This is not really a technology issue, it's a non-union employee issue. As a society we're asking the government to step in and legislate to protect workers rather than fostering unions to negotiate on a case by case basis.
Yeah, there was recently a (rare) train strike in Sweden over something vaguely along these lines. The train company wanted to move to flex-staffing that can vary on a week-by-week or day-by-day basis based on traffic models. The proximate trigger was that they laid off 250 salaried employees and immediately re-hired them as hourly employees, but the real issue of the strike was over that kind of flex-staffing. The strike ended with a compromise proposed by a mediator that was a victory for the train companies on the main formal dispute (no limit on hourly or flex staffing), but seen as a practical win for the union (hourly workers will have to be paid a significant wage premium over the salaried equivalent, to compensate for the uncertainty/precarity of the arrangement): http://www.thelocal.se/20140618/swedens-trains-back-on-track...
At least here in the UK, it's not (just) a non-union employee issue. Part of the problem is that business interests have a hugely disproportionate influence over the media, and as soon as any media outlet lets any union spokesperson speak it's portrayed as an example of left-wing bias. So instead we get people like the head of the Confederation of British Industry, a business lobbying group, claiming that workers benefit from this because it offers the workers "flexibility". I hear the US is even worse in this regard.
I agree that the software connection is weak, but it can be a reminder to people that decisions made by software can have a real positive or negative effect on human beings, in ways that the software (and software makers) can't easily predict. How do we build more humanism into our apps?
I've written simple scheduling software. The only consideration taken by this scheduling software were worker preferences: management doesn't care who covers the shifts, just that they're covered. So it took into account "fairness", day of week preferences, scheduled holidays, et cetera.
By those measures, the software does a lot better than humans. However, there's something to be said about the predictability of the old human schedules. The humans generally just figured out a 2 week schedule and repeated it; filling in holes created by scheduling conflicts with those workers they knew were usually eager to pick up more work.
IOW, you may previously have worked every 2nd Tuesday. If you couldn't work on a particular Tuesday, you just didn't work. Now you're much more likely to get a solid 2 shifts a month (presuming that's what you asked for), most will be on days you marked as preferred, some days may be on some you marked as available and none on days you marked as not available.
Now obviously I could have added a metric to guide the system towards more 'regular' schedules. But it would still compensate for those other considerations, and would still look somewhat random. It's usually pretty easy to tell the difference between a computer-generated and a human-generated schedule, and many people still prefer the human generated ones, even if it is less 'fair' by almost any measure.
Given how crazy a schedule generated solely by worker preferences is, I shudder to consider schedules driven solely by management preference...
What really helps is if the employees can
1) go online and see their "proposed" schedule months out, ideally with decent export options
2) can trade shifts, ideally online in some app (and have contact info for their colleagues)
3) have a schedule printer in the office
4) can report in ill on the app
5) and of course, manager needs to be hands-off from the schedule (you can of course, build this into the software by making sure it has a "how many urgent changes" counter for managers, so their bosses can see how finicky they are)
Especially you shouldn't build in the ability to give monetary incentives for work. That'll cause a race to the bottom on part of the employees.
Yes, my scheduling software has those, or equivalents. iCalendar export, a way to email everybody if you get sick, et cetera. It works on the honour system: anybody with a login can schedule anybody else for a particular shift. The presumption is that the other party has agreed to the change, and that assumption hasn't been violated for the 5 years they've used the software. If that presumption ever gets violated I suppose I may be asked to put in more verification, but I suspect that the response likely would be to remove the offender from the group.
In retrospect, that's perhaps all I should have built. But the schedule optimization part was the "fun" part. The rest is pretty standard CRUD + email webapp.
> she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday;
I have family working for the german train company, which has highly fluctuating shifts too, but something like that would be straight-up illegal here.
The company has two reasonable choices - either have the time between shifts be at least 9 hours, so the people can eat,sleep and wash; or if they really want a single person to handle closing+opening, and that person is okay with that, then they're welcome to pay for the whole nightshift including the downtime.
There shouldn't be a third option, and in most of the civilized world workers actually have the right to demand that.
"it's easy to treat workers illegally in the US" is irrelevant here - because this actually isn't illegal in the US to start with. There is no federal or state minimum time between shifts, although there are minimums within specific industries, like pilots.
If there is a higher demand for workers during certain hours, shouldn't the workers be paid higher for those hours?
Seems like a fair trade off? If you want ala carte hours, you should pay ala carte prices.
Only way I can think to do it though is by regulating time software... something like "if you use flexible hours, you must comply to these regulations" where in they specify custom pricing.
"Seems like a fair trade off? If you want ala carte hours, you should pay ala carte prices."
