https://twitter.com/Brian_Riedl/status/1391086956583530498 it's actually really fucking funny how many people are callin his bullshit
It has been beaten pretty bad, but claiming a worker only adds $8/hr of value is some of the most asinine shit i've read so far on this ridiculous fake problem that could easily be solved by properly compensating workers.
If someone's labor only adds $8/hr in revenue, an employer having to pay $15 is losing $7/hr on them
:marx-thinking:
Poor People Are Worthless and Shouldn't Be Paid
is simply the axiom. There is no refuting it.
I really like that part about college, pretty much summed up why i never went because after 2 years of junior college i realized I was only interested in humanities or the "bad" degrees and I'd never pay back my loans. I learned more in philosophy, sociology, anthropology and even political science than I ever did in any other class in any other classes by a large margin. And somehow that was the only thing I actually wanted to apply myself for, so I just went into the shitty job field and I'm probably just as well off some years later than had I got that degree. I know so many people my age with degrees working similar jobs as me, it's sad really.
What kind of business are you running that is viable at $8 worth of revenue per employee? Is the CEO coming down and using his exceptional value creating skills to run the ice cream machine and grills with their 8 arms?
Also love how he brings up the housing argument as it relates to wages for expensive urban centers, yet nothing is questioned in regards to how wage theft plays a significant role in that equation. But that's always the case with neoliberalism - you can just pretend everything is seemingly disparate and existing in a vacuum only when it's convenient for you.
Honestly, where do these people even come from? At this point I don't even see some of them as being human.
i mean it's this guy's job to straight up lie like this and come up with absurd scenarios and people who subscribe to the economist go "yess so true!!"
Real galaxy brain hours, I'm not sure if you could even consider this guy's argument a strawman but I guess that's the closest to what it is.
At least in my area, most of my meals at fast food places are like $7-8 and I don't get a drink 90% of the time.
During rushes, I would guess that the popular fast food places in my area (i.e. everything but burger king lol) pull a car a minute through the drive through. Assuming some of the cars have multiple people, and conservatively estimating $10 per car, that's $600 per hour. That would completely cover six employees over an eight hour shift at $15 per hour, and that's just the drive through for one hour.
Is the CEO coming down and using his exceptional value creating skills to run the ice cream machine and grills with their 8 arms?
The CEO had an idea so powerful that it turned lead into gold.
The workers are incidental, because you can always find someone to do manual labor at bargain basement prices.
It's just circular logic. "I'm worth it because I'm rich and I'm rich because I'm worth it." As soon as the labor surplus dries up, the CEO will go screeching to the government coffers for a bailout (or screeching to the police/DA's office for a new crop of press-ganged indentured servants). If you dispute any of it, the Libs just scream "Economically Illiterate!" at you.
The fact that he had three totally unrelated 'entry level's jobs shows that they were probably part time jobs he had as a kid and didn't actually need them.
I washed dishes for fucking years, hell it was a good part of my last job but I also got paid well, which is rare. Dishwashers generate the most value for money in the whole fucking restaurant. No one else can do anything if the dishwasher isn't doing anything. The dishwasher is the only person that is essential for every single other part of the restaurant functioning.
i always tell people the dishwasher is quite honestly the backbone to the restaurant business. Service comes screeching to a halt at high/medium volume places without them. If a dishie walks out, it's chaos, very rarely can someone freely hop in and do it right then, especially the back of the house. I did it for a bout a year and while it wasn't the best thing ever, it was mostly stress free unless someone is breathing down your neck about some bullshit. But they get paid usually the worst. I always tipped out the dishie though, it's only fair
I can bounce in on the line and am a prep wizard. I got paid well for my later dish gigs but that's cause I was also keeping the line stocked, doing baking and could train new line cooks from the pit. Otherwise I've stuck to prep gigs. I'm a great cook but fuck the line.
