AnarchyDice
13d ago
Not getting healthcare, retirement, overtime, unemployment insurance mean their compensation package is lower. Those items are generally considered part of pay. Also, getting paid in cash to avoid taxes and wage garnishing are artificial boosts to their pay that are not available to citizens. That makes for two directions that illegal labor undercuts the citizenry, they cost less and keep more of their wages.
Considering healthcare/retirement/unemployment can easily add 40%+ on top of wages and taxes would take a 20%+ bite out of wages, someone working under the table could easily surpass the above-board worker in take-home pay despite much lower paper wages. Above board $15/hr worker + $6/hr benefits costs the employer $21/hr while the employee only takes home $12/hr. Below board $13/hr worker costs the employer $13/hr and the worker takes home $13/hr. They could hire almost twice as many below board employees or simply keep the $8/hr difference. That would be a huge negative pressure on the wages the above board employees could demand. All the while the employer could complain that no one wants to work for the $15/hr wages, so they're forced to hire below board employees even though they have a large conflict of interest in such a declaration.
Secondly, I can guarantee solve any "labor shortage" anywhere with more pay. What they have is a labor shortage at the low pay they want. That might be a sort of tautology, labor is not some worker placement with limited figurines to put in jobs, it is a function of many variables most important of which is the compensation. If burger flipping was paying more than neurosurgery, you can guarantee they would never have an empty shift. How many people are even joining the workforce is also a function of compensation. If the market sucks, they may choose unemployment, underemployment, education, retirement, gig-work, greymarket, blackmarket, welfare, homemaking, or self-employment.
The whole thing stands out to me like an amalgam of two memes that live rent free in my head: Schitt's creek: "I cannot show you everything, David!" "Can you show me one thing?" and Simpson's: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I glance around at stores begging for employees to apply then I see their posted hourly wage to see that they are at most $0.25 above the going rate for the area while offering short hours at unusual times. I'd respect them a lot more if they actually tried raising wages and had to shutter, but instead they just muddle along until the lack of employees cascades into quality and coverage problems and the place closes with a whimper at the next shock or demand drop.
I see similar shotgun, canned openings for skilled positions in the engineering field that aren't really trying to be competitive if you look at their offered compensation, they feel more like dangling a hook hoping to get a bite from a desperate engineer they can snap up for cheap even as the engineering field as a whole supposedly has huge engineer shortages.
It can't be both a labor shortage companies desperately want to solve and also an immovable object that cannot see its budget increase. The fact that it is sold as both, to me, reads as a budget exercise to maximize profits rather than the desperate plight it is advertised as. Consequently, if it is not a desperate plight, then the off-the-book cheats they've been pursuing are in fact not necessary concessions but are instead just cheats.
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