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Helsing posted:What's the job you're trying to fill? I'm curious too. I suspect people mostly no-show for low-end jobs. I've known people who just decided not to show up for interviews for things like retail jobs because they found something else or decided they didn't like the place. Not a lot of people are going to care about being polite when it's a job that pays $12/hour or whatever. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there's nothing that can be done to solve this particular problem because people have no reason to care. Also, I guess to be more on topic with what you wateroverfire wanted this thread to be about, probably nothing can be done to improve the current job seeking process in general. It's bad in a way that goes right to the core. The resume/interview process has always been bad, but technology has evolved in a way that overwhelmingly favors employers and the labor marketplace is abysmally bad at actually putting people into jobs that they want or are well suited for. Fixing it probably means first fixing a lot of other things that are only tangentially related to hiring.
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May 9, 2019 17:39
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wateroverfire posted:Though I think technology, at least in hiring, is not doing either employees or employers a lot of favors. For instance, the biggest online job portal here, laborum.com, digitizes peoples' uploaded resumes and often butchers them so badly it's hard to tell they were ever written by humans. And then apparantly doesn't show the applicants how their information comes across. So trawling through that information ends up being done the old fashioned way - just eyeballing each resume - or a ton of worthy candidates get discarded. I think in this specific venue workers need to be better educated, too, in how to make themselves stand out. Having done a decent amount of consulting with businesses on the filtering side of the hiring process, I'm going to say that the eyeball approach isn't super common in large companies in the US. Even with smaller companies, an absolutely massive number of resumes are automatically filtered and discarded without ever being seen by a human being. A lot of online job portals are sold as being primarily for the benefit of applicants (look how many jobs you can apply to! It's so easy!), but having applicants who are essentially spamming out resumes absolutely shifts the balance more in the favor of employers. That said, I don't think this actually results in good hiring outcomes so I don't believe that it's actually beneficial to employers. It makes it easier to hire and it gives applicants drastically less power over the process, but I'd go so far as to say that it's bad for everyone involved. It encourages a box checking approach to hiring that severely limits applicant pools. It also forces people who might be well-suited to a particular job to take lower-end, fall-back positions because eventually the pressure to find a job outweighs the desire to find a good job. The easier it is for a huge number of people to apply to any given position, the more companies are forced to filter those applications to avoid overwhelming hiring managers.
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May 9, 2019 19:38
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lol never talk about automation until you actually have the job One time I had a client steadfastly refuse to allow me to provide my own estimate, because their policy with contractors was to provide their estimate and allow the contractor to either take it or leave it. I ended up billing them almost 300 hours for something that required maybe 10 hours of my time. That was an awesome couple of months.
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May 10, 2019 15:27
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Shrecknet posted:The first thing I do when dealing with a stack of applicants is throw half the resumes in the trash. This probably has a higher success rate than some of the filtering methods I've seen tbh
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May 11, 2019 07:47
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JBP posted:I was presented with a Myers Briggs at an interview and laughed at the HR person then left. She was furious. gently caress you I'm not working somewhere that wants to pseudoscience me. It's hilarious how annoyed some people can get at the idea that an applicant might be interviewing a company too. Like, good companies generally understand that interviews are two-way streets, but lots of lovely workplaces or just lovely hiring managers loving hate it. Applicants are there to beg for a position and the "do you have any questions for us?" follow-up is pure formality.
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May 13, 2019 07:37
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wateroverfire posted:A couple of people upthread talked about employment being a transactional relationship and no side having particular obligations to the other, and...yeah, from a certain point of view, that's true. If you reduce it down to its most basic "law of the jungle, everything is an exploitative power dynamic" kind of interpretation, that's true. Sort of. The thing is, though, holy poo poo do you not want to be working with or working for, for the most part, people who only look at it that way. That kind of cynicism is poisonous in a work environment and if I get a whiff that a potential hire thinks that way then they cease being a potential hire. And I would hope that if people perceive an employer thinks that way they run far, far away. It's always transactional at the low end. If you're convinced that an applicant is not viewing the hiring process as transactional, then you're just being duped by someone who is better at the game than you. It doesn't become more than this until you're well into the salary range where applicants stop treating jobs as paychecks.
