One of my jobs is public sector. Our project has maybe half the roles filled. A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled. And those more senior roles are still to be filled. But we are charging ahead anyway to give the idea of progress.
People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
Combine the financial stingyness of pretty much every manager anywhere with the self righteousness of people who truly treat you like you are their Victorian era servant as in their minds they own you for paying you.
Customer service people get treated like this all the time, public or private sector.
It sounds just like the private sector: Lack of staff everywhere. Perhaps talking too much about comfort of life led too many people to walk away; Meanwhile, well, we obviously generate enough wealth since they are walking away satisfied with their new standard of living.
The danger is, as a society, perhaps the feedback look has inertia: WAY too many people have resigned from the “hustle life” and we are not yet feeling the effect of what happens when so few people work.
Maybe, after 10 years, the Western countries will drop off the G8, and be replaced by cultures who are more willing to work.
The pandemic had the effect of the wake-up call of "Why hustle all of your life, enjoy it more, for it may end sooner than you expect.", although I don't know how great that effect is.
Maybe in the West/all over the world the workers have also noticed that the wealth is getting funneled more towards the top (Bezos can now send Captain Kirk up to the sky in a penis and buy a yacht that made headlines because a bridge in the Netherlands had to be allegedly disassembled so it would fit through...).
Even in China the youth are (or they were, was it just a fad?) doing the "lie flat" movement that the government has made statements of "Everyone has to work hard for the greater good!".
You're hiring at a pittance rate and then when no one wants to work for your company throwing red flags in the interview stage, and rather then asking "should we offer more money" you turn around and go "guess no one wants to work!"
No. No one wants to work for you at the rate you're offering.
Except the public sector, especially at the local level, only has a pot of money as big as the voters approve. You can pay more for fewer people (and it's often hard to layoff people) or pay less for more. So you can decide to pay more but that means hiring fewer people and doing fewer things (like filling in potholes) or staffing a DMV location.
Private companies have constraints too of course but generally have more flexibility in dealing with them--which can of course be to decide that some job isn't worth it if they have to pay $X to fill it.
We do this all the time at a personal level. While there are some service people who I would pretty much have to grin and bear it. There are plenty of other things I'd just let go, do it myself, etc.
They aren’t my boss. They just act like it in the outside world.
We couldn’t hire any senior level technical talent, so there was nobody who could actually tell management whether what they wanted was possible.
What was done during the time? Endlessly updating project timeline docs about the new deadline with assumptions about when senior tech people would be hired. I didn’t touch code for months.
Same. I spent a month working in the public sector (two weeks, followed by my two week’s notice). I just couldn’t stand sitting around doing nothing. Most of the folks there kind of seemed to enjoy not getting stuff done. It just isn’t for me. Also, it soured my already pretty sour view of public projects in the US.
It is that going out of your way in the public sector is not rewarded and just gets you dragged into meetings, so if your manager isn’t telling you what to do, why not just sit on your ass?
The public sector’s motivation problem is relying on intrinsic motivations.
Why do they rely on intrinsic motivations? As the public screams when they hear of people getting large raises or bonuses.
The biggest problem is merit pay is politically impossible. Imagine paying a hotshot developer $300k to introduce a new LMS for a school district. That very well might be cheaper than hiring a consulting firm and paying a team of developers $85k.
But there would be howls about taxpayer money being wasted on such a highly paid individual. The public only tolerates raises based on seniority because absent some tragedy everyone gets old, so everyone can imagine themselves in the public workers' shoes.
This in turn attracts workers who bank on seniority rather than merit for pay increases, creating a culture of mediocrity and tall poppy attitudes.
The private sector is shielded from such criticism by the magical "just don't patronize them" argument (when in fact many businesses are monopolistic and essential), and frankly because the public is ignorant of how well-paid certain individuals are within firms.
Not arguing against high merit pay, as it can lead to the most efficient outcome, but boy oh boy is it unpopular with a lot of people who never fall into the highly paid bucket.
> But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
General public reflects the existing social order. In a society that chews people raw and spits them out for profit, the general public won't be responsible or caring. They will start caring about the society and related morals and responsibilities as much as the society cares for them.
> A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled.
If that's the pace of the project, then the project was never important in the first place.
I've read plenty of job descriptions' sections for qualifications, and they're out of touch with reality. Many orgs want unicorn employees (e.g. 5 years in machine learning, 3 programming languages, also PM experience and SQL, and must have comp-sci degree of course) and are barely willing to pay market rates for it.
It's unclear to me if they're actually serious about work needing to be done. They're certainly unwilling to train non-perfect-fit employees and/or let someone competent post a job ad that's realistic.
This is only going to get worse. Just look at a demographic graph, as Boomers retire and Zoomers delay entering the workforce expect a shortfall of millions of people to fill existing white collar jobs, the trades have already been decimated.
The birth replacement rate in the United States isn’t sufficient to fill all the jobs, and automation is still decades (or more) away from replacing them as well.
I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.
Well, or automation just is less convenient/isn't as good. We'll probably see a lot more self-service at stores for example which (depending) I don't really like but if you have to wait 20 minutes in the one open cashier line, I guess you adjust. Repeat for ordering at restaurants, etc. And other tasks just get more expensive and you either just do them yourself, pay more, and/or wait longer.
My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which artificially limit movement.
The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
That's surprising to me. Canada has a reputation where I am for being generally pro-immigration and friendly to immigrants. Is this not the case, or is it specifically different in Quebec?
Quebec is effectively a country within a country. Even our legal systems differ in some major ways (this is why you often see contests that aren't valid in Quebec)!
You have to remember that Canada is not a monolith. Quebec is rather nationalistic for historical reasons. In ways both productive and pathological IMO. I won’t get into it as an Anglo and immigrant but I encourage you to visit QC some time and steep yourself in the culture.
Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian.
A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
Quebec enacts many policies to protect their culture — french language requirements, banning religious symbols and clothing in certain places and jobs, etc — which make it harder for immigrants (and Canadians from other provinces) to integrate.
I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.
shouldn't a small degree of forced uniformity aid in integration ?
we've seen in other more liberal communities (Denmark, Sweden) that influx of culturally different immigrants tends to create nuclei of those cultures where they just interact amongst themselves, and never integrate.
I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce.
that might speak more to danish and swedish culture, biases than to the immigrants. you picked notoriously racist societies with strong public neonazi movements instead of an example like toronto
I picked those societies because those are some of the ones I've interacted with therefore can have an opinion.
And what I saw was not racism, what I saw was Arab immigrants trying to make Danish schools ban pork, or having a complete disregard to the "tidy" Danish way of life (whether you like that way of life or not)
>>I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce.
I would argue that if the children of those immigrants are not fitting in then you have a problem. And that problem usually has to do with marginalization. In heavily immigrant areas do the people see themselves reflected in public insitutions? In teaching staff, bus drivers, police? America and Canada have historically been much better at this part than Europe.
And how did that end up for America ? A country so fragmented and divided, torn by tensions to the point where recent discussions were mentioning civil war as a possibility, or even as an ongoing thing in a new form.
Does immigration offer so much more other than cheap labour ?
Immigration is not the cause of polarisation in the US. There is a dangerous precedent of blaming all of a countries problems on immigrants and ethnic groups.
Polarisation in the US, in my estimation, has a lot more to do with democratic backsliding [0] cause by economic inequality, populism, cultural conservatism and the concentration of power in the US gov't.
Lots of things with much more evidence to point at before you start blaming immigrants.
Why would a society that is almost completely white reflect a new group of immigrants. And you obviously know that Muslim men aren’t Limiting their children’s educations and integration until the bus driver is brown. What is your motivation for lying?
You made such an absurdly strong claim with zero evidence. Their muslim faith and home country culture explains a lot more of their behavior than the skin color of people working public facing roles
I wouldn't say Quebec is anti-immigration, but our leading politicians are. Premiere Francois Legault linked immigration to extremism and violence in the last couple of days [0], and the party who is polling second in terms of percent thinks that immigration should be lowered still [1].
Having come from a poor American community into the tech world, I oppose justifying immigration with filling tech jobs. There are a whole lot of people in country already very capable of learning to fill these jobs and very little industry or state encouragement or support to help them.
Siphoning away the most ambitious and capable people from around the world also hurts the places they are from.
To be clear I do support immigration, just not as an easier to acquire and cheaper source of skilled labor.
Under this story about bootcamps there was also the experiment by Google to run fiber through those towns. I believe the lesson was that only a handful were employable as fully-remote devs.
There are openings in Quebec for _every_ job. From the service to the tech to the civil sectors, there are vacancies in every sector. I think a major limitation to our immigration programmes is that it is too often limited to people with undergraduate or post-graduate degrees rather than skilled and unskilled workers of any stripe.
