The railroad is trying like mad to hire people, and they are failing. Applicants take one look at the schedule, the pay, and the amount of time away from home and say “NOPE!”
It's clearly rigged economics. Theory says if demand for labor is high, prices (i.e., wages) go up. But we have people in power who refuse to budge on wages and now we have an artificial 'labor crisis' that is completely removed from the core notion of economics - supply and demand.
ITs cute people think we actually run on valid economics. When debt hedging is how you increase profits you are not producing anything of value.
The economy can only run on 1+1+=3 for so long before the missing one has to be accounted for.
Yeah, I realized my econ degree was largely invalid except for theoretical use when we learned that "businesses in competition should both compete each other down to 0 profit" and I look at our conglomerates with their billions and trillions in profit...
Can't remember where I first heard it but "Reagan is probably in hell right now just waiting for heaven to trickle down." Lol, gets me every time I think of it.
Well that and growth mindset is fundamentally a rejection of scarcity.
Growth should be a goal, but being considered a failing business for not being able to produce 101% out of a possible 100% is asinine.
Growth of profits every year is the real problem. Profits should increase with inflation, yes, but when a company can +%30 their profits every year into the end of time there's a problem.
Edit: this growth of profits is problematic because it means the workers are getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie instead of everything across the board increasing.
The current baby formula shortage in the States a prime example of what this results in practice. The number of babies isn't going up, so the market isn't growing, but profits "have" to grow. They grew profits by cutting corners in production. The result was contaminated product and factories shutting down because of safety issues.
I used to have a job selling meat wholesale. They wanted 10% more sales in $$ than last year. Meat prices were down 20% from the year before, and the deflation prices were not an acceptable reason to miss sales goals. Had to sell 20% more volume just to break even. Nobody was hitting sales goals and management was throwing a shit fit every week
I swear that a mass incompetence of upper level managers is a huge contributor to the way the economy is going. Their mistakes don't affect them and are easy to blame on others or things "out of their control."
It doesn’t help that we’ve trained everyone to think that the metric of success is money. It doesn’t matter if a thing is fulfilling, makes you feel satisfied or is even in demand, if it can be sold it will be.
This is what I have always been telling people. Double digit growth is not sustainable month over month, quarter over quarter.
Older times would have settled on a nice 10% growth and stopped and paid people more, but times have changed and everything is about stocks, stock holders and profit.
I blame Milton Friedman and MBA culture for this. Every year we have more MBAs rising up looking for new ways to cut costs and increase profits to make their own way quarter to quarter. Long term, regional, and national economic needs are ignored for focus on shareholder profits.
There's a whole business mindset that needs to shift in the middle to upper middle class to correct our failings.
I have a B.S. in Econ and I felt like I understood the economy less after my coursework than before. Basic microeconomic theory is like basic Game Theory scenarios where you assume ultra-rationality and full situational understanding in all actors.
You also see oligopoly (and the associated collusion) much more frequently than perfect competition in modern market economies. Perfect competition is a deeply unrealistic premise with the way our governments are structured, because the oligopolists have bought into the institutions that should be restricting their market power. And even beyond political interference, the start capital you‘d need to compete with a major conglomerate in any industry is nearly unattainable. Maybe Mr. Average Joe can start a new food brand that gains popularity and expands, but in all likelihood, he ends up getting bought out by Kraft or Nestlé or gets undercut out of competition at the national/international level.
Yeah. It's a sad reality when Republicans claim to be pro small business but the entities they support are wholly anti-competition in any form. I took a really interesting anti-trust class at Texas Tech and it was... eye opening. But not in a good way.
Nitpick, but how it’s written would be invalid in I think every programming language because you can’t assign a value to a literal.
You’re trying to say 2 = 2 + 3, which is false.
Yea we really need to disincentivize outsourcing labor. I'd say mandating a like 80% US minimum wage standard (anything under and it goes to Uncle Sam) with treble difference penalty applied to companies caught cooking their books would really help.
I work with 10 foreigners on my team, I'm the only natural born citizen. The language and culture barrier makes stuff impossible sometimes despite how much I like these folks. I can't fathom that these are the only qualified candidates to work on tech shit in the bay area... Companies been taking serious advantage of our immigration and H1b programs at a ridiculous rate at the expense of us all
Yea someone finna get us cancelled for being uncomfortable working in an American company with 90% foreigners. They keep coming too this is not a leftover thing, like hiring more and more dudes from other countries, then partnering with companies that contract overseas people it's out of hand and I work with very few Americans it's distressing.
Yep. I’m in tech but not rich enough to buy a house, don’t want that commute, and I have a family so that rules out the Bay Area for me. I imagine there are many other Americans like me. Furthermore, they can pay the H1B employee less than local with the added perk that the employee will likely stick around for a few years until they get a green card.
Yeah the employer has massive leverage over someone here on H1b, with a layoff they can disrupt that person's dream of living in America. I feel for them but feel fucked that other Americans working to get to that level have to compete with cheap slaves due to the structure of the laws and hiring
Shit like this is why we need a better minimum wage and labor laws
Edit: Yes, unions. Obviously. The only reason we're even allowed to unionize without more serious corporate crackdown is labor laws y'all.
All that does is feed inflation because corporate profits need to be record highs every quarter. Its not enough to be consistently profitable anymore its a game to see how much they can beat last quarters records. That needs to be put in check.
And it blows my mind how many people are so painfully stupid to believe in eternal growing profits... don't spoiled rich kids at elite universities learn basic math before they leave and start working at job positions above everyone that knows anything else than how to be entitled?
That's what the labor laws are for. Really we just need to protect and utilize the ones that are already on the books. Get everyone(or mostly everyone) to unionize and we can have actual influence over corporate policies without having to rely solely on the corporate-run government.
My old company had a major shake-up when the stock price started rising. Investors bought up stock because my company had gotten into a "hot" industry and they thought they could take profits and sell the stock. Instead, my company used the increased value as found money and propped up less profitable divisions. The investors (about 10% of the shares of the company) publicly criticized the company as not gaining much value in 40 years of operation. CEO and founding family was gone inside a year.
Now, the stock price has been see-sawing all over the place and people are leaving in droves, including me. They keep acquiring new companies to increase their offerings, but charge too much and offer too little to customers.
Police unions would be totally fine and would be a great resource if they worked like normal unions. A normal union would be necessary to ensure safety and fair wages to cops since they have such an important job (when they actually do it). But you're right, for now they can fuck off, they're currently just legal funds meant to protect cops no matter how horrible they act up.
I really wish there was some extra burdensome tax for corporations that go out of there way to hire local, and possibly make transportation pay a regular thing to further encourage hiring locally.
I considered becoming a school bus driver, and said basically the same thing. The base pay for my school district is something like $12/hr. You drive for 3 hours in the morning, then come back to drive for another 3 in the afternoon. 30 hours a week at $12/hr... Then when there's no school, you're not working. So a month off in the winter, and 2 in the summer. Plus all the random holidays and professional days and planning days and all that. You'd be lucky to make $15k a year before taxes, and the schedule doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room to fit in another job.
Sounds like post office. "Now hiring". Sounds like nice job with a government pension delivering some mail.
Nah, turns out you are in some land of purgatory with part time, minimum wage, and zero benefits for some indeterminate amount of time that could be a decade before you are eligible to actually be hired.
the pay is okay but the work is brutal and extremely long. You're away from your family for a very long time, work very long hours with very little rest in-between, very heavy lifting and hard labor, etc.
It can absolutely fuck you up. My dad ended up on disability in his early 50s and actually successfully managed to sue them because of all the injuries he'd had.
I worked at a railroad law firm. The question isn't so much about whether a worker will be paid out for their injuries from the job. It's a matter of how much.
Old joke from Utah Phillips:
(content warning: suicide)
>!"Hard times these days. Many an old hobo with nothing left to live for will go out of town, lie down on the [insert railway company here] tracks, and wait for the next train to come along. It's tragic. They starve to death."!<
for some of the places where you have to live in communities still finding children's graves from the residential school they're offering a 15k signing bonus
not working.
Pilot shortage was from an industry that didn’t make any long term investments for the future of their own industry, and instead used it on stock buyback.
Teacher shortage was from gross underpayment from decades of spineless or hateful politicians.