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May 14, 2019 17:25
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Volkerball posted:The median household income is nearly $60,000, which would require 2 people making, in wage terms, over $14 an hour discounting overtime, or one person making a whole hell of a lot more than minimum wage. With that being the case in over half of American households, the situation isn't as godawful as some people here are trying to make it seem, although there's obviously a bunch of room for improvement on the income inequality and personal debt fronts In what universe is $14/hour anything other than just barely above the lowest end of the income scale? That's like a buck or two above what you'd make at an entry-level retail job around here. Like, yeah, it's fine if you're a dual income household where each person makes that much and you have no kids, but otherwise that's solidly in paycheck-to-paycheck territory anywhere the cost of living isn't exceptionally low. It's poverty wages in cities or high cost-of-living areas. edit- household income is a massively deceptive stat and I wish we'd stop using it double edit- Reminder that the Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest living wage in the country was in the neighborhood of $59,000/year. For most of the country, the median household income is literally below what they found to be a living wage. Roughly 40% of the country makes less than $15/hour, which means nearly half of the country is below a living wage with two combined incomes. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 15, 2019 |
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May 15, 2019 17:25
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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. Yes, you've nailed it. $14/hour would be a livable wage except for all the reasons that it isn't, and those reasons amount to "expenses are too high for $14/hour to be livable." Take home, bi-weekly pay for someone making $14/hour and working full-time is going to be south of $900. That's less than $2,000/month. You have to live literally in the middle of nowhere for ~$1800/month to be anywhere near comfortable. You really shouldn't be telling people to grow up when you have a five year old's conception of personal finance.
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May 16, 2019 03:27
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Volkerball posted:Once again, the living wage you posted is the living wage for 2 adults and a child. That is not the same thing as the living wage for a single person. So that data is irrelevant, and since you didn't provide that context, very misleading. I mean on its face the idea that the minimum livable wage across the entirety of the country for a single person flirts with $50k annually, is ridiculous. I tried my best to address both situations. The single person living on their own, and the family of two adults and a child that would be relevant to the data you posted. That data is relevant because income stats are generally given for households, which is problematic for a ton of reasons. If we're talking about income in that context, then it makes the most sense to look at the needs of a 2 adult/1 child family, because household income is an extremely poor metric for discussing anything else. Remember that household income isn't calculated in the same way that households are calculated for something like tax purposes, it's literally just the total income of everyone sharing a residence. More to your point, there's effectively no data that shows $14/hour being anywhere near "comfortable" for a single person. For example, take a look at data from MIT's living wage calculator. This CNBC article compiles it nicely. $14/hour at 40 hours per week for 52 weeks will hit or modestly exceed the requirement for some states and also fall short for several states. This is also complicated by the fact that the average employee doesn't actually work anywhere near the 2080 hours per year that this represents, and this is more true as you move towards the lower end of the scale. It gets more complicated, though. This is what MIT has to say about their living wage model: quote:The living wage model is a ‘step up’ from poverty as measured by the poverty thresholds but it is a small ‘step up’, one that accounts for only the basic needs of a family. The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans. It does not budget funds for pre-prepared meals or those eaten in restaurants. It does not include money for entertainment nor does it does not allocate leisure time for unpaid vacations or holidays. Lastly, it does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g. provisions for retirement or home purchases). The living wage is the minimum income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity. In light of this fact, the living wage is perhaps better defined as a minimum subsistence wage for persons living in the United States. So $14/hour, if worked a minimum of 40 hours per week for 52 weeks per year, will, for some portion of the country, provide a subsistence wage that would allow a single person to not require government assistance for basic survival. If you see this as anything other than completely damning then I don't know what to tell you. There is essentially no data to support your argument that $14/hour is fine or comfortable in anything except very low COL areas. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 03:48 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 03:45
