My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months.
People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work.
The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the minimum salary available... which is somewhat 500 euros. It varies from 500 to 900 euros and 1200 in best cases.
The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do, and get treated awfully. There is just no point. And then all I hear from those guys owning massive hotels making 1m+ revenue in their pockets per year saying : 'Cant find anyone good to work for you nowadays, its all youngsters fault'. Well ok I'll admit that prolly youngsters dont have the nerves that older people had in their age, but at the same time you are not helping the situation at all when you are offering money that someone will just pass by and you are making 1m+ euros in your pocket a year, and then the only way to keep profiting is to steal a bit on tax and of course not fully insure your employees. AWFUL system!
I wonder if it's quite as simple as being reducible to salary as a single (or majority) variable. I tend to think people are willing to work a poorly paid job if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel (career advancement, primarily). (As a casual outside observer, and with all due respect) My bet would be that a pervasive sense of pointlessness or helplessness in society is an equal partner along with low entry level salaries in the case of Greece and many countries that face similar struggles.
There are only so many dollars you can shave off of your employment budget before people decide they do not have to bother.
It's an escalating problem in Eastern Europe in general. Our politicians are way too greedy. They lost all perspective. They try being a bit more insolent since the last year, they sit and wait -- no revolts, no fires, no pitchforks. So hey, these people don't mind! Let's get EVEN MORE money from them! Sadly it's how it has been going ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many elderly people say: "It was not all sunshine and rainbows back then either but at least the people had everything necessary to live respectful lives". They do have a point.
Thank the gods for internet and for me being a programmer ever since teenager. Otherwise I would probably live off social benefits as well.
It's very easy to demean people for being lazy or unmotivated or non-ambitious. But the reality is, the best career advancement ~85% of the people around here can hope for is an awful job with 2-3 hours of commuting in total for the day, for an income that exceeds the bare minimum needs with 5-10%. So it's pretty normal many decide not to bother, or to turn to petty crime.
The version of that currently operating in Hungary is that even though living on benefits is impossible, you can just go to Austria/Germany/UK and make way more money. Interestingly this is less true of programmers than it is of waiters and cooks, but then it's extremely true of doctors and plumbers.
Nobody in Budapest expects to make even a Berlin salary, but the difference is big enough now that lots of people say screw it, better to live abroad at least long enough to buy an apartment and so on at home. But I doubt many of those people will be coming back.
Ironically enough you could make a killing as a plumber anywhere in Germany right now, or in Vienna, or in Budapest, as per your choice. But a ton of Hungarian plumbers left when it wasn't like that, and now they have lives in Dinkelacker or wherever.
And it doesn’t help that large companies use to hire jobs that are low skilled directly and at least there was an opportunity for advancement. But now with most of those jobs being contracted out, there is no chance for advancement.
I’m even seeing that in IT. Back in the day you could start out as tech support, or an operator (as I did - long story) and be given a chance to program and move up. Now even those jobs are outsourced. It’s just as easy to hire someone from a foreign country to admin your AWS hosted instances as it is to hire someone locally.
If people are willing to drive a truck carrying garbage and feces all day, it is about money. Maybe also about shorter work days, but that is also related to money.
It really is reducible to the differential between salary and unemployment benefit, which is the opportunity cost of not taking a job. This is a well-known phenomenon in economics since the stagflation of the 70's, called the "poverty trap".
Just a few notes:
After a few years of full time employment I received a bit over 300 euro a month I believe, for a full year, when I was fired myself.
And I believe the maximum amount of time where you can be eligible for unemployment benefits over here in Greece is a year or so.
I believe a large cause for the apathy in people who you'd expect to work these jobs is the fact that working a job like that doesn't move you forward in any way.
Back in the day, you could work for a few years and survive on your salary and hope to open your own business.
Now what's the dream for these workers? They can never afford to save up on their 500 euro a month. They can never get a loan to open their own business.
The best they can hope is that they won't be discarded and their job given to a more young-looking person down the line.
