low-end jobs
Nov. 9th, 2004 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioMore recently, I've interacted with automation that is designed to specifically replace humans rather than broadening service. The automated check-out at grocery stores is the big example here. Instead of one cashier per line, stores now need one employee per 4 or so lines. This isn't making things more convenient for customers; unlike ATMs, the scanners are only available when the store is open anyway.
There are practical reasons I tend to avoid the automated checkouts, mostly related to speed. The line for the human has to be about three times as long as the line for the machine before the machine looks like a time-saver. People may get more proficient at scanning and packing over time, of course.
But I find that even absent that consideration, I'm reluctant to use the machine. Doing so helps to eliminate a low-end job that might be the only job the job-holder is capable of doing. Most of the cashiers I see at the grocery store aren't college-age kids looking for spending money; they're middle-aged and sometimes visibly handicapped.
This is not wholly a compassion-based argument; it's also one of expedience. I think we as a society are better off if almost everyone has a productive job. And some people are only capable of the lower-end jobs that are most in danger of being automated away. (Aside: for this reason, requirements for high minimum wages are also a bad idea -- don't make it cost-ineffective to hire people at prices they're willing to work for!)
We cannot avoid automation, of course, and in many cases it's a good thing. I'm no Luddite (she says, typing on her computer :-) ). But I kind of wish that we could focus it a little differently sometimes.
And yes, sometimes the humans are annoying to deal with. Last night I lost close to ten minutes to an inept cashier, and there is one (mentally challenged) bagger who I will never again allow to touch my groceries because he seems utterly bewildered by ideas like "the bread goes on top" (multiple failures). People who aren't capable of doing the job shouldn't hold the job anyway just out of pity. (Giant Eagle was right to fire the guy who was partially eating food and then putting the package back on the shelf, and I don't care that he didn't understand that this was wrong.) But y'know, the machines aren't painless either -- just try to get a scanning error fixed. And for the most part, the people holding these jobs are quite capable and willing to work, and I find I'm rooting for the people over the machines.
continued
Date: 2004-11-09 08:04 pm (UTC)This is also one of the points of evidence in my observation that "the problem with expecting 'enlightened self-interest' is not merely expecting enlightenment, but that most people have trouble figuring out what their own self-interest is." Wh en it is a widespread phenomenon that businesses would rather commit hari kari than engage in a free market of labor, capitalism cannot work.
As usual, the problem with a beautiful abstract system (in this case capitalism) is humans.
I like the spirit of your idea of guaranteed income (mandate X, govm't pays the diff between X and Y) instead of a minimum wage. I would expect Libertarians to scream bloody murder about that sort of social program (it has a cash handout and everything), but you're the second one to come up with it in my hearing.
But doesn't guaranteeing an income mean that employers will start to rely on it to make up the difference, and become even more unwilling to pay a living wage? If you think (and I don't know you do; many Liberta rians do) that people are lazy and will suck on the public teat instead of working, given half a chance, just wait till you see how businesses behave. At least people have shame about taking charity, and out of pride will try to get themselves off it. Businesses have absolutely no such compunction.
s
part 1
Date: 2004-11-09 08:46 pm (UTC)Did the buffet owner who wasn't willing to pay more than $X/hour for waitstaff consider hiring more waitstaff (rather than paying the existing ones more)? Or was there also some meme about the "correct" number to have, in addition to the "correct" price?
But people don't think that. They think the higher status a job is, the "nobler", the "more important to our society", the "better" it is, the higher it should be paid.
And yet, if you ask them which professions are "noblest" or "best for society", they'll rank teachers and nurses much higher than, say, IT professionals. While there's some correlation between salary and perceived worth, I think it may be more complicated than what you're describing.
You have a good point about non-conspiratorial price-fixing. If this "worth ceiling" is widespread, it would produce that effect.
There's so much bellyaching about how unions force their industries to pay higher wages, but look what they're up against: an irrational prejudice against paying some sorts of workers in some sorts of jobs what would really be the market rate, which deforms the so-called "free market".