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Volkerball posted:As to the hours worked, the average full time American employee works 47 hours a week, or 2,444 hours per year. That tends to jive with my experience working in factories at entry level. Per the bureau of labor statistics, the fields with the most hours worked weekly are manufacturing, logging, mining, goods producing, transportation, warehousing, and utilities, which aren't what I would call at the high end of the scale. When you take the average 40 hour work week at $14 an hour, and add the average 7 hours of overtime a week for a full time employee at $21 an hour, the end result is $36,764 annually, which surpasses the living wage in all but 8 states by over $10k annually. It's extremely misleading to use average full-time hours worked for this particular comparison. What you want to look at are numbers as directly reported by BLS in the Employment Situation Summary, and you want to use overall hours worked rather than hours for full-time employees only: quote:The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased $14/hour is at the lower-end of the pay scale and that almost universally skews towards jobs that are either not full-time or that barely pass the 35 hour hurdle. More importantly, full-time employment data collected by BLS does not distinguish between actual full-time employment and people working multiple part-time jobs. In other words, average full-time hours includes people working multiple part-time jobs who are not being paid overtime at all. Edit- And this isn't even getting into how ridiculous it is that your argument in favor of $14/hour being "okay" relies on people literally working more than 40 hours per week to exceed subsistence wages. Just holy poo poo, dude. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:03 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 05:58
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It's also worth adding that the average American doesn't work 52 weeks per year, so even 52 * 34.4 * 14 is going to end up being slightly on the high side for hourly employees. Edit- Oh, gently caress, let's add some more variables into this mix. About one-third of US workers participate in the gig economy in some capacity. The hours that these people work contribute to BLS full-time/part-time statistics. Someone working 25 hours at a part-time retail job and another 10 hours of Uber is technically employed full-time as far as BLS is concerned. Not only are these people not getting paid overtime, they're also paying self-employment taxes which creates an even bigger divide between their apparent pay and their actual take-home income. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:20 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 06:10
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Volkerball posted: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. And salaried employees who are reporting 60-70 hour work weeks are going to drive the average up. There are serious issues with self-reported works hours generally being overestimated (there have been several studies on this, I'll dig up some links tomorrow) anyway, but if we're going to use them then there's no reason to use anything other than overall average hours worked. This is more likely to skew high than to skew low. I'm honestly having trouble believing that you're arguing in good faith if you're really insisting that a straight 52 * 40 * 14 calculation isn't a serious overestimate for hourly employees. Just to point out how ridiculous this actually is: the BLS doesn't even collect overtime data for non-manufacturing overtime worked. Very, very few employers are paying overtime because very, very few hourly employees outside of specific industries are even hitting 40 hour work weeks. Here's a breakdown of average hours worked by industry: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm. Note that the service sector essentially never manages to crack 40 hours. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 06:47 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 06:40
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Paradoxish posted:There are serious issues with self-reported works hours generally being overestimated (there have been several studies on this, I'll dig up some links tomorrow) anyway I said I would do this today, so here it is: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours quote:The BLS study found respondents in the ATUS tend to give an estimate of typical working time that is 5 to 10 percent higher than what shows up in their diaries. But the divergence was not uniform across the population. The largest overestimates came from the people providing the highest estimates: People who said they typically worked 75 or more hours per week tended to provide diaries reflecting 25 hours’ less work per week than they estimated. People claiming to typically work between 65 and 74 hours weekly tended to be overestimating by 18 hours. You're going to have to do some digging to see more analysis, but this is all based on BLS comparing their own data to census data. The takeaway is that people tend to overestimate hours worked (thanks, toxic work culture) and most Americans are probably not actually working more than 40 hours. Data like that provided by the Gallup poll that shows American full-time workers averaging close to 50 hours per week is extremely suspect and almost certainly does not represent reality for hourly workers. BLS data for hours worked is based on their establishment survey rather than household survey, which is a good justification for using their average of 34.4. Realistically, if we're judging the overall state of hourly workers, then you probably want to use the average of 33.7 for production/non-supervisory employees.
