a website for a client with an open-source framework that you used for the 100th time or being at a almost 40 °C kitchen washing dishes in a speed way faster than one would do @ their houses?
It’s the intersection of skill, risk and mental requirements. Being an old school drill rig guy, high risk, long hours, bad locations. You get high pay. Washing dishes is unpleasant but easy to replace. There are many labor jobs that pay well for a reason. I asked what is the right pay then for a job that anyone can pick up immediately.
maybe to find a decent pay is to not treat dishies as an easy to replace person?
don’t confuse a fact, that it’s a role that’s easy to replace with how the person is treated. All deserve respect but that does not entirely translate to their wage.
I am all for fair wages
No, you're very obviously not. This line of argument is the very poster child of "if you're not doing something I think is important (and, apparently having clean dishes at a restaurant is by your own words "fairly low value") like being 'innovative' or 'creative', you are of little value and don't deserve adequate pay". Were you twisting your Mises Institute wristband fondly while writing it?
Do you have an actual counter point or do you just attack people. What’s the emptiness feel like?
I don't like what you said, so I'll pretend you didn't say anything. What's being intellectually vapid feel like.
Again do you have anything to bring the conversation besides attacks? I do believe in fair wages but I also believe that entry level positions are a tough one, I believe generally the market figures out the correct price eventually. We can make an argument that min wage needs to be increased but thats not was presented in this thread.
"I don't like what you said, so I'll pretend you didn't say anything" Glad you agree your statements follow that logic. Come to the table with real arguments or sit down please.
Have you ever worked as a dishwasher? It may not be complicated, but it's hard work.
It's not usually just washing dishes either, you're expected to help all around the kitchen.
And if the pastry chef quits in the middle of service, or if some waitstaff doesn't show up for the night, you might find yourself suddenly doing another job with no training (and no extra pay either), while still having to wash the dishes at the same time.
I work in IT these days, and honestly my Job is way easier and less stressful than when I washed dishes.
Spent plenty of years in a kitchen. Hectic during service but a mental piece of cake . The night would be over in a flash. Have washed dishes before. It’s not pleasant work but not too bad.
Again. I am not suggesting the wage is too low, high or right. Only suggesting it’s hard when there is a line out the door to fill that role.
you sound like an ass right now 'its fairly' binary' have you done the work yourself?
Who are you to assume what I have or have not done or use foul language.
I have worked as a washer before and it’s hard work. It also took zero skill and have hired people off the street before to do it. The output is binary. Clean or not clean. Nothing wrong with it. Its a job but not meant to be a career
They should be paid enough that the society is roughly equal.
That is definitely not the case when you allow people to work for less than $ 20k a year.
That makes it a democratic problem to pay people so little.
Plenty of answers already, but I have a very small passion project I hope to make my full-time living and one of the first things on my list is to employ one person and pay them a living wage - not, "how little can I pay them, or "what's the market rate" for the type of position." I'm sure money is tight, but that'd be a better framing to start with
So is that cushy-ass PM job with a plethora of fringe benefits. How much do they make?
Absolutely true
I think you're confusing value with scarcity.
I made $10.50/hr washing dishes in 1998 lol it's not a fair wage for anything today, really.
Because it's important, vital really, it has noun value, but for some reason it is not verb valued. This disconnect is also rampant among nurses and teachers. If you know any, ask and they'll let you know. Dishwashers don't even get an appreciation week.
The article was 2017 - so an inflation correction might apply. (post title should reflect)
$10/hr was a bad wage in 2017 too unless you were in an exceptionally low COL area.
$10/hr was a bad wage in 2017 too unless you were in an exceptionally low COL area.
$12.95/hour in today money.
The minimum wage in 2017 was $7.25/hour.
Almost noone in the US makes the federal minimum wage. You should look at local median wages if you want a relevant comparison.
It's about 1.3% of hourly waged workers who are at or below the minumum wage according to the BLS. That number is probably propped up though by the fact that only ~20 states have a minimum wage equal to the federal minimum and most of those are lower population states. After Texas the next largest state with a 7.25 minimum is Pennsylvania then Georgia.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2022/home.htm#....
https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage...
You should look at local median wages if you want a relevant comparison.
I wasn't making a comparison. I was just providing information.
Federal minimum wage was last increased in 2009 and it's the longest it's been since it was increased. It's criminally low even if you inflation adjust it back in time to '09 money. It's been a long long time since minimum wage was at all livable.
Would have to be outside the US for that to be a good wage in 2017. That isn't even a good wage internationally now.
There are still parts of the world where $10/hr is a good wage locally and would put someone in the upper rungs of workers in their local economy. They're just not places it's particularly nice to live if you're someone with internet access.
Not that underpaid workers aren't an issue, but - in my experience working in kitchens, the owner / person controlling the funds is very rarely actually on the cooking team. And so the respect comes from other team members, not management.
Oh god, get owners out of the kitchen. Unless they're experienced chefs starting their own restaurants (I know some people like this, they're awesome!) owners are much better off away from the food as much as possible.
I agree, I just meant that there is something of a disconnect between "working hard and getting the respect of the team" and "being rewarded by management with more money/benefits/etc.", probably because the owners tend to not even be familiar with the workers.
It's a different dynamic than a typical white-collar job where you're interacting with your manager (who can ultimately give you a raise) on a daily basis.
In my experience, in a typical white collar job, your manager might advocate for a raise for you, but rarely has the power to approve it.
They get paid in lip service apparently. Just like all the essential workers during covid lockdowns.
The best paid dishwasher is the one selling drugs to the rest of the staff. Waitress make big money from tips and some of them spend it on weed and blow.
Hey now, we did bang cutlery on cookware for them. No gratitude nowadays.
Dishwasher at my bar here in Sonoma County CA...make 25$ plus tips...which usually is at least another 10 per hour up to 30....
We can't survive without a strong happy disher
What does a drink at your bar cost? It must be incredible -- may 15 USD minimum. If you paying a dishwasher that much money, you must be paying other staff plenty as well.
It's illegal to pool tips in my state, but people still do it off the books a lot. Good dishwashers will often be tipped out via this tip pool, and I've seen really fantastic restaurants grind to a halt overnight because someone there decided to enforce that code and stopped tipping out the dishies. There's a huge difference between someone who does the bare minimum vs a dishwasher who's fast, good at cleaning, and helps out around the kitchen where needed, and the market rewards them and punishes those who don't compensate them for it, even it it is under the table. The guy I knew who left to find a similar tipped job elsewhere was making $40/hr with the pooled tips (nice restaurants mean high prices and high tips) and everyone was happy to pay him out that much until one person wasn't.
You have to either be entirely detached from reality or deliberately cruel to make statements like this alongside $20,000pa.
Willing to bet the latter given Per Se was charging 5% of that salary for a single dinner.