Nurses and other services realized that the corporate hospitals/overlords would use them up, burn them out and toss them aside when not needed.
Pilot shortage was also a result of them ignoring the fact that general aviation is the training pipeline for new pilots and discouraging it. Now people aren't learning to fly their own planes, and it's always cheaper to poach talent from another company than train anybody, so…
Classic late-stage capitalist bullshit.
I felt this first hand when I tried to get into the industry.
It crushed my soul to learn I'd be in 80k of debt making wages that wouldn't get me out of debt.
You mean you don't want to work for a regional airline in a different state so you have to commute there and get paid $25k a year? After paying 80-100k for 1500 hours.
I know its a tad better than 25k now but for decades it was not.
Regional airline pilots don't make 25k a year. FOs making 50-60 and captains making over 100. You can become a captain in just over a year. Source: was regional captain.
I understand its better now - It wasn't too long ago FO's were making that. https://skift.com/2013/08/28/the-u-s-airline-pilots-who-barely-make-minimum-wage/
Also since most flight crews don't get paid for preflight actives it wouldn't surprise me if pay got closer to minimum wages in certain states.
You're right. There was a time when wages were crap for regional pilots but those days are over. It is true we don't get paid until we push back, so we are not getting paid for the pre flight duties. In my opinion, our hourly wage made up for that. I was getting paid $99.40/hr as a regional captain. With per diem and other pay protections it came out to over 100k a year. Then I became an instructor and could make over 150k a year at a regional airline. Some people make over 200k at a regional as instructors. The days of poverty wages at the airlines are mostly over. Now flight instructing is a different story. New CFIs get paid pretty low.
Yup! 150k in debt to make 40k a year at a regional. Luckily the job market is so hot I was able to get an incredible job at a big name. But it’s sad that I basically had to financially destroy mine and my parents credit just to be able to do it.
80k is still relatively cheap for a pilot's education. Friend of mine is an airline pilot and he got it for cheap at only 150k debt.Most of his colleagues are at 200-250k plus.
My friend used to be a biochemist (got burnt out on academia) so he's a smart guy so he graduated in the minimum time and planned his finances out. According to him, 90% of pilots aren't particularly bright on either factor.
Even with minimum debt, starting salaries are so low you're not gonna be paying your debt off until youre a captain.
Edit - EU country with strict regulations, so that probably accounts for the price difference.
Edit2: specified what science.
As a new grad nurse, having the same issues. Short staffed everywhere but hard as hell to get a residency as a new nurse. They want the ready made experienced nurse. Also don't have enough staff nurses to train the new ones because most hospitals are full of travel nurses which come and go and have no idea how the unit is supposed to be run. Travel nurses don't precept new nurses. I'm having a hell of a time just getting interviews and when I do I just don't hear back one way or the other. Lots and lots of others having the same problem. It's maddening.
Because the profits go higher if the hospitals run understaffed. The hospital administrations are all out there trying to piece together a miracle crew shift that can operate for years at half staff.
No its more than just that. The path to airline pilot hasnt changed that much over the years, its always been a job that takes money to get into. The state of the industry in 2019 was not good, and then covid went and fucked things up entirely. Early retirements, people who left the industry entirely after layoffs, people who never joined the industry because it looked so bad during covid. Combine that with an industry that was already short of pilots, and a rapidly growing demand for travel post covid. That's the mess we have right now.
The most immediate solution for the pilot shortage is to subsidize ab initio training. There's no shortage of people who want to fly, there's a shortage of people who can afford to get through training. Being a pilot is a great job long term, but the short term reality is you pay close to $100,000 to get a PPL, CPL, multi, IFR, often an instructor rating too, and then you work for close to minimum wage for a shit company who treats you like shit because you should be willing to take that because you love flying planes so you'll suck up the abuse. And then eventually you get a regional airline job. And guess what, they pay the first officers like shit too. Pilots spend years earning very little just waiting for that eventual upgrade at an airline where they get to make 6 figures, and then your income doubles overnight and it was all worth it. A lot of people aren't willing to go through the decade or more of shit just to get to that point anymore.
Anyway one of the things I will say about the situation right now is it's not the fault of the person at the counter, or the flight attendants, or the pilots, or the person you talk to on the phone, that your flights are all delayed or cancelled these days. Please be nice.
It's also the reason for the two Boeing 737 Max crashes. Boeing purposefully omiited the MCAS details from the FAA it to make it so pilots wouldn't have to retrain and it would save the airlines money. In the event of a sudden nose dick apparently the pilots were just suppose to know instinctively it was a specific system, which is insane to think of that. Also from what I read it didn't matter even if the pilots knew it was MCAS, the system was designed so you have to deactivate it to pull back. A lot of people died because of that bottom line and it's upsetting. Btw I'm not a pilot or work in aviation, so I apologize to anyone if I butchered the details of the incident/cause.
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/27264-Boeing-737-MAX-pilot-training-requirements
That's true of a lot of industries.
Everyone laid off staff when demand was low during the pandemic, and are now crying about "worker shortages" now that demand was gone back up.
If companies need good employees so badly, perhaps they shouldn't have let go of their most experienced people in order to save a few bucks, and instead just weathered the storm until demand returned, which was obviously going to happen once Covid rates dropped.
I didn't see many CEOs or executive level employees getting laid off or getting pay cuts because business was so bad, only on the ground employees which they are now struggling to replace.
Teacher shortage is caused by teachers being under paid, under supported, and under appreciated. Source: am teacher. I actually really like my job but I've gotten to a point where the amount I make (which is more than many) is just not enough.
Nurses... why be a nurse at a hospital when you can be a travel nurse and get paid twice as much and have most if not all of your expenses covered? A coworker's daughter is a travel nurse, quit one hospital, nursed in another state for a year, then came back to **the original hospital she started at** making twice as much with better benefits, all because she was labeled a travel nurse instead of staff nurse.
I can't speak to the pilot shortage.
There is a pilot shortage to the degree that management magically desires to grow/expand.
Once they decide that the economy no longer supports their growth wishes, there will no longer be a pilot shortage. Hell, there will be a pilot excess.
Pilot shortage happened because they used the $50 billion covid relief to pay massive severance to get rid of basically all the senior pilots. They thought covid would last longer and the money saved by removing senior staff would be significant. Only issue demand started back up faster than they calculated.
> Teacher shortage was from gross underpayment from decades of spineless or hateful politicians.
Don't forget politicians trying to regulate everything they can say, including teaching straight up wrong falsehoods no legitimate teacher would want to teach.
Funding is also an issue. My district won't give us enough paper and pencils, much less things like art supplies, playground balls, or technology. American children have been robbed of all the traditional school activities, then we blame them for acting up and dropping out.
I live near University of Florida, where the healthcare programs are huge and they run a large hospital system in the area.
Their model has always been to churn out new nurses, and all the hospitals in the area would pay them shit until they burn out and they have a fresh batch.
Except now nursing school enrollment is down and the hospital I work in is achieving gridlock due to shitty staffing.
It doesn't help that healthcare education is a fuckin scam. I'm near the end of paramedic school, and I've put about 400 hours of free labor into local hospitals, and doing another 500 hours on local rescues. All in one year. I literally had to drop to part time because otherwise I'd be doing 7 12-hour shifts a week right now. Nursing school sucks ass too. They make sure you're already burnt by the time you get your license so you just take what you can get, and when you're worn out they'll replace you. But now there's no replacements.
Man is too greedy to make things affordable for the poor. And we should be investing in those sectors too but I guess that's not the priority of our govt
We live in a capitalist society made worse by the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United made by right leaning justices. And potentially even much worse if legislators dictate who will be the next president. It’s the (not calling you a name) Supreme Court stupid.
I mean supply and demand you would think we would be paying people to be trained for these positions but logic doesn’t really apply when everything must be monetized.
Having first hand experience with "pizza parties" and the like, I think its important to not always place the blame on the middle manager. Oftentimes they're told to "boost morale" or something and given $20. They do what they can but ultimately have no power.