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May 17, 2019 15:30
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The data doesn't support anything I want to believe so let me fall back on personal anecdotes and bootstraps to avoid analyzing my worldview at all.
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May 17, 2019 18:25
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wateroverfire posted:Yes, I know I need a person. I know that person is (to me) worth spending at least some amount, that I offer to them in exchange for working for me. I have no idea what their "objective" value is and no idea how to figure that out. I have no idea whether they feel what they're going to earn is fair except that they agree to come earn it. What is their worth? Is it the amount I'm willing to pay them? Is it the amount they accept? Is it the amount they would ideally want if they could pick? Yeah, this is the problem right here. People need jobs. The farther down the pay scale the job goes, the more people will need that job and the less options applicants will actually have for alternatives. The fact that someone will come and work for low pay is not an indication that a person feels that the wage is fair, it's a symptom of economic coercion. There are people in the US who will happily work for sub-minimum wage because at some point any pay is better than no pay when you need money. To complicate things even further, go ahead and throw wage opacity onto the pile. Most people don't know what their peers are making. They don't know what other employers are offering, because employers in general aren't listing pay in many job listings. They don't know if your offer is the best that they're going to get or if you're literally offering half the pay for twice the responsibilities of the average position. In most cases there are no good options for getting this information other than unreliable-at-best self-reported data on sites like Glassdoor. Individual wage negotiation is a game that is stacked 100% in the employer's favor and serves no useful purpose for employees. Your best outcome is that you maximize what an employer is willing to pay you, but by definition that's an amount they were willing to pay anyway. Negotiations only make sense when collective bargaining is at play and a union actually has significant leverage over an employer.
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May 18, 2019 04:42
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Yeah, fair wage for a given position should have a lot more to do with the cost of living than a lot of people want to admit. Most of the factors that we use to determine the bulk of a position's compensation (ie, responsibilities, qualifications, etc.) should be minor considerations at best. You start with the amount that an hour of any given person's labor should be worth and adjust up or down slightly based on the position itself. We'll never get there, but that's how it should be and there aren't any particularly good human-centered arguments for why labor should be treated as a market.
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May 19, 2019 06:37
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Main Paineframe posted: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. The fact that we're still happy to pay people based on job title is the strongest evidence that Americans don't really want a classless society, they just want a society where they can lie to themselves about which class they belong to and which classes they potentially have access to. People don't want to accept that widespread social mobility is largely a lie and not something that can be "fixed" because it is a fundamentally impossible goal. The really funny part is that you don't need actual, real socialism to have a more egalitarian income structure. You can achieve it through aggressive regulation designed to establish income floors and hard salary caps, but we won't do that either. The wealth gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is obscene, but the salary range that exists at the lower end is quite frankly not a good thing either. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 02:49 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 02:45
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Helsing posted:If someone requires years of training to reach a certain level of capability and you compensate them at the same rate as someone with far less experience then you aren't really weighing the full amount of time that the first person invested. If a worker invests ten years of training and experience into a field that dies, should their new employer in a different field compensate them for those ten years?