That only works if the supply of workers is limited. And in this case, the low-wage bracket, it isn't. It's absolutely flooded with people, so you can't expect the workers to command any such bargaining power. It's simply supply and demand, and there simply isn't enough demand to satisfy the huge supply of low-wage workers.
My solution: Company towns. Give the workers daycare, food, accommodation, training/education and pay them peanuts... in the middle of nowhere. But that'll never fly, because the argument really isn't about "fair-wage", it's more about "entitlement" so people see it as some sort of loss instead of a huge gain in a market that really isn't favoring them at the moment.
> My solution: Company towns. Give the workers daycare, food, accommodation, training/education and pay them peanuts... in the middle of nowhere. But that'll never fly
...because its been done before, became widely and accurately recognized as de facto slavery, and the key components of such schemes outlawed.
An example from late 19th century Mexico: Tiendas de Raya.
The drill worked like this. You live in a poverty riden rural area, and an "enganchador" (lit. hooker, but its kind or a recruiter) comes town and offers you a job elsewhere. You sign up and leave with this guy.
Upon arrival, you learn that you have to pay for the recruiter fee, which is always more than whatever money managed you brought with you for the trip. So your options are either debtors prison or ask your new boss for a single early payment. It's day one and you start in the red.
You are new in town, nobody knows you and will not do business with you unless you bring money upfront. That is, nobody except for "la tienda de raya" your bosse's personal side business, that is happy to extend you a credit line with your paycheck ("la raya") as warranty. Everything is more expensive there, but they will give you everything you need because you are "one of the bosse's men".
So, you are down the hole and digging. An extremely unusual degree of self control over a lengthy period of time is required to cut down your consumption enough so that you will sometime pay your debt. If you manage to do that, you will be able to shop at the same stores as normal people does, and benefit from it. But you will always have the temptation of going to the tienda de raya again for special one of purchases (like that special dress for your daughters wedding), or if the inevitable event of life set you back (like if you need to have a tooth extracted and end up short of cash before the next pay check).
And if you ever try to quit, or loose your job, it is debtor's prison again.
> Daycare, longings, travel, food, medical care, all free (or more accurately included in your paycheck).
Or, more accurately still, the amount of those things that the company decides that you should get without paying extra replaces the bulk of your paycheck. Anything more you want you have to buy with the pittance that remains (or on credit), from suppliers you have access to given the travel, communications, etc., that the company chooses allow you access to through the companies "free" and paid services -- which, usually, means through the company itself. Which, of course, gives the company incentive to ensure that what is provided in the "free" allowance is inadequate.
Company towns are near perfect walled gardens, and exhibit all the problems that walled gardens usually demonstrate.
It sound pretty Utopian to me. The problem with giving full control of the means needed for your own existence to some external entity (even a "Benevolent Tyrant"), is that when that entity begins making unreasonable demands you will be compelled to say "yes" under duress.
Individuals here make it seem as if the inhabitants of this town will be given the choice "work here and take what we give or die/starve/be broke"...as if it's a bad thing. Now, fine, sure, we all want to live in a nice world where people don't need to make such a choice. But we do it all the time when we live life.
Every thing I do, and every choice I make, has an implicit "do this, or you will suffer" rationality behind it. I choose (and other things) to work so I will not suffer, so I can provide for my loved ones and have them not suffer. But you don't see me complaining about being held captive, or being forced to agree to work under duress. Of course not.
"Sometimes I do what I want to. The rest of the time, I do what I have to."
The big reason is that a scumbag company then realizes that there's a lot of money that they're just giving to people. Why do we have to take care of them when we can completely fuck them over?
In a company town, the real problem is that the company is simultaneously the authority and trying to make a profit. It's like making ExxonMobil an environmental protection agency; there's a conflict of interest. Sure, an inspired CEO or manager can make a difference for a while, but the lure of extra profits will win out eventually.
The way this works is through easy availability of credit and high interest. Since you have your workers in debt to you, you're effectively paying them less because they have to pay off the debt. Now, instead of paying them 8 bucks an hour, you're actually paying them 6 bucks an hour because a quarter of their income is going toward paying off their debts. As debts mount, you're now paying them 4 bucks an hour. You can further speed this process along by overcharging for goods and services. After all, you can do that because you're the only one in the region who offers them.
It doesn't have to be like this, but it's very easy for a manager to say, "Hey, we're leaving forty million dollars on the table here. You like money, right?"
Consult your history--even in the event where going there was a choice, there are many, many ways to rig the game so that it becomes economically infeasible to leave again.
You also assume that people have free choice; when you're near flat broke, it's easy to miss your other options.
I see, so you're going to argue against historical company towns instead of my as-yet-undetermined suggestion. Do you honestly think a civilized country or informed internet would allow a company town to exist if it behaved like the historical company towns? They'd be up in arms as soon as they found out.
