A government subsidy makes sense for hospital workers since health care economics is weird and it should be government funded anyway, but not outside it. In normal markets, it would be better to...
A government subsidy makes sense for hospital workers since health care economics is weird and it should be government funded anyway, but not outside it.
In normal markets, it would be better to have a higher minimum wage for hazardous work. The employer should bear the cost so they have the incentive to cut back on hazardous work where they can, so more people can stay home.
The cost will be passed on in higher prices, and then maybe essential output should be subsidized. (Increase food benefits, along with a UBI.)
I don't disagree. The wage increase should be permanent, not neccessarily the govt funding of it, outside of maybe a small transition period. It could be funded by returning our tax code to 1960s...
I don't disagree. The wage increase should be permanent, not neccessarily the govt funding of it, outside of maybe a small transition period.
It could be funded by returning our tax code to 1960s rates.
You can also do things like rotate hazardous work throughout the population, a favorite scheme of some anarchists. However we’re not set up for that and now is not the time to start throwing new...
You can also do things like rotate hazardous work throughout the population, a favorite scheme of some anarchists. However we’re not set up for that and now is not the time to start throwing new people in to critical jobs. Just a comment about long term potential solutions.
Why not? Most economists think a wage subsidy is preferred due to being less distortionary than a minimum wage. The hazard pay is already priced into the wage. Regulatory requirements around...
A government subsidy makes sense for hospital workers since health care economics is weird and it should be government funded anyway, but not outside it.
Why not? Most economists think a wage subsidy is preferred due to being less distortionary than a minimum wage.
The employer should bear the cost so they have the incentive to cut back on hazardous work where they can, so more people can stay home.
The hazard pay is already priced into the wage. Regulatory requirements around occupational safety also make each person more expensive to keep on staff.
You're telling me that McDonald's worker's wages have hazard pay priced in already? I hate to tell you this but real markets have time delays unlike the idealized markets that don't exist that you...
In normal markets, it would be better to have a higher minimum wage for hazardous work. The employer should bear the cost so they have the incentive to cut back on hazardous work where they can, so more people can stay home.
The hazard pay is already priced into the wage.
You're telling me that McDonald's worker's wages have hazard pay priced in already? I hate to tell you this but real markets have time delays unlike the idealized markets that don't exist that you learn about in Econ 101. The hazard of the pandemic is not priced into McDonald's worker wages yet and given their nil bargaining power without a union, it's unlikely it ever will be.
I don't see how that addresses my question at all. You claimed hazard pay is already priced into the wages of essential workers, which is facially absurd. You bear the burden of showing that claim...
If you don’t want people going out we can just forbid them from going out. You can’t expect individual business owners to just know the optimal response to the pandemic. You either shut it down and give them a bridge grant or loan or you don’t. Market forces don’t apply since infectious disease risk isn’t subject to pricing mechanisms.
I don't see how that addresses my question at all. You claimed hazard pay is already priced into the wages of essential workers, which is facially absurd. You bear the burden of showing that claim to be true.
You are ascribing an argument to me I didn't make. Reread my post in its entirety please. Specifically this sentence, which makes it pretty clear that I don't think infectious disease risk is...
You are ascribing an argument to me I didn't make. Reread my post in its entirety please. Specifically this sentence, which makes it pretty clear that I don't think infectious disease risk is priced into wages. Because, you know, I said exactly that.
Market forces don’t apply since infectious disease risk isn’t subject to pricing mechanisms.
Okay. I'm just having trouble trying to find a way that your statement that "the hazard pay is already priced into the wage" doesn't mean "hazard pay [related to COVID-19] is already priced into...
The employer should bear the cost so they have the incentive to cut back on hazardous work where they can, so more people can stay home.
The hazard pay is already priced into the wage. Regulatory requirements around occupational safety also make each person more expensive to keep on staff.
Okay. I'm just having trouble trying to find a way that your statement that "the hazard pay is already priced into the wage" doesn't mean "hazard pay [related to COVID-19] is already priced into the page." But since apparently you don't think that there's no reason to continue with this back-and-forth.
The part where neither I, nor the person I was responding to, didn’t say “related to COVID-19” anywhere should have made it pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about COVID-19 in that clause and it...
I'm just having trouble trying to find a way that your statement that "the hazard pay is already priced into the wage" doesn't mean "hazard pay [related to COVID-19] is already priced into the page."
