I seem to have scrambled the order here, but that's because the eggs in my skull are just as scrambled.
While I'm sure there would be a feel good piece in the news somewhere there would be many other unreported examples of the glories of trickle-down economics.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in those kitchens with an old guy there seeing to it that I would not get a raise. Were the kitchen unionized I suspect the wording 'scab' would be in use.
On the flip side:
COVID certainly was an upheaval, no? I have no brilliant commentary (ever, ha) on the major movements of labour.
I do have an anecdote on some acquaintances who were in hospitality in a higher priced area. They fled when they were abruptly unemployed, spent months subsistence fishing from a trailer, and now part time in hospitality again, as well as continuing their subsistence fishing. Moving back to higher priced areas isn't workable for them. These labourers have fled and they aren't coming back without offers of cash enough to pay the rent.
So what these seniors are doing is interesting on the short term, picking up some slack (ha, slack), if there is not enough money available because it's in the hands of Jeff Bezos for the basic costs of living, the local labour pool will only diminish.
THAT aside, humans pitching in when needed is natural, and excellent. It's humans being humans at our best. So, what I think I'm stabbing at here is, this natural human helping out impulse is a thing that is damaging to society as a whole when applied to and exploited by... capitalism.
...
I started this thread as a bitter/lighthearted joke about the western world's aversion to the discussion of socialism and now I'm turning into a full blast commie.
*gestures broadly at COVID, anti-vax, bleach drinkers, cow dewormer ingesters, mask ragers, sovereign citizens, +
To my mind, there are four possible courses of action open to a business if their costs increase -- absorb them, find a way to cut them (or other costs), increase prices or go out of business.
Why do you think the owner isn't taking the obvious step of raising prices and offering better rates of pay, if the only problem is the wages are too low?
Maybe it's a different picture in the US, but what we're seeing in the UK (and I think it's the case all over Europe, though our problems are compounded and exacerbated by Brexit) but the reason we're being given here for staff shortages in the hospitality industry is that people who were working in the industry when the lockdown started have had to find other ways of supporting themselves since, and aren't now particularly anxious to leave them and go back to their old jobs, whether that's because they're better paid, or the hours are more regular, or they prefer the work or whatever.
Now restaurants, bars and cafes are opening up again, there are inevitably staff shortages, which will either be temporary or, if they're permanent, the venues will go out of business.
I seem to have scrambled the order here, but that's because the eggs in my skull are just as scrambled.
While I'm sure there would be a feel good piece in the news somewhere there would be many other unreported examples of the glories of trickle-down economics.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in those kitchens with an old guy there seeing to it that I would not get a raise. Were the kitchen unionized I suspect the wording 'scab' would be in use.
On the flip side:
COVID certainly was an upheaval, no? I have no brilliant commentary (ever, ha) on the major movements of labour.
I do have an anecdote on some acquaintances who were in hospitality in a higher priced area. They fled when they were abruptly unemployed, spent months subsistence fishing from a trailer, and now part time in hospitality again, as well as continuing their subsistence fishing. Moving back to higher priced areas isn't workable for them. These labourers have fled and they aren't coming back without offers of cash enough to pay the rent.
So what these seniors are doing is interesting on the short term, picking up some slack (ha, slack), if there is not enough money available because it's in the hands of Jeff Bezos for the basic costs of living, the local labour pool will only diminish.
THAT aside, humans pitching in when needed is natural, and excellent. It's humans being humans at our best. So, what I think I'm stabbing at here is, this natural human helping out impulse is a thing that is damaging to society as a whole when applied to and exploited by... capitalism.
...
I started this thread as a bitter/lighthearted joke about the western world's aversion to the discussion of socialism and now I'm turning into a full blast commie.
*gestures broadly at COVID, anti-vax, bleach drinkers, cow dewormer ingesters, mask ragers, sovereign citizens, +
In this situation, and obviously I'm not familiar with the background so all I can go on is first principles, but we've got people here behaving very unusually. Staff pay is what staff who are acceptable to the owner are willing to accept. Prices are what the customer is prepared to pay.
If the owner can't make enough from sales to cover staff costs, along with supplies, power, rent and all the other overheads, then there are numerous courses of action open to them, obviously, but recruiting people to work for free isn't normally one that most people turn to first. We know that, because if it was a successful business model, more employers would use it.
Nor are they alone in acting unusually. Over here, at least one of the big sandwich chains, Pret-a-Manger, have had to close several stores permanently because of the loss in traffic during the lockdown and people's continuing unwillingness to return to working from the office, and have also had to ask their remaining staff to take a substantial pay cut for the foreseeable future if the business is to survive.
It's not capitalism as such, I think, that's the specific problem here. It may be on the larger scale of things, but specifically the problem is, in both cases, the rent is too high.
The restaurant owner's labour costs have unexpectedly risen because of the pandemic, because they can't fill staff vacancies at what they paid previously. There's no realistic way of increasing the number of customers, or charging them more, and the owner is presumably locked into a lease that that the landlord won't negotiate.
In the case of Pret, it's rather different, because the value of each particular site where Pret chose to open an outlet was based on the projected footfall, and in some cases that's now collapsed, but again, there's no way to make the landlord budge.
In both cases people have to act unusually, and against their immediate economic interests, in order to protect their more long-term interests (customers volunteering to work shifts for free to keep the restaurant going, presumably because they value its presence in the neighbourhood, and , Pret staff agreeing to take a substantial pay cut because they want to keep their jobs even at the lower rate.
What else are people supposed to do? Bad though these solutions are, all the other ones available in a realistic timespan are even worse, or so it seems to me.
There's all sorts of possible forms of government intervention that might help (guaranteed income support, for example, or expropriate the landlords), but I'm not sure what else is supposed to happen in the meantime -- close the business altogether?
www.theguardian.com
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