Though, to be fair. We have "company towns" right now in Dubai and those oil-rich middle-east cities. Guess who's turning a blind eye? The government's where the cities are, and the governments of those immigrants being taken advantage of. They're ignored by both sides.
> Do you honestly think a civilized country or informed internet would allow a company town to exist if it behaved like the historical company towns?
If you want to propose something that is distinct from the historical phenomenon labelled "company towns", I suggest you use a different name (though your description seems to fit exactly into the historical mold, so I'm not going to be convinced that there is a meaningful difference unless you have a concrete explanation as to how your model would avoid recurrence of those problems once the laws put in place that would prevent anything on that model in most US jurisdictions that were motivated by the experience of company towns, such as state and federal laws imposing minimum wages and requiring that such be paid in cash or equivalents, were repealed to allow your new-model company towns.)
> Do you honestly think a civilized country or informed internet would allow a company town to exist if it behaved like the historical company towns?
Well, no, absent compelling arguments otherwise, I'm rather convinced that a country that allowed "company towns" as you have described them, given the historical experience that demonstrates the problems with that model, would, in that respect at least, be, ipso facto, uncivilized.
Seems like a fair question, one I'd like a thorough answer to. Not sure why the downvote. I can see why there are downsides, sure, but the slavery comparison would need more support.
If workers really didn't have any bargaining power then they'd all be paid minimum wage, whereas in reality just 5% do. Workers are not fungible, people don't start being productive until they learn the ropes and some people are better or worse at their job even after training.
In reality, they don't get these things from the government. I suppose "private-company run debit cards systems, private-company run day care, private-company run medical facilities, private-entity run education programs, etc." paid for with a stipend or debit card issued and funded by the government qualifies as "via the government."
However, as is so often the case when "welfare" or a social safety net comes up, especially in America, what is technically true by a parsimonious and context-free reading of the facts is, in practice, not fundamentally relevant (or even completely true).
Looking from the other side of it: if the supply of workers is such that you can get enough for your high-demand hours without paying more, why should workers be paid more?
I realize that the real world adds a lot of complications, but in theory, supply and demand should just work itself out here. "In theory" isn't always useful by itself, but the remedy depends greatly on why the theory is breaking down.
It could be viewed as a tragedy of the commons economic issue. Where a small pool of workers who have some self-interest driven needs (e.g I need money) in place drive a market to a condition that is no longer functional (e.g. nobody can make a living wage).
when basic dignity for workers is 'just because', a business has lost its' way.
a business should produce three things, for three important customer segments: customers, investors, and workers, and all three are equally important.
too many businesses, most of the large ones esp, cater only to investors (or the interests of the owners) leaving both customers and workers by the wayside. i fully support exile for people who operate these businesses.
>Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks.
Reminds me of the beginning of Marshall Brain's novella 'Manna':
>Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down.
>Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks.
I haven't been effected by this sort of thing in years, but I've always felt that they should have to pay you for hours they schedule you, whether they use you or not.
> I haven't been effected by this sort of thing in years, but I've always felt that they should have to pay you for hours they schedule you, whether they use you or not.
What I think would make sense in a regime where minimum wage exists, given that people often work multiple jobs and such scheduled-but-canceled-at-the-last-minute hours effectively exclude other work is to include hours scheduled or where the employee is required to be "on call" for work that are not cancelled sufficiently far in advance -- obviously, one needs to decide where to set the bar here -- are counted as hours worked for minimum wage purposes (including for calculation of overtime pay due at minimum wage -- and for hours worked for related purposes like "full time" status as it relates to any benefit mandates, etc.), but not as hours worked at the actual wage for the position, or overtime entitlement based on the actual wage. So, you can't use schedule-and-cancel to drop the pay for the "reserved" time of an employee below minimum wage.
Or at least compensate employees somehow if their shifts are cut short. Something like a flat-rate $10-20 inconvenience fee for cancelling hours and any additional commute costs (if they have to take the bus instead of getting a ride).
> >Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down.
The first two chapters are really good, but it goes downhill very quickly. Fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and I nearly burst out laughing at the dialog in the fifth chapter. It also fails to explore some of the more interesting aspects of robots-as-blind-managers.
For example, the robot asks workers in a store to report the shelf stock and asks a second to verify. What happens when typically-mischievous teenage workers lie to the computer (either individually or as a conspiracy)? Do they convince the computer that duct tape is a highly-shoplifted item? Is the software smart enough to correlate the misreporting with specific workers or groups of workers (and does it ever misidentify the perpetrator)? Do engineers spend untold hours figuring out why "Manna" keeps overstocking (or understocking) duct tape?
The computer manager in Manna is shown as a all-knowing with human intelligence and common sense. We all know that real software isn't like that.
"Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks."
Wouldn't this be farily easy to game ?
That is, I don't serve anyone at a register for a 10 minute period, so I quickly buy a small coke using my own money ... thus simulating a customer ... which would (I presume) throw off, or reset the whole algorithm.
Two assumptions - first, that the software really isn't that smart, and second, that it "fails safe" ... which is to say, if traffic patterns don't match up to existing models, just give up and keep people working and try again later.
So I would think this would be quite simple (and cheap) to game ... maybe four workers get together and chip in to simulate 2-3 meal purchases, thus gaining an hour or more of paid work ?
You're also assuming that this would not be easily noticed by the manager on shift (or that they would not try to prevent it, perhaps by firing a worker), and that you could shift the algorithm with an amount small enough that the workers (making ~$7/hr) can afford it without wiping out the income they would receive from the extra hour, and that the workers would band together instead of thinking 'well I won't be the one sent home so I'm not going to spend $2 on keeping Sarah here for another hour'.
That seems like a miss. I don't understand why, if they have such good technology, they wouldn't just have sensors on the trashcans or toilets that inform them when they need emptying/cleaning.
If you were building a system like this for real, you'd probably put sensors on toilets and trash cans in addition to the cash register connection. Real sensors fail, and, in a system where workers are explicitly discouraged from using common sense, that leads to overflowing trash cans.
He could be kicked out of day care for having no home address.
What the FUCK is that about? How can anyone justify that? "Oh, I see you're spiralling downward. Here's a fucking boot on your kid's head to make sure he gets right down to the bottom with you." That's a fucking disgrace.
This is definitely a scheduling technology issue in that these types of scenarios wouldnt exist without the technology to up to the minute track store activity and optimize schedules based on rapidly fluctuating store activity.
However the underlying issue beyond that is one of simple business 'greed'. Workers shifts are another resource to be optimized, and this is the end result. As long as this kind of optimization yields tangible bottomline benefits, and there are enough people who need the job so they are willing to deal with the fluctuating schedules, this is going to continue.
This article and the one on "House Elf Bias" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177292) reinforce each other. What magic had to happen to create that 40 hour schedule? What does the world look like to Gavin, the 4 year old son in the scheduling story?
I was thinking it would be interesting to create a 'low-income life simulator' where people could be presented with all the problems of an American with low income. With limited resources, and branching scenarios, you would attempt to 'solve' your way out of it. It would be interesting to see the reaction of people who blame low-income people for their own troubles, when actually playing this game.
I’ve seen something like this before (I forget where or its name), the idea is sound, but it added alot of sensationalist stuff as well, which would allow someone to dismiss it at as a whole.
It also threw in some points where the “character” made a bad decision, which led to really dire consequences. Someone could easily conclude “they are poor because they made bad decisions” but it doesn’t highlight how if you have the money bad decisions don’t compound the way they do when you don’t.
An interesting idea although you run the risk of making 'low-income life' seem like an interesting puzzle and one that once-solved is pretty easy actually.
Your idea reminded me of a project someone built several years ago to give western audiences a taste of life in darfur...
There was an attempt at this game on HN a year or so ago. It was insanely hard, but also super flawed - just one example you may get a scenario about half way in where you find out you have a dog, which you suddenly have to pay vet bills for.
The macro trend of more and more companies shifting jobs from full time to part time is disconcerting. Working one of these service jobs where you're slave to your hours like this is hell.
The "Share Economy" (Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.) has the potential to make this both better and worse. At least if you're an independent uber driver, you can choose when you're going to be available and pick up jobs when it makes sense for your schedule. There are time periods that are higher/lower demand, but you're wage is reflected in that and its your choice to make.
> The "Share Economy" (Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.) has the potential to make this both better and worse.
Incidentally, while its a pleasant (for the industry) propaganda/marketing label, these things have nothing to do with sharing. They are routine sales-through-an-agent, and are no more about "sharing" than selling a house through a real estate agent is.
They're different from their traditional competitors in that they increase the utilization of one's pre-owned assets. I can use the same car for commuting as I do for moonlighting as an UberX driver, for example. That's pretty innovative, whether people like to admit it or not.
> They're different from their traditional competitors in that they increase the utilization of one's pre-owned assets.
That's actually not a difference from their traditional competitors, in that (to the extent that the uses weren't actually illegal at the time) agent-intermediated rentals for already-owned assets weren't new things when these apps started doing it, and also because these apps aren't specific to "pre-owned" assets, and in fact drive asset purchases dedicated to rental through the apps. (And, in any case, rental-through-an-agent doesn't become "sharing" just because you owned the property you chose to rent out before you decided to rent it out.)