But of course, I agree that increase in immigration needs to be balanced and met with social and financial support for those who immigrate.
Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses.
Yes, the voters want their potholes filled but that doesn't mean they'll approve a bond issue or whatever to pay for it.
>Let these voters suffer their decisions seems like the only option?
Seems perfectly fine. And maybe they decide that they don't actually want to pay for some public services or they're fine with more automated/online versions of certain things. For example, where I live you do a lot more associated with the DMV online than you used to and I assume significantly fewer people are employed. Of course there can be issues with access and those need to be dealt with.
It's not clear to me that, in general, state governments are massively underfunded.
>Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses.
I mean there clearly is one. Ukraine got billions within two days of asking. We've sent them what, $70 billion this year alone? Funnily enough no new outlet seems to be tracking the total, just covering each one individually so it doesn't look like we're doing what we're doing: Prioritizing Ukraine over US citizens.
That's the federal government which owns money printing presses. State governments do not and are often required by their state constitution to balance their budget.
The federal government spends quite a bit on infrastructure at the state level. But, yes, the federal government also prioritizes certain spending related to foreign policy over other spending that's related to domestic policy (and vice versa).
Disclaimer: Writing this doesn't mean that I approve or agree with how the world currently works or that this is fair, right or good from moral perspective, it's only a cold analysis.
In current geopolitical climate you would lose a lot more than $70 billion if Russia would win in Ukraine, there is a lot more on stake than Ukraine independence, US debt is financed by the rest of the world. US is world hegemon because of its influence granted by military and economical power. If you lose that status you lose influence, if you lose influence you also lose your country "safe heaven" status for other people money, next USD could lose status of world reserve currency, next your budget deficit is unsustainable anymore, your social contract gets broken, 2008 crisis would be nothing compared to this. Not mentioning that US was not ready to fight Russia and China same time, elimination of Russia from equation through proxy war in Ukraine will allow US to focus on China. Additional benefit to USA is Sweden and Finland joining NATO and strengthening US influence in Europe, making it a lot easier to flip Europe against China (see how NATO joint statement about China changed in Madrid summit in July 2022 compared to stance of leading EU countries before the war). $70 billion is not a high price to show the world that you are not a declining superpower (especially after that Afghanistan retreat and rise of China) and retain your status and influence, if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
>In current geopolitical climate you would lose a lot more than $70 billion if Russia would win in Ukraine
Pure speculation.
>if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
No it's not, I wrote about how debt works in USA and you have 1 trillion deficit a year.
> I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
Remaining a world hegemon is number 1 priority for USA, sorry but being US citizen and not knowing this is ignorance and lack of knowledge about how the world works, if you lose that position I assure you that you will have a lot more problems than national healthcare, actually you can forget about national healthcare then.
> Because it makes a naive assumption that there's some magic money tree a state government can go to in order to pluck dollars from that the voters have chosen not to provide for salaries and other expenses.
Yeah there is. It's called the weekly handouts and tax cuts for the rich.
I wouldn't put it about the money as much as "there is only so deep a pool of competent workers, and if another 5 million of them are hired in the public sector, labor in the private sector becomes correspondingly worse."
It's unfortunate that the city can't hire enough secretaries. Do I want them to poach competent workers from my ISP, Target, Amazon, or my insurance company? Not really, no.
Then the people, in general, need to stop listening to the echoed words of Grover Norquist ("government so small you can drown it in a bathtub") and recognize that taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society.
After all, where else can public sector wages come from?
It also needs to be said that this is a common and despicable tactic of the right wing: first, vote consistently against any support for the public sector; then, claim that the public sector is fundamentally incapable of doing a good job (and should thus be deprioritized further), rather than it having been deliberately starved of funding and public support over the course of decades.
We have the public sector we vote for and are willing to pay for: no more, no less.
Also don’t forget, use anytime gov is ineffective but your enemy party is in power as evidence that they can’t do their job. When you’re in power, still blame them when things don’t work.
Well since we are getting political, how about the left-wing tactic of always needing more money. Just a little bit more and everything would be better.
I am being a bit pithy, but I think these sort of opinions are based in ideology, and not experience. If you are untrustful, you will always be skeptical of government, and too trustful, will always accept that more money is the answer.
> Well since we are getting political, how about the left-wing tactic of always needing more money.
And if government had ever been funded to the point that the left wing actually wants (note: not "to the point that politics actually allows in compromise budgets, either with the Republicans or with the fiscally conservative parts of the Democrats"), over the past few hundred years, and it had still failed to solve the problems that are trying to be solved with more money, you might be able to derive a valid criticism out of this.
Money isn't zero-sum, even during inflation. But the broader point that we need a big active public sector that isn't cowering and underfunded to be a modern society is true.
I’d put it slightly differently: the public sector needs to pay much more of its total compensation in the form of cash wages instead of in benefits, work rules, and job stability regardless of performance.
That is indeed better. We need a less risk-averse civil service with the stones to push back against idiot pols and deliver the services we need like nuclear energy, public transit, and social housing.
I want them to get good wages to the point I paid additional taxes, half to the Federal Government and half to the State of California. 45% of income, while in the lowest tax bracket, blowing literally every billionaire out of the water. Why? Gratitude, first off, because they prescribed me stimulants knowing I had been treated for addiction, which was risky, and which I couldn't have done in the private sector. Took a risk. Made a bet. Helped me. Went very very well for everybody. And consequently I made sure it went well for the government, sure it's not that much money but it does pay for eg a tank of gas on a police cruiser, send in the cavalry. And I would argue I look great on their balance sheet, obviously better than Jeff Bezos.
And I did the math and noted, first, to get a dollar out of State of California, you have to pay them a million in taxes. In aggregate. Like if you pay a million dollars in taxes and it's equally distributed, maybe not a million to one quite but around there. Very close, ballpark, at least for the purposes of the following estimate:
I got a 1000000000x speedup (actually a bit more but I frequently round down to a more impressive number) on an algorithm thanks to those stimulants, and then it made sense: I still got 1000x ROI from paying taxes. Purely mathematical about it. Best money I ever spent! If you get a big enough speedup, taxes are a great investment. And they're the only thing that get people out of the absolute deepest holes.
No, they don't. In a democratic system, they need to pay what the voting public wants them to pay. Give the People a referendum to decide this: they can choose between paying public-sector employees well (competitively with private industry) and raising taxes to pay for it, or lowering taxes and keeping public-sector pay low.
Which one do you think they'll choose?
Or, if you prefer that elected representatives make these decisions, get some people to run on a platform of jacking up taxes to raise public-service position salaries. Let's see if they get elected.
Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all)
It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.
I'm worried about how this reality is leading to the formation of a modern slavery system. That might seem hyperbolic but I can assure all who read this, it is not.
In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs.
So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
Astute observation, but at the same time it's the lesser evil to allow them to take that job. Let's not allow misguided compassion to do real world harm to the people to whom that compassion is directed.
If the US is supporting the worse conditions that make taking the job the lesser evil, and benefiting from the resultant labor (as parent comment claims), then it isn't really compassionate to support that system, as the system depends largely on suppressing quality of life elsewhere rather than creating opportunity. An analogy is that it might be the lessor evil for an African centuries ago to get on a slave ship rather than to be murdered on the spot. That doesn't make supporting slavery compassionate.
I disagree. You can support immigrants being allowed to work without supporting all parts of the system!
Cause and effect is what matters. Not some abstract purity test of "supporting a system" that's totally disconnected from actual moral outcomes. If you advocate a policy that blocks immigrants from working in the US, you are directly causing their suffering. If your position aligns closely with ethnonationalists, it's time for some deep introspection. This is malevolence masquerading as compassion.
I've seen that argument (the one you're replying to) many times online and I never understand it. In the same breath people say that immigrants choosing to immigrate will have low wages and poor working conditions. Alright, but that's no secret, they know that and it's still better than where they came from, or they wouldn't move! Keeping them out hurts them or forces them into illegally immigrating.
The America First, America for Americans type people at least have a position that is coherent even if it's not compassionate.
The anti immigrant liberals for whom class solidarity ends at the border just don't make sense to me.
It's a purity thing. The left and right have their own notions of purity that have nothing to do with a deep understanding of morality. If these notions of purity are violated, they feel disgust. For the right, everyone knows what those notions of purity are (racial purity, bodily purity). For the left, hiring low wage workers is one of the triggering impurities, even if doing so leads to demonstrably utilitarian outcomes in the form of reduced suffering. So it's just people trying to avoid disgust triggers. Nothing to do with morality.
> You can support immigrants being allowed to work without supporting all parts of the system!
This is my exact position. You are assuming I am against immigration. In the big picture, the system that makes immigration is not compassionate, but it would also not be compassionate in the small picture to stop immigration.