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May 20, 2019 22:15
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Helsing posted:Ideally the cost of changing jobs or educating yourself would be socialized and losing your job wouldn't be a life destroying change in your standard of living. I'm not entirely sure what the best arrangement to achieve that would be, it would probably vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances. We literally can't achieve this goal as long as we continue to insist that pay is primarily determined by things like experience and training. If you're a worker with, say, a diploma related to a particular field and ten years of experience in that field, then you will never actually be able to make up for time lost if you're forced to move out of that field. Obviously some work experience is universal and transferable, but ultimately no amount of retraining will ever make you whole in that situation. Your standard of living will always take a sizable hit unless you're moving into a field where entry level pay is much, much higher or wages are in some way guaranteed. Edit- Just to be clear, I'm not saying that everyone has to be making the same amount of money down to the dollar. All I'm getting at here is that you'll never, ever deal with these kinds of problems without regulations that are specifically intended to compress the wage scale. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 01:38
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Helsing posted:This isn't a value judgement this is a concession to reality. If you want to keep the most difficult, unpleasant, dangerous and skill intensive jobs staffed then you're likely going to have to offer wage premiums for those positions. Similarly, if you want to stop a doctor who you just spent more than a decade training to remain a doctor you may need to offer incentives to stop him from burning out after a couple years and deciding he'd rather write novels or run a woodshop or something. This doesn't reflect reality, though. We don't have some huge problem where doctors are running off to write novels and we can't replace them. There's actually an artificial shortage of doctors that's largely been created by the AMA to keep wages high. Likewise, we don't pay lovely, awful, dangerous jobs more than any other jobs. There are jobs like that that are well compensated, yeah, but that's because they tend to be skilled positions. A lot of really terrible jobs pay peanuts and they get filled anyway because the barrier to entry is low.
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May 22, 2019 03:38
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Helsing posted:Sure, this is all accurate but it misses the point. In a socialist economy with current levels of technology you would not pay everyone equally. I think you could radically compress wages and the economy would benefit but paying everyone literally the same hourly wage isn't feasible. I mean, I specifically said in the first post that you were responding to that I don't think everyone can or should be paid equally. I'm not sure that you could even have a purely socialist economy that functions properly in that way, and even some weird hypothetical post-scarcity, post-currency economy would probably still have some inequality. The point is that the labor "market" is wildly dysfunctional because treating labor as a market doesn't actually work. We paper over this fact with nonsense about the economy being meritocratic, but in practice there isn't even a thin facade of meritocracy over our system. At best, labor value functions on a very crude supply/demand model. If you have skills or education that's uncommon then you have a theoretically higher ceiling for your wages, assuming there's actual demand for those skills and you meet a whole bunch of other arbitrary requirements and also get kind of lucky. This is literally the best case scenario for the current labor market, and it's not really meritocratic in any reasonable sense of the term. Compressing wages needs to be about more than just raising the minimum wage. We need to acknowledge that the way wages are determined is fundamentally unfair and that that's largely true because of these weird contradictory lies we tell ourselves about meritocracies and labor "markets." Basically, we need things like aggressive wage insurance alongside either jobs guarantees, universal basic income, or both. And that's just for dealing with the bottom end of the market.
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May 23, 2019 04:39
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Helsing posted:Lotta utopian socialist naval gazing going on in here. I mean, saying that doctors are only doctors because it pays well is actually a huge indictment against compensation as a good motivator. It's a tacit admission that our system as-is completely fails to sort people into occupations based on interest or aptitude, which implies that it's actually wildly inefficient. Edit- Just to be clear, I'm talking about high paid jobs specifically here. The vast majority of high paid jobs are good jobs and most people would want to do them if they had the opportunity. The parts of being a doctor that are really terrible are largely artificial, and there are undoubtedly tons of people who would rather have the opportunity to learn medicine than flip burgers. Lots of really terrible jobs pay basically nothing. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 02:44
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KingNastidon posted:That doesn't mean we can't reduce hours at the expense of maximizing productivity or ensure income/wealth distributions are flatter. But I don't think there's a large number of people doing complete make-work right now where there would be no economic downside to reducing the labor participation rate. Beyond expanding the social safety net to ensure displaced workers don't suffer until they find another job I don't know what else should be done right now. Part of the problem with your argument and the reason that you're running head first into a lot of other posters in this thread is that you seem to be conflating the idea of "make-work" and "work that is not socially useful." They aren't necessarily the same thing. Make-work is generally understood to be something that has no benefit to anyone whatsoever, and that's ultimately a net drag on the economy. There probably isn't much of that for obvious reasons. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that all work that is done is socially useful or productive or that it has in any way contributed to a higher overall standard of living other than by employing people and providing them with money to put back into the economy. Most of the work that I'm generally paid pretty loving well to do I would argue is of very, very little social value. It's still not make-work, though.