Normal people didn't rent out their bedrooms overnight before AirBnB came around and now they do. Normal people also didn't drive strangers around for money in their own cars before Lyft and UberX came along and now they do.
> Normal people didn't rent out their bedrooms overnight before AirBnB came around and now they do. Normal people also didn't drive strangers around for money in their own cars before Lyft and UberX came along and now they do.
People clearly did. I'm not sure what definition of "normal" you are trying to use here, but it seems likely circular...
> You can't say there's nothing new there.
Nor did I say that there's nothing new there. What I did say is that it has nothing to do with "sharing", each is just a new convenient web/mobile app for fairly normal agent-intermediated rentals (often with little attention to the legalities of the specific industry -- which in several cases of so-called 'sharing economy' companies is the main innovation offered over existing online agent-intermediated rental systems in otherwise similar markets.)
> you can choose when you're going to be available and pick up jobs when it makes sense for your schedule
Sharing economy workers are 1099 contractors, so wages can be pushed below minimum wage. You may not be able to make enough to get by just by working when its convenient for you, and have to work during the high demand/wage hours or whenever jobs are being offered.
The market for sharing economy labor will probably be where demand is more unpredictable, because businesses that can predict demand will just hire employees. Workers will have short notification windows and feel more pressure to take higher paying work when it becomes available.
This is part of the creeping one-sided "professionalization" of low-wage work. Employees are expected to arrive pre-trained, stick within specific constraining roles, and be available at all hours. Employers are demanding all the responsibilities of white collar salaried jobs while offering none of the benefits. For many people it's not even possible to juggle two of these jobs thanks to "improved" scheduling technology.
Minimum wages also contribute to this: when you remove flexibility from one parameter of a gigantic system in dynamic tension, it can be partially clawed back elsewhere.
So if the mix "lower wages but consistent (and often overstaffed) schedules" is prohibited by the wage law, you may instead get the mix "slightly higher wages but hours aggressively trimmed and rearranged".
Even people making minimum wage struggle to make ends meet. Do you propose that this will significantly change if we remove minimum wage?
I understand the "prices will fall" mantra, but cost of living goes up with inflation. One would think that there would be no need for a minimum wage because as cost of living goes up, no one would be paying the 'bare minimum' anymore. The problem is that this is not what we see in practice.
Another consideration is that middle-/upper-class wages would (in my opinion) no fall as a result of minimum wage abolition. This does not have an insignificant impact on prices too (just because cost goes down does not necessarily translate into lower prices, maybe just higher profits).
I don't see him proposing that minimum wages should be removed, or that anything will "magically" work out if they are. I merely see him stating that minimum wages contribute to this particular problem, which is true. It does not then follow that minimum wages should be eliminated.
This sort of knee-jerk reaction makes it really hard to discuss any sort of public policy in a rational way. The moment you point out any problem with anything, somebody will come along and "rebut" your statement by pretending that you just stated that everything would be better if you eliminated the thing you're discussing. It's really annoying!
Why would you blame minimum wage for this problem if you weren't implying we should reform or abolish it?
Also, the process of proposal and rebuttal you describe has another name: Debate. And the constant rebutting is why it works so well. You attack the other side's idea while defending your own and the best ideas survive the process.
"Why would you blame minimum wage for this problem if you weren't implying we should reform or abolish it?"
Seriously? It's possible to think that something causes a problem while still thinking that it's a net gain. Is that concept actually foreign to you? Do you truly think that you must either see no faults in something or you must think it should be changed?
Debate involves a mutual discussion. The process I describe, where a person "rebuts" something that was never said, is not debate, it's simple argument.
Yeah, I the fact that you could support it as a necessary evil (benefits outweigh the costs) slipped my mind. My bad. I still thought the post heavily implied something needed to be changed about minimum wage.
Debate and argumentation are essentially the same. Debate can imply something formal, and argument can carry a negative connotation. But both are, by definition, adversarial methods of arriving at the truth. They require people to take sides, if just for the sake of argument.
Mentioning minimum-wage laws as a contributing factor isn't quite 'blaming' them. Also, even minimum-wage proponents can (and often do) admit there are tradeoffs involved with such mandates, they just think those tradeoffs are worth it.
You've guessed right that I don't personally think the tradeoffs of price-controls on wages are worth it. (Among other problems, the very young & low-skilled, who get priced out of essential starter jobs, are hurt more than those who remain employed at the higher wages are helped.) But we don't have to agree on that to reach common understandings on other particulars of how employers and employees adjust to constraints.
Did I mention prices at all? (You've slipped into some other scripted debate, with fuzzy political euphemisms like "making ends meet", which is only tangentially related to the point I'm making about the topic of this article.)
The point above is that the system has many, many parameters in constant dynamic adjustment. Setting a minimum on one that's easy-to-observe (hourly wages) in law doesn't just cause that one value to change.
