8 ms·

Saw a theory somewhere that, instead of raising the minimum wage, a policy that enables and incentivizes job hopping is what actually works for increasing the m

• bushbaba 1mo ago
  The more turnover the more leadership wants to keep talent. The more turnover the more hiring leadership needs to keep headcount. Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers
  • b1gTekken 1mo ago
    Not just in employment; voting out incumbents improves economic growth for the majority: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy. And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know. GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-discourse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di... I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
    • hattmall 29d ago
      That's some pretty extreme bitterness. Good luck to you.
      • harimau777 29d ago
        I mean, can you blame them? Look at the world the boomers damned us to.
        • mlrtime 29d ago
          Which is statistically better than any time in history for all ages. *For long time periods, not cherry-picking small time periods.
          • scarecrowbob 29d ago
            I dunno, the Ute and Navajo folks I live near don't agree. A lot of the indigenous folks I know think we are living in a literal apocalypse. Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling. I can't make the math work, though.
          • b1gTekken 29d ago
            And statistically worse in many ways. Statistics are just euphemism for history, prior observation; stats exist for both categories. We can write and carry on about wars we won and ignore Vietnam with stats just as we do English. It's just a language that lets us ignore physical reality like religious catechism; same biological ability to delude ourselves. There's the whole ignoring externalities of capitalism and reality itself for toxic positivity thing. Sure is great though watching where I grew up slowly become engulfed in wildfire smoke; something that never happened until 10 years ago.
      • b1gTekken 29d ago
        Don't know you, text on a screen, don't care. American freedom; off the hook assuring a social safety net exists for you is pretty great. Will go my entire life never having to worry if you end up buried in medical debt living in your car.
  • DANmode 29d ago
    But greater turnover only occurs when people don’t want to stay. It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
    • samrus 29d ago
      Yeah. Itd be ideal if companies could adjust their existing employees wages fairly. This alternative of people moving frequently creates a high turnover org which isnt efficient. But if employers dont compensate their existing employees fairly then high turnover is unfortunately the only way to go
      • DANmode 27d ago
        > Itd be ideal if companies could adjust their existing employees wages fairly They can. Employee-owned companies do it all of the time. Properly-ran privately-owned companies do it all of the time. Who’s the odd one out?
• applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
  And yet that has terrible implications. Job hopping is both extremely unsatisfying on an individual level (no place to belong; you're just an interchangeable cog in the machine being swapped around, giving you no sense of purpose in your work) and on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).
  • manlymuppet 1mo ago
    A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though. You get choose which job you go to, and if you have better options available, and choose your optimal fit, that can give you more purpose, not less. And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy. Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).
    • applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
      > A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though. Maybe "a competitive labor market" doesn't, but "job hopping" does. That is, in fact, the definitional meaning of job hopping. They specifically made the claim about "job hopping" as pertains to a mechanism for achieving wages. This is incompatible with finding an optimal fit -- even if you found your optimal fit, you would essentially be taking a massive wage cut to stay at your optimal fit job for more than a couple of years, if job hopping is the chosen mechanism for society-wide wage growth. I was responding to the claim that was made about job hopping, not some other claim about competitive labor markets.
      • manlymuppet 29d ago
• manlymuppet 1mo ago
  This is the standard in the Scandinavian social democracies. They have no minimum wage laws (though unions supplement that greatly) and a competitive labor market pushes wages up. Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 999900000999 1mo ago
    They also have a much better safety net. Healthcare not being tied to employment is already massive. I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
    • andsoitis 29d ago
      > the other 90% still need work but can’t find it. Where do all jobs come from? Ultimately they’re created by people, so I wouldn’t worry about there being a demand but no supply.
      • manlymuppet 29d ago
        Jobs are created by desire, and the labor required to fulfill the market's desires. People won't ever stop wanting things. Our wants today are vastly different from our wants a hundred years ago, and thus the labor pool looks vastly different. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that there is a limited lump of labor.