The part where neither I, nor the person I was responding to, didn’t say “related to COVID-19” anywhere should have made it pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about COVID-19 in that clause and it was a general statement about risks inherent to a job.
The "distortion" from a minimum wage is that it discourages employers from giving people work by making it more costly to hire them. Usually that's considered bad. But due to the pandemic, it's...
The "distortion" from a minimum wage is that it discourages employers from giving people work by making it more costly to hire them. Usually that's considered bad. But due to the pandemic, it's opposite day, and we want people to stay home if possible. So for now, discouraging employment (in hazardous situations) is good.
If you don’t want people going out we can just forbid them from going out. You can’t expect individual business owners to just know the optimal response to the pandemic. You either shut it down...
If you don’t want people going out we can just forbid them from going out. You can’t expect individual business owners to just know the optimal response to the pandemic. You either shut it down and give them a bridge grant or loan or you don’t. Market forces don’t apply since infectious disease risk isn’t subject to pricing mechanisms.
Forbidding people from going out and making it expensive to do it are both ways of discouraging it. "Essential work" isn't really binary; some food businesses are more essential than others, and...
Forbidding people from going out and making it expensive to do it are both ways of discouraging it. "Essential work" isn't really binary; some food businesses are more essential than others, and some things a business will ask its workers to do are more essential than others. Charging more is a rather harsh way of getting businesses to make tradeoffs, and due to inequality it favors things the rich will pay for, but it's less harsh than forbidding things entirely.
The business owners aren’t equipped to make these decisions. They’re not epidemiologists. How the hell are they supposed to know what the risks are? None of it is reflected by labor costs either.
"Essential work" isn't really binary; some food businesses are more essential than others, and some things a business will ask its workers to do are more essential than others.
The business owners aren’t equipped to make these decisions. They’re not epidemiologists. How the hell are they supposed to know what the risks are? None of it is reflected by labor costs either.
If the epidemiologists are saying they need to stay home, they should stay home. Again, I don't see where or how pricing gets into it. The hazard, in this case, isn't to the individual worker,...
If the epidemiologists are saying they need to stay home, they should stay home. Again, I don't see where or how pricing gets into it. The hazard, in this case, isn't to the individual worker, it's to society from the worker becoming a transmission vector.
Epidemiologists (or rather, departments of public health) aren't making decisions for individual workers or even individual businesses. The way the health orders work (around here, anyway) is...
Epidemiologists (or rather, departments of public health) aren't making decisions for individual workers or even individual businesses. The way the health orders work (around here, anyway) is there are broad categories of businesses that can stay open like food preparation, or car repair, and business owners decide whether to stay open based on whether they think they're in that category. And some stretch things a bit.
So business owners already make decisions, and the question is, what are good inputs into that decision? I am not sure that making decisions based on taxonomy (is this food preparation or not) is a best way of deciding what's essential?
They are making decisions in the case of individual people who are at risk. They can't force you to comply, but if you have comorbid respiratory conditions you're being instructed to stay home...
Epidemiologists (or rather, departments of public health) aren't making decisions for individual workers
They are making decisions in the case of individual people who are at risk. They can't force you to comply, but if you have comorbid respiratory conditions you're being instructed to stay home regardless of whether you work in an essential industry or not.
I am not sure that making decisions based on taxonomy (is this food preparation or not) is a best way of deciding what's essential?
Is there a better method that's practicable in the real world? One of the reasons they do taxonomy is because every registered business is already tagged with an NAICS code that can be used as an objective way to track who is allowed to be open or not. Most other methods would open up space for people to lie.
I'm really kind of confused what point you're making. In my department of ~20-30 people, there's a good handful of maybe 7-8 immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk (conditions like asthma)...
I'm really kind of confused what point you're making. In my department of ~20-30 people, there's a good handful of maybe 7-8 immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk (conditions like asthma) coworkers that would disagree on there being no hazard to themselves. And that's excluding an immunocompromised coworker who quit because he was afraid both of getting it himself and passing it to his elderly mother back at home.
COVID-19 is a health risk, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to pay employees extra for the extra risk that they're taking on. Not just the direct risk to themselves, which does still exist, but also for their loved ones back at home.
As far as how much extra, they should be asking the advice of experts because, like you say, the employers aren't experts. The correct/fair pricing is up to the experts to determine. If that amount's too much for employers to pay, they'll find ways to adapt. If it's too little for employees to consider "worth it," in theory, they'll leave. I might be missing your point entirely but "squishy" things like this don't really have a set value, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or don't have any value.