The adjustments happen all over. Marginal workers aren't hired or kept-on-staff. Hours of operation are trimmed. Outfits run on slimmer crews. It's harder to find someone to ask a question. Lines for check-out get longer. Facilities go a little longer between restocking/cleaning. (Minimum wages mean grosser store bathrooms.) Unregulated, harder-to measure benefits get trimmed. The topic of this article, schedule predictability or flexibility, is just such a benefit.
And it doesn't require conscious tit-for-tat book-balancing action by employers for these trade-offs to happen. As they notice they're making less, adjustments happen. (Or, smaller businesses that are slow to adjust simply become uneconomical and leave the market: minimum wages benefit Wal-Marts & McDonalds, with their expert formula operations, over intuitive "Mom-and-Pops".) Over time, since more people are now eager for extra hours at the legally-mandated higher salary, it's easier to place more informal demands on those people, like "you better take every shift when offered, or it won't be offered again".
There are likely some good workers who'd prefer steadier work, in predicable shifts, at a lower wage. That agreement is made illegal by minimum wage laws, and they are forced to compete with a larger group of people looking to scoop up shorter, more random, higher-paying shifts.
With no minimum wage, an employer who offers the absolute worst in predictability would have to offer a higher wage than the same sort of work with predictability-as-a-benefit. Similarly, an employer who offers lots of employee-friendly flexibility – you can always leave early, no penalties for refusing an offered shift, etc – could pay less.
People then get compensated for what they care most about, not what a legislature has decreed as the only acceptable wage rate. They'd also tend to sort into the workplaces that best fit their circumstances. Social surplus is maximized.
A wage floor prevents these sorts of adjustments, because it creates a surplus of hours-offered at the higher wage, while eliminating other hours-demanded. (For example, it's no longer economical to have 3 registers open, or to check on the restrooms hourly, or to bring customers their own orders as opposed to having them picked up, or to have someone wandering the store floor for issues/questions.) Thus the hours available can be rationed out as an inducement for other, harder-to-regulate concessions.
So while the wage floor makes employers (who continue to employ) pay more, in that one dimension, it strengthens their powers of control/coercion is most others.
The absolute best system for employees is tight labor markets, where if anything about the job is bad – wage, hours, respect – they can walk across the street for another job-on-offer at about the same wage with a better mix of everything. That best system is sabotaged by lots of well-intended restrictions on employment relationships, so we only see it occasionally, during transient booms and in boom regions (like, recently, North Dakota).
I don't believe there is any job in the united states that should pay less than 8.25 an hour. If it has to do so in order to provide reasonable conditions to employees than that business should not exist.
> If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.
While being in this position sucks, I kind of think that this is a compromise she chose for herself. "I want to work as many hours possible" is obviously going to conflict with "I want to work a stable shift".
In my experience with a certain retailer, the former is a decision made for you: they'll schedule you for 32-34 hours if they schedule you at all. As soon as you introduce any friction outside of what they're legally obligated to accept, you get squeezed out.
Scheduling software is a tool. Management still makes the decisions. At the end of the article, management helped this woman out and gave her a more bearable situation.
Software may magnify the problem but this is fundamentally about how management views employees.
Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jobs.
Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"?
Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them.
Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.
Children aren't always intentional, and birth control isn't cheap, especially for someone who works near-minimum wage jobs. Add to that the general lessening of availability of birth control due to conservative influences in the United States, and you get an environment in which birth control is hard to effectively use—especially if you're on an erratic schedule, which this woman is.
Not to mention the US, Japan, and most if Europe is already below the replacement rate. Without immigration we are a dying society suggesting we need even fewer kids is a great way to end up extinct.
Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975.
PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.
Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar. A stable job today might not be stable in 5 years, if employment conditions change (as they seem to be changing in the case discussed here). I suspect in the medium-term future there will be very few stable jobs at all.
Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment. Perhaps child-bearing should be limited to people with at least $100k in the bank to cover emergencies, plus a STEM degree? Maybe a savings account and a STEM degree and N years of experience, to make sure they aren't one of those people with a CS degree who can't code?
Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
For what it's worth I wouldn't have a kid without $1 million in liquid assets set aside for him. It seems evil to me to have a kid without enough money to feel confident he'll never have to work for money. But then most people think I'm nuts.
If everybody did that it would cause a demographic crisis. Who exactly do you expect to be looking after you when you are retired (growing your food, manufacturing your medication, diagnosing your ailments etc etc) and only 0.01% of the population have had children in the last 50 years.
Other people having children is actually a vital service to the rest of society. Or at least those of us hoping to live for at least another 30-40 years, which will require a younger generation to provide the goods and services we will need to stay alive.
