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Entorwellian posted:Around $27-30/hr. Anywhere else in Canada it would be considered an alright wage for the education and driving requirements. It's more the location: Vancouver, B.C. The new employees we got left are either near retirement or they are very young and still living with their parents. Everyone young to middle aged has moved away out into the valley, so the few employees that we do got left either have to make 2 hour commutes from Squamish or Chilliwack, or we're stuck with low-skilled, arbitrary-behavioured locals. I don't know much about remote shitholes no one cares about, but Wikipedia tells me that Vancouver is the most populated city in the entire province and the highest population density in the country. I'd guess that an "alright wage" "anywhere else in Canada" might not be very attractive in this particular place. And indeed, the internet also tells me that Vancouver's extremely high "shelter-cost-to-income ratio" (Vancouver's housing costs are the highest of any Canadian city, while its median income is among the lowest of any Canadian city) makes it one of the most unaffordable places to live in the entire world, let alone in Canada.
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May 13, 2019 02:21
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Volkerball posted:It's also consistently ranked one of the top handful of cities in the world to live in. That's how living in big cities works. The cost of living goes up because of the demand, and people pay it because they want to have easy access to the nightlife, food, and events that happen there. There's always people who will accept marginally higher wages and a significantly higher cost of living to live in a place like that, and the number of immigrants coming to Vancouver is a testament to that. Canada's issue is rooted more in its demographics. It's got a very old workforce, to the point that immigration is only a band-aid. I'm just pointing to why so many applicants might be having sudden second thoughts about a job that pays an "alright wage anywhere else" in a city with a worse imbalance between housing costs and wages than even San Francisco or New York.
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May 13, 2019 16:08
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Cicero posted:Googling indicates that rent is lower in Vancouver than Seattle, actually, at least nominally. The impression I came away with was that Vancouver housing prices aren't as high as housing costs in major American cities...but living in those major American cities usually comes with a wage premium, which isn't the case for Vancouver. For example, Seattle's median household income is over $20k above the general US median income, while Vancouver's median income is about the same as Canada's general median income. So although the basic home prices may not give the impression of sticker shock for those used to US housing prices, Vancouver pairs those urban housing prices with being one of the poorest major cities in Canada.
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May 13, 2019 17:38
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wateroverfire posted:But that doesn't mean that as an employer you should be an rear end in a top hat to your employees. Or that as an employee you should be resentful of your employer for demanding that you actually work or for not paying you what you think you're worth That's not what a transactional relationship means. What it means is that you and your employees both understand is that you're paying them for work, and act accordingly.
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May 14, 2019 20:04
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wateroverfire posted:Ok. Would you be more comfortable with "it's a transactional relationship, but that doesn´t mean either side needs to act like an rear end in a top hat?" I'm not clear on where the "rear end in a top hat" part came from at all. No one said it was okay for employees to act like an rear end in a top hat in any relationship style.
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May 14, 2019 20:17
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Volkerball posted:Something like 2.5% of the workforce aged 16+ make minimum wage so nah, it's a rare few that don't move on to bigger and better things. That's the percentage of people making the federal minimum wage or below. It doesn't count state minimum wages, which are often higher. This is why over half of federal minimum wage earners live in the South, where states tend not to raise their minimum wage laws. In Texas, for example, over 10% of workers are paid at or below the federal minimum wage. No one appears to be collecting data on how many people make the state minimum wage in each state. But given the massive numbers seen in Southern states that don't set a minimum wage higher than the federal, it's safe to say the number is significantly higher than 2.3%. And even then, half the people being paid at or below federal minimum wage are over the age of 25. Naturally, two-thirds of federal minimum-wage earners are women, and black and Hispanic populations are overrepresented in the minimum wage population as well.
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May 14, 2019 21:36
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Volkerball posted:Yeah, it's a difficult thing to discuss, because peoples perception of what constitutes a living wage is based on the costs of living, when the largest costs of living for millennials are things that come from very predatory markets in major need of reform, like the student loan industry and healthcare. With the exception of single parents and people in the highest cost of living cities in the country, you could live comfortably on something like $14 an hour or less, and set yourself up for a good retirement. But one bad break with health or student loans can gently caress your whole life up. But I think that's less related to wage and more a testament to the importance of fundamental change to how we deal with secondary education and medical expenses. Rent is a trickier one because population rises are inherently going to change demand in urban areas and the natural course of that dynamic is for people to get priced out of their own neighborhoods, which is pretty hosed, but I personally don't know how you address that. $14 an hour, 40 hours a week, is about $30k before tax. Why am I bringing this up? Well...  And of course, many people don't get full-time wages. It's possible to live on less than $14 an hour, but it's hardly comfortable. Even if you think that map is too vague, we can easily do the math ourselves. $14 an hour is about $2260 a month, which puts the affordable rent level (30% of your income) at $670. That puts rents in remote, semi-rural jobless shitholes just barely below the line of unaffordability. Except that because they're remote, semi-rural jobless shitholes, $14 an hour is considered incredible wealth there, and low-wage workers make half that.