If it’s a material risk to them due to immunological issues we shouldn’t be having employers make choices about how much extra to pay them. They just shouldn’t be working. Full stop....
In my department of ~20-30 people, there's a good handful of maybe 7-8 immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk (conditions like asthma) coworkers that would disagree on there being no hazard to themselves. And that's excluding an immunocompromised coworker who quit because he was afraid both of getting it himself and passing it to his elderly mother back at home.
If it’s a material risk to them due to immunological issues we shouldn’t be having employers make choices about how much extra to pay them. They just shouldn’t be working. Full stop.
The correct/fair pricing is up to the experts to determine.
Epidemiologists don’t know anything about how a grocery store operates. Grocers don’t know anything about epidemiology. Nobody has the knowledge-base to be making these sorts of fine-grained decisions for every aspect of the economy. If it was possible to impose price controls at this level of granularity, the Soviet Union would have been a successful economic model. But that wasn't even feasible in normal times with lots of data. It's definitely not feasible in pandemic times with no good data.
You either keep people home or you don’t. There should be no negotiated pay scale on deciding whether someone should work because no individual has enough information to truly understand what kind of risk they pose. A blanket subsidy makes sense since it both gooses the economy and will help recovery and it compensates the people working for the extra inconvenience.
Why are you so insistent on this black-and-white dichotomy you got going on there? Keeping everyone home is not an option. People need food and supplies, so keeping the grocery stores open is...
Why are you so insistent on this black-and-white dichotomy you got going on there? Keeping everyone home is not an option. People need food and supplies, so keeping the grocery stores open is pretty much a necessity unless you're building your own infrastructure for that. Which also requires people to build and run. The utility infrastructures need people physically there working. You can't send those people home. Those positions that must be filled now have an extra risk to them, so add extra pay to compensate for the new hazard.
And nobody's saying that any one person has to be an expert on every single thing, either. Employers hire the experts, the experts request and receive all the information they need in order to make an informed recommendation, and then they can say "raise wage for these employees by this much." Or not, they might say "it's not worth the risk to society to keep this business (or this part of this business) open right now." Epidemiologists aren't one single entity with indivisible attention. Nobody's asking the grocers to suddenly become experts, either. Collaboration exists.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against a blanket subsidy, just arguing against the idea that the people working right now haven't taken on extra risk that doesn't need to be compensated.
You were talking about coworkers who are immunocompromised. If the risk is material to them (as in, life threatening) they should not be out and working, period. Regardless of what industry...
Keeping everyone home is not an option
You were talking about coworkers who are immunocompromised. If the risk is material to them (as in, life threatening) they should not be out and working, period. Regardless of what industry they'er in. That's pretty black and white.
For everyone else it's unlikely to get much worse than a bad cold or flu and they can continue if it's necessary. But again, that's not the responsibility of any individual worker or business owner to decide. The main focus is preventing spread, not the risk to any individual person. The government policy is a blunt instrument to scare people into staying home or not to limit exposure and spread. Pricing does nothing there because the main thing you're trying to stop is an externality.
Those positions that must be filled now have an extra risk to them, so add extra pay to compensate for the new hazard.
Yeah, which is being done by a wage subsidy because it's a uniform risk for anyone who is out. What's more, the actual risk isn't really that high for a young, healthy person with no comorbidities. Not that much higher than the regular cold and flu season impose anyway.
I'm not arguing against a blanket subsidy, just arguing against the idea that the people working right now haven't taken on extra risk that doesn't need to be compensated.
The extra risk to an able bodied person is minor. It's a greater risk to at-risk people they interact with than it is to themselves, but then you wouldn't be paying hazard pay for a job, you'd be paying it for people who know people at those jobs. Most of the "nobody is safe!" rhetoric is as much to keep people home and slow transmission than an actual reflection of how dangerous it is to be out. If we were pricing risk to the individual based on material risk posed by COVID-19, we actually wouldn't be paying people much of anything. And if they're immunocompromised to where it is a real risk, no amount of money should be used to entice them to work anyway. That would be immoral!
It's kind of like people asserting that the solution to Facebook's data privacy evils is to make them pay you for their use of your data. Except it turns out that once they model it Facebook would only end up paying people a few cents a year, not enough to actually affect anything in any way. By all means pay people more because they deserve to be paid more. Or pay them more because the jobs are harder now because of being short staffed, ordinary services and rhythms being interrupted, etc. But it's not really "hazard" pay. If you focused on that then you'd end up paying them way less.