This is complicated by unions' job-protection-in-excess-of-demand tactic, though, which is a perversion of the free market in its own right. Locally, the unions are getting very cranky because the city, which is shrinking in population, wants to eliminate some public-service positions. This has nothing to do with wages and everything to do with keeping now-superfluous police officers (etc) on the payroll.
Unions do have a real problem to contend with -- low wages in the face of "disposable people" (there's always a pool of cheap labor somewhere if you don't care about churn). Overall, though, in the last couple decades I'm not sure they've been a net gain for workers.
Sorry; that was a tangent.
[continued]
Re: part 1
Date: 2004-11-10 12:07 am (UTC)Me rationalist. You rationalist. Rest of world.... not so rationalist.
Yeah, really insanely, mind-bogglingly stupid and self-destructive.
I decided the field of economics had little utility to me, when I was about 20 and several local stores responded to dwindling patronage (lower demand) by raising prices. To make up for lower sales, you know.
*beat* *head* *on* *desk* *beat* *head* *on* *desk* *beat* *head* *on* *desk*
At which point I threw up my hands and acknowledged that the the laws of supply and demand only worked to describe markets on a macro level of earthlings, or on a micro level that was populated by people from some more intelligent planet.
(Yes, the shops went out of business.)
Have you ever actually tried to have the "if you have fewer customers maybe you should drop your prices" conversation with a vendor? I've had people look at me like I was absolutely out of my mind for suggesting that.
Heck, I expect there's SCA branches out there which responded to dwindling event attendence with trying to share around the cost of the same hall among fewer people. "Oh, no, we have fewer people, so now our event prices have to go up."
I could go on, and on, and on (and probably have :) with the unbelieveably counterproductive, cockamamie, "do you just not grasp capitalism?!", "how have you managed to stay in business?!" things I've witnessed in the business world.
Did the buffet owner who wasn't willing to pay more than $X/hour for waitstaff consider hiring more waitstaff (rather than paying the existing ones more)? Or was there also some meme about the "correct" number to have, in addition to the "correct" price?
Three answers to your question:
1) Not memetically, but there are other issues which force the number of heads, e.g. no matter how economical you think it would be to have 40 people all work one hour a week, you are unlikely to find workers willing to play along. The costs of overhead can mean it's cheaper to have fewer workers and pay them more -- or it can mean it's cheaper to have many workers and pay them less. Depends on circumstance, cost per employee, and market conditions.
2) Here, I don't think that would have solved the basic problem. If you need three waiters to work three hours each, but are unwilling to pay enough so that there are three people would take the jobs, being willing to hire four people at less money than anyone will accept doesn't solve the problem. It's not like we're talking about overtime here.
[cont]
"go out of business rather than pay market labor price"
Date: 2004-11-10 03:32 pm (UTC)Then, Jen decided she wanted to quit her job to become a full-time mother (the cost of two kids in day care would just about equal her take-home pay, so she figured she might as well eliminate the middleman). She went about looking for her own replacement. I asked around, and was told by various people in the know that someone with the skills to fill her job could command about 150% of her salary. Unfortunately, her boss wanted to pay Jen's replacement less than they were paying Jen. The person they eventually hired had "Unix system administration" on her resume, but it turned out that she didn't even know the difference between "cd afs" and "cd /afs".
The center hasn't gone out of business, but...
Also note that according to various studies, the best computer programmers can be an order of magnitude more productive than the worst, but they certainly aren't paid an order of magnitude more. I suspect this underpaying is due to a combination of (a) corporations not willing to pay technical workers more than the managers above them in the hierarchy; (b) the bureaucratic imperative of "the more people report to you, the more powerful you are" leads managers to hire several mediocre programmers when they could hire one star; (c) the difficulty of measuring the quality of a programmer's output.
At which point I threw up my hands and acknowledged that the the laws of supply and demand only worked to describe markets on a macro level of earthlings, or on a micro level that was populated by people from some more intelligent planet.