The US isn’t meddling in Central American affairs by banning drugs here in the US. Although it does affect them! They should also feel bad for allowing poison to be created and sold from their country.
What I worry about is that the same people who call for more immigration also call for higher wages and better working conditions for blue collar labor.
Increased immigration from poorer countries only results in lower wages and less leverage to negotiate for the most vulnerable. Regardless of whatever laws you try to bring forth to counter this, you’ll be fighting a permanent uphill battle against physical reality.
The modern progressive attitude is to simply be for everything indiscriminately, without regard for the contradictions.
"Increased immigration from poorer countries only results in lower wages and less leverage to negotiate for the most vulnerable."
Nonsense, given that the "most vulnerable" -- by a large margin -- are the people inside the poor country who have now been unbanned from the landmass you've declared that you own at the barrel of a gun.
And yet historically, the period with the highest immigration to the US, roughly 1880-1920, was also a period of rising wages, not lower wages, as well as generally improving living conditions.
Immigration cannot be a permanent solution, because eventually everyone will have immigrated.
Immigration is basically arbitrage on living conditions, the US could directly institute “compassionate slavery” and many very poor countries would gladly sell themselves and their children into it.
In fact, there are likely people who would rather live in US prisons than in the country they’re currently in.
Maybe this is region-dependent, but I haven't seen that to be the case. For example, Betsy DeVos pushed to defund public schools in favor of charter schools at the state level, to disastrous consequences [0], then pushed for the exact same policies at the national level.
As cynical as that rhetoric is, it's not the problem.
The article answers the question quite convincingly, though it takes eight paragraphs to get there: government jobs don't pay well and governments[1] are very slow to adjust worker pay to market conditions. So no one wants to work these jobs because they're working better jobs elsewhere.
[1] Across the ideological spectrum. Sure, republicans might have a cynical reason to want to torpedo the government, but no bureaucrat wants to raise pay scales. It's all downsides from the perspective of middle management.
If the wealthy enclaves of democrats and republicans are both model cities but the poor center cities of both are hellholes it tells you more about money than politics.
But some cities like San Francisco have had both for decades, and should be doing exceptionally well.
That argument is self refuting. Such wealthy enclaves are wealthy enclaves by virtue of the local planning laws that ban poor people from being allowed to live there.
Trash pickup isn't controlled by 'evil republicans', i am surprised to see this as top comment here. It took me 1.5 hrs (vs < 20 mins) yesterday to go downtown on CTA chicago because apparently 'labor shortages due to covid' they keep making announcements on speakers to plan for slowdowns due to covid. ( Even though president declared 'covid is over' )
A major part of the problem in my experience is actually government regulation and policy as it applies to those workers.
Want to stay remote? As a federal employee, too bad. Furloughs suck too. You have little negotiation power compared to private bosses.
The teachers I know would rather change professions, or work at a lower paying private school than at a public school. They're tired of all the administrative problems. I'm sure pay is more of an issue in certain states (mine pays well), but this lack of freedom, or even micromanagement is a major factor as a teacher or in the private sector.
I have had coworkers that left government work and government contract work that did so because the policies are crippling the mission.
I have no interest in working at a public school. I have little interest in working for the government either - both due to the regulations and bureaucracy.
“It’s on TV when the city is negotiating with the city manager to give them a 3 percent raise,” said National League of Cities CEO Clarence E. Anthony, describing a “fishbowl effect” that doesn’t exist for most private-employer wage negotiations. “People call in, saying, ‘Why do they deserve an increase? They’re public servants!’”
Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts.
the fattest, laziest, most 401k retirement gold plated health care bureaucrats I have ever met in real life, say exactly "you don't pay well enough, we need budget increases" as a reply to almost every problem. Their leaders rise in the ranks by making this statement with ever-more removal of details, essentially no accountability, no efficiency designs, no program changes.. Calling out a single unfair, one-sided statement as your rallying cry, is negotiations 101. all sides are guilty here
I hear you, but let's circle back to the part where EMS staff is being poached by Dunkin fucking Donuts. That should not even be possible. A pizza delivery driver in a decent delivery area can make multiples (!!!) of the median salary for EMS staff.
The government offers stability and post retirement benefits, as opposed to cash remuneration. Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today, so this type of remuneration is useful for campaigning on “keeping taxes low today”.
Pensions are notoriously under/unfunded, particularly in local governments. I wouldn't count that as a guaranteed benefit. It may retroactively be cut in the future.
> Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today
They actually are, at least for pension contributions.
>They actually are, at least for pension contributions.
No. The government exempts taxpayer funded pensions from laws about calculating pension liabilities, and so they use discount rates far above what non taxpayer funded pension funds are required to use. And even these liberally calculated costs are not even funded properly, because there is nothing stopping the politician from not kicking the can down the road.
Given we have stagnant or declining populations any defined benefit pension plan will fall short of the promises in the coming decades. Not only is deferred compensation unappealing to many people because of present time orientation, it's a riskier pension than a defined contribution plan. You also lose out on the ability to negotiate better compensation by changing jobs.
On the whole the lifetime employment model was abandoned by the private sector decades ago for many good reasons, namely the impossibility of funding defined benefits after population growth stalled; as usual the government is the last place in society that makes necessary changes.
It’s a bad model I ageee but the defined benefits Usally get pegged at last couple years salary so you just have to hope you don’t retire into inflation like we have now
On the other hand, defining the benefits based on the last few years, leads to employees taking every overtime opportunity for the last few years to inflate their retirement benefits. Overtime absolutely should be excluded for the calculus so people can’t game the system.
Government is a microcosm of the economy. Like we're not want for applicants for cushy middle management and above government jobs. We can't find the bus drivers, teachers,cops, and so on that get (relative) shit wages for crap jobs.
I suspect this can be generalized beyond the public sector.
How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.)
As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards.
Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain.
The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions.
And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years).
I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.
> Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc.
Where are salaries higher? That doesn't seem to be the case in real terms in most places.
Higher paying than what? Than other places you can get jobs now?
The most conservative estimate I've seen shows that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the past 50 years, it would be over $21/hour now. The minimum wage.
From what I've seen, Dunkin and Amazon* pay a $15 minimum wage—which, yes, is better than many other places now, but not compared to what you could expect to get for similar jobs several decades ago (adjusted for inflation). And I haven't heard anything one way or the other about Dunkin, but Amazon is actively hostile to unions, which were the strong sword and shield of blue collar workers like them back when they could expect pensions and such—not at all coincidentally.
* For those actually designated employees; I'm given to understand that Amazon also does all sorts of shenanigans to designate various people who work for them as contractors of some type.
This is the correct answer. The public sector is culturally further and further away from every other employer in the market. That gap needs to narrow.
Lack of people to work should be the norm. Getting enough humans to work should be the bottleneck of the system to force treating them well and optimize everything around them.
The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The working class will get a larger chunk of the pie only if they organize into powerful unions and directly negotiate with the wealthy to dramatically reduce corporate profits. Right now all that pie that should go to workers goes to investors.
Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that.
Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.
Unions don’t work the way you think they do. If they are large unions they actually actively negotiate against the workers as well. Take a look at the railroad union as an example.
Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits
Ha you say that in jest but Enron is a good model for large zombie corporations. We know a lot more about the inner workings of Enron that we do about many corporations as well.
It's ironic that you mention the railworkers union to defend your claim that I don't understand unions, when the rail industry in America got everything they wanted from the workers.
Your point is basically "the worst union imaginable is the same as no union".
The railroad union got screwed. For one they didn’t get an actual contract. As far as I can tell they got Tentative deal that was used as a procedural trick to delay the strike till after the midterms. It’s not even clear that there was anything in this “tentative deal”.
More importantly the strike wasn’t about pay as much as it was about absolutely terrible scheduling practices. Employees were on call 24/7/365 had to show up at very short notice, couldn’t take vacation or sick leave etc. There was no promise of actually fixing any of the problems in that deal.
This happens a lot in union strikes, workers want better work conditions but instead the union negotiates like 1-2% more pay and the media reports it as greedy unions getting overpaid. Even though that’s not what the workers even wanted.
This is talking about the public sector. Public sector unions are a disaster, with the police unions being the the star example. Unlike the private sector, you can't capture profits from the owners because there is no profit to begin with. Instead, the money comes from the more junior employees and in the form of taxpayer debt. Thanks to unions, 40% of Chicago's education budget goes towards paying pensions. Meanwhile, younger teachers are stuck in dead-end part time roles because that's all the city has budget for.
To make the irony worse, the pension returns are dependent on allocating their capital to monopolies which are able to capture excess returns. Re-allocating profits from shareholders to workers de-funds the pensions (and retirees more broadly.)
I wish all the “record profits” reports were in real terms and not nominal terms, which are impossible to evaluate objectively, especially in a high inflation environment.
