I accept that the market drives down the wages of service workers, but their working conditions are just outrageous to me. Automation and optimization has turned retail into a hellish job. On demand scheduling, zero tolerance policies, wage theft, etc. Its MBAs and programmers making a buck by burdening the people who are least equipped to find a job doing something else.
See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush ("A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. 'I know you were told to be here at 8:15,' she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, 'but that was just to make sure you got here early.'").
Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work?
I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do.
Unemployment isn't an engineer or an MBA's fault. It's the fault of shareholders, executives and congressmen: they're the ones hoarding the money at the top. I guarantee you, if the money went to the engineers, we'd have 98% employment right now and the jobs would be a whole lot more interesting than retail. Heck, we'd have to start using graphical user interfaces for stores because we wouldn't be able to find enough people to work retail!
Service jobs aren't inherently crummy. What makes it crummy are the software systems that let managers schedule people on variable, on-demand schedules, and policies that micro-manage bathroom breaks and the like. There's an entire industry focused on getting additional tenths of a percent out of service workers.
Papa John's founder said it'd cost something like $0.50 extra per pizza to offer his employees health insurance. I'm not even talking about a luxury like health insurance. What would it cost to let employees take a few extra sick days or be able to plan on when they'll work or the occasional unplanned bathroom break? http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1djlt0/pregnant_tmobil...
>"What makes it crummy are the software systems that let managers schedule people on variable, on-demand schedules, and policies that micro-manage bathroom breaks and the like. There's an entire industry focused on getting additional tenths of a percent out of service workers."
The problem that you see here could also be characterized as a lack of demand for the labor services of the employees. Perhaps we should attempt to find more, new productive activities for low-skill workers.
> Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work?
Unless your software is giving those people something better to do you're lying to yourself if you think you've made things better for them. As miserable as these jobs are, they're still better than no job at all.
Of course, I'm not saying it's your responsibility to solve that problem. When you automate someone's job away, the person who benefits is the employer, not the (ex-) employee.
The customer is the most likely to benefit, which is why they often choose to shop at stores which are highly automated and optimized. The employers are often automating or optimizing to compete with alternatives, and these companies often see the gains competed away. Managers may benefit, though they often face issues similar to the employees.
Unemployment wasn't what was at issue. It was the structuring of particular jobs in ways that are particularly unpleasant for those who remain simply because it lets you cut one more job.
This isn't the fault of all MBAs or all engineers, but it's quite arguably the fault of the particular engineers who built the tools to manage that way and certainly the particular MBAs who chose to deploy those tools in a way that makes people miserable.
You know, I'd never blame anyone for looking out for number one. I just think its sad that one of the easiest things to do as either an engineer or an MBA is figure out how to put people put of work. Much easier than finding a way to put someone to work. I just lament the system is structured that way.
Eh... to my mind it partly depends on the degree they benefit and the degree of harm they inflict (taking into account a bunch of things, including the chance of someone else doing the same thing instead of them). But I agree that the balance of blame should be reserved for the system when it is structured in a way that encourages poor behavior and leads to poor results,
That'd just push down wages for the parts of your schedule you're actually working, though. Minimum wages are the type of thing where if you push on one side, it incentivizes employers to extract more value by any means possible out of you.
I'm a broken record on this, but: an unconditional basic income is the answer to this situation. The only way you can make sure every job has dignity is for every person to be able to quit their job without worrying about starving or being unable to afford any housing. Once everyone is guaranteed that bare minimum, employers have to treat their employees with a basic level of respect and dignity. Otherwise they'll quit.
So, what happens if the unconditional basic income becomes 'the new poverty' as the economy adjusts and the price of basic goods and services change? We'd end up in the same spot - they can treat you like crap, because you are replaceable, and you still need the money.
I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.
Freely available, more or less safe and sanitary public water fountains have not resulted in economic or cultural collapse; nor have they wiped out the bottle water market.
The people who really hate the idea of a basic income often have a religious background... how dare they be allowed a civilized level of charity without following religion, etc.
One way to work around price manipulation is to cut out the highly profitable middleman... Here's your bag of rice and block of cheese, see you next week. Need a safe warm place to sleep? Here have this empty unlocked jail cell. It would likely close resemble a long term version of natural disaster / hurricane aid, perhaps more formally run. In culturally inferior areas it'll almost certainly resemble the worst imagination (caricature) of the projects. In better cultural areas, it'll probably look a lot like a student dorm. People gonna be themselves, no matter if you like it or not.
If you want even the slightest tiny bit better, and most will, that'll cost a bit. In fact it probably will cost a bit more than now.
An increase in the cost of living would occur, particularly for people for whom essential goods form the large part of their consumption (luxury goods, in contrast, would likely decrease in price). The details of extent, however, depend on the magnitude of the basic income.
A couple things counteract that increase in price. For one, capital would flow more toward producing essential goods owing to a larger demand: this would prioritize research and development in those goods, and in hunting out inefficiencies that hamper their production and distribution, leading to a lower real cost. For two, most people already consume the bare essentials of life--the real question is just where that money comes from, be it a basic income, a demeaning job, a good job, or debt. (These two counteracting factors are at odds, btw: the more one is a factor, the less the other is. The second prevents inflation from being an issue at all, while the first merely mitigates against it. Two is the larger factor, imo.)
In addition, there's an individual psychological factor that helps. Not having a guaranteed income means that, at a moment's notice, you can have no financial ability to take care of yourself: this puts you into bad situations and leads you to make locally rational decisions that are globally suboptimal (where you do less-than-ideal things to survive today that cost you a lot more down the line than the benefit you got today). And this has a broader deleterious social impact: for instance, you might be forced to abandon all your social networks to move back home (if you have a home to go back to!), which significantly increases search costs and destroys valuable information, making labor markets less efficient. So even if there's been serious inflation because of a basic income, it still allows you to stay afloat instead of throwing your life into radical chaos.
I share your concern about the exact shape of what would happen, and the level of basic income that best improves social outcomes depends on such a number of factors that it seems very difficult to calculate. Phasing it in over a range of increasing values seems like one way to deal with that.
So, that is an interesting point you brought up regarding the psychological factor of knowing that your well-being is tied completely to your job that prevents you from making rational decisions. But we are speaking about this from the perspective of a well-adjusted (presumably) adult.
I'm going to do something I shouldn't and try to imagine myself as a teenager again (urgh), and whether or not I would have ever held down a job if I had guaranteed money to fall back on. There are times I think I would have done it, and times I could easily see myself throwing hands in the air and going home to play video games at the first sign of adversity.
The whole exercise leaves me wondering, even though I think the 'Basic Income' is an interesting idea for replacing needs-based programs, whether or not these individual choices, acted out en masse, would cause some severe productivity problems down the line. We aren't post scarcity just yet, after all.
Not that it matters. Most of us will be dead before something like 'Basic Income' ever makes it to the US. We are still hanging on to some pretty severe depression-era baggage.
It's hand wavy, but you can probably say that Northern Europe is quite a lot closer to having a basic income than the U.S. I think the basic standard of living is higher there than the U.S., by a variety of measures.
(not sure it's clear: by basic standard of living, I mean the standard of living typical at the bottom end)
edit: I guess it's probably not great to compare the package of social policies to basic income though.
See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush ("A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. 'I know you were told to be here at 8:15,' she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, 'but that was just to make sure you got here early.'").