This is the sort of thing that makes me regret that I didn't major in economics. (Youth is wasted on the young, and all that...) "The laws of supply and demand" are for the freshmen. All the juicy research and theorizing about the exceptions to the laws of supply and demand are saved for the grad students.
(And actually, Keynesian macroeconomics is based on the observation that labor markets don't follow the laws of supply and demand in the same way that, say, the market for pork bellies does. Read his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.)
continued
Date: 2004-11-10 12:07 am (UTC)3) I didn't get to discuss it further with the people involved (I confess, I was too stunned and lost the initiative -- there are a lot of details I wish I'd been more on the ball to seek out), but I will observe that there was (and is) the surrounding economic condition: This city has massively sky-rocketting rents. Things were bad all over, but much worse in the region where this restaurant was. (I don't know how to estimate tip-worker's income, so I use non-tip guidelines. Right now the Federal minimum wage for non-tip workers is $5.15/hr. That's $206/wk before taxes. I pay below market for my one-room apartment: $825/mo. Do the math.) People in waitering jobs in that region were being priced out of their apartments. They had a decision:
(1) Move to where they could afford the rent and commute in.
(2) Move to where they could afford the rent and get a new waitering job there.
(3) Don't move, and try to get more wages to afford to remain in neighborhood.
Overwhelmingly, it seems #2 won. Apparently when people in low-paying service positions moved out because they couldn't afford to live here any more, they didn't stick around, commuting to their old jobs; they got new low-paying service positions out where they live. The people taking their old apartments were "young professionals" -- white-color workers who certainly don't wait on tables.
A lot of restaurants folded. A lot of restaurants are trying to get by on a few vastly over-worked waiters.
And a lot of restaurants raised their prices, and are doing fine.
Survival of the fittest, I'm sure, but that's cold comfort to the food vendors who lost market, commercial landlords who lost restaurant tenants, cooks who lost jobs, etc. A business' success is good for many more people than the business itself.
Overall, though, in the last couple decades I'm not sure they've been a net gain for workers.
Very true. I think of unions as "supply-side corporations" -- they are corporate vendors on the labor market. What we call corporations are "demand-side corporations" because they're the ones with demand for labor, they're labor-buyers. (Really, an incorporated company is a union of employers, engaged in collective bargaining over the price of all the jobs at a facility.)
As such, unions are just as heir to the sorts of counterproductive stupidity I've discussed above, as their demand-side brethren are. They are just as likely to become corrupt, or taking over by stupid people.
This is sort of the fundamental problem of corporatism.
Re: continued
Date: 2004-11-10 04:31 am (UTC)Apparently when people in low-paying service positions moved out because they couldn't afford to live here any more, they didn't stick around, commuting to their old jobs; they got new low-paying service positions out where they live.
That's what I would have expected. Employers treat the people in those jobs as interchangable, but the people in those jobs also (largely) treat employers as interchangable. Why commute in to the old job if you can get the same type of job more conveniently?
part 2
Date: 2004-11-09 08:46 pm (UTC)I like the spirit of your idea of guaranteed income (mandate X, govm't pays the diff between X and Y) instead of a minimum wage. I would expect Libertarians to scream bloody murder about that sort of social program (it has a cash handout and everything), but you're the second one to come up with it in my hearing.
Well, just to be clear, I don't actually like it -- I don't like government handouts. But if we are going to have such a system -- and I don't think it will go away in the US in my lifetime -- then at least we shouldn't cripple it so that people are motivated to not work. Right now, as I understand it, people who try to generate income are penalized (beyond a dollar-for-dollar trade, I mean). That's not right.
But doesn't guaranteeing an income mean that employers will start to rely on it to make up the difference, and become even more unwilling to pay a living wage?
This is why I'd rather not have a government program. Some people are lazy (would-be employees) or cheap (would-be employers), and will abuse the system. Government intervention in the market can cause problems like this.
