I've started to dislike this perspective, because it feels like an "if the only tool you have is a hammer..." kind of explanation. It's a valid perspective, but it's not the only one, and other perspectives are often more useful.
Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Or maybe hotels have to rethink their business models. It's an inevitable consequence of real wage growth that labor becomes more expensive relative to goods and services. At some point, the old ways are no longer viable. Hotels can't hire as many housekeepers as before, because people are not willing to pay enough for hotel rooms. Hotels must then find ways to provide housekeeping more efficiently with less labor.
As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time
Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers.
I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs !
I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ?
When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs.
Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled.
They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything.
That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs.
If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value.
(Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)
> When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs.
Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
I've arrived at other airports at busy times (e.g. the return to Heathrow) and it's not comparable. Perhaps there are more non-English speakers arriving at JFK?
It's more complex, and I really wish people wouldn't try to look at this purely from an economic perspective.
If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium.
Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place.
Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships.
To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.
What a great answer. Other examples of job systems in action are the US military (hiring anybody with an IQ over 85 to reduce official unemployment numbers) and NASA (carefully placing jobs in all states to ensure political support).
Private companies are full of job systems as well. People hired to make their manager look good and justify larger budgets for example. You can walk into most companies and fire most of middle management and the company will end up more profitable and efficient as a result.
> Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations.
You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed?
And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.
Of course hotels can attract people from other sectors if they choose to pay ridiculous wages (like $100/hour). That observation is true but not necessarily useful.
Sometimes other perspectives are more useful. Maybe the shortage is real and the reason for it is cultural. In some places, hotel housekeeping is seen as temporary work. It's something people in specific demographic groups do for a few years before moving on. If there are fewer people in those groups than there used to be, or if those people have found better opportunities, there may be a shortage. In such situations, raising wages may not be an effective way of attracting new workers. If people think people like them don't do certain jobs, they may be reluctant to take such jobs.
With hotels, worker shortages have probably exposed that many hotels were doing things like in person checkin and daily room cleanings that guests would often just as soon not pay for. At some hotels, cleanings were already optional in exchange for giving you some points (or even explicitly charged for). Hotels can certainly pay more. But automating or eliminating unvalued services makes sense too.
Those people driving for those gig apps often value the flexibility of not having a set schedule. I don't think that style of work is very compatible with hotel housekeeping.
Some do, some don't. On the margin, higher pay incentivizes people to compromise their preferences.
As a silly example, imagine if all hotels started paying $200 an hour to their cleaning staff. I think we can probably all agree that they would be flooded with workers and have no shortage at all.
Given that there is a shortage now, we can infer that there's a pay point between the current prevailing wages and $200/hr that would cause enough people to want to work in hotels to solve the staffing issues regardless of people's preferences.
Even with benefits you're probably still going to get royally screwed if you're a housekeeper or anyone with a low paying job that offers benefits. When your deductible is $6k or more and max out of pocket is sky high you're screwed when it comes to a health emergency especially if you're already living paycheck to paycheck. Even with the most basic insurance the US health care system will rake you over the coals and leave you with debt.
They also get paid reliably. Gig apps advertise for workers, in part, by touting their fast reliable payouts. Hotel cleaning is often contracted out to shady operators.
> Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
doesn't get at the point of this:
>> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow!
In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us.
That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.
>>Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough
No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough.
Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations.
My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.
This is assuming that hotels are making enough money to be able to afford to pay more. If margins are thin, they have to increase prices or reduce expenditures in order to get more money. A hotel is not a license to print money; it has to come from somewhere.
This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached.
The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market.
The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop.
Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
You also have the lever demonstrated in this article. You institute more automation, self-service, and cut back on services (like daily room cleanings) that a lot of customers don't really value.
Yes, agreed, this method can work, but it isn't magic. I kind of lumped that in with "cost cutting", because in almost every case it results in a lower quality of service. Supply and demand operates on the margins; even though a lot of customers don't value the services, enough might to cut into your income, at least over time, and risk sacrificing some customer goodwill.
Oh. I agree self-service, for example, can either be generally better than dealing with a person (e.g. getting cash at an ATM) or something of a mixed bag (self-service checkout). However, cutting back on room service seems like a general win especially if you'll service rooms on request. After all, there's such a thing as serviced apartments that explicitly only service once a week unless you pay for more.
Hotels would be happy to pay everyone more if customers would happily pay more for a room. The parent is providing an example of how their company categorically won't pay more.