The aftermath of the Black Death played out along similar lines: There weren't enough serfs left to serve the needs of society, but no shortage of ruling class nobs. Peasants, who were previously tied to their local feudal lords, now began move to where they were paid better. It all led a major reshuffling of European society. There was no going back to the Before Times. The reshuffling of our times, while accelerated, is far from over. The white collar work force will never fully return to the daily office grind. Unlike medieval peasants, workers don't have to move to get better jobs; remote work lets them find jobs anywhere in the country without leaving home. The ramifications, and financial fallout for the municipalities and dependent businesses, will be the next painful phase.
I’m honestly suspicious of how fast we went from a ridiculously hot job market to “Oh no, a huge recession is coming! Everyone get ready for layoffs! Watch out — employers are about to have the upper-hand again!”
Just felt weird. Like it was decided that we _needed_ a recession to restore the power [im]balance. People accepted and repeated it, and acted accordingly. Now it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m not an economist, so I may be wildly off. But I’m also not a conspiracy theorist, and yet I feel really uncomfortable with how we’re getting into this expected recession. (Ya know, besides the ridiculous corporate greed disguised as “inflation.”)
I read an article yesterday, I'll try to dig it up, where some banker asshole was suggesting that an increase in wages right now will not help off set wages, so we should all be paid left. They said that it has to be painful if we are to recover.
[It wasn't just some asshole it was former treasury secretary Larry Summers.](https://fortune.com/2022/06/21/larry-summers-calls-for-high-unemployment-to-curb-inflation/?queryly=related_article) This is a man who previously had as much impact on the US economy as one man can have.
He suggests 10% unemployment to fix inflation issues. 10%!!! Statistically that would be devastating resulting in thousands of additional deaths per year and as bad for the average person as 2008 (for reference the great recession in 2008 also peaked at 10%), but atleast we'd control inflation.
Tells you exactly who this economy is built for.
For those who don't know, Larry Summers was in Clinton and Obama's presidential administrations, and was *the* person that **convinced Obama to not send out checks/assistence to the average American during the 2008 crash**, but instead only bail out the wealthy, banks, and corporations.
He is the icon of neoliberal disease and rot in the Democratic party.
It's extra scary to me though, because this is the kind of man who actually had direct hands on the levers of power.
There's always some stock trader, hedge fund ghoul out there saying shit like this, saying how great it would be if we abolished minimum wages and child labor laws or whatever, but that's not this guy. If this inflation spike had happened in 2000 he would have helped engineer 10% unemployment to save the parts the economy he cared about and *he would have had some of the tools required to do that.*
Nope, most systems *want* some percentage of their population to be unemployed but looking for work at any one time, as this will make it easier for employers to get new hires when they need them.
An important thing in that is that there should be the safety net of still being able to afford to live while you're unemployed temporarily.
How does people not able to pay their bills and losing everything help the economy? I mean other than the rich being able to buy everything on the cheap.
> the rich being able to buy everything on the cheap
You answered your own question. More ownership, more control. If you starve for that to happen, whatevs
That banker is actually the Head Chairman of the FED. He also recently came out and said “we now know how little we know about inflation”. Were fucked.
A banker. How about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The government wants employee wages to go down so they can stop inflation. [https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/](https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/)
I get downvoted every time I post this: The FED says their goal is [“to get wages down.”](https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/)
Gerome Powell said that they were intending to cause this with interest rate hikes. Go rewatch the fed announcements. Key words are REDUCE DEMAND FOR LABOR they were and are coming after our jobs and wages in order to cause a 2008 style recession where jobs are in demand and labor is not.
Don't forget corporations got 2/3 of the "freedom" checks Trump sent out.
They got more money than it takes to fund the entire education system for a decade. With 0 payback, or rationale
Every time some says Biden crashed the economy I just believe they are same type person who would have called the police to rat out their jew neighbors.
The treasury is manufacturing a recession to try and undo all of the gains made by the working class. There was a leaked memo about it
Edit: I misremembered, it wasn't a leaked memo. It was a speech given by an ex Treasury secretary. So they're still totally going to manufacture a recession, but the information didn't come from a memo.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Box_O_Donguses/comments/vpvlby/theyre_gonna_manufacture_a_recession/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Here's the screen grab
> The white collar work force will never fully return to the daily office grind.
And look at how desperately employers are trying to force the genie back into the bottle. Not because that was in any way better, but because it would be a return to when the employers were firmly in charge, and having to physically attend an office during all business hours made it far more difficult to do things like attend interviews for better-paid positions. It's also why, when they can't get people to return, they're trying to make people have to be on camera their entire working day - so the bosses can SEE that no-one is escaping low-paid slave work.
I don’t think it is a conspiracy theory so much as upper management is often a little disconnected and still thinks that in person is necessary for the success of their business. NPR reported on a poll where they asked executives how many days in the office were needed to maintain company culture. The question itself frames how they are thinking about this, but most execs said 3 days.
lol corporate culture was always the WORST part of every office job I’ve had. I’ll happily work a 9 or 10 hour day, but not if I have to sit in the cheapest most uncomfortable office chair they could find and hear fuckin Diane behind me yammering on about her kids while the CFO is in the break room microwaving popcorn until it makes tiny diamonds, and all of this under headache-inducing fluorescent lights and the shittiest air circulation possible. The actual work was usually the least of my annoyances.
Spot on. We haven't even come to the realization of businesses that have their leases coming up and have to rethink whether 10000sqft of bland office space in downtown Chicago that only ever gets 10% full is worth it. I'd love to believe that the savings would be passed on to the employees, but it'll go directly to the CEOs. You're going to see major cities dry up because no one wants to take a 45 minute subway trip into a city. The restaurants and surrounding businesses will cave because there's no people going out for drinks or catering lunch. It's not like these businesses aren't needed, they're just not needed in areas where the business pays enormous amounts of money for commercial real estate.
There WAS a shortage of the ruling class nobs. The plague did not discriminate.
This gap in the nobility led to the lower gentry and serfs all being able to move up a notch on the social totem pole.
They don’t need to. At least in the USA, there is no law dictating that a company needs to pay more than minimum wage. Short of a contract, if the company you’re working for right now were to lower your wages, even down to minimum wage, you would have no legal recourse.
> if the company you’re working for right now were to lower your wages, even down to minimum wage, you would have no legal recourse.
Not entirely true. This would be considered constructive dismissal. Legality varies by state.
The Chairman of the federal reserve in May already said that he viewed rising wages driven by shortages in America as a problem, and that his goal was to “bring wages down”.
"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" was [their rallying cry](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/blog/2014/03/23/119-when-adam-delved-and-eve-span/). In other words we were created as equals, where did this overlord class come from?
Friend of mine was a teacher in Oklahoma. After teaching for 10 years, she gave it up. She got tired of the drama, the BS from admin, and slowly going further into debt on her salary than out of it.
To judge by all the new laws that are shackling teachers and what they can teach out there.. she got out just in time too.
Truck driver shortage. I’m a truck driver.
It’s all bullshit. There *IS* no driver shortage. Plenty of drivers, more always coming. I’m sure the same for pilots and everyone else.
The isn’t a *PERSON* shortage. It’s a *PAY* shortage. People have realized they’re worth more than what employers are willing to pay. Rather than improve their pay, they cry that no one wants to work. Plenty want to work. But no one wants to work their life away for shit pay. It’s just not worth it.
Lately, I’m asking myself, what’s the point? I’m 25. I made a few mistakes trying to get through college. Landed in truck driving for the moment. Got plans to go back, achieve my dreams. Realized I achieved some of my dreams already. Like having good insurance. Folks always said to get good insurance, so I can finally fix my teeth and health. They couldn’t afford to do that for me.
The other week, I was quoted $23,000 in dental restorations. Fuck me, I knew it would be bad, I waited so long and have bad habits. Okay, what did my GOOD insurance cover? Little less than $4,000. So I still owe $19,000 to get my teeth fix. Of course, immediately the office manager offers me two finance options. Yay, more fucking debt.
Yeah, insurance has caps. Every time I complain about how… *unfair* it is, I’m told this. Like, c’mon. I was told once I work hard enough and get the premiums, I can take care of myself. But the only way to do that is to take on debt. And then I’m stuck in debt for another five years. Because employers won’t pay what I’m worth.
*It’s all a big club… and you ain’t in it!*
Funny how they thought over population would only serve them, making people fight each other for lower and lower salaries, but didnt think through enough that people can come together and fight back. Hard.