Now if we were dealing with an illness that actually killed more reliably, then this definitely would be more of a hazard. But at that point, you shouldn't be running things out of independent grocery stores anyway. You'd be on full lockdown and having people distributing rations.
Agreed. It sounded like you were extending your all-or-nothing to everyone, high and low risk. Like you say, for some high-risk individuals, no reasonable amount of compensation is enough. But...
You were talking about coworkers who are immunocompromised. If the risk is material to them (as in, life threatening) they should not be out and working, period. Regardless of what industry they'er in. That's pretty black and white.
Agreed. It sounded like you were extending your all-or-nothing to everyone, high and low risk. Like you say, for some high-risk individuals, no reasonable amount of compensation is enough. But there is risk for everyone. Even able-bodied people are being harmed and killed by this. Lower risk doesn't mean no risk. The risk is there, it applies to the individual, and it's new, so it should be compensated.
There is an added risk to society from the person becoming a transmission vector, but like you said, pricing has no hold there. The pricing change is for the individual, and for the companies to pressure them into making more conservative choices on who really needs to be exposing themselves and everyone around them.
Yeah, which is being done by a wage subsidy because it's a uniform risk for anyone who is out. What's more, the actual risk isn't really that high for a young, healthy person with no comorbidities. Not that much higher than the regular cold and flu season impose anyway.
This seems to be the main sticking point then. Everything I hear places COVID-19 at a much higher risk for everyone than the flu. Otherwise, why is nearly the whole planet shutting down? We could just be directing only high-risk people to stay home and the rest of us continue on as normal. This is more than just a kinda bad, kinda unexpected flu season.
And the people who are out working are out far more than the people staying home and sheltering in place. The risk is for everyone, but it's not uniform.
So there's two things. There is the virus' virulence and its actual impact. It's much more virulent than a regular cold or flu because nobody has any immunity to it yet. But it's actual impact is...
Everything I hear places COVID-19 at a much higher risk for everyone than the flu.
So there's two things. There is the virus' virulence and its actual impact. It's much more virulent than a regular cold or flu because nobody has any immunity to it yet. But it's actual impact is not that much stronger, and the actual risk presented to people without any comorbidities is very low. (Though comorbidities can include things like being a smoker, having really bad allergies, or getting double-infected by both COVID-19 and another, regular coronavirus at the same time, so it still covers a lot of people).
What's more is, we make a habit of not treating the flu as seriously as we ought to. So when people say it's like the flu that really should be read more like "Oh God, it's like the flu!" rather than "Whew! It's 'just' a flu."
The planet is shutting down because we don't have the kind of herd immunity that slows down and moderates how virulent it is. People get flu shots during flu season and, even aside from that, there is some baseline immunity in society from the influenza virus. This slows down how quickly it gets around and how well people can recover from it. The point of social distancing is to slow down how long it takes for it to infect everyone so that the healthcare system doesn't get slammed. The deaths from COVID are as much due to COVID as they are due to the healthcare system being too slammed by COVID cases to take care of other stuff, like heart attacks and strokes.
It sounds like it wouldn’t add $12 per hour but bring their salary up to a minimum of $12 per hour. Unless I’m misunderstanding.
The federal government would triple what the employer offers and add it to the worker's paycheck as an additional bonus, up to a total of $12; For example grocery workers getting a $3/hour bonus from worker would get an extra $9/hour from the government.
It sounds like it wouldn’t add $12 per hour but bring their salary up to a minimum of $12 per hour. Unless I’m misunderstanding.
I believe "up to a total of 12" is referencing the bonus pay amount. The example this article has is a bit weird because it says "workers getting a bonus from worker". I'm pretty sure the employer...
I believe "up to a total of 12" is referencing the bonus pay amount.
The example this article has is a bit weird because it says "workers getting a bonus from worker". I'm pretty sure the employer would provide an additional $3/hr to employees on top of their normal pay. Then the government would provide an additional 9/hr on top of that, for a total of $12/hr bonus added to a worker's normal pay.
Even as a very left person myself, progress is progress and should be celebrated. My concern is always that these temporary/small measures are often seen as good enough and stall progress. In...
Even as a very left person myself, progress is progress and should be celebrated.
My concern is always that these temporary/small measures are often seen as good enough and stall progress. In particular when the small measures are what are initially proposed, and get compromised into worthlessness.