Speaking for my org personally we have zero debt, and are cash positive largely because policies like a hotel expense cap that prevent sales people from draining to company coffers
If I buy a farm/restaurant/hotel/retailer for top dollar and complain about cost of wages making it unprofitable, the problem isn’t the wages. But you’re stuck with your acquisition price, so you’ll lobby for lower wages and make no mention of your sunk costs.
This is likely true. I just read a report that said that the shortage highly correlates with the reduction of immigrants due to COVID and the tightening of immigration into the US. It may not be the only factor, but it is one that contributes to the shortage of service workers.
Like it or not, new immigrants are more likely to take jobs that pay less as compared to non-immigrants.
This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.
There has been no tightening of immigration. In particular, illegal immigration is higher than it's ever been [1]. And illegal immigrants are far more likely to work in the hotel industry as cleaners.
There was never any slowdown. Briefly during the initial covid scare and briefly after Trump's election, but neither pause lasted more than a few months.
You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.
Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
> You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.
That's fair, but technically I didn't say it would lead to wage growth. My point is that loose immigration allows capital to keep wages at their current levels, or lower them, because it's still probably better for those immigrating here than from where (whence?) they emigrated.
> Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
But is immigration the only solution to this problem? I get that birth rates are low, but it seems like that's due in large part to having kids being really expensive, on top of everything else being really expensive due to inflation. I don't get why we don't incentivize americans to have more kids. I get that orban is a controversial figure, but his plan [0] seems like a good thing for a government to do for its citizens. Why does helping families have to be a right-wing policy?
Norway have had monthly payments to all parents until kids turned 18, very high parental leave, low caps on fees for nurseries (around 300 usd/month), and most of these have support across the political spectrum.
All told, the value adds up to tens of thousands in support per child, and yet it's nowhere enough to keep fertility rates at replacement. As such I doubt Orbans policies will as well.
I would suggest a read of The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on US Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery - https://www.nber.org/papers/w30589 and reconsider that position.
In America. Elsewhere, hotels have been much cheaper for a long time. Even well before the pandemic, it was much cheaper for me to stay in hotels in Japan or western Europe than anyplace in America.
Immigration only inhibits wage growth when unions and workers rights are obliterated to the point that they can't fight back against corporations and make them pay a living wage to everybody. Don't act like immigration = wage growth being inhibited, that is absurdly fatalistic about there being no alternative to the status quo.
However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.
The solution to this in Canada seems to be to allow a lot of immigrants from poorer countries, willing to live two to a bedroom. Fast food places, Walmart, and other places are now fully staffed thanks to that policy. I know for a fact that it's the case, because in my town it's a very large demographic change from recognizable ethnicity where 5 years ago there was almost none. Unfortunately Canada is a a very expensive place to live, and living 2 to a bedroom is how they can make the pay work.
I have noticed this, too, in numerous different cities and towns throughout Canada, over the same time period that you mention.
This approach hasn't been good for anyone involved.
The employees typically seem quite miserable, as would be expected given their circumstances.
Economically, this approach also significantly increases demand for supply-constrained housing, health care, infrastructure, and goods. This in turn exacerbates Canada's current inflation problem, and it's made worse by these imported workers not offering any real (in the economic sense) productivity gains to help offset the increased demand.
The combination of these factors, plus cultural differences, seems to have resulted in a steep decline in the customer experience at such establishments over that period of time, too.
I now spend a small fraction of what I used to at such businesses because the experience is typically poor, at least relative to what it was in the past. I know others who have changed their spending habits, too, for the same reason.
The payback is over generations. Children of immigrants historically have higher fertility rates and higher participation in the workforce. Someone seems miserable at work but they’re living for their grandkids.
This isn't a solution, its just hurting people who have been so hurt other places that this comparative hurt is less bad. How twisted is it that you see this as a solution? The solution is workers joining together to enact leverage over the wealth horders in society and demanding better wages for everybody. The money is absolutely there in rich countries like the US and Canada.
If it eases your mind I do not support these policies. I think it's the height of hypocrisy that the leftist parties in my country support this. But it is what it is. Our leader has the support of office and managerial class in this country.
It's not like I can change someones thinking, when they see themselves as God's gift to the world. Though, I leave, next time they try and mandate I inject myself with drugs to protect their lard-ass.
> Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen.
I dunno, my pay sure hasn't gone up by 25% in the past 2 years.
What was it up from? If for example they offered the US federal minimum wage in 2020, and the shift hours were unreliable and inflexible, then I could imagine even an extra 25% wouldn't make it worthwhile.
The article says up from $10. I don't know whether that's a decent wage in the US, but it sounds low and $16 is just barely above the proposed compromise new US minimum wage figure, so it sounds not-hellish but not "do it just for the money" level.