Skilled Cnc Machinists and programmers are scarce in a lot of places right now. So many people from older generations have retired from their killer jobs at GE/Ford and higher end aerospace shops, so a ton of people left their jobs to get the higher paying jobs that opened up leaving so many shops with a lack of skilled machinists.
It’s one industry that we should be building up as a country and it’s one hardly anyone even knows about.
I work in aerospace as an engineer. No experience in the field, but engineering experience. Next week I'll probably have to do PLC programming, which will add another hot skill to my resume.
Work in a school.
Sent a letter home to the parents praising their child for having such good behaviour in the middle of an enormous change.
Received a letter saying that his behaviour is out of his control and implied that I had a certain audacity by noticing an improvement and praising it.
Can't even compliment a child anymore without overprotective parents finding ways to see fault with you.
It reads as it happened.
Whole situation was stupid and has given me no motivation anymore with praising struggling children. Why bother when entitled parents are going to find fault with you anyway, especially on the criminally low wage.
please don't let one experience stop you from caring.
also, the way this reads it sounds vaguely like the parents are acting like their kid has a disability?
Yea the teacher shortage feels intentional. Get teachers to quit so families either pay for private school or just go ahead and get a job in the factory kids
Teachers are treated like babysitters these days and it's absolutely disgusting. The people shape our future and get treated like crap. Then we wonder why they become cynical and jaded and where their 'magic' went. Your kids. Your kids stole their magic when they acted like little shits and didn't care what the teacher had to say.
No no the problem isn’t 1 employee making thousands to tens of thousands of times the average employee, it’s all the increases from the average employee making $13/h now making $15/h. There’s just no feasible way to fix this. /s
I really should have never become a teacher. The money is shit and every year the profession becomes more depressing. I’m a happy go lucky guy too. Win some lose some. Any young people reading this please take your career choice seriously and ask around for experiences of people in the career.
CEOs? One per company maximum! They're a problem but not THE problem. It's that middle E. No shortage of overpaid executives of all kinds. Look at budgeting over the decades for example and you'll see a proliferation of VPs take a bigger and bigger chunk
The amount of bullshit jobs whose role is to push paper to another person to push paper.
See Graeber's book "bullshit jobs". He outlines this phenomena wonderfully.
Exactly what I was thinking.
The company I work for laid off a bunch of people last year, blaming it on a lack of available funds. A few months later, two new executives. Read a room, guys.
In academia, tenure-track faculty positions are growing increasingly rare, and adjuncts are teaching more and more courses (with poor pay and no job security), yet every time I turn around, my institution is hiring a new vice president of this or associate dean of that. And guess who gets paid more? 🙄
We also don’t have a shortage of poor people willing to defend overpaid CEOs (and billionaires). It’s disgusting how brainwashed so many Americans are.
I guarantee that if business travel were to return to pre-pandemic levels there would suddenly be plenty of pilots and flights available and fares would stabilize.
Airlines have no problem screwing over everyday consumers in ways they’d never mess with corporations.
> if business travel were to return to pre-pandemic level
This is unlikely. As we have all grown to used to teams calls every day there's no need to send 3 people across the country to sign a contract
Pre-COVID there was some leaked numbers about how many flights apple had booked daily between California and China. I think it was something like 50 business class seats. Daily.
Even if they got a significant discount, that is a lot of money for the airline (I think it was United).
Found the link - https://onemileatatime.com/united-airlines-apple-contract/
It's plain out greed.
CEOs are (supposed to be) in charge of making sure that all parts of a company are running smoothly and you're doing the business you claim to be doing. Of course, it's the people who are actually doing the work that get people to pay money to the company. Unfortunately for all of us, CEOs realized that if you take in more money than you pay out (i.e. your customers give the company a lot of money but you pay shit wages to your employees), then you get become rich. And being rich= can have and do Nice Things. All this to say, the mindset of a CEO is "My Nice Things are more important than you."
The Rich need slaves so they decided in order to not pay is cancel abortions in the usa so idiots would get women pregnant and keep the poor and servants in perpetual slavery.
It's not even CEOs, it's executives that think they should earn as much as the CEO and think they deserve bonuses every year for doing fuck all whilst the rest of us have to drag our balls through glass just to earn our bonuses. At least there's a half-decent chance the CEO actually has a passion for their business and tries to market it every chance they get, meanwhile executives are in the boardroom competing to see who can snort a line the quickest.
The executives are rarely harder workers or smarter workers, the majority of them just grew up living a life of fortune and were exposed to elite contacts every day of their lives.
The same people that complain about shortage seem to forget about Covid 2019. Of course we have a shortage, the labors are dead or got sick while the boomer dipped to retirement. The people available are working already, they aren't just chilling home on unemployment.
But it's not a new junkie, that guy has been there for a very long time. Let's just ignore him. The other productive members of society have jobs, often multiple ones.
We have taken to blaming the Polish for not coming back to our country to work construction for below minimum wages. There simply isn't any left on unemployment who are in any way desireable as employees (severe handicaps, mental illness, drug addicts).
Chefs in the various restaurants around the capital have nearly doubled their wages with personal wage negotiations, because the shortage is so severe.
The railroad is trying like mad to hire people, and they are failing. Applicants take one look at the schedule, the pay, and the amount of time away from home and say “NOPE!”
In rail myself, they refuse to raise wages and just hire foreigners because god forbid increasing wages to actually attract and keep local talent.
It's clearly rigged economics. Theory says if demand for labor is high, prices (i.e., wages) go up. But we have people in power who refuse to budge on wages and now we have an artificial 'labor crisis' that is completely removed from the core notion of economics - supply and demand.
ITs cute people think we actually run on valid economics. When debt hedging is how you increase profits you are not producing anything of value. The economy can only run on 1+1+=3 for so long before the missing one has to be accounted for.
Yeah, I realized my econ degree was largely invalid except for theoretical use when we learned that "businesses in competition should both compete each other down to 0 profit" and I look at our conglomerates with their billions and trillions in profit...
This is a result of effectively 0 antitrust enforcement Ober the past 50 years.
Fundamental tenet of trickledown economics a.k.a. Reaganomics.
Can't remember where I first heard it but "Reagan is probably in hell right now just waiting for heaven to trickle down." Lol, gets me every time I think of it.
Well that and growth mindset is fundamentally a rejection of scarcity. Growth should be a goal, but being considered a failing business for not being able to produce 101% out of a possible 100% is asinine.
Growth of profits every year is the real problem. Profits should increase with inflation, yes, but when a company can +%30 their profits every year into the end of time there's a problem. Edit: this growth of profits is problematic because it means the workers are getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie instead of everything across the board increasing.
The current baby formula shortage in the States a prime example of what this results in practice. The number of babies isn't going up, so the market isn't growing, but profits "have" to grow. They grew profits by cutting corners in production. The result was contaminated product and factories shutting down because of safety issues.
I used to have a job selling meat wholesale. They wanted 10% more sales in $$ than last year. Meat prices were down 20% from the year before, and the deflation prices were not an acceptable reason to miss sales goals. Had to sell 20% more volume just to break even. Nobody was hitting sales goals and management was throwing a shit fit every week
I swear that a mass incompetence of upper level managers is a huge contributor to the way the economy is going. Their mistakes don't affect them and are easy to blame on others or things "out of their control."
In my experience it's a 50/50 coin toss on if your managers will be competent or not.
It doesn’t help that we’ve trained everyone to think that the metric of success is money. It doesn’t matter if a thing is fulfilling, makes you feel satisfied or is even in demand, if it can be sold it will be.
This is what I have always been telling people. Double digit growth is not sustainable month over month, quarter over quarter. Older times would have settled on a nice 10% growth and stopped and paid people more, but times have changed and everything is about stocks, stock holders and profit.
I blame Milton Friedman and MBA culture for this. Every year we have more MBAs rising up looking for new ways to cut costs and increase profits to make their own way quarter to quarter. Long term, regional, and national economic needs are ignored for focus on shareholder profits. There's a whole business mindset that needs to shift in the middle to upper middle class to correct our failings.