This point seems to be missed by a lot of libertarians (who are frequently childless single young men) in their anger about parents getting support from the government.
That's irrelevant, because developed countries (i.e. the countries that are in the position to have a social safety net) almost universally have shrinking populations, not growing ones.
It's not irrelevant. More people (especially more people in developed countries) = more CO2. You can't spin that away. Even if the US population goes from 300M to 200M, that would produce more CO2 than going from 300M to 100M.
It's a good thing for you (and all of us) that most people think you're nuts. If the threshold for having a kid was $1MM in the bank, our population would crash and our economy would be doomed.
By the time you have $1 million you will be too old to have a kid (especially if female).
People really need to start getting married earlier. If you marry in your early twenties having a child at that time is not a problem, even if you don't have tons of savings yet.
And aside from the biology of having a child late, simply raising a child is much harder when you are older (late thirties), because your energy level really starts diverging from theirs. (Obviously you can make it work, I'm only saying it gets harder.)
I'm pretty sure men can have children into their 70s. And with $1 million I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
> I'm pretty sure men can have children into their 70s.
Sometimes, but sperm quality declines, leading to more birth defects and it takes longer to succeed. And a 70 year old is simply not a suitable father.
I assume you were planning a may/cecember marriage? Which is pretty cruel to the wife, and to the kids who will loose their father MUCH too early.
Kids need their father very much in their 30's. If you are waiting long enough that you are dead, or even just declined you are not doing well by them.
> I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
You don't even have kids and already you hate them?
> My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
OK, now you REALLY make no sense. A sentence before you want to give them a horrible childhood (using nannies too much leads to attachment issues, and various disorders).
And now you want to do better?
I have a feeling you have no idea whatsoever about what children actually need out of childhood. It's not money. It's love, attention, and approval. Having lots of money is detrimental to all of them.
And your standard is ridiculous anyway - if every generation refused to have kids until they could do it "better" no one at all would have kids.
Without trying to poke holes in your economic assumptions (which I think I could), giving your kid 15K a year seems a lot less valuable than teaching them self reliance, logical reasoning, frugality, a love of education/learning, work ethic, etc.
You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things.
The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
Well they didn't choose to be born so leaving them with the option of killing themselves or spending most of their lives doing things they don't enjoy just to stay alive seems cruel to me.
I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
> or spending most of their lives doing things they don't enjoy just to stay alive seems cruel to me.
I assume you mean poverty? The parent having money is associated with kids having less money later in life, but it's not the cause of it.
If you want them to do things they enjoy give them skills and confidence. If you give them money instead you do them harm.
> I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
You can't. It's a reality of humanity that giving people things too easily leads to misery. People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them. If you are willing to learn from the replies you got then you'll do fine.
You can work hard and be successful at something that's not particularly economically valuable. I happen to enjoy writing software and people happen to want to pay for it but most people's lives (see TFA) consist of doing boring bullshit they hate 40h+ out of the week just to put food on the table. It's an awful waste of human life.
When you have money, you can pursue anything you want indefinitely. Even if it takes you 20 years to become a great painter or writer or bass guitarist, there's no pressure along the way to quit and get a job as a barrista to pay rent.
>I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them.
You have good perception, that's definitely part of it :)
Honestly, I never remember caring whatsoever as a child whether or not my parents spent time with me. I didn't have anything in common with them anyways. A credit card and a new Benz on my 16th birthday, however, would have completely changed my memories of what could have been the best years of my life but which were instead wasted indoors on the internet because I couldn't afford to do anything else.
> People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I would guess this is not true on average. If anything, I would guess the opposite: the Waltons, Kochs, Kennedys, etc., who inherited their money and are able to do whatever kind of bullshit they want with it, are happier.
"Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment."
If the degree benefits your employment chance, you should have done it before you have kids. If the degree does not benefit your employment chance, then why do it at all? Either way, finish it before.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?
No, it's inflicted by a broken society. In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living. This allows both a flexible economic system (entrepreneurship, job-changing, etc.) and family life to coexist: your company going bankrupt does not mean your kid can't attend school or eat. The American solution seems to be that people should have a corporate job for life with the old IBM or Amoco, which provides both ultra-stable employment and benefits (company-provided childcare, parental leave, health insurance, etc.) and only those people are "deserving" of having kids.
No, it's not. The broken society didn't make the woman pregnant and give birth. Also, 'broken' sounds really melodramatic.
"In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living."
Is having and maintaining a Ferrari a basic standard of living? No? Well, that's how expensive kids are, no, they're even more expensive.
That is a very ambitious basic standard you're setting here. Obviously, this is going to cost uninvolved people heaps of money just because everyone thinks they are entitled to make as many children as they want regardless of their ability to support them. It's a huge burden on everyone else's back. The pinnacle of selfishness.
