| Suppose politicians or local citizens believe the following: - that there are some jobs necessary to basic local functions even though marginal productivity doesn’t add much value to the employer - nobody wants to work those jobs, and so the people who end up with them end up there in a musical chairs sort of way and, for whatever exogenous reasons, cannot retrain for different jobs - workers at these jobs will have their wages marginalized toward zero, with unlivable lack of medical benefits, in free market operation, because employers will respond to the lack of adequate value added for marginal additional labor in these jobs. Add a fourth, more speculative position to the discussion: - in the media and in political grandstanding, people in the working class who depend on these jobs will have an outsized sympathy effect from how cases of suffering or perceived unfairness are amplified to create bad press for businesses or politicians. In the end, it creates a real mess. - You can’t allow market forces to pay these people less, cut benefits or outright remove the headcount. This creates an unemployable underclass who cannot move away or retrain. They either can work these jobs or be wards of the state or appeal to live on charity or just die from lack of resources. - You also can’t require businesses to pay more or pay for adequate insurance, especially at inflated modern insurance prices. Businesses are already fighting for their lives at the margins and it would be counter-productive to require them to pay more as they’ll just reduce headcount instead. In my view, it suggests that the local government should pay a living stipend with insurance to many of these workers, which could be supplemented by part-time or low-wage work in some of these jobs. People might be incentivized to work them if the money is meaningful as a supplement to a living base stiped, while allowing businesses to maintain staff. But basically, as a tax-payer in SF, one option that is not possibly open for belief is to keep wages & benefits low and/or economically force out low-wage workers. It’s just not a possible option, because the result would just be a bunch of people either living on charity or just directly dying from lack of resources. In no scenario will they be able to move elsewhere to get more resources for a low-wage job or retrain to get a higher wage job. Just no. To me, this issue is one that demands some serious reckoning, and politicians who don’t want to catch the falling sword can only keep pushing it off a little longer before we start having urban zones where it’s just opulent wealth juxtaposed with humanitarian crises on virtually every block. |