Mitt's solution is good as a temporary measure. I hope it results in a $20 minimum wage after people grow accustomed to it.
I don't really know. I think when the GOP launched REDMAP and gained a false majority in the 2012 house election and disproportionate or even fake majorities in several statal Congresses they...
It's more a 'how did it take you this long to find out' complaint. The examples I point to show a party that doesn't act very democratically, which is very dangerous to US democracy but Mitt's...
It's more a 'how did it take you this long to find out' complaint. The examples I point to show a party that doesn't act very democratically, which is very dangerous to US democracy but Mitt's criticism of the GOP only seems to date back to Trump's takeover, even though the GOP was already doing some pretty terrible things, even before him. Maybe I'm thoroughly misinterpreting this and projecting my opinions of people like Trump onto him just by virtue of him being a Republican but his criticisms just seems somewhat shallow and late even if they're fully valid.
I'm going to have to side with @Kuromantis on this one. Trump wouldn't have gotten in to power without the party that paved his way. A deep-seated love of gerrymandering. Pandering to racists. The...
apply your views of Trump onto all Republicans, which leads to things like this
I'm going to have to side with @Kuromantis on this one.
Trump wouldn't have gotten in to power without the party that paved his way.
A deep-seated love of gerrymandering. Pandering to racists.
The Obama-era obstructionism. The W era warmongering and power consolidation. The Clinton era obstructionism. Clinton got raked over the coals for relatively minor offenses. Trump got a free pass for numerous crimes he literally bragged about on Twitter.
The Republican party went completely off the rails after Nixon. In retrospect, I probably would have preferred Nixon over W or Trump. At least Nixon founded the EPA.
Those links counted too if I didn't make that clear. Those show the GOP gerrymandering districts to gain a majority despite often being a minority in an area. The last link has a split votes...
The only thing your video shows happening before Trump was two years of not confirming Obama's federal judges
Those links counted too if I didn't make that clear. Those show the GOP gerrymandering districts to gain a majority despite often being a minority in an area. The last link has a split votes option for you to use in FL if it doesn't show up that way.
The GOP wasn't nearly as terrible as it is now before then, or at least not obviously so.
If gerrymandering isn't your biggest concern then there's also Republicans talking about voter ID in a partisan way ("Voter ID will help romney win PA")
In case you think voter ID is easy to get (text from [this article](https://indivisible.org/resource/voter-id-101-right-vote-shouldnt-come-barriers))
For many Americans, an ID seems like an easy thing to obtain. Everyone has one, right? Wrong. Think about it this way. The most common form of ID is a driver’s license.
A lot of people don’t drive. Maybe they live in urban areas, are elderly, or can’t afford driver’s ed or a car. For those folks, driving is off the table. In some cases, people are working schedules that stop them from accessing the venues in which drivers license's could be obtained. That doesn’t mean voting should be off the table.
Even other forms of required ID can be hard for many people to come by. Other common forms of required ID include US passports, military ID, and (depending on the state), government or private employer IDs, tribal IDs, student IDs, and gun or hunting licenses. In practice, this means that if you don’t drive, don’t travel internationally, don’t have a job that gives you an ID, and don’t hunt or carry a gun you can’t vote in many states. You’ll frequently hear the argument that a person has to have an ID to drive a car or buy alcohol—so why can’t we require ID to vote? Let’s be serious: driving a car and buying alcohol are not fundamental civil rights. Voting is.
Even if someone has all of the required documents for a “free” ID, transportation to the DMV or registrar’s office can be a challenge. After all, if you don’t have an ID, you don’t have a driver’s license. Most Americans do not live in cities with robust public transportation options, and even public transit can be expensive. People in rural areas have an even more difficult time getting to their DMV, which may be miles away. Even more troublingly: some states, like Alabama, paired their new voter ID laws with the closure of DMVs in predominantly Black areas.
A government subsidy makes sense for hospital workers since health care economics is weird and it should be government funded anyway, but not outside it.
In normal markets, it would be better to have a higher minimum wage for hazardous work. The employer should bear the cost so they have the incentive to cut back on hazardous work where they can, so more people can stay home.
The cost will be passed on in higher prices, and then maybe essential output should be subsidized. (Increase food benefits, along with a UBI.)
I don't disagree. The wage increase should be permanent, not neccessarily the govt funding of it, outside of maybe a small transition period.
It could be funded by returning our tax code to 1960s rates.