> Now what's the dream for these workers? They can never afford to save up on their 500 euro a month. They can never get a loan to open their own business.
Work harder. Make more money if you want to do your own thing. Surely there are professionals in Greece making good money working as employees for others. What are they doing that the lazy uneducated worker is not?
Do more of that and less complaining that you're making 500 euro a month.
Let's ignore the fact that there simply aren't enough high paying positions for everyone that "tries hard enough".
Let's simply discuss why people might not always go for the highest paying job they could get.
What most people that aren't doing everything optimally to improve their situation is that they're succumbing to common human logical fallacies.
People don't see that there are jobs that can potentially lead them out of that class of salaries, not because they're lazy but because they're uninformed about these possibilities.
Or they might gauge that the small chance they have to get such a job isn't worth doing something they don't enjoy at all, and would rather survive doing something they find bearable.
For a lot of younger people however, things are even more depressing. A lot of the "lazy uneducated" workers you mentioned spent years getting a university education, up to the PhD level frequently, and they feel they're invested in a thing they might be good at or they might enjoy practicing.
Objectively, they should give it up. Subjectively, I can understand wanting to hold on to a small hope that you might eventually get to do the thing you enjoy doing for a living.
If I'm allowed to be frank I find the characterization "lazy" very offensive, despite not having been in their shoes, because I have countless peers that are in this exact situation.
> A lot of the "lazy uneducated" workers you mentioned spent years getting a university education, up to the PhD level frequently, and they feel they're invested in a thing they might be good at or they might enjoy practicing.
Objectively, they should give it up. Subjectively, I can understand wanting to hold on to a small hope that you might eventually get to do the thing you enjoy doing for a living.
And all it takes is one(!) bad/uninformed decision in your past: skip STEM.
One of most cirurgic comments I read in HN. It's a pity that is buried in the thread.
At least over here, studying STEM isn't a guarantee that you'll be able to make a career out of your degree, much less a lucrative one. Tech gets you a job, but medical or physical sciences, and math, from the stories I hear involve fighting over scraps. I could elaborate and repeat the horror stories related to me by people around me but I won't for now.
You're suggesting they pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Put on some boots and try to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Let me know your vertical.
I suggesting that maybe, just maybe hard work might play a role in things. If someone doesn't want to work hard for 800 euro because they can get 400 euro for nothing, do they have the mindset and drive necessary to become wealthy in today's economy?
So you're saying that the labour force of entire countries in the Mediterranean region (Portugal, Spain, Greece) suffers from lack of mindset and drive, and that explains the low salaries they suffer from right across the board. Interesting. Perhaps you might want to come over and straighten them out. White man's burden and all that.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [0]
"The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do, and get treated awfully."
This is the argument for Universal Basic Income.
Give everyone something less that 400s euro, whether they work or not.
Let's say its 300 euros. Then the decision is don't work and take home 300 euros, or work and take home 800 or 1100 euros. There is a much greater incentive to work.
> The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry,
There are always people who don't just want to live off the dole.
Also a lot of the people who complain about crappy entry level wages (that they're unwilling to accept) also complain that they are rejected from higher jobs because they don't have any work experience.
> ... get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do,
That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?
> ... and get treated awfully.
That's not acceptable period though specifics matter.
>That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?
Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do.
I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world.
I think you mean "autonomy", and at larger firms, you're going to have to work with others. The ideal is collaboration, but you don't normally get to choose what you work on, your management does.
"I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?"
Ever read about Sun Hydraulics?
"At Sun, we have no job titles, no hierarchy, no formal job descriptions, no departments, no budgets, no direct sales channel, no close supervision, and only some work instructions."
As I read it, the whole point was that those normal hassles of a job aren't worth the (small) differential between the salary and the dole, and the suggested alternative was go on the dole.
And don't forget you usually don't work from home: so you pay for gas or public transportation. As you're at some shit job you lose opportunities to network or get new skills. You're not there for your children.
The OP has a very strong point when it comes to money.