Also, I noticed they said "25%" but $10 to $16 is 60%, and if you're griping and can say "we raised by 60% and nobody bit!", then you say that instead of "we raised by over 25% and nobody bit!". So I'm skeptical of the figures - maybe that 60% is best-case or something, and most people are offered $12.50 or something.
Would you work for $16/hr with no health insurance? Hotels are notorious for not only not offering steady 40 hour employment but sending staff home if room count is low or calling people in with minimal notice.
I stepped away from the professional world and am working retail for 15/hr while I get my shit sorted out. This only works due to the following factors:
1.) I have zero commute expenses. I live a five minute walk from work.
2.) I have state provided healthcare independent of my employment, which most Americans can't get. I'm only eligible because I have a severe disability.
3.) I live in a LCOL area. We're still under 1k for a two bedroom apartment and houses can be had for ~100-150k.
4.) I have some professional contacts/a network with higher incomes that can help me out if I need it and don't abuse the relationships.
We're still struggling a lot. If you're going to be homeless with or without a job, why bother with a job?
If we ignore the low pay, physically demanding work, bad benefits and and unpredictable work schedule, then yeah I guess these jobs sound great for moms.
Physically demanding? What's the difference between cleaning a hotel room and cleaning your house or bedroom? There's absolutely zero heavy lifting. You change the sheets, vaccuum and wipe down everything.
I would option to say taking care of kids is more physically demanding than cleaning.
If it's just supplementary income it wouldn't really matter about benefits as the spouse would already have benefits.
Zero breaks, for one. And no ability to take sick days/stop doing it if you're injured. Doing work for 1-2 hours a day or a few hours a week is very different from doing it for 20-40 hours a week. (Much like there's a difference between taking on a project or two for a small team that requires some programming and being a full time dev). Oh, and you can't sit. That's like saying anybody who mows their lawn would have no difficulty in a landscaping position.
And the kid thing it strongly depends on the age and type of kid. Kids at the most physically exhausting ages also tend to take naps which gives the parent a respite. You can also trade off with the other parent/other relatives if you're tired. Can't do that with work: Your coworkers aren't going to do your job if you have an off day.
The physically demanding part is in the demand for physical consistency.
C'mon man. At least have a serious argument. You act like a person cleaning a hotel room can't stop to use the bathroom or take a few moments to collect themselves before starting on the next room.
Have you ever stayed at a hotel? The staff moves at a normal rate, there doesn't appear to be a rush, they aren't sweating through their clothes. I've seen staff in their phones, texting, changing their music.
Not in room cleaning - I was a dishwasher - but yes, I know how it works.
If you think 3 minutes in the bathroom is the same as an actual break, it's not. They appear not to be in a rush because they have to set a sustainable pace. That doesn't mean it's not difficult, especially for females. Many things that are easy for males physically are a PITA for us.
Being on your feet all day and bending over to scrub a toilet is physically demanding relative to a project manager sitting in front of their laptop. Yes it's not as physical as working in a moving company, in a steel mill, or as a home health aide who lifts disabled people. "If you've got time to lean you've got time to clean."
There's not always a spouse with a good job. When the employment market is in favor of employers people just have to accept shitty jobs. In tight labor markets these low wage no benefit jobs are hard to fill and current workers at an establishment don't lose much by quitting for greener pastures. Even with a spouse who has benefits through work, many employers don't subsidize family benefits. Their solution is a "spousal surcharge."
The rate it’s gone up is a red herring. If people don’t want to take the job at the posted rate then they are underpaying.
Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
There are almost certainly miserable working conditions, bad hours, and still an overall low wage. If people are able to find better jobs, then hotels need to treat people better or pay more to offset that.
Are we seriously going to cry about megacorps not getting away with paying workers trash wages for miserable jobs? Boo hoo, pay more.
> If people don’t want to take the job at the posted rate then they are underpaying.
Well, that's why they're going to robots I guess.
> Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
I worked a much worse factory job for years. I don't blame people for not wanting such a thing, but sometimes it isn't all about pay, either. You couldn't pay me to go back to my old job.
It's a bit of both, though it looked like the robots were roombas or something. And I think the cleaning would only matter on longer stays, since I believe they'd still have to turn over the room between guests.