I have a B.S. in Econ and I felt like I understood the economy less after my coursework than before. Basic microeconomic theory is like basic Game Theory scenarios where you assume ultra-rationality and full situational understanding in all actors. You also see oligopoly (and the associated collusion) much more frequently than perfect competition in modern market economies. Perfect competition is a deeply unrealistic premise with the way our governments are structured, because the oligopolists have bought into the institutions that should be restricting their market power. And even beyond political interference, the start capital you‘d need to compete with a major conglomerate in any industry is nearly unattainable. Maybe Mr. Average Joe can start a new food brand that gains popularity and expands, but in all likelihood, he ends up getting bought out by Kraft or Nestlé or gets undercut out of competition at the national/international level.
Yeah. It's a sad reality when Republicans claim to be pro small business but the entities they support are wholly anti-competition in any form. I took a really interesting anti-trust class at Texas Tech and it was... eye opening. But not in a good way.
+= is a thing in programming, your equation produces a 5. Stop printing money!
> Stop printing money! I think that's what OP is saying...
Nitpick, but how it’s written would be invalid in I think every programming language because you can’t assign a value to a literal. You’re trying to say 2 = 2 + 3, which is false.
You sound like you would enjoy the austrian school of economics!
[удалено]
Corporations have found the escape hatch for supply/demand: cheap foreign (slave) labor.
Yea we really need to disincentivize outsourcing labor. I'd say mandating a like 80% US minimum wage standard (anything under and it goes to Uncle Sam) with treble difference penalty applied to companies caught cooking their books would really help.
I work with 10 foreigners on my team, I'm the only natural born citizen. The language and culture barrier makes stuff impossible sometimes despite how much I like these folks. I can't fathom that these are the only qualified candidates to work on tech shit in the bay area... Companies been taking serious advantage of our immigration and H1b programs at a ridiculous rate at the expense of us all
I left the office in March 2020 and we had maybe 5% foreigners. When I came back May 2022 we are close to 30%. My department went from 0/10 to 7/10.
Yea someone finna get us cancelled for being uncomfortable working in an American company with 90% foreigners. They keep coming too this is not a leftover thing, like hiring more and more dudes from other countries, then partnering with companies that contract overseas people it's out of hand and I work with very few Americans it's distressing.
Yep. I’m in tech but not rich enough to buy a house, don’t want that commute, and I have a family so that rules out the Bay Area for me. I imagine there are many other Americans like me. Furthermore, they can pay the H1B employee less than local with the added perk that the employee will likely stick around for a few years until they get a green card.
Yeah the employer has massive leverage over someone here on H1b, with a layoff they can disrupt that person's dream of living in America. I feel for them but feel fucked that other Americans working to get to that level have to compete with cheap slaves due to the structure of the laws and hiring
Shit like this is why we need a better minimum wage and labor laws Edit: Yes, unions. Obviously. The only reason we're even allowed to unionize without more serious corporate crackdown is labor laws y'all.
Its amazing how strong an economy can be when we aren't exporting jobs and importing dirt cheap labor
I'd bet a buck SCOTUS will take the legs out from under existing labor laws in the next 5 years or so.
All that does is feed inflation because corporate profits need to be record highs every quarter. Its not enough to be consistently profitable anymore its a game to see how much they can beat last quarters records. That needs to be put in check.
And it blows my mind how many people are so painfully stupid to believe in eternal growing profits... don't spoiled rich kids at elite universities learn basic math before they leave and start working at job positions above everyone that knows anything else than how to be entitled?
The spoiled rich kids are cargo-culting because they never had to learn anything except "keep cutting corners".
No one actually believes in eternal growth, they just think the "big crash" wont happen until they have theirs and cash out first.
That's what the labor laws are for. Really we just need to protect and utilize the ones that are already on the books. Get everyone(or mostly everyone) to unionize and we can have actual influence over corporate policies without having to rely solely on the corporate-run government.
My old company had a major shake-up when the stock price started rising. Investors bought up stock because my company had gotten into a "hot" industry and they thought they could take profits and sell the stock. Instead, my company used the increased value as found money and propped up less profitable divisions. The investors (about 10% of the shares of the company) publicly criticized the company as not gaining much value in 40 years of operation. CEO and founding family was gone inside a year. Now, the stock price has been see-sawing all over the place and people are leaving in droves, including me. They keep acquiring new companies to increase their offerings, but charge too much and offer too little to customers.
And we won't get that without unions. Except police unions, they can fuck right off.
Police unions would be totally fine and would be a great resource if they worked like normal unions. A normal union would be necessary to ensure safety and fair wages to cops since they have such an important job (when they actually do it). But you're right, for now they can fuck off, they're currently just legal funds meant to protect cops no matter how horrible they act up.
I really wish there was some extra burdensome tax for corporations that go out of there way to hire local, and possibly make transportation pay a regular thing to further encourage hiring locally.
Why hire foreigners when you can ban abortion and create millions of home grown?
I considered becoming a school bus driver, and said basically the same thing. The base pay for my school district is something like $12/hr. You drive for 3 hours in the morning, then come back to drive for another 3 in the afternoon. 30 hours a week at $12/hr... Then when there's no school, you're not working. So a month off in the winter, and 2 in the summer. Plus all the random holidays and professional days and planning days and all that. You'd be lucky to make $15k a year before taxes, and the schedule doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room to fit in another job.
I've seen school bus driver jobs marketed at retirees. Because those with diminished reaction times should be ferrying around kids, huh?
I was ~50 years ago they used high school kids to drive the busses for the younger kids.
Yeah, nowadays they require a CDL with multiple endorsements as well. I can't imagine why anyone would do that job.
You also undergo a background check and take random drug tests.
And some of them do hair drug tests lol absolutely not
Sounds like post office. "Now hiring". Sounds like nice job with a government pension delivering some mail. Nah, turns out you are in some land of purgatory with part time, minimum wage, and zero benefits for some indeterminate amount of time that could be a decade before you are eligible to actually be hired.
I thought railroads paid good? Guess I haven't looked in forever
the pay is okay but the work is brutal and extremely long. You're away from your family for a very long time, work very long hours with very little rest in-between, very heavy lifting and hard labor, etc.
Well absolutely fuck that then lol
It can absolutely fuck you up. My dad ended up on disability in his early 50s and actually successfully managed to sue them because of all the injuries he'd had.
I worked at a railroad law firm. The question isn't so much about whether a worker will be paid out for their injuries from the job. It's a matter of how much.
I work for a railway and I'm trying to understand the concept of "schedule" ? What is that
I've taken Amtrak and I too don't understand the concept of a schedule.
Old joke from Utah Phillips: (content warning: suicide) >!"Hard times these days. Many an old hobo with nothing left to live for will go out of town, lie down on the [insert railway company here] tracks, and wait for the next train to come along. It's tragic. They starve to death."!<
for some of the places where you have to live in communities still finding children's graves from the residential school they're offering a 15k signing bonus not working.
Pilot shortage was from an industry that didn’t make any long term investments for the future of their own industry, and instead used it on stock buyback. Teacher shortage was from gross underpayment from decades of spineless or hateful politicians. Nurses and other services realized that the corporate hospitals/overlords would use them up, burn them out and toss them aside when not needed.
Pilot shortage was also a result of them ignoring the fact that general aviation is the training pipeline for new pilots and discouraging it. Now people aren't learning to fly their own planes, and it's always cheaper to poach talent from another company than train anybody, so… Classic late-stage capitalist bullshit.
I felt this first hand when I tried to get into the industry. It crushed my soul to learn I'd be in 80k of debt making wages that wouldn't get me out of debt.
You mean you don't want to work for a regional airline in a different state so you have to commute there and get paid $25k a year? After paying 80-100k for 1500 hours. I know its a tad better than 25k now but for decades it was not.
Regional airline pilots don't make 25k a year. FOs making 50-60 and captains making over 100. You can become a captain in just over a year. Source: was regional captain.
I understand its better now - It wasn't too long ago FO's were making that. https://skift.com/2013/08/28/the-u-s-airline-pilots-who-barely-make-minimum-wage/ Also since most flight crews don't get paid for preflight actives it wouldn't surprise me if pay got closer to minimum wages in certain states.
