These jobs do exist, their simply done by ‘contractors’. When every stripper is classified as a contractor, if they state says they must use employees then the strip joint is going to close or swap paper work. That’s the only option, they can simply drop all contractors without any other change.
The jobs only exist if they're creating more value than it costs to hire someone. If you raise the cost of hiring someone, some of the jobs go away, either because the company folds or because it lets go some of the workers and dumps their workload on the remaining ones (who now can't quit because it's harder to find another job), or cancels shifts that had been only marginally profitable.
This typically has the greatest impact on the least productive workers who have the most trouble finding another job, especially when the same requirements are imposed on all local employers.
If the jobs go away who is doing the work the person was previously doing? Were they being hired unnecessarily because they were cheap, or are they going to make the remaining employees work twice as hard to cover all of the jobs? Or is stuff going to fall through the cracks.
Aren't the number of jobs needed more dependent on the demand for your product than the price of hiring employees? It's like the fallacy of supply side economics: people are hired to fill demand, not because it's cheap to hire them. Now more expensive labor can make your end product more expensive which can reduce demand for it and cost jobs, but that's a second order effect and should be muted if everybody is affected by the same laws at once.
The people who really get hurt are the ones competing with sweat shop slave labor in foreign countries, but most of those jobs are already gone and lazy Americans weren't willing to work 100 hour weeks for pennies anyway so competing fairly against them was Quixotic in the first place.
> If the jobs go away who is doing the work the person was previously doing?
Nobody. You used to have two shifts, one that made a lot of money because it was peak hours and one that you could justify with a lower labor cost but not anymore. So now there's one shift and the business has shorter operating hours.
> Were they being hired unnecessarily because they were cheap, or are they going to make the remaining employees work twice as hard to cover all of the jobs? Or is stuff going to fall through the cracks.
Well yes, that's exactly what can happen. Stuff falling through the cracks has a cost. If the cost is more than the cost of hiring someone to prevent it, you do. If the cost of hiring someone goes up, the cost of the problems may now be less than what you have to pay someone to prevent it.
> Aren't the number of jobs needed more dependent on the demand for your product than the price of hiring employees?
A job exists when it creates more value than it costs to hire someone. If the value it creates stays the same and the cost to hire someone goes up, some of the jobs move to the other side of the line and disappear.
You're basically assuming that all jobs at all companies have the same margins. The high margin jobs will stay but the low margin jobs don't. "Low margin jobs suck anyway" is little consolation to the people whose alternative is even worse. And if you gave them a better alternative then they would choose it even if you hadn't prohibited the worse one.
> Now more expensive labor can make your end product more expensive which can reduce demand for it and cost jobs, but that's a second order effect and should be muted if everybody is affected by the same laws at once.
If everybody is affected by the same laws at once it makes it easier to raise prices because your competitors have to do the same thing. But raising prices still reduces overall demand.
And in many cases the competitors aren't affected because they're in other jurisdictions, and then raising prices really reduces demand in your jurisdiction because people just buy from the competitors whose prices haven't gone up.
> The people who really get hurt are the ones competing with sweat shop slave labor in foreign countries, but most of those jobs are already gone and lazy Americans weren't willing to work 100 hour weeks for pennies anyway so competing fairly against them was Quixotic in the first place.
That's just a lazy rationalization. It's the people at the margin who get hurt, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or that they don't get hurt.
Right! This is twisting Capitals arm to pay the “true” cost of the labor it needs. ‘Cause if they didn’t need it, there wouldn’t have been contractors doing the job in the first place.
I am extremely satisfied to see labor rights advocacy making a comeback.
In my field, contractors make more than employees, even after accounting for benefits, because the employers prefer the flexibility and are willing to pay a premium for it.