Unlike having a nation full of Ferraris, having a nation where at least a replacement-rate of kids are born is necessary to keep it from aging and eventually dying out. Human reproduction is not a random consumer product, but an integral part of the continuation of human societies. Therefore, society puts in place a social system to ensure that kids can be raised, educated, etc., but does not put in place a system to ensure widespread Ferrari ownership.
I didn't have children until my 40's (admittedly, that's probably kind of too late). Why? Because I wanted to have a stable marital and financial situation in place for them. If you have no husband and no job, you shouldn't be having children just barely out of your teenage years. Children don't happen by "accident".
And you're very right, nowadays people feel that they're entitled to a Ferrari just for being alive. Our society sure has changed in recent decades.
Bah. Watch me get voted down along with you. I don't care. It needs to be said.
Can I guess that you grew up in an environment where you were taught, either by family or schools about birth control? That you had healthy role models about what a stable family looks like? That it was odd where you grew up for people to have children in high school? Or that you were taught how to calculate how much time/money it takes to support a child?
If so, you grew up with enormous privilege. Lots of people are born into situations where none of that is true. Some truly exceptional folks are born without any of that privilege, make what we consider to be mistakes in family planning, before learning any of that, and still strive to make their lives better. I for one would like there to be resources available to help them escape that brutal cycle.
Saying that it is self-inflicted shows a gross myopia about how much of the world lives and implying that the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us can coerce us into doing anything is laughable.
What degrees offered 15 years ago are irrelevant today? Honest question here, as someone who dropped out of college 10 years ago, I've no idea of how academia works in that direction.
No, it isn't common sense. It's a wise decision to make under a certain set of socio-economic conditions, which may not apply uniformly to everyone that you encounter.
Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job.
This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants.
Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care.
So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.
if you already know that you definitely won't be okay
This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
Access and funding for reproductive health care and education have been cut severely by many U.S. state legislatures in the past several years. See, for example: https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women
You're not the only one; there are a great many people who have the same opinion. Not that you aren't entitled to your opinions, and this one in particular, but the fact is the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought.
"the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought."
Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
Sure. Your opinion includes implicit assertions regarding all the things that go into "sorting out education and jobs". In particular, the core assertion is that it's possible to do so and that it is something that's feasible or a reasonable expectation in all cases (hint: it's neither, in some cases and in particular cases involving poverty and families on the lower end of the income spectrum). You're implicitly asserting, almost to the point of making it tautological, that people who aren't born into privilege ought not have children.
The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).
Some people will never get the opportunity to have a stable environment... through no fault of their own. Does that mean they should never have the opportunity to be parents?
There are a bunch of people on HN who would say "Yes, people without X amount of money shouldn't be allowed to have children."
And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
Any society that does not structure itself such that each adult can be biological parent to at least two children without significant penalty to their own quality of life is not going to be stable in the long term. That's not even a full replacement rate.
I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
It's really complex, and I can see where you're coming from, but I wouldn't call it a right.
I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right.
What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
>>What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children(and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I actually believe as a society we should be okay supporting them. But there's a caveat. The preventative measures in place we currently have in society are not working because, IMHO, we waste too much money in WarOnDrugs and questionable wars. If we could stop doing that and ramp up the education & availabilty of birthcontrol in lower income areas, I bet there wouldn't be that many of them falling through the cracks(canyons really) in the system and ending up appearing to us as being irresponsible burdens. It would be a nice small number of people that we could handle.
It's a right because people can do it, and they would also kill or die to keep doing it. It's that simple. If you tell someone they cannot reproduce, or forcibly sterilize them, they might try to escape your control or kill you.
If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.
But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
The bibliography you use depends in large part on where you want to align yourself politically.
The endless debate cycle between disaffected and disenfranchised libertarians covers the topic of human rights quite often. Most of us agree that the UN declaration is not a viable framework, because some of the enumerated rights imply that someone, somewhere, would necessarily be impressed into compulsory service to enforce them. For example, a right to adequate medical care implies that someone must become a physician and supply that care, possibly without pay. The right to food implies that someone must farm it, possibly without pay.
Even the experts can make mistakes.
So rather than read what others have said on the topic, it may be better for you to simply think it out for yourself and see what you come up with. Ideally, you will come up with a set of principles that are unambiguous, self-consistent, and able to serve as the foundation for a civilized society. It's much harder than it sounds. Good luck.
You're not alone; quite a lot of people think that.
The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff.
And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.
You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse).
In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)
How is it irrelevant? Most of the lady's problems were because of her being a young single mother with a very young child. I didn't see the word "rape" in the article, and I assume the pregnancy wasn't an immaculate conception.
Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/jul/23/e...