From this article and others that I have read, it is also about work/life balance. Pay is getting better in some places and that gives options. Previously those working 14 unsociable hours a day seemed to be either highly paid execs or lowly paid service workers (yes, a generalization). I imagine that the latter have jumped at the chance to move into the comfortable middle that a lot of HN readers occupy. Many economies have relied on significant numbers of people having no choice but to accept bad pay, conditions & hours and it'll take time to adjust but they really should. Everyone should be able to have a good work/life balance and be paid adequately for a full day's work.
Looking at europe i think it's an actual shortage of workers which leads them to pick (or hold on for) better jobs, and this is the new normal now, and you can't fix it with immigration either
It's not a shortage of underpayable workers. The workers are still there. The problem is that it's illegal to hire them at all because of minimum wage. They've been priced out of the market and low margin employers can't afford them. Many at the bottom are unable to do anything except beg for help from others if they're not employable at wages that employers are willing to pay.
This, in the article they complain that they already raised pay from $10/hour to $16/hour. In Baltimore, where minimum wage is currently $12.50 according to the DOL.
"To keep the employees they do have, the couple tries to accommodate staff needs" yeah, that's what good employers should have been already doing before.
Or an overabundance of educated, nonworking people who don't feel the need to do what they consider menial labor, because they don't need the money; likely because they're either still living with their boomer parents or said parents departed and left them with a bundle.
I'm actually not even sure that's it. What do you get with the tokens you're paid in? The ability to participate in society. There's no longer a society to participate in though as all the social institutions have been deconstructed. Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it. It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work (and is that something you even want?) so it's not happening.
Note that this isn't the first time in history this has happened.
> Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it.
Curious about where you live and where you grew up? I ask because none of these rings true for me. Many of my friends have bought homes and started families, along the way, they’ve created their own traditions, and are part of communities where they know their neighbors. And this isn’t in just in one place in the country.
> If you want to see the canary in the coal mine, try befriending someone who works in the service industry.
I have a couple of very close friends in the service industry.
They are less well off than others I know and it’s reflected in their lives (still renting, fewer vacations), but no signs of societal collapse (have families and community relationships) there either.
Service industry doesn’t necessarily mean poverty wages. For hotel housekeeping and similar it probably is though.
Had a friend making about $50k waiting tables depending on the year in a city you’d likely never heard of before switching to sales.
Another working in a kitchen planning to buy a home soon.
I know a couple local bartenders who do much better than I expected for a neighborhood bar.
Met a guy years ago who was a school janitor and for whatever reason I always thought they would be poor. Turns out that’s a pretty good job.
That said, none of these people work as a cashier at McDonald’s or hotel room cleaner either. The one making $50k worked at a national steakhouse chain, not a fancy one but a step up from Applebees.
Yeah, you didn't mention their families though. And regardless divorce rates are way up.
If the incentive to work is "yeah you can show up and nothing will go wrong." Great. The same thing happens if you don't leave your parent's basement/subsidized housing/your friend's couch and you won't have to put up with as much crap or pay for a car. Do you see why people aren't bothering?
I’m not sure this is true anymore. The median American will never be able to afford their own home at current housing prices. Sure, we have a higher gdp per capita, but it doesn’t buy us the things we actually need like housing, health care, etc.
Perhaps what’s needed is to bring back family homesteads, but that doesn’t feel like much progress.
I'd say the difference between those times is the feeling of agency/possibility of a good life (defining good life by what that meant at the time). Objectively, material conditions were worse, but due to a variety of factors, the average person felt that society was getting better. We'll put up with a lot of shit if we think it's temporary or something that we could change.
And some people honestly liked living like that. My great-great grandparents lived until the 1980s (born in the 1870s) and refused to get indoor plumbing. People are weird and sentiment matters.
Meaningless, no, because we're hairless chaos apes living in hives of other hairless chaos apes and plenty of our fellow apes live their lives based on this subjective measure which means it needs to be considered in governing and managerial decisions.
I want to add that the current feeling the country is getting worse, in my opinion, is pushed by right wing media.
One of the main themes of conservatives is that then is better than now as well as holding back change their supporters push the notion that things are getting worse (regardless if it's true or what specifics) to help them get elected
The right are open about pushing 'it's worse than it's ever been'. The left prefers to memory-hole history and combine that memory hole with thought terminating hyperbole: They like to present threats completely divorced of historical context.
(I worked in political communications and spent a couple of years getting lists of stories and headlines from all sides of the aisle fed to my email.)