That is absolutely the plan. And if it weren’t for human-trafficked labor, we would have reached low points like this a long time ago. There are plenty more humans to traffic in the world, and the ruling elite has no problem starving them away from their families and communities then congratulating themselves as though they have done a good deed.
I was recently listening to population growth lecture from 90s Yale and among few things that really struck me was a phrase that said something to the effect of 'while the locals may object over their personal interests, we, the elite, may see it through a more wide economic lens'. It was fascinating and it helped me understand the deeply ingrained distrust in US population of the educated 'elite'. I always thought thought it was largely uninformed bias, as I keep listening to old Yale lectures, I learn that US populace is a lot smarter than most give it credit.
Without (recent) immigration the US population would be shrinking and aging trend. In addition a large part of immigration to the US is educated boosting the country even further. Immigration is not the problem' politicians selling the populace out for profits to corporations is a much bigger issue.
Maybe. Maybe not. People do respond to their current situation. It is hard to predict with a dose of certainty that X would happen as people could very easily reverse the predicted trend.
It may not be THE problem, but dismissing it as just one of the culture wars items is in itself counter-productive ( if only, because perception is reality and people do vote based on their belief systems ).
I do not disagree with you on the clear focus of US on the true beneficiary of this system ( corporations ).
I'm sure money is one reason people don't have kids but look at rich european countries compared to poorer countries. Families tend to be smaller, why?
More specifically, business models which expected to make money by extracting money from everyday citizens after first establishing a bunch of customers don’t actually make sense because tons of companies are doing the same thing while ignoring that everyday people don’t have any disposable income anymore and will never pay for their products and services.
The continued running of the economy is practically dependant on a wealth transfer to labour so we can enable a second wealth transfer to capital.
I know that wealth tends to follow a Pareto distribution historically, this is the qualitative fact. My impression is honestly that this is a function of some people being able to earn a return on money more easily than other people. The poor can make better use of fifty dollars than a millionaire, a millionaire can take better advantage of a fifty thousand dollars than a billionaire, and a billionaire can make better use of 50 million dollars than the poor or millionaires. So things eventually reach some sort of equilibrium as it's self-correcting, somebody who uses money badly gets overcome by somebody who uses it well.
Right now I think that equilibrium is out of sorts because I think it's almost self-evident how much somebody poor could do with a thousand dollars, whereas a company like Berkshire Hathaway right now is at such a loss as to what to invest in that they're literally just sitting on cash when they get it. There's are exceptions but I see too much of this these days. Wealth also isn't distributed like a Pareto distribution, it's too top-sided to follow the distribution perfectly, and if history repeats itself we will see that unravel. I expect the top to fall more than I expect the bottom to rise though.
I think this comment and the parent comment are key insights. My random thoughts and rant:
The extract of money to the rich has created the wealth gap: CEO pay , investors with money to invest, all of got richer when the money supply was expanding while keeping worker (actual producers) pay raise at a far lower rate.
Now that there are supply issues, due to different Covid rules across countries for global trade, and demand relatively high, the rich are looking for “growth” still. But with a cash tightening, they can’t borrow as much to produce goods at an accelerated pace. Hence “worker shortage”.
If CEOs and companies are cutting staff, the board should consider readjusting executive pay as well to save money and reallocate the savings towards hiring! It’s time to adjust executive pay vs. worker pay and shrink the wealth gap a little.
Looking at that article, price controls are a broad topic (MSRPs are a price control, minimum wages are price controls, rent control is a price control, fixed prices for food are a price control), one that results in obvious economic deadweight (scalping, enforcement), and one which is generally pretty heterodox in economics.
I'll give a real world example. In Canada, they privatised almost every public telecom in the country except Sasktel. Since Canada has lots of rural customers that would be unprofitable to service, connecting these customers is subsidised by the government, in return for the companies among other things accepting price controls on what they both charge companies and also charge 3rd party providers piggybacking off their infrastructure like MVNO's. Canada has some of the highest telecom prices in the entire world, so price controls at best were inadequate and at worst failed. Yet Saskatchewan notably pays less than the rest of the country, and that's because there's no incentive for them to collude with the big telecoms to raise prices, so they don't.
He also mentions anti-trust, anti-trust is all well and good but historically only a very few companies get broken up and it tends to encumber than less than expected, Microsoft is doing OK. Taxing corporate profits more is almost totally hopeless, especially for something like Big Pharma which has countless means to shift around which country profit was realised in. Price controls for pharma make no sense, the government is artificially raising pharma prices through IP enforcement, just don't enforce their patents and you'll have lower drug spending and lower enforcement costs. Why do governments enforce patents for tax dodgers anyways?
To me, I feel like Reich is dancing around the crux of the issue, talking about moderate approaches which mostly buy into the status quo, talking about things like price controls with a degree of embarrassment.
Problem is, there's no lack of people looking for work - there's a lack of people who want to work these particular jobs. For every 300 applicants for an ez comfy remote six-figure developer position, there's 0 for a (literal shit-job) wastewater treatment plant position paying $16/hr - and it's no wonder why.
I've seen this exact problem with home health assistants. If you have a Medicaid waiver and qualify for a home assistant, Virginia will pay $16/hr for a full-time assistant in a high COL area. The bottleneck is of course finding someone willing to accept unlivably low wages (edit: which you cannot supplement) for a very hands-on, dead-end job that entails significant liability.
I sort of agree with where you think we are, but not where we're going.
> Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The Fed is clearly going to engineer a massive recession and financial crisis to throw enough people out of work to get inflation under control and make people continue to work for peanuts.
They're not giving the working class a larger chunk of the pie without a massive fight (and what remains to be seen is if how far they'll go before they realize they're harming themselves in the process, and even if they capitulate before they destroy everything).
The fed’s job is to keep inflation under control, not to “engineer (a) financial crisis.” If the fed raises the interest rates and sinks us into a financial crisis, it was a mistake, as seen during the great depression.
If you want working class pay to go up, go vote for people who will help working class pay up instead of assigning conspiracy theories to the fed.
I think OP was using "financial crisis" in a non-technical way and was referring to the Fed's targeted plan to leave an additional 1 million people unemployed by the end of the year.
If we assume this is what they meant, I think the post is reasonable. The fed is targeting labor in this way specifically to avoid a wage/price inflation spiral. Those hurt the most by such a spiral are capital holders as the relative power of their capital decreases.
(all this said, I would actually prefer solutions targeting the land-holding class, over labor and capital).
I don't see how this is FUD. The fed is intentionally trying to "soften the labor market"[0], and one of the ways the intend to do that is to invoke policies that will increase unemployment to at >4%. Increased unemployment is a target of the current policies. The stated reason for this appears to be inflation control and particularly a wage-price inflation spiral[1], again, fixed with increased unemployment. I don't think any of this should be controversial from an economics or fiscal policy standpoint, this has been the playbook since stagflation in the 70s.
The fed is not _trying_ to soften the labor market, it is trying to reduce inflation. It expects that the labor market may soften as a byproduct. It's right there in your link.
It won't be a mistake. The Fed will raise interest rates to tame inflation and will create unemployment by doing so. That will also cause a financial crisis, though. Every time the tide goes out we find out who was swimming around naked. This time isn't going to be any different.
It’s hardly a conspiracy theory. Pretty much everyone that has the ear of the FED has an investment portfolio and are going to be pushing positions that control costs in those portfolios, one of which is labor.
I don't see this happening as a net result. There are just too many powerful (wealthy) interests working multiple angles to ensure that a vast majority of any gains go to the top.
There will be faux gains or benefits which appear substantive but are either offset by some new life cost (such as inflation, but not necessarily so great and complex) or are outright new expenses.
Which is why the only real way to fix this problem is with legislation. Minimum wage laws aren’t perfect but they address core issues like this far better than most, imo.
Yes. Try actually doing the calculation ((Year 2022 / Year 2000) - 1) * 100% for both and you’re going to see the EU had faster growth over that time period.
Though double checking my calculation the US should be 91%.
>Lack of people to work should be the norm. Getting enough humans to work should be the bottleneck of the system to force treating them well and optimize everything around them.
The reason there's a surplus is egalitarianism. Most of the developed world realized we didn't economically tap much of society because of whatever *ism. Fixing that produced a huge benefit. But it also ended up with 2 key problems. Huge surplus of low-skilled labour AND a problematic population pyramid.
>The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The problem after that im sure they'll call the 'great unretirement' where people who retired ran out of money but lots of those people wont want to work. Nobody will hire them. They will turn to crime.
For example: "The New York City Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and aides for not complying with its vaccine mandate, bringing the total to nearly 2,000, the New York Post reported Saturday."
People are saying that states and cities just need to raise wages, but that's not always possible...
>...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt.
Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them?
Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low.
In Delaware, where I live, garbage and recycling pickup are done by private companies, rather than municipal governments.