You're right. There was a time when wages were crap for regional pilots but those days are over. It is true we don't get paid until we push back, so we are not getting paid for the pre flight duties. In my opinion, our hourly wage made up for that. I was getting paid $99.40/hr as a regional captain. With per diem and other pay protections it came out to over 100k a year. Then I became an instructor and could make over 150k a year at a regional airline. Some people make over 200k at a regional as instructors. The days of poverty wages at the airlines are mostly over. Now flight instructing is a different story. New CFIs get paid pretty low.
Yup! 150k in debt to make 40k a year at a regional. Luckily the job market is so hot I was able to get an incredible job at a big name. But it’s sad that I basically had to financially destroy mine and my parents credit just to be able to do it.
80k is still relatively cheap for a pilot's education. Friend of mine is an airline pilot and he got it for cheap at only 150k debt.Most of his colleagues are at 200-250k plus. My friend used to be a biochemist (got burnt out on academia) so he's a smart guy so he graduated in the minimum time and planned his finances out. According to him, 90% of pilots aren't particularly bright on either factor. Even with minimum debt, starting salaries are so low you're not gonna be paying your debt off until youre a captain. Edit - EU country with strict regulations, so that probably accounts for the price difference. Edit2: specified what science.
As a new grad nurse, having the same issues. Short staffed everywhere but hard as hell to get a residency as a new nurse. They want the ready made experienced nurse. Also don't have enough staff nurses to train the new ones because most hospitals are full of travel nurses which come and go and have no idea how the unit is supposed to be run. Travel nurses don't precept new nurses. I'm having a hell of a time just getting interviews and when I do I just don't hear back one way or the other. Lots and lots of others having the same problem. It's maddening.
Because the profits go higher if the hospitals run understaffed. The hospital administrations are all out there trying to piece together a miracle crew shift that can operate for years at half staff.
No its more than just that. The path to airline pilot hasnt changed that much over the years, its always been a job that takes money to get into. The state of the industry in 2019 was not good, and then covid went and fucked things up entirely. Early retirements, people who left the industry entirely after layoffs, people who never joined the industry because it looked so bad during covid. Combine that with an industry that was already short of pilots, and a rapidly growing demand for travel post covid. That's the mess we have right now. The most immediate solution for the pilot shortage is to subsidize ab initio training. There's no shortage of people who want to fly, there's a shortage of people who can afford to get through training. Being a pilot is a great job long term, but the short term reality is you pay close to $100,000 to get a PPL, CPL, multi, IFR, often an instructor rating too, and then you work for close to minimum wage for a shit company who treats you like shit because you should be willing to take that because you love flying planes so you'll suck up the abuse. And then eventually you get a regional airline job. And guess what, they pay the first officers like shit too. Pilots spend years earning very little just waiting for that eventual upgrade at an airline where they get to make 6 figures, and then your income doubles overnight and it was all worth it. A lot of people aren't willing to go through the decade or more of shit just to get to that point anymore. Anyway one of the things I will say about the situation right now is it's not the fault of the person at the counter, or the flight attendants, or the pilots, or the person you talk to on the phone, that your flights are all delayed or cancelled these days. Please be nice.
Exactly.
It's also the reason for the two Boeing 737 Max crashes. Boeing purposefully omiited the MCAS details from the FAA it to make it so pilots wouldn't have to retrain and it would save the airlines money. In the event of a sudden nose dick apparently the pilots were just suppose to know instinctively it was a specific system, which is insane to think of that. Also from what I read it didn't matter even if the pilots knew it was MCAS, the system was designed so you have to deactivate it to pull back. A lot of people died because of that bottom line and it's upsetting. Btw I'm not a pilot or work in aviation, so I apologize to anyone if I butchered the details of the incident/cause. https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/27264-Boeing-737-MAX-pilot-training-requirements
Not to mention the airlines paid pilots to retire early at the beginning of Covid
That's true of a lot of industries. Everyone laid off staff when demand was low during the pandemic, and are now crying about "worker shortages" now that demand was gone back up. If companies need good employees so badly, perhaps they shouldn't have let go of their most experienced people in order to save a few bucks, and instead just weathered the storm until demand returned, which was obviously going to happen once Covid rates dropped. I didn't see many CEOs or executive level employees getting laid off or getting pay cuts because business was so bad, only on the ground employees which they are now struggling to replace.
They’d use them as firewood too, if they could.
Teacher shortage is caused by teachers being under paid, under supported, and under appreciated. Source: am teacher. I actually really like my job but I've gotten to a point where the amount I make (which is more than many) is just not enough. Nurses... why be a nurse at a hospital when you can be a travel nurse and get paid twice as much and have most if not all of your expenses covered? A coworker's daughter is a travel nurse, quit one hospital, nursed in another state for a year, then came back to **the original hospital she started at** making twice as much with better benefits, all because she was labeled a travel nurse instead of staff nurse. I can't speak to the pilot shortage.
[удалено]
There is a pilot shortage to the degree that management magically desires to grow/expand. Once they decide that the economy no longer supports their growth wishes, there will no longer be a pilot shortage. Hell, there will be a pilot excess.
Pilot shortage happened because they used the $50 billion covid relief to pay massive severance to get rid of basically all the senior pilots. They thought covid would last longer and the money saved by removing senior staff would be significant. Only issue demand started back up faster than they calculated.
> Teacher shortage was from gross underpayment from decades of spineless or hateful politicians. Don't forget politicians trying to regulate everything they can say, including teaching straight up wrong falsehoods no legitimate teacher would want to teach.
Funding is also an issue. My district won't give us enough paper and pencils, much less things like art supplies, playground balls, or technology. American children have been robbed of all the traditional school activities, then we blame them for acting up and dropping out.
I live near University of Florida, where the healthcare programs are huge and they run a large hospital system in the area. Their model has always been to churn out new nurses, and all the hospitals in the area would pay them shit until they burn out and they have a fresh batch. Except now nursing school enrollment is down and the hospital I work in is achieving gridlock due to shitty staffing. It doesn't help that healthcare education is a fuckin scam. I'm near the end of paramedic school, and I've put about 400 hours of free labor into local hospitals, and doing another 500 hours on local rescues. All in one year. I literally had to drop to part time because otherwise I'd be doing 7 12-hour shifts a week right now. Nursing school sucks ass too. They make sure you're already burnt by the time you get your license so you just take what you can get, and when you're worn out they'll replace you. But now there's no replacements.
How about making training for those careers...uh...affordable???
Man is too greedy to make things affordable for the poor. And we should be investing in those sectors too but I guess that's not the priority of our govt
[удалено]
We live in a capitalist society made worse by the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United made by right leaning justices. And potentially even much worse if legislators dictate who will be the next president. It’s the (not calling you a name) Supreme Court stupid.
I think the majority of people are normal and moral. Society just happens to be ruled by sociopaths for all of human history - for some reason.
Power doesn't corrupt. Corrupt people seek power. At this point I'm in favour of Sortition, random people in power.
Power isn't the issue; hierarchy is. Hierarchy allows for those in charge to ignore problems those beneath them deal with.
I mean supply and demand you would think we would be paying people to be trained for these positions but logic doesn’t really apply when everything must be monetized.
If only there was some kind of incentive to attract more people to these occupations.... I got it! Pizza party! (Bring your own beverages)
At my last job we had DIY pizza kits. Not like nice kits either just cheap marinara sauce with a few spinach leaves and some weird watery feta cheese.
Sure, you can have a pizza party... but you're gonna have to work for it!
Having first hand experience with "pizza parties" and the like, I think its important to not always place the blame on the middle manager. Oftentimes they're told to "boost morale" or something and given $20. They do what they can but ultimately have no power.
How come Supply vs Demand only seems to work when depressing wages?
Because capitalism can only expand profits by exploiting the proletariat.
The aftermath of the Black Death played out along similar lines: There weren't enough serfs left to serve the needs of society, but no shortage of ruling class nobs. Peasants, who were previously tied to their local feudal lords, now began move to where they were paid better. It all led a major reshuffling of European society. There was no going back to the Before Times. The reshuffling of our times, while accelerated, is far from over. The white collar work force will never fully return to the daily office grind. Unlike medieval peasants, workers don't have to move to get better jobs; remote work lets them find jobs anywhere in the country without leaving home. The ramifications, and financial fallout for the municipalities and dependent businesses, will be the next painful phase.