One example of this is all the fear-mongering the Dems/their media arms do around things like abortion rights or queer rights/safety. (And before anybody comes for me, I'm a lesbian so I'm impacted by both.) Like apparently I'm supposed to be constantly terrified by the backsliding on both. And they do concern me but like I grew up in the 90s? I personally remember things being worse and I wasn't curled up in a ball throwing money at the Dems to Save Me. (And speaking of memory holing, as a gay millennial I remember quite clearly how long it took for the Dems to get behind gay marriage: Let's not pretend the current socially progressive planks are anything other than realizing we're a voting bloc that can be pandered to as hard as the MAGA people. I have no doubt the Dems would throw queer people under the bus tomorrow if it were a more viable electoral strategy to do so.)
Finland is in the top position in the world happiness report in 2022. Followed by Denmark and Iceland in second and third place. Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Israel and New Zealand, were among the top 10 'happiest' countries in the world [1].
Except for Israel wouldn't you say though counties have some of the lowest religious participation? What about nationalism?
I'm not trying to prove the opposite of you view as this doesn't show causation but I think it sufficiently counters your view
Obviously there are plenty of individuals where this isn't the case (and there are plenty of people working hard) but the discussion is about the movement of the group and this does appear to be where things are going on both sides.
Not OP, but I think the term "movement" was meant to mean the percentage of people who are starting families, keeping their religion, owning homes, etc. is moving downward. Pew Research has plenty of evidence for this movement downward.
BEFORE the pandemic most americans couldn't afford a $400 emergency bill, people are pretty desperate in the US on average and if you don't encounter that day to day you are living in comparative luxury.
I recently transitioned from long term NEET to full time work and this is hitting me hard. I just end up sitting at home alone playing video games all weekend anyway. What's the point of working the other five days? Especially if the work isn't enjoyable.
Some degree of support network, and when you get paid dirt and the cost to work is high itself (buying and maintaining a car being the big one) the tiny amount of money you get for a huge mental and physical toll just isn't worth it?
You are likely still going to be entirely dependent upon that support network job or no job. Jobs that are available to most people dont generally pay a living wage anymore, is that not sinking in for you?
I am trying to learn here so I am asking these questions with genuine curiosity.
When you say "support network" - I hear that as "friends and family" or some sort of community support (eg: church?) Is that what you mean?
And if so, is it "fine" to not work and thus be a bigger burden on this network? Meaning, even if a role doesn't pay a "living wage", there's a big difference between just living on your friend's couch and eat their food (or whatever) and being able to work and contribute say $2K/month towards your friend for the favor they are doing you?
Nowadays, you can't make any demand if you don't work because of a choice of yours.
workers (should) have unions, the ability to go to strike, and the political position to ask better
The anger of the general public is moving on from high unemployment rates to low wage for workers.
- Have no job ? Nobody cares anymore since service industry needs a workforce (even if you're qualified in any other field)
- Have an underpaid job ? You can have a political impact nowadays.
Also, jobs allow you to have better jobs in the future. You build experience, and working in some companies, like Amazon, allows you to follow a university course, as mention in OP's article.
If you're not doing this for you, you should just have a job to be able to flip off abusive bosses.
>Jobs that are available to most people don't generally pay a living wage anymore
I don't think it can be a long lasting trend. Check out China, where ppl are protesting. And check out what happens at Amazon in the USA, where the high rate of resignation worries management
https://news.yahoo.com/amazon-burns-workers-quickly-executiv...
OP's article wasn't about choosing between not working and working in hotels, it's about hotel workers who moved on to other industries after a few years of covid. They're no longer available to work in hotels, no matter how you compensate them : they move on and are happy with their new job and lives.
But in your situation, if you have the opportunity to work, you can do it to grow the GDP and make your wage.
You can't just expect that others, who might also dislike their jobs, have to pay taxes to share their salary with you just because you don't want to work.
There are real issues that cause unemployment : real estate that prices out workers in cities with jobs, banks that expect you to have a job before giving you a credit, when you need to afford a license and a car before you start a job, inconsistencies between companies expectations and job seekers, injuries, depression or lack of confidence,...
But being a crybaby about working isn't a reason to piggy back on workers.
I'm not even neoliberal, I'm communist. And I think you should work both for yourself and for the sake of the others.
> There's no longer a society to participate in though as all the social institutions have been deconstructed. Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it.
What a strange statement. Could you give some evidence?
> It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work
Uh. They may not starve to death but most would certainly end up living in the street and die early in almost all developed country.
If it's anything like the rest of the country most of those churches are dead and/or irrelevant. Showing up on Sunday, singing, and giving money to poor people isn't religion.
> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
You can't have a shortage of underpayable workers, since a shortage means that quantity supplied is less than quantity demanded at every possible price point.
What it is, is purchasers seeking government intervention in the market to artificially suppress market clearing prices.