If they offer you a $800 wage, when your unemployment is $400, your effective earning rate for the work you are doing is just $400/mo. Cost-benefit analysis isn't in favor of working. The employers either have to offer something on top of the starting wage (like clear path to advancement), or raise the wage. Otherwise it's a fairly logical choice for people to stay home and draw unemployment.
> That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?
Did you ever work in the hotel industry as a low-level worker ?
>The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros
Is there a limit to how long you can collect unemployment? In Finland if you still haven't found a job in about a year, you stop getting payments altogether. And while getting payments, you still have to prove that you're actually searching for a job and not just trying to scam taxpayers.
Not at all. It is a signal that with the instinct for survival removed, people will push back on hard work for low pay, as they should.
I think society would be a better place if people were paid based on the value they delivered, and not coerced into work based on the need to subsist. When employers/owners have to absorb long-term costs, they make changes.
People who work on pipes or other buried things used to often get killed or injured by collapses of mud or stone. Worker's compensation costs forced employers to put reinforced steel safety devices in the holes to mitigate.
It's not the same model. Presumably the €400 are forfeited when earing €500 as a salary. One of the premises of basic income is that working more doesn't cancel out any benefits.
That sounds like a stretch, and you probably need to define what you mean by "basic income not working". For who? Society? Employers? The worker?
Parts of these "youngsters" are probably off doing something related to self-development and fulfilling which might provide benefits for society later on.
In this case they (seemingly) aren't getting any more money from working extra, compared to not working either, since their social benefits are stripped away if they start working. If this was basic income, they would be left with something extra at the end.
Really frustrating to hear that argument. It's the same the right is making across Europe: "Just remove the social security net, then people will be forced to accept any wage.".
Do you think that the owner(s) of the hotels shouldn't be compensated for the risk that they're taking by building and operating the property? There's a ton of risk associated with investing like that.
You mean the properties they now own for a decade? Those that are fully developed and barely require maintenance? The same properties that are fully insured even against natural disasters that obliterate them to their foundations?
Yeah, let's compensate them for being insured and at the worst case scenario lose 500 euros a month every now and then when a shadier employee comes around and leaves quickly. Poor them. Whatever will they do, 1 million euros a year can barely get your ends meet!
Many risks. A disaster (war, bad weather) could keep customers away. A competitor could build next door, and resulting in your hotel being half full instead of full. A competitor could start a price war. Tastes in vacations could change resulting in less customers than expected coming. The laws could change in many different ways, each of which can change either your income or expenses.
That is just off the top of my head.
Of course as has been pointed out, your suppliers could demand more money than you have left in your budget (employees are a form of suppler - the human aspect has been intentionally ignored)
I think the GP's comment was unhelpful, but there is always risk in starting a business, particularly in hospitality, and especially as an independent operator.
There's risk in the construction (that budgets/timelines will blow out, contractors will be unable to complete the work to specifications), in whether the hotel will be appealing to customers, in the possibility of a recession or natural disaster or civic crisis that will keep tourists away.
The thing you describe is the narrative of the evil capitalist owner exploiting poor workers.
Here's a thought experiment - those (tourism businesses) owners are making lots of money, so why not create such a business yourself (maybe with help of some external capital) and pay better wages and treat your staff better and pay taxes? Your clients will be much happier with you while having to pay the same. Other capitalists are probably happy to get a piece of the cake.
Of course, you cannot blame workers to not work in this industry right now, but obviously there are still enough people accepting that type of employment, otherwise salaries would have improved already.
So what you're suggesting is that this person should not complain. Instead he should set up his own business, offer better salaries than everyone else, and single-handedly change the labour market of an entire country. Great suggestion. Why didn't I think of that?
> So what you're suggesting is that this person should not complain. Instead he should set up his own business, offer better salaries
Yes. Either yourself or maybe find someone else who does.
But if you find no one who solves it for you, the question stands whether the employer is indeed an evil guy or just doesn't have a lot of margin to hand out higher salaries. It's easy and lazy to assume evilness without ever having been there.
> and single-handedly change the labour market of an entire country. Great suggestion. Why didn't I think of that?