The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
Your point about there being only one company that can fulfill the contract is a good one. My suggestion was to vote for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. I haven't worked out exact details of how this voting would work -- maybe voters could upvote/downvote service providers reddit style, and their contract percentages could be adjusted accordingly. But the overall thought was that if company A is currently providing 100% of Centerville waste services, and company B from Borderville is looking to expand into Centerville, they try to convince voters to assign 5% of Centerville waste disposal contracts to company B.
Monopolies arise because it is an individual's best interest to buy whichever option is cheapest. But it is in our collective best interest to have healthy competition. By having voters vote on what % of contracts should go to which provider, they end up choosing in our collective best interest, and keeping providers on their toes by maintaining a bit of diversity.
It's a bit of a wacky idea, I just had it this morning actually. My larger point is there is a disappointing lack of willingness to discuss and run small scale experiments on wacky ideas that could totally work :-D For example, the scheme I described incentivizes companies to tattle on each other for bad behavior like harming the environment! Isn't that interesting? It also goes a long way to address the classic problem of charter schools trying to goose their test scores by kicking out low-performing students.
You could have the garbage companies bid for the rights to serve a particular neighborhood, or pay a tax to the municipality according to the product of
decibels emitted * estimated fraction of the population sleeping at the hour services are delivered * population size affected
A big problem in this area is the public-run sewer systems, usually run at the township level. Many municipalities have sold to the big private water/sewer company, who immediately raised the rates by double or more.
Naturally, the outcry was that these 'greedy' corporations are taking people to the cleaners. In reality, the formerly public ran sewer was horribly managed. Maintenance and capital expenses were deferred from day 1, and now the bill is coming due. The bill from the private Corp accurately captures the ongoing maintenance and capital reserves, which the local gov just kicked the can down the road to avoid pissing off the voters.
I don't give a fuck about 5 choices if they are all bad. In fact, most people in the USA are in this exact conundrum with certain types of utilities (e.g. Internet). In fact, public ISPs in the USA have a phenomenal track-record compared to their private competitors.
I want one good choice for my utility. Portland, for all of its problems, has a pretty excellent electric company, also named "PGE", which absolutely mogs the fuck out of the other "PG&E" that people on HN are likely more aware of due to the blackouts that the public private partnership, PG&E have instituted.
In fact, I can't think of any large-scale situations where public utilities in the USA were privatized and it led to improvements in services rendered.
As it turns out, fiduciary duty is kinda fucked up when you're talking about essential utilities. I want there to be no profit incentive.
PG&E has blackouts to prevent wildfires. It's not clear how switching to a different provider would solve that problem.
But even accepting your premise that Portland's PGE "mogs the fuck out of PG&E", under the scheme I proposed, California voters could vote to assign say 5% of California energy contracts to Portland's PGE and see how it goes. That % could increase every year if the voters think they're doing a good job.
The thing I proposed is not the same as traditional utility privatization. Utilities are natural monopolies, so privatizing them doesn't actually create competition. With the proposal above, the voters get to vote on exactly how much competition they want in each industry, including utilities.
My wife is looking to change jobs in the midwest of the US. When we search, however, the majority of openings are less than full time and have no health insurance benefits.
And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.
The jobs can't afford to provide healthcare either.
The underlying harsh truths of health care in the United States is that it became bloated by design (incentives for high base prices), and also that the US population is incredibly unhealthy. And that a few million of health care workers (mostly in insurance companies) will have to lose their jobs to make it fair for the rest of us.
But because unhealthy people are lumped together with healthier ones, it tends to lower the costs to a tolerable (still very high) level. Also, many workers don't pay their full premiums, which again helps mask the true costs of health care.
Eventually it will all come crashing down and there will be far more suffering than there had to be, had we addressed the problem earlier and in full (Gut the insurance companies, Single-Payer, Cost ceilings on critical medication).
I agree with your assessment that single payer is necessary, but as for the millions of job losses claim, I don’t agree. Those millions of jobs are for doing something right now, so do you think that something will be eliminated just because the government took over and what is that something? I don’t believe that many jobs could be effectively useless, but I stand to be corrected.
If they all get jobs with Government Healthcare inc, where are the actual savings coming from? Who is going to be earning less? The profit margins of healthcare insurance companies are almost nothing. Look at Humana for instance... 2.5% net margins. Cut that out and every american saves $5 a month.
Best case: they're not kept on as 'No men' (contrast, 'yes men' for underlings who are just empty enablers), but transferred to scientifically evaluating and seeking the best treatments.
Worst case: we go back to what things were before the ACA where if you had a preexisting condition you were screwed.
Yea, I'm thinking that there might be a lot of administrative work that could be eliminated by a centralized electronic system for single payer care, but the way I see this going right now is the government adding another layer of administration on top of the current system to operate it (literally privatising it), and then adding a centralized directory of service charges and moving towards eliminating the parts of the system that are unnecessary under this scheme while also working with the same companies as currently exist to merge all EHRs into one common system. I expect most of the cruft of the current system to remain for several decades or more, plus more government cruft, but the upside is that we can eliminate the profit as a goal and probably balance half or more of the government cruft with eliminating inefficiencies. If they privatized pharma and the EHR software companies, too, then that would probably immediately lower prices due to the insane profit motives for investors in those areas, but that would never happen.
I think we might save some money right away, but more likely we'll lose a bit, gain the ability for our citizens to not have to worry as much about their jobs being their literal lifeline, and over time we'll save more and more versus the current system due to an increased quality of living due to better health outcomes and longer lives.
There wouldn't be much actual savings without massive disruption for providers. Right now Medicare and Medicaid are cheaper per patient largely because they pay below cost for the same services. They are subsidized by private insurance.
A move to Medicare for all at current reimbursement rates would require drastic budget cuts at every healthcare provider in the country. That may be what's necessary to fix the broken system, but it would involve a lot of pain.
2. They paid 10B in operating costs and receieve ~70B in premiums on top of other streams
3. They increased their interest expense for the KAH acquisition
4. They hold $44B in assets and $28B in liabilities
The story they are clearly telling investors is they are seeking to consolidate Payers with Providers to improve efficiencies, which ignores that they they could improve operational efficiencies today.
David Graeber has a long book on this, called "Bullshit Jobs". It turns out many of those people do think _their own_ job is useless and could effectively be removed with no impact.
In the book he offers some numbers on the healthcare system in the US, where in administration and insurance there are indeed many such bullshit jobs. What is worse, they often bring a bureaucratic burden on people like nurses, who do have real work to do. (All by the assessment of the people doing the bullshit job)
He offers quotes to show this was even the point of view of Obama
> Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” the former President noted. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.
I think a lot of people think we can eliminate a lot of things, but cannot properly pick the things to eliminate. I think there is a lot of bullshit we hate to do, that is still necessary; or alternately, we can't eliminate it due to some sort of momentum or systemic reliance on that bullshit.
In healthcare, I imagine there is a lot of bullshit that would still have momentum in a post-single-payer world that we couldn't eliminate right away, but I still want that. See my other recent comment, I went into more detail on why I think single-payer would be great, but isn't a panacea for healthcare costs and efficiency.
I noticed that this became more and more common back when ACA was passed. It's cheaper to hire a lot of people part time than it is to hire fewer full time people because of the benefits they would be required to cover
It has definitely been a trend at the public entity where she works. When full time employees leave/retire, two part-time positions are created to replace that person instead of hiring one full-time employee.
Since health insurance is 20-30% of the benefits package it’s cheaper to either hire under the full time bar or work people 7 days a week 10hrs a day and just pay the overtime differential. I think the calculus has swung enough that overtime at 1.5x is actually cheaper than adding new employees.
It's okay. It's not the end of the world. Many organizations eventually need to die. In the private sector, companies just collapse. In the public sector because we will prop them up no matter what, we'll need to take some short term pain as we defund the department.
Same here in the UK with local council (government) and NHS (healthcare) jobs.
The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere.
These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish.
No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".
Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK.
Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.
There was already a multi-year pay freeze in the NHS that added up to about 10-15% pay cut. If they reversed it and started giving the 10% annual inflation raise, then yes it could go some way to helping. However, that is so far out of the Overton window. Instead, tax cuts for the rich were prioritised last week.
This is the problem with the classification “public workers”. While I haven’t been able to find the statistics, my understanding is that most local government budgets are dominated by school and police/fire department personnel. Indeed, I suspect that at the local level, there are very few bureaucrats to fire (perhaps building inspectors).
Red tape may have its costs (as well as benefits), but bureaucrats do not add a lot of tax burden at the local level, which is where most public sector jobs are.
Reducing red tape doesn't mean just reducing the number of personnel. It also means utilizing existing personnel effectively. Often government processes have SO MANY steps (often meaningless) that the total amount of work done by existing people is much lower than what they are capable of.