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May 16, 2019 00:59
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Volkerball posted:The figures on this map are based on the needs of two adults and a child, per your link. I would absolutely agree that you cannot support a family with a stay at home significant other on $14 an hour. But two people together making $14 an hour have an income of $59k with no overtime, which would put them above the living wage in all but 3 of these states. Big cities disproportionately affect these numbers as well. That's why DC is higher than any state, and Illinois is higher than its surrounding states due to having Chicago when the rest of the states cost of living more closely mirrors Iowa, Indiana, etc. Same deal with Colorado and Denver relative to its surrounding states. With that in mind, outside of being close-ish to downtown in the largest, most expensive metropolitan areas, that figure would put a family above the living wage with several thousand a year to spare, and that's a totally attainable short/long term goal for most people. You're all over the place here. Let's not forget that I posted that info in response to you saying that anyone except single parents could live comfortably on $14 an hour. And now you respond by saying that two people both making that wage, without children, would be able to make a little bit above the living wage? That's a substantially different claim, with a lot more strings attached. What are single people supposed to do, drop dead? Also, you're talking about "several thousand above the living wage" like it's loving untold riches. Living wage is the bare minimum needed to support basic needs, not the level beyond which all spending can be saved. In what universe is the 30% rule "conservative"? And how does it make any sense for that to be "especially at lower incomes"? Rent is the biggest fixed cost in most people's lives, and the only people who think it's "affordable" for low-income people to pay 40% or 50% of their income toward housing are the real estate agents selling them that housing. You're talking about $1k a month like it's no big deal, but if you're making $14 an hour then that's literally half your monthly after-tax income. That $650 rent you're so proud of is only barely under the 30% affordability threshold. You manage to make that work not because of your smart financial literacy, but because you're a young healthy person with no dependents and few expenses. I know that because I've made $14 an hour with a $650 rent too. Like you, I felt like I had everything paid for with a little money to spare. And unlike you, I recognized exactly how fast that "little money to spare" I was saving would vanish if any unexpected major expenses came up. Like, for example, when the sketchy startup I was working for at the time ran out of money and decided to just ghost with my last paycheck or two. wateroverfire posted:A lot of good research quoted in your post. I enjoyed looking through it. I think you are mingling two concepts that it would be better to disentangle. Individual people are not statistics. Within every group there's variation in outcome and what I'm proposing here is that whatever the economic or social headwinds an individual faces, they should do what they can to maximize their good outcomes. That means if a person's looking for more money, they should (IMO) go out and play the game and try to get it - and even figure out how to be better at that skill. On a societal level many people won't do that, or will try and not be successful, but that doesn't make it bad individual advice. It's not the solution to everyone's labor problems or to any big picture problems. So I think it would be good to talk about individual strategies separately from these big societal statistical considerations - which are real and valid - rather than treating the statistics as reasons for people to decide advancing in life is impossible. As the employer, you are the one deciding those outcomes. They're not just random statistics floating in the wind - you are the one deciding you're going to pay person X less than person Y for the same amount of work. Don't go and loving blame that on them, or on statistics, or on random variation, or on anything else. They're "playing the game" by working for you for your profit, loving pay them fairly for it.
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May 16, 2019 21:40
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Volkerball posted:30% is the perfectly ideal situation in which you have enough disposable income to be choosy. It's fairly common for 30% to not cover the cost of rent if you have a lower income, but it's not like the second you cross over 30% you're automatically hosed and you die. 35% isn't ideal and 40% is starting to get a bit extreme, but you can go over 30% without being in a dire financial situation. The $1,000 figure was for a multiple bedroom home in the 2 adults making $14 and a child scenario, and the $1,000 is actually less demanding as a percentage of the household income in that scenario relative to the single individuals $650. Sorry, let me be more clear. Rent is the biggest fixed cost in most people's lives, and the only people who think it's "affordable" for low-income people to pay 40% or 50% of their income toward housing are the real estate agents selling them that housing. You're talking about $1k a month like it's no big deal, but if you're making $14 an hour then that's literally half your monthly after-tax income. That $650 rent you're so proud of is only barely under the 30% affordability threshold. Volkerball posted:This is a more useful metric. 14x40x52= 29,120, which clears this living wage figure by more than $5,000 annually in 31 states. All but 8 states have a living wage that is lower than this wage figure by $3,000 or more. It would fall short in only 4 states. $3000 above the living wage? Wow, that means that after taking care of their most basic and critical needs, they have a whopping $250 a month left over! Invest that poo poo and they'll be millionaires in no time! Volkerball posted:I would not argue that working less than 40 hours a week is likely not going to provide someone a comfortable margin over a living wage. But there are plenty of full time positions out there, and the math still comes out the same if you're working multiple part time jobs that add up to 40 hours a week. I would argue that a lot of part time employees are either college or high school students, supplemental income to a household, and people with other forms of income (disability, social security, etc), who don't need to or can't work full time (benefits for those who can't is a different discussion), which drive down those averages, so that number is misleading in its own way. So have you just given up on data completely? Because I'm pretty sure the only source you have for any of these claims is your own rear end in a top hat.