You can also do things like rotate hazardous work throughout the population, a favorite scheme of some anarchists. However we’re not set up for that and now is not the time to start throwing new people in to critical jobs. Just a comment about long term potential solutions.
Why not? Most economists think a wage subsidy is preferred due to being less distortionary than a minimum wage.
The hazard pay is already priced into the wage. Regulatory requirements around occupational safety also make each person more expensive to keep on staff.
You're telling me that McDonald's worker's wages have hazard pay priced in already? I hate to tell you this but real markets have time delays unlike the idealized markets that don't exist that you learn about in Econ 101. The hazard of the pandemic is not priced into McDonald's worker wages yet and given their nil bargaining power without a union, it's unlikely it ever will be.
Already addressed this
I don't see how that addresses my question at all. You claimed hazard pay is already priced into the wages of essential workers, which is facially absurd. You bear the burden of showing that claim to be true.
You are ascribing an argument to me I didn't make. Reread my post in its entirety please. Specifically this sentence, which makes it pretty clear that I don't think infectious disease risk is priced into wages. Because, you know, I said exactly that.
Okay. I'm just having trouble trying to find a way that your statement that "the hazard pay is already priced into the wage" doesn't mean "hazard pay [related to COVID-19] is already priced into the page." But since apparently you don't think that there's no reason to continue with this back-and-forth.
The part where neither I, nor the person I was responding to, didn’t say “related to COVID-19” anywhere should have made it pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about COVID-19 in that clause and it was a general statement about risks inherent to a job.
The "distortion" from a minimum wage is that it discourages employers from giving people work by making it more costly to hire them. Usually that's considered bad. But due to the pandemic, it's opposite day, and we want people to stay home if possible. So for now, discouraging employment (in hazardous situations) is good.
If you don’t want people going out we can just forbid them from going out. You can’t expect individual business owners to just know the optimal response to the pandemic. You either shut it down and give them a bridge grant or loan or you don’t. Market forces don’t apply since infectious disease risk isn’t subject to pricing mechanisms.
Forbidding people from going out and making it expensive to do it are both ways of discouraging it. "Essential work" isn't really binary; some food businesses are more essential than others, and some things a business will ask its workers to do are more essential than others. Charging more is a rather harsh way of getting businesses to make tradeoffs, and due to inequality it favors things the rich will pay for, but it's less harsh than forbidding things entirely.
The business owners aren’t equipped to make these decisions. They’re not epidemiologists. How the hell are they supposed to know what the risks are? None of it is reflected by labor costs either.
The advice of epidemiologists would be helpful in setting the minimum wage for hazard pay for each kind of job. Employers could just take it as given.
If the epidemiologists are saying they need to stay home, they should stay home. Again, I don't see where or how pricing gets into it. The hazard, in this case, isn't to the individual worker, it's to society from the worker becoming a transmission vector.
Epidemiologists (or rather, departments of public health) aren't making decisions for individual workers or even individual businesses. The way the health orders work (around here, anyway) is there are broad categories of businesses that can stay open like food preparation, or car repair, and business owners decide whether to stay open based on whether they think they're in that category. And some stretch things a bit.
So business owners already make decisions, and the question is, what are good inputs into that decision? I am not sure that making decisions based on taxonomy (is this food preparation or not) is a best way of deciding what's essential?
They are making decisions in the case of individual people who are at risk. They can't force you to comply, but if you have comorbid respiratory conditions you're being instructed to stay home regardless of whether you work in an essential industry or not.
Is there a better method that's practicable in the real world? One of the reasons they do taxonomy is because every registered business is already tagged with an NAICS code that can be used as an objective way to track who is allowed to be open or not. Most other methods would open up space for people to lie.
I'm really kind of confused what point you're making. In my department of ~20-30 people, there's a good handful of maybe 7-8 immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk (conditions like asthma) coworkers that would disagree on there being no hazard to themselves. And that's excluding an immunocompromised coworker who quit because he was afraid both of getting it himself and passing it to his elderly mother back at home.
COVID-19 is a health risk, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to pay employees extra for the extra risk that they're taking on. Not just the direct risk to themselves, which does still exist, but also for their loved ones back at home.
As far as how much extra, they should be asking the advice of experts because, like you say, the employers aren't experts. The correct/fair pricing is up to the experts to determine. If that amount's too much for employers to pay, they'll find ways to adapt. If it's too little for employees to consider "worth it," in theory, they'll leave. I might be missing your point entirely but "squishy" things like this don't really have a set value, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or don't have any value.