Consider the following (still not-very-libertarian) scenario: each jurisdiction (I'm thinking city-size here) has some government-funded cheap housing and subsistence food available. Essentially, you won't die frozen under a bridge or of starvation. However, there's no financial handout, and the housing isn't all that comfortable, so you're motivated to actually go out and get a job so you can provide for yourself.
Would some lazy slugs move in and never try to get out? Sure, but (absent any data whatsoever, mind), I'm guessing the cost would be lower than what we currently have.
Meanwhile, if by doing this you lower the costs to taxpayers (first by getting rid of a federal bureaucracy and second by encouraging people to strive for better), then more dollars are available for private aid. Sure, some people, given a tax cut, will say "woot! 60-inch HDTV here I come!", but others will channel more into charitable efforts because they have more. I don't know how much and it sounds like wishful thinking, but I also know a non-trivial number of people who tithe, so who knows?
At least people have shame about taking charity, and out of pride will try to get themselves off it. Businesses have absolutely no such compunction.
On the other hand, there is probably a wage threshold below which people are not willing to fall, particularly in a "get the money anyway" scenario. Some jobs are only worth $2/hour, but others are worth $5/hour and people will punt before taking the latter for $2 if they can still get food and shelter.
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 12:37 am (UTC)You know, that's exactly what the other Libertarian I mentioned above said. You could have knocked me over with a feather. A socialist libertarian! His rationale (which I approve of) is that a truly free market in labor is so desireable it is worth it to adopt a public policy of guaranteeing subsistence to all human beings, so that they can engage in the labor market without the threat of starvation, exposure, or lack of medical care making them exploitable.
I could get behind that.
more dollars are available for private aid. Sure, some people, given a tax cut, will say "woot! 60-inch HDTV here I come!", but others will channel more into charitable efforts because they have more. I don't know how much and it sounds like wishful thinking, but I also know a non-trivial number of people who tithe, so who knows?
Well, I'm a Reform Objectivist on alternate Tuesdays, and as such think of private aid as a consumer commodity: the consumer pays money to get a warm fuzzy feeling. Sort of like cable TV. Donating is essentially a selfish act of ego-gratification and, if one is so theologically inclined, self-soul-saving.
So I don't really see private charitable giving as really intersecting with the problem of social justice and welfare. People give where it feels good to them to give, not where it is most needed nor where it is most useful to society. As environmentalist activists are happy to point out at length, the money will pour in to protect an endangered mammal with cute offspring, but an ugly bug which happens to eat other ugly bugs which predate on human crops, and keep those crop-eaters in check? It can go pan-handling in Harvard Sq.
In a society with as much bigotry and prejudice as we have, relying on people's good will tends to mean that the haves donate money to haves-with-problems, not to have-nots. White people are more likely to donate money to causes which benefit poor whites, not to poor blacks. Christians donate to christians. It's how it is. I'm not even sure that that's wrong, on some level. I think people should be able to support their own, if they want.
But if we want that freedom, then, but are also trying to make our society just in the rudimentary ways, and not have people starving in the streets (which, I, wholly selfishly, would like) we need to have a social system which doesn't rely on personal predilection for where the money goes, that systematically attempts to address big-picture problems.
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 04:45 am (UTC)Who is this other person, out of curiosity?
A socialist libertarian!
An expedient libertarian. The ideal solution doesn't involve the government-provided baseline, but we do not live in an ideal world.
So I don't really see private charitable giving as really intersecting with the problem of social justice and welfare.
For most people it doesn't, which is why I wondered about the degree to which this would actually work. But for some, this is a religious obligation; the word tzedakah, usually translated as charity, actually means justice. We support the poor not because we pity them but because they are human beings who deserve it, and there but for the grace of God go I. I accept a personal obligation to aid those less fortunate, but I don't think it's generally the place of government to mandate it.
But yes, there will be the problem of distribution. It takes time to introduce better memes for directing support dollars. Most people give to the charities that personally speak to them because a lot of the basics are already covered by government handouts. If there were no welfare, I'll bet a lot more dollars would go to aiding the poor than to preserving cute mammals, because those poor would be in your community, in your face. Maybe this too is wishful thinking; we'll never find out, most likely.
