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I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."
As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.
It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.
So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."
But, like, you did.
But your very own account, you had this job as a teenaged, hated it (but made some money) and then worked hard at your studies to go build a different career. Not hopping-in-and-out of it would imply you either a) never got the job in the first place or b) are still working there (or a similar job).
You're proving my point here. Shitty jobs are shitty. People shouldn't have them for very long. But they're hand to have if you're close to destitute and need quick, honest cash (or if you're, I don't know, a student who would like some small income).
Please re-read my original post. I'm not advocating for shitty jobs as actually not shitty. I'm not saying people should be thankful for their shitty jobs and stay in the forever. I'm saying that shitty jobs should have low friction of entry and exit and that, because they do not, this contributes a level of extra competition at the lower end of employment that is wrong and unfair, especially for legally complaint native born Americans.
I think that there's some misinterpretation of what my point is and I'm not totally convinced it's innocent misinterpretation. I agree with "people shouldn't have to work shitty jobs" as much as I agree with "we shouldn't have wars" -- A nice thought, but unrealistic. Worse yet, I find that people who are super-duper anti-shitty job tend to be in favor of very generous Government cash transfer programs. This is a negative-sum game; the taxpayer base gets a raw deal, and the welfare recipients become strange pseudo-indentured wards of the state.
The thing is, I was already a good student before I had that shitty job. It didn't motivate me to go and work harder, it actually just distracted me a lot from my studies. Saying I hopped-in-and-out is like saying someone can quickly move from from a brief drug addiction or short prison sentence. It's possible, there are people who do it, but it's not good for anyone, and there's an awful lot of people who get stuck there for lifetime. Most of the people I saw there were stuck there or in a similarly shitty job for their entire life.
I agree with you that it's unrealistic to not have shitty jobs. You seem to think that they can be done by native-born people who are just working there briefly on their path to a better life. I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.
When you say "we" in "we should help citizens find a better life" what do you mean exactly? Education programs? Cash transfers? Job finding support?
Because all of these ideas have been tried before and, in some cases, are still being tried - to great failure.
Again, what is your proposed solution? Please try to be more specific than "help those who need helping"
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One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).
Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.
I don't really understand how your comment relates to the topic at hand. H1B visa holders are usually getting paid more than minimum wage, and migrant/illegal workers aren't bound by any rules at all.
My own experience is that the real world is a bit different from the perfect frictionless sphere econ101 view of the world. Working at a small shop, it's not always easy to replace someone, so they'll often put up with some shockingly bad behavior to avoid firing. But there's also shitty managers who enjoy flexing their petty power to make workers lifes worse just because they can, for not rational economic reason.
The conversation turned significantly toward minimum wage "dead-end jobs". You can find some more interesting discussion of this group here.
This sort of feeds into 100's point about frictions. Yes, there are frictions to firing people, too, which in multiple markets leads to behavior like, "Let's just make it shitty enough for them that they quit." This isn't just at the low-end. I'm very aware of situations where C-level people were pushed out by just gradually taking away all of their power/budget and making their job shittier and shittier from the perspective of a C-level person.
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The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
Sanitation is far from frivolous, if anything it is one of the more essential jobs out there. I am prepared to wager that janitors and dishwashers are far more critical to the day-to-day survival of civilization than whatever it is that you're doing.
With that sort of attitude I am confident that you aren't working in food or energy production.
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I think you misunderstand what it was like. the restaurant had a dashwasher. Not like the one you have at home, it was a huge industrial machine. It required two humans to constantly load and unload it, like an assembly line. If you want to raise pay for that sort of thing, you'd have to massively raise prices at the restaurant and no one would want to eat there anymore.
My father did a job like that for several years. They didn't have air conditioning, and he complained about it being about 90 degrees most of the time, and they only gave him little pixie cups of water. He eventually left after they switched the kitchen language to one he didn't know, and got a job teaching high school math, because he was a grown adult with a college degree, a clean background check, and family at the time. In retrospect, I have no idea what he was doing there, and it's good he was pushed out.
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