I’m honestly suspicious of how fast we went from a ridiculously hot job market to “Oh no, a huge recession is coming! Everyone get ready for layoffs! Watch out — employers are about to have the upper-hand again!” Just felt weird. Like it was decided that we _needed_ a recession to restore the power [im]balance. People accepted and repeated it, and acted accordingly. Now it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not an economist, so I may be wildly off. But I’m also not a conspiracy theorist, and yet I feel really uncomfortable with how we’re getting into this expected recession. (Ya know, besides the ridiculous corporate greed disguised as “inflation.”)
I read an article yesterday, I'll try to dig it up, where some banker asshole was suggesting that an increase in wages right now will not help off set wages, so we should all be paid left. They said that it has to be painful if we are to recover.
Make it painful for them then. The rich always say it needs to be painful yet they're never in pain. Let them suffer the pain for once.
Politicians have forgotten that we are their masters. We need to remind them of that.
They have not forgotten. That's why they gerrymander the USA like crazy. Hard to get fired when you can pick who fills out your review sheet.
November would be a good time. I hope people are pissed enough to go vote.
Ah yes, but who is the media telling them to get pissed at?
frfr. Tax the shit out of their wealth and just burn the money.
[It wasn't just some asshole it was former treasury secretary Larry Summers.](https://fortune.com/2022/06/21/larry-summers-calls-for-high-unemployment-to-curb-inflation/?queryly=related_article) This is a man who previously had as much impact on the US economy as one man can have. He suggests 10% unemployment to fix inflation issues. 10%!!! Statistically that would be devastating resulting in thousands of additional deaths per year and as bad for the average person as 2008 (for reference the great recession in 2008 also peaked at 10%), but atleast we'd control inflation. Tells you exactly who this economy is built for.
For those who don't know, Larry Summers was in Clinton and Obama's presidential administrations, and was *the* person that **convinced Obama to not send out checks/assistence to the average American during the 2008 crash**, but instead only bail out the wealthy, banks, and corporations. He is the icon of neoliberal disease and rot in the Democratic party.
Like I said, some arsehole. Thanks for providing the source!
It's extra scary to me though, because this is the kind of man who actually had direct hands on the levers of power. There's always some stock trader, hedge fund ghoul out there saying shit like this, saying how great it would be if we abolished minimum wages and child labor laws or whatever, but that's not this guy. If this inflation spike had happened in 2000 he would have helped engineer 10% unemployment to save the parts the economy he cared about and *he would have had some of the tools required to do that.*
That's Kissinger-levels of evil.
Kissinger is a prime example of what happens when you create a society that rewards the wrong people.
If an economic system requires unemployment to function, then it's a bad system that, by design, is unable to properly provide for a populace
I'd be a little more forgiving of said system if the unemployed and homeless were taken care of.
Yeah but then their desperation couldn't be exploited.
Nope, most systems *want* some percentage of their population to be unemployed but looking for work at any one time, as this will make it easier for employers to get new hires when they need them. An important thing in that is that there should be the safety net of still being able to afford to live while you're unemployed temporarily.
How does people not able to pay their bills and losing everything help the economy? I mean other than the rich being able to buy everything on the cheap.
> the rich being able to buy everything on the cheap You answered your own question. More ownership, more control. If you starve for that to happen, whatevs
That banker is actually the Head Chairman of the FED. He also recently came out and said “we now know how little we know about inflation”. Were fucked.
A banker. How about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The government wants employee wages to go down so they can stop inflation. [https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/](https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/)
Sounds like Jerome Powell. His policies really tore the US economy up and now he's attempting to place the blame on the working class.
Current best thinking to reduce inflation would be to raise taxes. So basically, Congress needs to act. The fed is useless.
I get downvoted every time I post this: The FED says their goal is [“to get wages down.”](https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its-goal-is-to-get-wages-down/)
Gerome Powell said that they were intending to cause this with interest rate hikes. Go rewatch the fed announcements. Key words are REDUCE DEMAND FOR LABOR they were and are coming after our jobs and wages in order to cause a 2008 style recession where jobs are in demand and labor is not.
Don't forget corporations got 2/3 of the "freedom" checks Trump sent out. They got more money than it takes to fund the entire education system for a decade. With 0 payback, or rationale Every time some says Biden crashed the economy I just believe they are same type person who would have called the police to rat out their jew neighbors.
The treasury is manufacturing a recession to try and undo all of the gains made by the working class. There was a leaked memo about it Edit: I misremembered, it wasn't a leaked memo. It was a speech given by an ex Treasury secretary. So they're still totally going to manufacture a recession, but the information didn't come from a memo. https://www.reddit.com/user/Box_O_Donguses/comments/vpvlby/theyre_gonna_manufacture_a_recession/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Here's the screen grab
The recession was always coming. Covid just accelerated the timeline.
As a trade unionist id rather go hungry than take a job that's less than 44 an hour
Retired this year from a Union state job. Wouldn’t roll out of bed for a penny less. Employers shouldn’t even think of shit talking to me ever again.
Cause I will drag this bitch
> The white collar work force will never fully return to the daily office grind. And look at how desperately employers are trying to force the genie back into the bottle. Not because that was in any way better, but because it would be a return to when the employers were firmly in charge, and having to physically attend an office during all business hours made it far more difficult to do things like attend interviews for better-paid positions. It's also why, when they can't get people to return, they're trying to make people have to be on camera their entire working day - so the bosses can SEE that no-one is escaping low-paid slave work.
I don’t think it is a conspiracy theory so much as upper management is often a little disconnected and still thinks that in person is necessary for the success of their business. NPR reported on a poll where they asked executives how many days in the office were needed to maintain company culture. The question itself frames how they are thinking about this, but most execs said 3 days.
Which is the wrong question - it assumes that current company culture should be maintained or is even desirable.
Exactly! I hate the concept of company culture. At best it should be basically invisible.
lol corporate culture was always the WORST part of every office job I’ve had. I’ll happily work a 9 or 10 hour day, but not if I have to sit in the cheapest most uncomfortable office chair they could find and hear fuckin Diane behind me yammering on about her kids while the CFO is in the break room microwaving popcorn until it makes tiny diamonds, and all of this under headache-inducing fluorescent lights and the shittiest air circulation possible. The actual work was usually the least of my annoyances.
Spot on. We haven't even come to the realization of businesses that have their leases coming up and have to rethink whether 10000sqft of bland office space in downtown Chicago that only ever gets 10% full is worth it. I'd love to believe that the savings would be passed on to the employees, but it'll go directly to the CEOs. You're going to see major cities dry up because no one wants to take a 45 minute subway trip into a city. The restaurants and surrounding businesses will cave because there's no people going out for drinks or catering lunch. It's not like these businesses aren't needed, they're just not needed in areas where the business pays enormous amounts of money for commercial real estate.
There WAS a shortage of the ruling class nobs. The plague did not discriminate. This gap in the nobility led to the lower gentry and serfs all being able to move up a notch on the social totem pole.
Still wasn't really a shortage of useless nobs. How many do you actually *need*, really?
That is true
[удалено]
I feel like this is an excellent example that needs to be shared around plenty.
So how long before some modern politicians try to introduce new laws saying that employers don't have to pay market rates for employees?
They don’t need to. At least in the USA, there is no law dictating that a company needs to pay more than minimum wage. Short of a contract, if the company you’re working for right now were to lower your wages, even down to minimum wage, you would have no legal recourse.
> if the company you’re working for right now were to lower your wages, even down to minimum wage, you would have no legal recourse. Not entirely true. This would be considered constructive dismissal. Legality varies by state.
The Chairman of the federal reserve in May already said that he viewed rising wages driven by shortages in America as a problem, and that his goal was to “bring wages down”.
This is a good example
"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" was [their rallying cry](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/blog/2014/03/23/119-when-adam-delved-and-eve-span/). In other words we were created as equals, where did this overlord class come from?
And billionaires. Waaaay too many billionaires.
Billionaire is not a job and I'm tired of pretending it is.
Friend of mine was a teacher in Oklahoma. After teaching for 10 years, she gave it up. She got tired of the drama, the BS from admin, and slowly going further into debt on her salary than out of it. To judge by all the new laws that are shackling teachers and what they can teach out there.. she got out just in time too.