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May 29, 2019 13:13
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BougieBitch posted:UBI is insidious, because it sounds like a progressive policy in and of itself, but the point that literally has not been addressed for some reason is that the progressive tax rate does all the heavy lifting, UBI does virtually nothing on its own. Giving everyone $500 isn't better or worse for any specific recipient, and that's all UBI is if you discount the funding mechanism. It literally is, though, because that's how the value of money works. $500/month in the hands of someone making $15k/year is actually drastically more valuable than it is in the hands of someone making $1,000,000/year. Any program which provides a flat amount of money to everyone will always benefit the poor more than the rich, even if you aren't using progressive taxes to recapture any of that money. It's not even wrong to say that UBI isn't a compromise. It's totally a bandaid on capitalism and I'd personally prefer an extremely strong jobs guarantee, but a good jobs guarantee is so massively disruptive to our current system that it's hard to see it happening any time soon. A bad jobs guarantee would arguably be more dystopian than a poorly implemented UBI.
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May 31, 2019 16:04
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OwlFancier posted:Because 1. Why is the wage likely to be fair? 2. If the job was useful why is it not already being done? 3. If it's just an exercise in government spending then why not just do that either by giving people free money or employing people normally to do useful things rather than through this weird last resort poo poo? You're being really silly here. Your first question is just nonsense. You can easily rephrase it to "why would a UBI pay enough to be useful?" and the answer is really straightforward: because we're talking about ideal programs. This is like saying that a UBI can't exist unless we cut all other social welfare programs and replace them with straight cash payments, which obviously would be dystopian as gently caress. A good jobs guarantee should pay somewhere above the current subsistence-level definitions of a living wage, because that's kind of a necessary thing for the "good" part. Your second question is also nonsensical unless you're asserting that capitalism is perfectly good at distributing labor and that markets really are the best solution to all problems. There's ton of useful work that isn't done because it isn't profitable. There's loads of useful work that is done and goes unpaid, such as family caregiving. A properly implemented jobs guarantee isn't employment of last resort, which is the entire point. It's effectively a federally mandated floor for working conditions and wages that sidesteps all of the complaints about regulations leading to greater unemployment. If employers can't compete with the better pay that the federal government is offering, then those employers don't get to exist anymore and their workers have a better option now anyway. Ideally you also provide options for training, education, homemaking, etc. If you're having people do makework then the program isn't designed correctly. Coincidentally, this is why it's also arguably better (and drastically more disruptive) than a UBI. A UBI does nothing to deal with exploited labor. It actually risks making the problem worse, since companies can justify lower pay since it's now just "extra" on top of a UBI. A jobs guarantee puts employers of last resort out of business entirely if they don't shape up.
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May 31, 2019 17:22
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OwlFancier posted:I suppose I am significantly more skeptical about the practicalities of "literally get the government to take over half the economy" which would be what a jobs guarnatee at a living wage would be, than I am about "give everyone a bit of free money to establish a floor and increase bargaining power owing to less dependency on work" I don't even disagree with you, dude. I'm not opposed to a UBI because a decent one will help people and it's probably more achievable. This is why I keep calling a jobs guarantee more difficult and ultimately more disruptive to the status quo. I would prefer a jobs guarantee and I consider it a better policy if I had to choose between the two. That said, I do strongly disagree with calling a jobs guarantee "workfare." They are fundamentally different things and not in the same family of policies at all.
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May 31, 2019 17:32
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OwlFancier posted:I'm gonna keep calling it that until I see some existant instance of it that isn't that. I don't know how to respond to this other than to call it ridiculous. You're essentially redefining an established term because you don't like it.