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May 17, 2019 12:35
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Volkerball posted:The argument I'm making boils down to "if you are 30 or younger working at a grocery store and not getting by, there are doors open to you to change your situation to one where you are doing well financially." It's getting much harder than it has any right to be because wages aren't growing relative to GDP and haven't in a long loving time, but not that many people literally have no recourse. Few of us are inherently a statistic. I started posting about the $14 an hour for 40 hours thing to point out that even at that level you can get by with some extra cash, simply to make the case that there are attainable goals that can see you have a good life. It wasn't my intention to get bogged down in the minutiae of that exact figure. $14 an hour is not a goal that should be the end goal of your life plan. It's a poo poo wage, and you can do a lot better than that, particularly when you get more experience and get older and further down your career path. A lot of people arguing with me here are doing better than that, and are just trying to make the case that the most amount of people possible will fail. But if you aren't doing well and don't see a way out, and wallow around in these sorts of talking points, you 100% will fail, which doesn't need to be the case. The point of statistics is that your one personal anecdotal experience does not trump the experiences of the millions of other people. Yes, you were lucky enough to get opportunities to move upward and outward. Statistics tell us that plenty of people don't get those opportunities. Your sob story about starting your very first entry level job at $11 an hour fresh out of high school doesn't seem to have a date stamp, but that's 150% of the current federal minimum wage. If it was more than ten years ago, it'd be double the minimum wage. I don't want to hear advice for moving up from minimum wage from someone who's never made that little money in their entire life. I mean, really, step back for a minute and think about it. Think about the numbers you've posted in this thread, and compare them to your own life. With just a few years of experience and a community college certificate, you're already making several dollars over the median hourly wage in the US. Over 80 million people make less than you do. The lesson to take away from that isn't that it's really easy to get ahead if you just work hard, it's that you've been exposed to opportunities that many others haven't had. I realize you feel like you had it so tough with your $11/hr manufacturing job right out of high school which let you build experience and served as the base for a career. But five years ago, 24 million workers made less than that. And on top of that, over half of them were older than age 30, and just under half had more education than a high school degree. The study doesn't provide info on their occupations, but given what we know about low-wage work, it's safe to say many of them were working jobs like janitorial or fast food where accumulating more work experience would be unlikely to open further career opportunities for them. wateroverfire posted:Why is someone's labor worth X and and not 0.5*X? If you want to say that a worker should be paid what they're worth then at the very least there has to be some objective way to measure what that is. So what is it, in your opinion? Clearly you already have a way of determining that, since the moment you post the job ad, you already know the salary range you're willing to pay. Obviously, they can't negotiate you up to 2X or 3X - X is the number you have in mind, and while you'll happily go under X, you're unlikely to go much over X. You wouldn't even be hiring for that position unless you had a fairly clear idea that it would be worth the cost, and that means being able to quantify more or less how much the position is worth. We're not dumb loving rubes gathering at your feet to receive the wisdom of the inscrutable small business kings and their endless knowledge. The fact that you think tame questions like these are going to be a decent Gotcha trick against anyone here is downright sad.
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May 17, 2019 21:29
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wateroverfire posted:I have no idea what anyone's labor is "worth" in any kind of objective way and I'm asking you (or anyone else), seriously, unironically, how someone would arrive at that number. I know more or less what I can budget and there are statistics that can help figuring out at what wage I might be able to fill a position but literally the only way I can assess whether someone thinks I'm paying what they're worth and that what I'm paying is fair is whether they agree to come work for me or not. You know that you need their labor badly enough to justify spending that amount of money to hire and employ them. You're not hiring employees out of charity, you're doing it because they'll enable you to maintain or increase your profits even after accounting for their salary and other related costs. Do you think we're stupid or something?
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May 17, 2019 22:36
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wateroverfire posted:I think I'm really, honestly trying to ask you about this and you keep being snarky instead of just engaging with it. You don't need to know what a person is worth. You need to know what the work is worth, and then find a person capable of doing that work. Anything beyond that is just trying to get that work for less than it's worth.
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May 17, 2019 23:16
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Weatherman posted:I don't know why people sneer at janitors in the first place. I've worked in enough places to know that if all the janitors disappeared/went on strike, society would fuckin' collapse within two days. People are animals, people in corporate setttings even more so. Mostly because it's the kind of work that used to be done by servants - or, where relevant, by slaves. The structure of society and the nature of employment have changed considerably since then, but the fundamental idea of linking social class to work (or vice versa) has remained, and the basic cultural idea of treating workers based on the expected social class of those doing those jobs has survived into the modern era.
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May 19, 2019 18:39
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