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 07:43 am (UTC)Ooh, I knew you'd ask a difficult question like that. It was in a conversation on a very high-volume mailing list which I read in digest form (so the "from" lines don't reflect authors), some time in the last 2 years, plus or minus 1.5, by one of several resident Libertarians. Or maybe it was in a private off-list discussion. I've been grepping my archives, but haven't found it so far and am having trouble thinking of clever strings to grep on.
I may give up grepping at some point, and just post asking if someone wanted to own that position. How interested are you to know?
Also, do you get enough email? If not, I could help with that....
For most people it doesn't, which is why I wondered about the degree to which this would actually work. But for some, this is a religious obligation; the word tzedakah, usually translated as charity, actually means justice.
I've heard it translated as "righteousness", too.
We support the poor not because we pity them but because they are human beings who deserve it, and there but for the grace of God go I.
This reminds me! There was a quote that crossed my desk which I thought you might like, from one Matt Gordon, on an email list I am on:
I accept a personal obligation to aid those less fortunate, but I don't think it's generally the place of government to mandate it.
I have much to say on this. I'm going to be non-linear here and jump ahead, otherwise I'll never to get home.
One of the Waytes (Laenus, the mad fiddler) made a fascinating point to me over dinner one night. He pointed out that through period, the Roman Catholic Church did all of the things we now think of as "Health, Education and Human Welfare": they founded and ran the universities, the hospitals, the almshouses, the monestaries (which housed many people who could not otherwise make their way in the world), and they patronized the arts.
They did this in part by imposing a simple flat tax upon their worshippers -- "tithe" means "tenth", and that's what it was. They also did it by pay-per-use services (college students paying to attend lectures, by the lecture, in a very clean capitalist system) and self-sufficiency and industry (monestaries strove to be self-sustaining).
With the eviction of religion from civil life, these functions were no longer systemically performed. For quite a while -- a bunch of human generations -- people got on OK without them. But it turned out they hadn't been fungible after all. The problems the Church had been solving didn't go away. And they compounded.
Eventually some situations got so dire, that the government wound up being brought in by the citizenry. So now we have government run schools and government funded universities and government subsidized hospitals and governmental arts grants. We don't have much in the way of poor houses, but we have some grant money going to battered women's shelters and homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
When FDR started the New Deal, it was, in a way, secular government throwing up its hands and saying, "Alright, alright! I guess someone does need to deal with this!"
It seems to me, in light of history, that a society cannot neglect these problems. Leaving individuals to sort it out on a non-systematic, ad hoc basis winds up imposing massive costs -- from the direct monetary through the costs of lost labor and human potential -- on society. There must be a systemic, institutional approach to dealing with them.
Maybe it doesn't have to be the "government", but I for one would be very unhappy to see it be the Church. Or churches.
[cont]
errata
Date: 2004-11-10 06:03 pm (UTC)Ooh, I knew you'd ask a difficult question like that.
Oops, sorry. Please don't go to any more effort on my account; it's not that important. I incorrectly assumed that it was a recent conversation or perhaps something you'd read on LJ. If it was a conversation still in progress that'd be interesting to look in on, but sending someone email two years after the fact just doesn't have the same attraction.
Also, do you get enough email? If not, I could help with that....
I probably get enough email, but I'm always interested in hearing about other things I should be reading. procmail can at least let me sort it for batch reading.
I've heard it translated as "righteousness", too.
That too. I think of it as "when we do justice we behave righteously". Do you know the phrase "tzedek, tzedek, tirdof", usually translated as "justice, justice you shall pursue"? It comes amidst a bunch of commandments and/or advice about behaving righteously.
Quote: thank you! I like that.
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 07:43 am (UTC)It seems to me, that there's a hole in our society. There's a place where no thing is. We have this concept "government" which orders how things are. But we have this echo of an idea of this other thing, the function of which was fulfilled by religious organizations, but for which we have no generic term, which tended the common weal and husbanded society itself.