        • andsoitis 29d ago
          > Jobs are created by desire This made me pause and think for a moment. Desire is not an external entity or being that manipulates us. Our biology generates desire, since it has been selected for by evolution through natural selection. People create jobs. But unlike the conventional picture people have in their head, it is a unidirectional creation process (i.e. by the "job giver"). The job is created through the dynamic of the "giver" and the "seeker".
• tangjurine 1mo ago
  I was thinking the time it takes to find a job is good indicator of how hard it is to switch jobs, if that was tracked and reduced that would be good for workers.
• testing22321 1mo ago
  > any policy that makes job hopping harder than staying would suppress the wage level Like healthcare being tied to employment?
  • Avicebron 1mo ago
    Or hiring practices that can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent?
    • eru 29d ago
      The way to benefit from irrational hiring practices is by starting your own company that's less irrational, and thus can scoop up good workers for relatively cheap (while still paying them more than they get in the rest of the market.) Worked for Alan Greenspan and his consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan. If you run your own company like that, then the longer the market stays irrational the bigger your gain.
      • Avicebron 29d ago
        Ah yes, just make sure your dad is a stockbroker like Greenspan's before you plan on spending all that capital in one piece.
        • eru 29d ago
          You might like https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ more if you don't like Greenspan.
  • xp84 1mo ago
    Exactly like this. Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
• shimman 1mo ago
  Yeah no thanks, I rather have the government regulate some actual floors rather than hoping that the better angels of American corporations eventually do the right thing. Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
  • manlymuppet 1mo ago
    You're not simply hoping that corporations do the right thing though. Rather, you're making it economically unfeasible for them to pay workers less. That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it. It also just works better than adding a price floor, if done right. And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
    • shimman 29d ago
      Gotcha, pure fantasy that seems to rely on many assumptions that don't hold up in other countries. Do appreciate the criticism section on wiki: "a purely linguistic combination of opposites that can be applied to virtually any policy mix."
      • manlymuppet 29d ago
        Everything we try will rely on some assumption, but I think it’s unfair to call that fantastical. What assumptions do you think are uncalled for? Norway, Sweden, Denmark—these are countries where this model has been proven to work in practice, not theory. If you still call bullshit though, I’d cordially invite you to show me similar evidence for price controls working as well as flexicurity does in the Scandinavian states.
• rpdillon 29d ago
  > enables and incentivizes job hopping I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
  • manlymuppet 29d ago
    What kind of things made you feel not good in the first four years? Just unfamiliarity, something else? Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.
    • rpdillon 29d ago
      It's not about being uneasy. I've had six jobs in my career that are all over the lot with respect to software engineering. How to work with specific influential personalities like the C-suite, picking up and gaining some expertise with the company's stack, establishing the proper processes and engineering discipline for mentoring and growth. Over time I see the decisions that the company has made and what has worked and what hasn't, and also the reasoning behind those decisions, and I can bring that knowledge forward when the company tries to iterate on their current processes. That is immensely valuable in maintaining continuity in the business and making good decisions that don't repeat past mistakes. I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
    • RugnirViking 29d ago
      not op but - well yeah - unfamilliarity, to a certain degree. But its more than that. It's the slow process of gaining expertise. There are of course many transferable skills from one company to another. and there are some that are not. Knowing the relationships between all the bosses, who got passed over for promotion, who needs a certain type of project on their plate etc. Also knowing all the history of various prior initiatives, failed and successful, really helps you get stuff done. Most work in non-small enterprises needs building yes but also buy-in from others, which needs them to respect you, and for you to know what hoops to jump through and what to say to keep tham all happy.
• adrianN 29d ago
  A policy that requires job hopping to get good wages discriminates against people who are less mobile: workers with families, elderly parents, older workers with more ties to their neighborhood, people who don’t have enough savings to move, people who can't afford transportation... I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
  • defrost 29d ago
    As a tangent, poverty line definitions vary by country, in Australia, for example, earning less than half the median wage is considered below the Australian poverty line. Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty. * AU: https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/ https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/ * UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom * US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_States_Census_Bureau) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_Sta...