When you go into the bowels of government, you realize how many steps are "Send X document by USPS, an employee evaluates for 6 weeks and sends Yes, No, Invalid, Request for more docs by USPS again." Then you send more documents and they take 8 weeks to evaluate again.
The root of the problem is lack of market forces. When a union organizes against company owners for better salaries and benefits, they have to leave something on the table for the business owners who will otherwise just close their doors and open some other type of business, maybe even elsewhere.
With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners.
Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient.
And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons.
So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.
We’ve got plenty here in Spain would be happy to ship you a couple hundred thousand might help our budgets and reduce red tape at the same time over here.
Do those jobs really pay less when you take into account pension benefits? Pension benefits are worth a LOT and continue to increase in value as people are living longer.
How many of these shortages were caused by the unconscienable "vaccine" mandates? Biden said the pandemic is over, but the administrative/bureaucratic controls remain in place, keeping people out of jobs in the federal and state sectors. Considering we've known for 2+ years these mRNA shots don't prevent transmission or infection, it's truly absurd that this was used to deny people jobs.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadPeople complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
Customer service people get treated like this all the time, public or private sector.
The danger is, as a society, perhaps the feedback look has inertia: WAY too many people have resigned from the “hustle life” and we are not yet feeling the effect of what happens when so few people work.
Maybe, after 10 years, the Western countries will drop off the G8, and be replaced by cultures who are more willing to work.
Maybe in the West/all over the world the workers have also noticed that the wealth is getting funneled more towards the top (Bezos can now send Captain Kirk up to the sky in a penis and buy a yacht that made headlines because a bridge in the Netherlands had to be allegedly disassembled so it would fit through...).
Even in China the youth are (or they were, was it just a fad?) doing the "lie flat" movement that the government has made statements of "Everyone has to work hard for the greater good!".
No. No one wants to work for you at the rate you're offering.
Private companies have constraints too of course but generally have more flexibility in dealing with them--which can of course be to decide that some job isn't worth it if they have to pay $X to fill it.
We do this all the time at a personal level. While there are some service people who I would pretty much have to grin and bear it. There are plenty of other things I'd just let go, do it myself, etc.
Most managers end up doing the latter because slowing things down against organizational inertia is really hard
Why is the project delaying starting until some roles are filled? (What was done during this time?)
We couldn’t hire any senior level technical talent, so there was nobody who could actually tell management whether what they wanted was possible.
What was done during the time? Endlessly updating project timeline docs about the new deadline with assumptions about when senior tech people would be hired. I didn’t touch code for months.
Whose job is it to tell the hiring team that hiring senior level technical talent at the budgeted salary is impossible also?
Do you need to be a senior HR manager for that? Are those also impossible to hire?
It is that going out of your way in the public sector is not rewarded and just gets you dragged into meetings, so if your manager isn’t telling you what to do, why not just sit on your ass?
The public sector’s motivation problem is relying on intrinsic motivations.
Why do they rely on intrinsic motivations? As the public screams when they hear of people getting large raises or bonuses.
The biggest problem is merit pay is politically impossible. Imagine paying a hotshot developer $300k to introduce a new LMS for a school district. That very well might be cheaper than hiring a consulting firm and paying a team of developers $85k.
But there would be howls about taxpayer money being wasted on such a highly paid individual. The public only tolerates raises based on seniority because absent some tragedy everyone gets old, so everyone can imagine themselves in the public workers' shoes.
This in turn attracts workers who bank on seniority rather than merit for pay increases, creating a culture of mediocrity and tall poppy attitudes.
The private sector is shielded from such criticism by the magical "just don't patronize them" argument (when in fact many businesses are monopolistic and essential), and frankly because the public is ignorant of how well-paid certain individuals are within firms.
Not arguing against high merit pay, as it can lead to the most efficient outcome, but boy oh boy is it unpopular with a lot of people who never fall into the highly paid bucket.
General public reflects the existing social order. In a society that chews people raw and spits them out for profit, the general public won't be responsible or caring. They will start caring about the society and related morals and responsibilities as much as the society cares for them.
If that's the pace of the project, then the project was never important in the first place.
I've read plenty of job descriptions' sections for qualifications, and they're out of touch with reality. Many orgs want unicorn employees (e.g. 5 years in machine learning, 3 programming languages, also PM experience and SQL, and must have comp-sci degree of course) and are barely willing to pay market rates for it.
It's unclear to me if they're actually serious about work needing to be done. They're certainly unwilling to train non-perfect-fit employees and/or let someone competent post a job ad that's realistic.
I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.
The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian.
A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.
we've seen in other more liberal communities (Denmark, Sweden) that influx of culturally different immigrants tends to create nuclei of those cultures where they just interact amongst themselves, and never integrate.
I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce.
And what I saw was not racism, what I saw was Arab immigrants trying to make Danish schools ban pork, or having a complete disregard to the "tidy" Danish way of life (whether you like that way of life or not)
I would argue that if the children of those immigrants are not fitting in then you have a problem. And that problem usually has to do with marginalization. In heavily immigrant areas do the people see themselves reflected in public insitutions? In teaching staff, bus drivers, police? America and Canada have historically been much better at this part than Europe.
Does immigration offer so much more other than cheap labour ?
Polarisation in the US, in my estimation, has a lot more to do with democratic backsliding [0] cause by economic inequality, populism, cultural conservatism and the concentration of power in the US gov't.
Lots of things with much more evidence to point at before you start blaming immigrants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding
>>What is your motivation for lying?
Unhinged.
[0] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1912126/legault-apol...
[1] https://www.lesoleil.com/2021/11/21/le-parti-conservateur-du...
Siphoning away the most ambitious and capable people from around the world also hurts the places they are from.
To be clear I do support immigration, just not as an easier to acquire and cheaper source of skilled labor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155
Under this story about bootcamps there was also the experiment by Google to run fiber through those towns. I believe the lesson was that only a handful were employable as fully-remote devs.
I expect I’d find it moderately hard to learn coal mining at my age and though I don’t believe it would have been impossible in my youth.
But of course, I agree that increase in immigration needs to be balanced and met with social and financial support for those who immigrate.
Yes, the voters want their potholes filled but that doesn't mean they'll approve a bond issue or whatever to pay for it.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansa...
“Voters choose to withhold funding for public services they expect” would be a better headline.
Seems perfectly fine. And maybe they decide that they don't actually want to pay for some public services or they're fine with more automated/online versions of certain things. For example, where I live you do a lot more associated with the DMV online than you used to and I assume significantly fewer people are employed. Of course there can be issues with access and those need to be dealt with.
It's not clear to me that, in general, state governments are massively underfunded.
I mean there clearly is one. Ukraine got billions within two days of asking. We've sent them what, $70 billion this year alone? Funnily enough no new outlet seems to be tracking the total, just covering each one individually so it doesn't look like we're doing what we're doing: Prioritizing Ukraine over US citizens.
In current geopolitical climate you would lose a lot more than $70 billion if Russia would win in Ukraine, there is a lot more on stake than Ukraine independence, US debt is financed by the rest of the world. US is world hegemon because of its influence granted by military and economical power. If you lose that status you lose influence, if you lose influence you also lose your country "safe heaven" status for other people money, next USD could lose status of world reserve currency, next your budget deficit is unsustainable anymore, your social contract gets broken, 2008 crisis would be nothing compared to this. Not mentioning that US was not ready to fight Russia and China same time, elimination of Russia from equation through proxy war in Ukraine will allow US to focus on China. Additional benefit to USA is Sweden and Finland joining NATO and strengthening US influence in Europe, making it a lot easier to flip Europe against China (see how NATO joint statement about China changed in Madrid summit in July 2022 compared to stance of leading EU countries before the war). $70 billion is not a high price to show the world that you are not a declining superpower (especially after that Afghanistan retreat and rise of China) and retain your status and influence, if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
Pure speculation.
>if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
No it's not, I wrote about how debt works in USA and you have 1 trillion deficit a year.
> I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
Remaining a world hegemon is number 1 priority for USA, sorry but being US citizen and not knowing this is ignorance and lack of knowledge about how the world works, if you lose that position I assure you that you will have a lot more problems than national healthcare, actually you can forget about national healthcare then.
Yeah there is. It's called the weekly handouts and tax cuts for the rich.
It's unfortunate that the city can't hire enough secretaries. Do I want them to poach competent workers from my ISP, Target, Amazon, or my insurance company? Not really, no.
If that's what it takes for public sector employees to be well taken care of. Unironically, yes.
Probably cause a huge outrage by people who don’t understand math.
After all, where else can public sector wages come from?
It also needs to be said that this is a common and despicable tactic of the right wing: first, vote consistently against any support for the public sector; then, claim that the public sector is fundamentally incapable of doing a good job (and should thus be deprioritized further), rather than it having been deliberately starved of funding and public support over the course of decades.