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May 31, 2019 17:40
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OwlFancier posted:What do you think the fundamental difference between the two concepts is? Because I still don't see one, in fact the only real difference I see is the pay rate. That they are literally unrelated, unless your definition of workfare is not the commonly accepted one? Workfare means making social benefits contingent on employment. That's what workfare is. It's not a jobs program, except in the sense that it forces people to work to receive some or all of their social safety net benefits. There are all kinds of implementations and they are all universally lovely. Very few workfare programs actually offer any kind of government funded work to people that are on them. A jobs guarantee just means guaranteed federal jobs. It absolutely does not tie social welfare benefits to employment. Its entire purpose is to guarantee that jobs are available to anyone who wants them.
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May 31, 2019 17:48
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I get what you're saying, but you're playing the exact same rhetorical game as people who say that we can't have a UBI because then we'll have to cut all other social benefits. Like, right here: OwlFancier posted:Sure, you could have a job program and welfare but what do you call a program where, say, you have a work program at minimum (unlivable) wage and not very good conditions and it's used to undermine existing public sector workers? You're creating jobs and not necessarily getting rid of the welfare system but are you doing much good? Are you effectively providing a floor of conditions and pay? You're trying to undermine the concept by picking the worst possible implementation and using that as an argument against every possible JG. You can do the same thing against a UBI or literally any policy. A JG as conceived by people who favor one over a UBI has no relationship at all to the policy that you're describing. The entire purpose of the policy is to provide a higher floor for both wages and working conditions (hours, etc.). If a policy doesn't do that, then JG proponents aren't going to support it. edit- OwlFancier posted:Like this isn't just me saying this. This is what the UK labour party called a "jobs guarantee" in 2015: Right, and this is strictly workfare. Cash payments can be workfare too. We already have them in the form of the EITC. Coincidentally, expansion of the EITC is routinely brought up as an option to appease UBI proponents.
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May 31, 2019 18:07
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OwlFancier posted:Like I don't think the UBI objectors are arguing badly I just disagree with their fundamental premise that a JG-like approach is the less dangerous policy. I'd really like to know how a UBI is a less dangerous policy. From my perspective, a UBI is acceptable because it will objectively improve people's lives even though it's clearly a deal with the devil. I can't see any possible argument that says a UBI that provides an actual, living wage is more politically achievable than a good JG, which means that all of the policies we're discussing are all half measures. At the lower end of the scale, a UBI effectively entrenches lower-end employers in the same way that something like SNAP does. It encourages employers to undervalue labor since the government is picking up their slack. Worse, any UBI that falls short of providing a full living wage does nothing to actually increase the bargaining power of labor. You still need strong unions (we don't have those), you still need universal healthcare (we don't have that), and you still need tuition free education (nope) to actually give labor any sort of actual ability to negotiate.
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May 31, 2019 18:25
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OwlFancier posted:The lowest form of a jobs guarantee is the workhouse and we are already barely a step from that. That's why I think job programs are more dangerous. They are an extremely credible and imminent threat right now. I hate to break it to you, but this is the lowest form of cash payments too. The EITC in the US is already a direct cash payment that's contingent on having earned income. Again, expansion of the EITC is routinely brought up as an option for UBI-like policies.
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May 31, 2019 18:37
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wateroverfire posted:To me, like it or not, all three of those things seem necessary and I can't think of any way to accomplish them that doesn't also force some people to do things they otherwise don't want to do. Not to step on OwlFancier's toes here, but there's a difference between compelling someone to do something that they don't want to do and economically exploiting someone for their labor. There are also somewhat more equitable ways to get simple, unpleasant, but socially important work done. You could, for example, have mandatory community service programs that aren't in any way tied to traditional concepts of employment. They're just a thing that everyone has to do for so many hours per year, in the same way that jury duty is just a thing that you have to do sometimes.
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May 31, 2019 20:22
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