If you're washing dishes and being treated as an inferior you can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt or at least make people stressed all shift. It definitely taught me how to demand respect .
yeah that's what's up, a good restaurant in my eyes always has the dishie training in other areas to be a fill in, because that industry is soooo fuckin flakey and owners never hire enough people or backup/on call people so if someone on the line gets sick and they actually don't show up for once, a trained dishie can keep everything going smooth. I always viewed it as a more "old fashioned" thing that has gone away in sooo many industries where you legit can work your way to (mostly) the top if you put in the effort and wherever you work trusts you to take on more responsibility like prep and then line cooking.
My last fish job was at a super small vegan place, the owner was still small business tyrant but worked as a cook for a long time beforehand so she was a lot more reasonable than most. I was out of town and she covered my job for a week, when she actually had to do it and fully knew how much I actually did I was given a three dollar raise and was third in command of back of house, basically in charge at night. Before and what I'll probably go for when I have to work again was catering or prep jobs for grocery stores or what have you.
hell yeah, sometimes people legit only learn when they put themselves in someone else's shoes. Some still wont ever learn, but it's good you had a boss who did.
I'm only laid off because they're too small for even limited seated dining with covid. Also there's only one bathroom and it's in the very open kitchen. The main thing that sucks with it is my EI may run out before I'm necessary there again and I was getting a way bigger wage than anyone else will offer and tips were split evenly between front and back of house and we cleaned up hard in tips. During slow times it still averaged $200 a week. There was also a staff of about ten people, four of us were commies the rest were decent radlib folk. I was also personally allowed by the owner to help myself at the bar while working, my pot dealers door was in the alley by the restaurant where i had smoke breaks. Me and the owner did whippets in the stock room on slow days and I could make paying customers listen to anarcho punk and of they complained servers could tell them to piss off. I legit miss that job.
Edit: also I think maybe I just live in a pretty based town generally. The average person is a socdem so our small vegan restaurant people who have all gone through the working in kitchen gauntlet are usually pretty radical or literally Joe Rogan
I’m only laid off because they’re too small for even limited seated dining with covid.
Yeah, i do feel for the good places that suffered through this like that, it can't be easy. I mean, i'm biased caused I'd love to do a foodtruck/eventual hole-in-the-wall type deal, so I think about it a lot.
Overall sounded like a good gig though, I mean at the very least, sounded like you were happy there and to me i'll take small pay cuts to just be happy where I work, ya know? I've worked for too long in too stressful places that extremely unappreciated me and my co-workers and always kept me drinking at night or just being grumpy asshole. I don't want to be that kinda person.
My second job ever was at a mom and pop burger place and that shit was so fuckin awesome. It was just the cook and me as server/cashier/fryer whatever needed to be done. But we got paid alright cash but I never had to deal with the boss, and the cook was the dopest dude ever and bought me beer when I was like 19/20 and we'd always crack a beer near closing time and just got along. Good food, always got a big ass serving for my free meals and overall just no stress. Even when a ton of people would come in I knew that job like the back of my hand so it never really got to me. I appreciated when it was busy actually, day go by so fast like that
depends on the spot really. at first it can be overwhelming for sure, but most jobs can be like that. you'll probably break some shit and then be paranoid about doing that for a long time until you do it again and then realize it's just not a big deal if you're keeping up with the pace of shit, but that was always a more stressful thing I had to overcome in the start. you gotta figure out a system that's efficient and good. It's not always just grabbing the first thing you see and rinsing and throwing in the washer, you have to know what takes priority over others. I'm speaking mainly from a higher volume perspective, but typically you need to clean various pans and stuff the cooks use often but you can't fall behind on the stuff they also need: plates and sometimes utensils. I would never call the job easy though, it's maybe mediumish, sometimes super chill and relaxing, other times it's chaos. Really depends on how many dishes the restaurant has and how good your actual dishwashing machine is. I've never been to a place that handwashes everything but some of the nicer places do handwash a lot of stuff!! Dishies absolutely deserve more than they start out, and truly do deserve some of the tips if they don't split it at that restaurant automatically. You gotta either know someone or shop around to find a place that takes decent care of them, you never want to see a good dishwasher leave, it's a huge morale killer unless of course they have moved on to better things and you can be happy for them.