Not many people have €5M to build their own hotel, particularly those who are unemployed. Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.
> Not many people have €5M to build their own hotel
There are evil rich guys waiting to invest into a promising venture. Interest rates are at a record low. VCs are everywhere.
> particularly those who are unemployed
You just added that element to the discussion.
> Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.
That's an interesting point, maybe it's not so easy after all and maybe the risks and costs of operating the business is higher than the employee thinks.
Do it yourself and the you can complain and prove you have cash left over and hand it out. Then you can complain the guy is evil, the rest is mere speculation.
Note I am not saying it's easy (I know for a fact that it's hard). I'm just saying it's lazy and non-constructive to just assume the other guy being evil without knowing even 10% of what's going on and where the problems of the business lie.
Small business guy here. When abusive employment practices give you a competitive advantage and nothing stops you from doing them, you can indeed go and be virtuous and make less money for yourself and your business and lose all day long.
At the scale of publically held companies, your bossy evilness is virtue signalling that tells the market that you are viable in the era of Uber and Amazon. Right now, as things stand, wrecking things and your own employees is expected and you will get no support and no investment from breaking ranks. That's just how it is.
In my field, I ended up just flipping the table and switching to Patreon so I could dump free competitive product and better serve my own userbase. My income got literally decimated by this decision but has rebounded to about a third or half of what it would have been, but I'm totally exempt from having to behave like a vulture: it suits my market positioning quite well, though if I was a really serious threat to the market leaders in my sector, I'm pretty sure they would come up with a way to sabotage me. That's also why I MIT license: I can funnel good stuff to poor musicians if I also let already-rich people steal it in exchange for only publicity. The alternate is they steal it anyway but with no publicity, or simply try to wreck my operation so there's less competition.
The narrative of the evil capitalist overlord persists for good reason: in the absence of a working society it's down to power and power alone, and only winning and getting the most capital allows you to continue to win and get more capital. It's a feedback loop and there's no reason 'salaries would improve' barring outside interference, which is less likely by the year.
Go ahead and do your thought experiment, but it doesn't map to the real world of 2018. To survive you've got to think more disruptively: your axioms here are pretty naive. For instance, what is actually important: your clients being happy, or your clients paying more money?
All is not lost, the story of Gravity Payments is an unfolding example and experiment of a company owner, Dan Price, taking positive actions for employees including large wage increases. https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/
Dan took a thought and turned it into a real experiment. I believe the results are very positive in terms of profits, much higher wages for workers, higher customer retention, and deservedly good PR. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2018/01/24/what-...
I think you're reading a little too much into my above comment.
Just to reduce my point to the basics:
Either the evil guy makes lots of money (in the sense of profit) -> You start your own business in the same sector -> get some of that market share and profit -> pay your workers better -> everyone is happy except evil guy
Or the evil guy doesn't make a lot of money -> He cannot pay his workers more -> He's not the evil guy.
Sure, this isn't black and white but as long as there isn't a monopoly on anything involved, the above holds.
Let's just stop complaining and force evil guys to press the pause button by competing with them.
As a side note, it is an open question whether truly evil guys have a pause button (I assume Sauron and Darth Vader don't have one) or whether there are other things at work.
Maybe those guys just spent years living close to poverty to make their start-up a huge success. Maybe not. Just saying there are somewhat understandable reasons that don't necessarily mean the guy is evil.
People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work.
The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the minimum salary available... which is somewhat 500 euros. It varies from 500 to 900 euros and 1200 in best cases. The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do, and get treated awfully. There is just no point. And then all I hear from those guys owning massive hotels making 1m+ revenue in their pockets per year saying : 'Cant find anyone good to work for you nowadays, its all youngsters fault'. Well ok I'll admit that prolly youngsters dont have the nerves that older people had in their age, but at the same time you are not helping the situation at all when you are offering money that someone will just pass by and you are making 1m+ euros in your pocket a year, and then the only way to keep profiting is to steal a bit on tax and of course not fully insure your employees. AWFUL system!