We have the public sector we vote for and are willing to pay for: no more, no less.
I am being a bit pithy, but I think these sort of opinions are based in ideology, and not experience. If you are untrustful, you will always be skeptical of government, and too trustful, will always accept that more money is the answer.
And if government had ever been funded to the point that the left wing actually wants (note: not "to the point that politics actually allows in compromise budgets, either with the Republicans or with the fiscally conservative parts of the Democrats"), over the past few hundred years, and it had still failed to solve the problems that are trying to be solved with more money, you might be able to derive a valid criticism out of this.
Galbraith's get it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
And I did the math and noted, first, to get a dollar out of State of California, you have to pay them a million in taxes. In aggregate. Like if you pay a million dollars in taxes and it's equally distributed, maybe not a million to one quite but around there. Very close, ballpark, at least for the purposes of the following estimate:
I got a 1000000000x speedup (actually a bit more but I frequently round down to a more impressive number) on an algorithm thanks to those stimulants, and then it made sense: I still got 1000x ROI from paying taxes. Purely mathematical about it. Best money I ever spent! If you get a big enough speedup, taxes are a great investment. And they're the only thing that get people out of the absolute deepest holes.
No, they don't. In a democratic system, they need to pay what the voting public wants them to pay. Give the People a referendum to decide this: they can choose between paying public-sector employees well (competitively with private industry) and raising taxes to pay for it, or lowering taxes and keeping public-sector pay low.
Which one do you think they'll choose?
Or, if you prefer that elected representatives make these decisions, get some people to run on a platform of jacking up taxes to raise public-service position salaries. Let's see if they get elected.
The People are getting what they voted for.
Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all)
It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.
1) implicitly you are saying that lots of public sector jobs are so bad they can/should only be done by “others” that move “here” to do them for us.
2) who will do the crappy jobs where the immigrants came from?
Getting immigrants to do exclusively jobs that locals won’t do feels like a bandaid to me. Does anyone else worry about this?
In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs.
So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
Cause and effect is what matters. Not some abstract purity test of "supporting a system" that's totally disconnected from actual moral outcomes. If you advocate a policy that blocks immigrants from working in the US, you are directly causing their suffering. If your position aligns closely with ethnonationalists, it's time for some deep introspection. This is malevolence masquerading as compassion.
The America First, America for Americans type people at least have a position that is coherent even if it's not compassionate.
The anti immigrant liberals for whom class solidarity ends at the border just don't make sense to me.
This is my exact position. You are assuming I am against immigration. In the big picture, the system that makes immigration is not compassionate, but it would also not be compassionate in the small picture to stop immigration.
Increased immigration from poorer countries only results in lower wages and less leverage to negotiate for the most vulnerable. Regardless of whatever laws you try to bring forth to counter this, you’ll be fighting a permanent uphill battle against physical reality.
The modern progressive attitude is to simply be for everything indiscriminately, without regard for the contradictions.
growth was so large that society could accommodate such immigration rates
Immigration is basically arbitrage on living conditions, the US could directly institute “compassionate slavery” and many very poor countries would gladly sell themselves and their children into it.
In fact, there are likely people who would rather live in US prisons than in the country they’re currently in.
For this reason, we will never have "everyone has immigrated" be a serious problem.
Also, legal immigration has been down under Trump and has not bounced back to Obama levels under Biden.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-...
The article answers the question quite convincingly, though it takes eight paragraphs to get there: government jobs don't pay well and governments[1] are very slow to adjust worker pay to market conditions. So no one wants to work these jobs because they're working better jobs elsewhere.
[1] Across the ideological spectrum. Sure, republicans might have a cynical reason to want to torpedo the government, but no bureaucrat wants to raise pay scales. It's all downsides from the perspective of middle management.
But some cities like San Francisco have had both for decades, and should be doing exceptionally well.
Want to stay remote? As a federal employee, too bad. Furloughs suck too. You have little negotiation power compared to private bosses.
The teachers I know would rather change professions, or work at a lower paying private school than at a public school. They're tired of all the administrative problems. I'm sure pay is more of an issue in certain states (mine pays well), but this lack of freedom, or even micromanagement is a major factor as a teacher or in the private sector.
I have had coworkers that left government work and government contract work that did so because the policies are crippling the mission.
I have no interest in working at a public school. I have little interest in working for the government either - both due to the regulations and bureaucracy.
Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts.
I dug up the lede from where it was buried.
Reads like someone has discovered that the government sector has a hard time competing with the capitalist sector.
> Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today
They actually are, at least for pension contributions.
No. The government exempts taxpayer funded pensions from laws about calculating pension liabilities, and so they use discount rates far above what non taxpayer funded pension funds are required to use. And even these liberally calculated costs are not even funded properly, because there is nothing stopping the politician from not kicking the can down the road.
On the whole the lifetime employment model was abandoned by the private sector decades ago for many good reasons, namely the impossibility of funding defined benefits after population growth stalled; as usual the government is the last place in society that makes necessary changes.
How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.)
As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards.
Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain.
The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions.
And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years).
I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.
Where are salaries higher? That doesn't seem to be the case in real terms in most places.
The most conservative estimate I've seen shows that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the past 50 years, it would be over $21/hour now. The minimum wage.
From what I've seen, Dunkin and Amazon* pay a $15 minimum wage—which, yes, is better than many other places now, but not compared to what you could expect to get for similar jobs several decades ago (adjusted for inflation). And I haven't heard anything one way or the other about Dunkin, but Amazon is actively hostile to unions, which were the strong sword and shield of blue collar workers like them back when they could expect pensions and such—not at all coincidentally.
* For those actually designated employees; I'm given to understand that Amazon also does all sorts of shenanigans to designate various people who work for them as contractors of some type.
Yes. That's the only metric that matters for most people.
The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that.
Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.
Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits
Your point is basically "the worst union imaginable is the same as no union".
That's not the own you think it is.
The railroad union got screwed. For one they didn’t get an actual contract. As far as I can tell they got Tentative deal that was used as a procedural trick to delay the strike till after the midterms. It’s not even clear that there was anything in this “tentative deal”. More importantly the strike wasn’t about pay as much as it was about absolutely terrible scheduling practices. Employees were on call 24/7/365 had to show up at very short notice, couldn’t take vacation or sick leave etc. There was no promise of actually fixing any of the problems in that deal.
This happens a lot in union strikes, workers want better work conditions but instead the union negotiates like 1-2% more pay and the media reports it as greedy unions getting overpaid. Even though that’s not what the workers even wanted.
That's more like thanks to disinvestment in retirement funds to build capital for future payouts.
Winding back the clock to stimulate growth seems to be the order of the day
I have the suspicion this will only be used to import cheaper labor, not to treat current labor better or pay them more.
It may not be THE problem, but dismissing it as just one of the culture wars items is in itself counter-productive ( if only, because perception is reality and people do vote based on their belief systems ).
I do not disagree with you on the clear focus of US on the true beneficiary of this system ( corporations ).
The continued running of the economy is practically dependant on a wealth transfer to labour so we can enable a second wealth transfer to capital.
It’s pretty obvious when you think about it.
Right now I think that equilibrium is out of sorts because I think it's almost self-evident how much somebody poor could do with a thousand dollars, whereas a company like Berkshire Hathaway right now is at such a loss as to what to invest in that they're literally just sitting on cash when they get it. There's are exceptions but I see too much of this these days. Wealth also isn't distributed like a Pareto distribution, it's too top-sided to follow the distribution perfectly, and if history repeats itself we will see that unravel. I expect the top to fall more than I expect the bottom to rise though.
The extract of money to the rich has created the wealth gap: CEO pay , investors with money to invest, all of got richer when the money supply was expanding while keeping worker (actual producers) pay raise at a far lower rate.
Now that there are supply issues, due to different Covid rules across countries for global trade, and demand relatively high, the rich are looking for “growth” still. But with a cash tightening, they can’t borrow as much to produce goods at an accelerated pace. Hence “worker shortage”.
If CEOs and companies are cutting staff, the board should consider readjusting executive pay as well to save money and reallocate the savings towards hiring! It’s time to adjust executive pay vs. worker pay and shrink the wealth gap a little.
I don’t usually agree with Robert Reich as I’m more moderate than he is positions, but topic I’m in agreement: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflat...
I'll give a real world example. In Canada, they privatised almost every public telecom in the country except Sasktel. Since Canada has lots of rural customers that would be unprofitable to service, connecting these customers is subsidised by the government, in return for the companies among other things accepting price controls on what they both charge companies and also charge 3rd party providers piggybacking off their infrastructure like MVNO's. Canada has some of the highest telecom prices in the entire world, so price controls at best were inadequate and at worst failed. Yet Saskatchewan notably pays less than the rest of the country, and that's because there's no incentive for them to collude with the big telecoms to raise prices, so they don't.