Hey fuck it's hard. I did it and other kitchen stuff for over ten years. I've done pretty much every variety except for big chains. I know professional food making.
I keep trying to do a decent answer but there's a lot of different setups and types of kitchens and stuff and I keep getting lost in specifics. There's the size of the place, the dish machine (if there is one) if you're solo or a group and other crap. No matter what it's fucking hard hard work. Kitchens are a whole culture that if you haven't done it it's hard to explain well. Kitchen work is fucking brutal up and down but dish in a bad place is the worst you can get. In a good place it can be pretty rad but that takes finding a good spot and being able to do more than just dish.
What is the metric by which it is determined their labor only contributed $8/hr?
The one where you get paid to say shit like that. Seriously, fuckin dude thinks wages have actually increased proportionally with productivity over the last 40 years and linked a Larry fuckin' Summers paper lol. And even in that paper they claim wages haven't increased with productivity by blaming "external factors" or whatever it was, he didn't even really read it. But he gets paid to say shit like that from his libertarian think tank. I guess if you just count CEO's wages going up, it's basically the same thing lmfaoo
The one where you get paid to say shit like that.
So much of modern economic journalism is justifiably attributed imposter syndrome.
I love that they have the gall to say shit like this and then have someone do their books for $8 an hour and watch how the $5-10k/day net turns into $2-4k profits after wages and expenses.
The LTV is true, but workers get like 90-95% of the value of their labor
Brilliant
If all of the CEOs in America were to go on strike at the same time all of the sanitation workers went on strike, who would society beg to go back to work first? That is who provides the most value.
It's funny because this is a step up from "if they have to pay their employees twice as much they'll only be able to afford half as many employees." Like this is their most intellectual possible argument and it still fails to basic common sense.
In fact I bet the stupider version is more effective, because that one is completely brain dead whereas this one prompts you to think and then immediately realize that it doesn't work.
Is there a single job that only adds $8/hr in revenue, besides CEO, if we're being generous?
Hm, I'm looking at this again and even though it's both poorly explained and wrong, I think there's actually a kernel of truth to it and the reasons it's wrong are a little subtler than they might look. Might have to do an effort-ish post about this argument, what it does get right, and how to counter it if I really feel like putting off my other work.
The gist of it is that there is actually a sense in which an employee can contribute less than $8/hr, although it doesn't really have anything to do with being "unskilled" like this guy is implying, and in fact doesn't depend on the employee so much as the larger structure of the business.
edit: though, the biggest and most obvious reason it's wrong is just that it doesn't agree with actual evidence
Just taking the first tweet, the premise that one person's labor, no matter what they actually do is $8/hr is an absurd thought in itself. Labor isn't just actual physical work, it's time being used by the employee as well. I can't think of a single job that are actually legit worth $8/hr. If your business is actually loosing money after paying someone $10-15, Robert's original argument still holds true, as well, you do not have a viable business model OR at the very least, be doing the work yourself if you truly believe in it. Not even really getting into the Marxist critique of what he believes labor truly is either. If we we're to break this down and say, Employee A is worth $11/hr and employee B is worth $7/hr but they are both paid $8/hr, then either train your lower performer better or find someone else, that's sorta how the current system is supposed to work. I've slacked off at jobs plenty once I realized how busting my ass isn't worth it for slightly above min wage, mostly because I and many people in those jobs are worth more than that and it's not even a way to truly survive in this world.
If people who produce a thing cannot afford to live the price of that thing is artificially low and should be raised to it's natural price whereby those people can live comfortably
I like how they have no problem defending the labor theory of value when it suits them.
I got blocked, lol. Normally blue checks just turn off notifications from people without blue checks.
i should have mentioned he was reading all the comments!! that is actually the best part when you know you get under their skin lol