    • Alpha3031 29d ago
      As I understand it, that's a fairly common definition for relative poverty (either that or 60%) though of course you're still right that it's best to confirm both the threshold the methodology is the same (or use an explicitly international comparison that covers both/all compared countries in the same work, such as those produced by the OECD or similar bodies).
  • kaashif 29d ago
    Why does it have to be a choice? Raise the median, raise the minimum, use wealth created through higher productivity and a healthier labour market to redistribute to some degree, everyone wins? The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
• eru 29d ago
  Your job hopping comment is interesting and is generalisable: reduce monopsony in the labour market, and you get more competition for labour that actually bites. The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers. Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
  • jay_kyburz 29d ago
    I'd like to see a world where the government provided a job for anybody who wanted one. If you're not enjoying your corporate job you can go back to planting trees to offset carbon emissions. Getting to old to plant trees? Go work in the library. Want to develop it skills? get a job helping the government transition to Libre Office
    • eru 29d ago
      Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
      • YZF 29d ago
        I agree with the work sucks bullet point. So nobody should work. We can all just sit at home, get our UBI money, and pay our rent, get our groceries, buy a car, get fuel, go on vacation. That sounds perfect to me. But.. who makes the car? who grows the fruit and veggies? Who works in the store? Who builds houses? Who repairs and cleans those houses. Hm. maybe somebody has to work after all. Seriously I support having a decent social net so that nobody is starving on the street without healthcare etc. but the preference is always that if work is available someone should work (assuming it's reasonably suitable, they're not taken advantage of, they are able to work etc.).
        • bryanlarsen 29d ago
          UBI has to be significantly lower than the average taxes paid. If it isn't the books don't balance and eventually inflation kicks in hard and eventually it reaches that equilibrium. If nobody works then taxes are $0 and UBI is $0. So if you do the math using fairly roughly you'll find that the US can support a UBI of about $1500/month without significant inflationary pressure. That'll pay your rent (if you're sharing an apartment) and cover groceries (if you mostly live on rice and beans). If you want a car, vacations or the latest iPhone you have to work. So most would work and build those cars et al.
• Hammershaft 29d ago
  Reforming tax incentives to prevent health insurance from being coupled with employment would be a major improvement on this front.
• Gareth321 29d ago
  This is essentially how the job market is structured in Denmark, and it works very well. We provide strong safety nets, free healthcare, etc, but in return, employers are given wide latitude to fire employees. This allows them to remain unusually flexible in a European context - responding to market changes much faster than almost any other European nation. We don't even have a minimum wage. Despite this, people can and do leave when an employer treats them badly or pays them poorly. This forces employers to offer reasonable wages and working conditions, or they lose their employees. For example, in 2021, Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening measured that 38.4% of employees in their member companies changed jobs. This was during a period when inflation jumped but employers were too slow to increase wages. While this should not be extrapolated to the entire economy, it provides an anchor to understand just how dynamic our job market is.
  • close04 29d ago
    Employees are (or should be) given more rights/protections than the employers because they have less individual bargaining power. The rights are there to counterbalance. For example it shouldn't be as easy to get fired as it is to quit. The country's culture matters a lot. The same system that works perfectly in a healthy society will end up an abusive nightmare in an unhealthy one. Mobility for salary raises can also become mobility just to keep a job.
    • Gareth321 29d ago
      I don't disagree re bargaining power, but there are many ways to remedy this other than direct intervention. I think Denmark's model is one of the best in a nation with high social service costs.
• xnx 29d ago
  Low job switching is a sign of a stagnant economy and society. An environment where a worker feels confident to change jobs has all kinds of hidden benefits like business-process cross-pollination.