If it’s a material risk to them due to immunological issues we shouldn’t be having employers make choices about how much extra to pay them. They just shouldn’t be working. Full stop.
Epidemiologists don’t know anything about how a grocery store operates. Grocers don’t know anything about epidemiology. Nobody has the knowledge-base to be making these sorts of fine-grained decisions for every aspect of the economy. If it was possible to impose price controls at this level of granularity, the Soviet Union would have been a successful economic model. But that wasn't even feasible in normal times with lots of data. It's definitely not feasible in pandemic times with no good data.
You either keep people home or you don’t. There should be no negotiated pay scale on deciding whether someone should work because no individual has enough information to truly understand what kind of risk they pose. A blanket subsidy makes sense since it both gooses the economy and will help recovery and it compensates the people working for the extra inconvenience.
Why are you so insistent on this black-and-white dichotomy you got going on there? Keeping everyone home is not an option. People need food and supplies, so keeping the grocery stores open is pretty much a necessity unless you're building your own infrastructure for that. Which also requires people to build and run. The utility infrastructures need people physically there working. You can't send those people home. Those positions that must be filled now have an extra risk to them, so add extra pay to compensate for the new hazard.
And nobody's saying that any one person has to be an expert on every single thing, either. Employers hire the experts, the experts request and receive all the information they need in order to make an informed recommendation, and then they can say "raise wage for these employees by this much." Or not, they might say "it's not worth the risk to society to keep this business (or this part of this business) open right now." Epidemiologists aren't one single entity with indivisible attention. Nobody's asking the grocers to suddenly become experts, either. Collaboration exists.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against a blanket subsidy, just arguing against the idea that the people working right now haven't taken on extra risk that doesn't need to be compensated.
You were talking about coworkers who are immunocompromised. If the risk is material to them (as in, life threatening) they should not be out and working, period. Regardless of what industry they'er in. That's pretty black and white.
For everyone else it's unlikely to get much worse than a bad cold or flu and they can continue if it's necessary. But again, that's not the responsibility of any individual worker or business owner to decide. The main focus is preventing spread, not the risk to any individual person. The government policy is a blunt instrument to scare people into staying home or not to limit exposure and spread. Pricing does nothing there because the main thing you're trying to stop is an externality.
Yeah, which is being done by a wage subsidy because it's a uniform risk for anyone who is out. What's more, the actual risk isn't really that high for a young, healthy person with no comorbidities. Not that much higher than the regular cold and flu season impose anyway.
The extra risk to an able bodied person is minor. It's a greater risk to at-risk people they interact with than it is to themselves, but then you wouldn't be paying hazard pay for a job, you'd be paying it for people who know people at those jobs. Most of the "nobody is safe!" rhetoric is as much to keep people home and slow transmission than an actual reflection of how dangerous it is to be out. If we were pricing risk to the individual based on material risk posed by COVID-19, we actually wouldn't be paying people much of anything. And if they're immunocompromised to where it is a real risk, no amount of money should be used to entice them to work anyway. That would be immoral!
It's kind of like people asserting that the solution to Facebook's data privacy evils is to make them pay you for their use of your data. Except it turns out that once they model it Facebook would only end up paying people a few cents a year, not enough to actually affect anything in any way. By all means pay people more because they deserve to be paid more. Or pay them more because the jobs are harder now because of being short staffed, ordinary services and rhythms being interrupted, etc. But it's not really "hazard" pay. If you focused on that then you'd end up paying them way less.
Now if we were dealing with an illness that actually killed more reliably, then this definitely would be more of a hazard. But at that point, you shouldn't be running things out of independent grocery stores anyway. You'd be on full lockdown and having people distributing rations.
Agreed. It sounded like you were extending your all-or-nothing to everyone, high and low risk. Like you say, for some high-risk individuals, no reasonable amount of compensation is enough. But there is risk for everyone. Even able-bodied people are being harmed and killed by this. Lower risk doesn't mean no risk. The risk is there, it applies to the individual, and it's new, so it should be compensated.
There is an added risk to society from the person becoming a transmission vector, but like you said, pricing has no hold there. The pricing change is for the individual, and for the companies to pressure them into making more conservative choices on who really needs to be exposing themselves and everyone around them.
This seems to be the main sticking point then. Everything I hear places COVID-19 at a much higher risk for everyone than the flu. Otherwise, why is nearly the whole planet shutting down? We could just be directing only high-risk people to stay home and the rest of us continue on as normal. This is more than just a kinda bad, kinda unexpected flu season.