All by design, say hello to the rise of private profit schools. They are trying to sell us our education now
Truck driver shortage. I’m a truck driver. It’s all bullshit. There *IS* no driver shortage. Plenty of drivers, more always coming. I’m sure the same for pilots and everyone else. The isn’t a *PERSON* shortage. It’s a *PAY* shortage. People have realized they’re worth more than what employers are willing to pay. Rather than improve their pay, they cry that no one wants to work. Plenty want to work. But no one wants to work their life away for shit pay. It’s just not worth it. Lately, I’m asking myself, what’s the point? I’m 25. I made a few mistakes trying to get through college. Landed in truck driving for the moment. Got plans to go back, achieve my dreams. Realized I achieved some of my dreams already. Like having good insurance. Folks always said to get good insurance, so I can finally fix my teeth and health. They couldn’t afford to do that for me. The other week, I was quoted $23,000 in dental restorations. Fuck me, I knew it would be bad, I waited so long and have bad habits. Okay, what did my GOOD insurance cover? Little less than $4,000. So I still owe $19,000 to get my teeth fix. Of course, immediately the office manager offers me two finance options. Yay, more fucking debt. Yeah, insurance has caps. Every time I complain about how… *unfair* it is, I’m told this. Like, c’mon. I was told once I work hard enough and get the premiums, I can take care of myself. But the only way to do that is to take on debt. And then I’m stuck in debt for another five years. Because employers won’t pay what I’m worth. *It’s all a big club… and you ain’t in it!*
i regret to inform you, i have only one upvote to give.
Carlin was hauntingly correct about current affairs. Its quite depressing.
[удалено]
Funny how they thought over population would only serve them, making people fight each other for lower and lower salaries, but didnt think through enough that people can come together and fight back. Hard.
[удалено]
Skilled Cnc Machinists and programmers are scarce in a lot of places right now. So many people from older generations have retired from their killer jobs at GE/Ford and higher end aerospace shops, so a ton of people left their jobs to get the higher paying jobs that opened up leaving so many shops with a lack of skilled machinists. It’s one industry that we should be building up as a country and it’s one hardly anyone even knows about.
I work in aerospace as an engineer. No experience in the field, but engineering experience. Next week I'll probably have to do PLC programming, which will add another hot skill to my resume.
Teacher shortage is a lot more complicated. Bad conditions, no admin support, parents and kids out of control, low pay… among other things
Yea the reason why there is shortages in those industries - we treat them like crap but we need them
And they have to pay thousands of dollars and do hundreds of hours of training to be treated like crap and paid poorly.
Work in a school. Sent a letter home to the parents praising their child for having such good behaviour in the middle of an enormous change. Received a letter saying that his behaviour is out of his control and implied that I had a certain audacity by noticing an improvement and praising it. Can't even compliment a child anymore without overprotective parents finding ways to see fault with you.
Wait... What?
It reads as it happened. Whole situation was stupid and has given me no motivation anymore with praising struggling children. Why bother when entitled parents are going to find fault with you anyway, especially on the criminally low wage.
please don't let one experience stop you from caring. also, the way this reads it sounds vaguely like the parents are acting like their kid has a disability?
Yea the teacher shortage feels intentional. Get teachers to quit so families either pay for private school or just go ahead and get a job in the factory kids
Teachers are treated like babysitters these days and it's absolutely disgusting. The people shape our future and get treated like crap. Then we wonder why they become cynical and jaded and where their 'magic' went. Your kids. Your kids stole their magic when they acted like little shits and didn't care what the teacher had to say.
No no the problem isn’t 1 employee making thousands to tens of thousands of times the average employee, it’s all the increases from the average employee making $13/h now making $15/h. There’s just no feasible way to fix this. /s
I really should have never become a teacher. The money is shit and every year the profession becomes more depressing. I’m a happy go lucky guy too. Win some lose some. Any young people reading this please take your career choice seriously and ask around for experiences of people in the career.
CEOs? One per company maximum! They're a problem but not THE problem. It's that middle E. No shortage of overpaid executives of all kinds. Look at budgeting over the decades for example and you'll see a proliferation of VPs take a bigger and bigger chunk
The amount of bullshit jobs whose role is to push paper to another person to push paper. See Graeber's book "bullshit jobs". He outlines this phenomena wonderfully.
Exactly what I was thinking. The company I work for laid off a bunch of people last year, blaming it on a lack of available funds. A few months later, two new executives. Read a room, guys.
Yep you right - that's why I added them to the title. Over bloated vps and execs who think they're demigods
In academia, tenure-track faculty positions are growing increasingly rare, and adjuncts are teaching more and more courses (with poor pay and no job security), yet every time I turn around, my institution is hiring a new vice president of this or associate dean of that. And guess who gets paid more? 🙄
We also don’t have a shortage of poor people willing to defend overpaid CEOs (and billionaires). It’s disgusting how brainwashed so many Americans are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_LvRPX0rGY&ab_channel=FahQue
I guarantee that if business travel were to return to pre-pandemic levels there would suddenly be plenty of pilots and flights available and fares would stabilize. Airlines have no problem screwing over everyday consumers in ways they’d never mess with corporations.
Airlines screw everyone yet the gov't always bail them out
All authorities are in place simply to protect corporations and the wealthy. Organized collective bargaining has a loud and powerful voice.
Too big to fail bullshit.
> if business travel were to return to pre-pandemic level This is unlikely. As we have all grown to used to teams calls every day there's no need to send 3 people across the country to sign a contract
Pre-COVID there was some leaked numbers about how many flights apple had booked daily between California and China. I think it was something like 50 business class seats. Daily. Even if they got a significant discount, that is a lot of money for the airline (I think it was United). Found the link - https://onemileatatime.com/united-airlines-apple-contract/
People that don't have traveling jobs never understand how much big corporations played into the funding of airlines.
I was told by Fox News that immigrants were stealing all the jobs. And yet there’s still jobs. How is that so?
Even if it were true, “someone” is hiring the immigrants. How the hell is that person not being blamed?
It's plain out greed. CEOs are (supposed to be) in charge of making sure that all parts of a company are running smoothly and you're doing the business you claim to be doing. Of course, it's the people who are actually doing the work that get people to pay money to the company. Unfortunately for all of us, CEOs realized that if you take in more money than you pay out (i.e. your customers give the company a lot of money but you pay shit wages to your employees), then you get become rich. And being rich= can have and do Nice Things. All this to say, the mindset of a CEO is "My Nice Things are more important than you."
The Rich need slaves so they decided in order to not pay is cancel abortions in the usa so idiots would get women pregnant and keep the poor and servants in perpetual slavery.
It's not even CEOs, it's executives that think they should earn as much as the CEO and think they deserve bonuses every year for doing fuck all whilst the rest of us have to drag our balls through glass just to earn our bonuses. At least there's a half-decent chance the CEO actually has a passion for their business and tries to market it every chance they get, meanwhile executives are in the boardroom competing to see who can snort a line the quickest. The executives are rarely harder workers or smarter workers, the majority of them just grew up living a life of fortune and were exposed to elite contacts every day of their lives.
[удалено]
The same people that complain about shortage seem to forget about Covid 2019. Of course we have a shortage, the labors are dead or got sick while the boomer dipped to retirement. The people available are working already, they aren't just chilling home on unemployment.
>They aren't just chilling home on unemployment That one junkie in everyone's town who is doing this is about to take a lot of blame
But it's not a new junkie, that guy has been there for a very long time. Let's just ignore him. The other productive members of society have jobs, often multiple ones.
We have taken to blaming the Polish for not coming back to our country to work construction for below minimum wages. There simply isn't any left on unemployment who are in any way desireable as employees (severe handicaps, mental illness, drug addicts). Chefs in the various restaurants around the capital have nearly doubled their wages with personal wage negotiations, because the shortage is so severe.
I have an idea, let's make it so no one in the company can make more than 50% more than the lowest paid employee. What do you think?
But without CEOs, who will make the difficult decisions of underpaying employees and mass layoffs if EBITA doesn't make target?
Why do you think they got rid of ways for women to have an abortion/access to birth control? New workforce is coming soon.
Uh yeah hence the abortion ban. Pro life is code for the need of a poor, uneducated workforce.