He also mentions anti-trust, anti-trust is all well and good but historically only a very few companies get broken up and it tends to encumber than less than expected, Microsoft is doing OK. Taxing corporate profits more is almost totally hopeless, especially for something like Big Pharma which has countless means to shift around which country profit was realised in. Price controls for pharma make no sense, the government is artificially raising pharma prices through IP enforcement, just don't enforce their patents and you'll have lower drug spending and lower enforcement costs. Why do governments enforce patents for tax dodgers anyways?
To me, I feel like Reich is dancing around the crux of the issue, talking about moderate approaches which mostly buy into the status quo, talking about things like price controls with a degree of embarrassment.
The conditions are so shitty and pay so poor that I almost question the motivations of people doing it.
A lot of ‘saints’ but also a lot of theft and abuse , particularly around medication occurs in these low cost facilities and low pay home help.
- Java developer / C++ developer - 10+ years of experience - Low end of medium wage. - Something about excitement in your advert.
> Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The Fed is clearly going to engineer a massive recession and financial crisis to throw enough people out of work to get inflation under control and make people continue to work for peanuts.
They're not giving the working class a larger chunk of the pie without a massive fight (and what remains to be seen is if how far they'll go before they realize they're harming themselves in the process, and even if they capitulate before they destroy everything).
If you want working class pay to go up, go vote for people who will help working class pay up instead of assigning conspiracy theories to the fed.
If we assume this is what they meant, I think the post is reasonable. The fed is targeting labor in this way specifically to avoid a wage/price inflation spiral. Those hurt the most by such a spiral are capital holders as the relative power of their capital decreases.
(all this said, I would actually prefer solutions targeting the land-holding class, over labor and capital).
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20220... [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wage-price-spiral-column-do...
I don't see this happening as a net result. There are just too many powerful (wealthy) interests working multiple angles to ensure that a vast majority of any gains go to the top.
There will be faux gains or benefits which appear substantive but are either offset by some new life cost (such as inflation, but not necessarily so great and complex) or are outright new expenses.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2...
edit: updated link to last 15 years
USA GDP per person growth, 2000 to 2022, 87%. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...
EU GDP per person growth, 2000 to 2022, 126% https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUU/european-union/gdp...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Though double checking my calculation the US should be 91%.
I mean you can compare things over the last week, but that’s obviously meaningless.
You’re wrong and you know it, this little do-Si-do is just embarrassing
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
The reason there's a surplus is egalitarianism. Most of the developed world realized we didn't economically tap much of society because of whatever *ism. Fixing that produced a huge benefit. But it also ended up with 2 key problems. Huge surplus of low-skilled labour AND a problematic population pyramid.
>The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The problem after that im sure they'll call the 'great unretirement' where people who retired ran out of money but lots of those people wont want to work. Nobody will hire them. They will turn to crime.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/17/850-more-unvaxxed-nyc-teachers...
>...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt.
https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506...
Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them?
Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low.
https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...
It seems to be working decently well.
But we also have a very local town power and water utility that is also working well, too. So perhaps it’s something else.
The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract.
I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.
Your point about there being only one company that can fulfill the contract is a good one. My suggestion was to vote for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. I haven't worked out exact details of how this voting would work -- maybe voters could upvote/downvote service providers reddit style, and their contract percentages could be adjusted accordingly. But the overall thought was that if company A is currently providing 100% of Centerville waste services, and company B from Borderville is looking to expand into Centerville, they try to convince voters to assign 5% of Centerville waste disposal contracts to company B.
Monopolies arise because it is an individual's best interest to buy whichever option is cheapest. But it is in our collective best interest to have healthy competition. By having voters vote on what % of contracts should go to which provider, they end up choosing in our collective best interest, and keeping providers on their toes by maintaining a bit of diversity.
It's a bit of a wacky idea, I just had it this morning actually. My larger point is there is a disappointing lack of willingness to discuss and run small scale experiments on wacky ideas that could totally work :-D For example, the scheme I described incentivizes companies to tattle on each other for bad behavior like harming the environment! Isn't that interesting? It also goes a long way to address the classic problem of charter schools trying to goose their test scores by kicking out low-performing students.
decibels emitted * estimated fraction of the population sleeping at the hour services are delivered * population size affected
Naturally, the outcry was that these 'greedy' corporations are taking people to the cleaners. In reality, the formerly public ran sewer was horribly managed. Maintenance and capital expenses were deferred from day 1, and now the bill is coming due. The bill from the private Corp accurately captures the ongoing maintenance and capital reserves, which the local gov just kicked the can down the road to avoid pissing off the voters.
I don't give a fuck about 5 choices if they are all bad. In fact, most people in the USA are in this exact conundrum with certain types of utilities (e.g. Internet). In fact, public ISPs in the USA have a phenomenal track-record compared to their private competitors.
I want one good choice for my utility. Portland, for all of its problems, has a pretty excellent electric company, also named "PGE", which absolutely mogs the fuck out of the other "PG&E" that people on HN are likely more aware of due to the blackouts that the public private partnership, PG&E have instituted.
In fact, I can't think of any large-scale situations where public utilities in the USA were privatized and it led to improvements in services rendered.
As it turns out, fiduciary duty is kinda fucked up when you're talking about essential utilities. I want there to be no profit incentive.
But even accepting your premise that Portland's PGE "mogs the fuck out of PG&E", under the scheme I proposed, California voters could vote to assign say 5% of California energy contracts to Portland's PGE and see how it goes. That % could increase every year if the voters think they're doing a good job.
The thing I proposed is not the same as traditional utility privatization. Utilities are natural monopolies, so privatizing them doesn't actually create competition. With the proposal above, the voters get to vote on exactly how much competition they want in each industry, including utilities.
And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.
The underlying harsh truths of health care in the United States is that it became bloated by design (incentives for high base prices), and also that the US population is incredibly unhealthy. And that a few million of health care workers (mostly in insurance companies) will have to lose their jobs to make it fair for the rest of us.
But because unhealthy people are lumped together with healthier ones, it tends to lower the costs to a tolerable (still very high) level. Also, many workers don't pay their full premiums, which again helps mask the true costs of health care.
Eventually it will all come crashing down and there will be far more suffering than there had to be, had we addressed the problem earlier and in full (Gut the insurance companies, Single-Payer, Cost ceilings on critical medication).
Worst case: we go back to what things were before the ACA where if you had a preexisting condition you were screwed.
I think we might save some money right away, but more likely we'll lose a bit, gain the ability for our citizens to not have to worry as much about their jobs being their literal lifeline, and over time we'll save more and more versus the current system due to an increased quality of living due to better health outcomes and longer lives.
A move to Medicare for all at current reimbursement rates would require drastic budget cuts at every healthcare provider in the country. That may be what's necessary to fix the broken system, but it would involve a lot of pain.
Net income: 2.9B USD
HOWEVER:
1. They paid 3.6B USD in dividends in 2021
2. They paid 10B in operating costs and receieve ~70B in premiums on top of other streams
3. They increased their interest expense for the KAH acquisition
4. They hold $44B in assets and $28B in liabilities
The story they are clearly telling investors is they are seeking to consolidate Payers with Providers to improve efficiencies, which ignores that they they could improve operational efficiencies today.
In the book he offers some numbers on the healthcare system in the US, where in administration and insurance there are indeed many such bullshit jobs. What is worse, they often bring a bureaucratic burden on people like nurses, who do have real work to do. (All by the assessment of the people doing the bullshit job)
He offers quotes to show this was even the point of view of Obama
> Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” the former President noted. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.
In healthcare, I imagine there is a lot of bullshit that would still have momentum in a post-single-payer world that we couldn't eliminate right away, but I still want that. See my other recent comment, I went into more detail on why I think single-payer would be great, but isn't a panacea for healthcare costs and efficiency.
The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere.
These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish.
No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".
Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK.
Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.
> "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".
You're saying fixing the root cause of this sentiment, wont fix the sentiment?
- Work hours / shifts
- Holidays
- Micromanagement of your workload
- Having orders given down but taking full responsibility if it goes wrong?
- Miscommunication and resources not being available or sent to the wrong place?
Red tape may have its costs (as well as benefits), but bureaucrats do not add a lot of tax burden at the local level, which is where most public sector jobs are.
When you go into the bowels of government, you realize how many steps are "Send X document by USPS, an employee evaluates for 6 weeks and sends Yes, No, Invalid, Request for more docs by USPS again." Then you send more documents and they take 8 weeks to evaluate again.
With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners.
Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient.
And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons.
So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.
Employers have enjoyed exploiting workers for much too long and now they feel entitled.
Productivity has greatly increased. Pay and respect have not.