And the people who are out working are out far more than the people staying home and sheltering in place. The risk is for everyone, but it's not uniform.
So there's two things. There is the virus' virulence and its actual impact. It's much more virulent than a regular cold or flu because nobody has any immunity to it yet. But it's actual impact is not that much stronger, and the actual risk presented to people without any comorbidities is very low. (Though comorbidities can include things like being a smoker, having really bad allergies, or getting double-infected by both COVID-19 and another, regular coronavirus at the same time, so it still covers a lot of people).
What's more is, we make a habit of not treating the flu as seriously as we ought to. So when people say it's like the flu that really should be read more like "Oh God, it's like the flu!" rather than "Whew! It's 'just' a flu."
The planet is shutting down because we don't have the kind of herd immunity that slows down and moderates how virulent it is. People get flu shots during flu season and, even aside from that, there is some baseline immunity in society from the influenza virus. This slows down how quickly it gets around and how well people can recover from it. The point of social distancing is to slow down how long it takes for it to infect everyone so that the healthcare system doesn't get slammed. The deaths from COVID are as much due to COVID as they are due to the healthcare system being too slammed by COVID cases to take care of other stuff, like heart attacks and strokes.
I like this. I would like to see it permanently, but it's a great start.
That’s only $24,960 per year for a full time worker.
That’s barely enough to live on a subsistence level.
The article is a $12/hr raise.
For any worker doing minimum wage, that's a huge increase.
^This. For so, so many people this would double their pay.
It sounds like it wouldn’t add $12 per hour but bring their salary up to a minimum of $12 per hour. Unless I’m misunderstanding.
I believe "up to a total of 12" is referencing the bonus pay amount.
The example this article has is a bit weird because it says "workers getting a bonus from worker". I'm pretty sure the employer would provide an additional $3/hr to employees on top of their normal pay. Then the government would provide an additional 9/hr on top of that, for a total of $12/hr bonus added to a worker's normal pay.
Isn't the Federal minimum wage $7.25? Unless they're tipped, I can't imagine how grocery workers are being paid $3.
7.25+3+9 = 19.25/hr.
It's a raise, not a new minimum.
Wonder what all the progressivism/defiance against the GOP is for? A 2024 run?
Instead of having an ulterior motive, maybe he has begun to realize what damage the Republican party is doing to the country.
Even as a very left person myself, progress is progress and should be celebrated.
My concern is always that these temporary/small measures are often seen as good enough and stall progress. In particular when the small measures are what are initially proposed, and get compromised into worthlessness.
Mitt's solution is good as a temporary measure. I hope it results in a $20 minimum wage after people grow accustomed to it.
I don't really know. I think when the GOP launched REDMAP and gained a false majority in the 2012 house election and disproportionate or even fake majorities in several statal Congresses they crossed a line they shouldn't. I'd even argue not splitting Florida's EC votes in 2000 was damning enough.
It's more a 'how did it take you this long to find out' complaint. The examples I point to show a party that doesn't act very democratically, which is very dangerous to US democracy but Mitt's criticism of the GOP only seems to date back to Trump's takeover, even though the GOP was already doing some pretty terrible things, even before him. Maybe I'm thoroughly misinterpreting this and projecting my opinions of people like Trump onto him just by virtue of him being a Republican but his criticisms just seems somewhat shallow and late even if they're fully valid.
I'm going to have to side with @Kuromantis on this one.
Trump wouldn't have gotten in to power without the party that paved his way.
A deep-seated love of gerrymandering. Pandering to racists.
The Obama-era obstructionism. The W era warmongering and power consolidation. The Clinton era obstructionism. Clinton got raked over the coals for relatively minor offenses. Trump got a free pass for numerous crimes he literally bragged about on Twitter.
The Republican party went completely off the rails after Nixon. In retrospect, I probably would have preferred Nixon over W or Trump. At least Nixon founded the EPA.
Those links counted too if I didn't make that clear. Those show the GOP gerrymandering districts to gain a majority despite often being a minority in an area. The last link has a split votes option for you to use in FL if it doesn't show up that way.
If gerrymandering isn't your biggest concern then there's also Republicans talking about voter ID in a partisan way ("Voter ID will help romney win PA")
In case you think voter ID is easy to get (text from [this article](https://indivisible.org/resource/voter-id-101-right-vote-shouldnt-come-barriers))