In a religiously homogeneous environment, having the Church in that position solved the "people only donate to what they like" problem. You tithed, period. You didn't get to say that you didn't want your money going to those nasty lepers. You were welcome to give more and more specifically.
Right now government is in that place, and fitting badly.
What would you say to an institution (we need a name for it), existing in parallel to and independent of the "government" (yet which might be said to be a "government" of its own), to which all such social programs were relinquished and which got not one dime of tax money; and once a year you got a bill for one twentieth of your income which was completely, utterly, 100% voluntary to pay or not as you like?
The government would remain the people with the guns, responsible to make and enforce the laws which protect us from force and fraud, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, etc.
If there were no welfare, I'll bet a lot more dollars would go to aiding the poor than to preserving cute mammals, because those poor would be in your community, in your face. Maybe this too is wishful thinking; we'll never find out, most likely.
Why look forward when we can look back? The first national anti-animal-cruelty society was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England, founded in 1822. (America followed in in 1866.) Eventually the fact that it was illegal to beat a horse but not beat a child -- quite seriously, that was one of the arguments of the day in support -- lead to the founding of the The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first child protection agency in the world, in 1875. England followed with the
London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty in 1884 which became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children five years later.
No, it turns out the cute mammal thing goes back quite a ways.
church and state
Date: 2004-11-10 06:17 pm (UTC)I assume this worked because the church was near-universal. There are certainly people who were left out of those benefits -- Jews, for example -- but they reached a high percentage of the population. No single body does that today, though many (mostly-religious) organizations still do similar things within their own ranks. For example, the Jewish community tends to have aid grants for the needy, (kosher) food banks, free-loan societies, and so on. I assume the RC church still does some of this within their ranks. I assume that other religions/denominations do as well. But no one is doing it all, even within their own communities, and not all communities are doing any particular thing.
But even if they were, this leaves out a lot more people than the church left out in the middle ages. Some of that gap is plugged by other voluntary associations -- for example, look at the outpourings of support when SCA members face crises like fires. This is not the same as the day-to-day support needs of poor people, of course, but -- here's that word again :-) -- community comes in many forms today, perhaps more than at any pre-industrial time. Sometimes people are able to draw on that community. I've known people who were pretty much always the beneficiaries of event leftovers, for instance. But again, it's very spotty.
What would you say to an institution (we need a name for it), existing in parallel to and independent of the "government" (yet which might be said to be a "government" of its own), to which all such social programs were relinquished and which got not one dime of tax money; and once a year you got a bill for one twentieth of your income which was completely, utterly, 100% voluntary to pay or not as you like?
Assuming that this replaces the government programs, I'd be completely up for that. Let it act as a federation as much as possible rather than trying to centralize, and it's even better.
I'm not sure if this would be a net positive or negative, but consider a stipulation: if you ever benefit from the service, you're required to contribute some when you find yourself in better circumstances. (This is that "free loan" idea.)
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 03:40 pm (UTC)I personally don't think there's anything wrong with such a plan, and I don't think most liberals would, either, but I suspect that a negative income tax would be a hard sell to conservatives and moderates. There seems to be a widespread belief that government welfare should only be given to people who "deserve" it, which entails an intrusive and expensive bureaucracy to separate the deserving from the non-deserving.
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 06:31 pm (UTC)Mind, I used to think that way too about worthiness (fueled by bad uses of food stamps observed in grocery stores), and I still have some tendencies in that direction. But if, instead of having an arcane process for applying for and keeping welfare, with fraud opportunities galore, you instead did a tax-like filing with a body that's already set up to sniff out egregious fraud, you can let it all boil down to the contents of the tax return and not even deal with all the other factors like proof that you've been dilligently job-hunting. If you're willing to live below the poverty line, I shouldn't be not that concerned with whether you're lazy or truly deserving. (You do, of course, have to keep the line fairly low; the point is to provide for the most basic needs only, not to provide a comfortable living. This is "don't let them starve" money, not "support the beer/pizza/cable habit" and "dynasties of welfare families" money.)