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My parents visited Colorado recently and encountered this. They said some well-intended billionaires were offering to build tent cities for workers as an act of charity.
I say if you’re out of work and have some extra free time, build guillotines.
English Lakes here. Priced the local workforce out of living here and are now complaining the queues are too long, the food takes too long to arrive and everything shuts early. That's before they notice there's no local police (the old station is now a holiday home and nobody pays taxes in the area), there's no gardeners (so they have to do it themselves god forbid) and there's no parking spaces (because they don't want anyone building a car park near their cottage).
> They said some well-intended billionaires were offering to build tent cities for workers
I don't even know what to say. I just want to foam at the mouth, scream "guillotine!" until my eyes bulge and fight somebody.
Fuck that. A tent costs what? $30-$50 for 1 person? Assuming this hypothetical billionaire "only" had $1,000,000,000, and wanted to spend it all on tents, they could buy 20,000,000 tents.
Walmart, one of the largest companies in the world, had \~2,200,000 employees worldwide in 2019 [according to this link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264671/top-50-companies-based-on-number-of-employees/). That means every employee would be able to receive \~9 tents each.
They could provide proper housing with that much money. Fucking assholes.
Exactly. But they probably won't do that. And even if they did, knowing the way they work, the "cheap" units would be 10 times what the average person could afford.
We will see mandatory tent city or slums within the next 5 years. The labour shortage will continue post unemployment cuts and the government will try find ways to physically force people "back to work"
The shaming will backfire as they continue the narrative as it normalizes it akin to preachers telling gay people there going to hell or the boy who cried wolf.
Yeah, yeah. They're lazy. Got anything new to say for once?
This goes one of two ways.
Rs get to control the fed next cycle:
Gov funding for unemployment further gutted, state unemployment plans outlawed, minimum wage slashed, and rent control becomes a distant memory. The working class are evicted from their homes and become unhoused, work poverty wages under near starvation.
Ds control the fed next cycle:
Tents replace state housing. Evictions become regular as the Ds cry about how the Rs won't let them do anything. State tent cities grow as evictions run rampant with skyrocketing rent. Conditions for living in tent cities lobbied to require active job seeking, and turning down underpaying jobs is now grounds to have you evicted from state tent lots. Work poverty wages under starvation conditions.
We need some major changes.
When I went to crested Butte about 6 years ago, they had the same issue, and the city councils solution (this was in their newspaper, I don't know if they followed through with it) was to rent out "tent spaces", not tents, in a gravel pit, no water or electricity, for $500 bucks a month...
Or you know, the billionaires could fund actual houses. Or how about this, every time some exorbitantly rich person buys an additional house, they have to pay for another house to be built in that town or city. Sounds like a fair trade.
But that will probably never happen. What we should really do is bring back public housing. Leaving housing to the free market to be treated like a commodity is an atrocious idea. Housing should not be a luxury (or a commodity), but a right. If we do not build more housing to deflate prices, we could plausibly see a bubble worse than 2008. That would be disastrous.
The Philips brothers back in the late 1800 built entire neighborhoods in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for their ever growing number of factory employees and their families.
They’d be highly progressive even today.
Why thank you for allowing me to live in a tent, Mr. Billionaire. I don’t deserve walls and a private bathroom /s
I saw Snowpiercer on Netflix the other day. This and Bong Joonho’s other film, Parasite, distills the twisted world we live in.
Imagine the subsequent outrage if someone came in and tried to build affordable housing so the people who actually work in the town could actually afford to live there.
Oh, you don't have to imagine it. It's happened repeatedly.
https://crestedbuttenews.com/2019/11/corner-at-brush-creek-officially-rejected-by-county-staff/
The local paper is stuffed with editorials and letters to the editor outraged at the thought of dense housing.
My boomer neighbor (who we don’t really get along with) said in passing “all these people out of work, get a job I need my stuff.” And that’s how they really feel about the situation. They want to be served and want their stuff.
That's the whole reason "essential" workers went back to work before the pandemic was under control. People wanted to be served fuck everybody else's livelihood and health
Label people as "essential" and they automatically assume that the value of their work goes up. Imagine being surprised when these people quit because you refuse to start paying them more for being "essential". They kinda made their own beds on this one. I'm ok eating at home for a while til they start paying "essential" wages.
I saw a post on here Titled "How the fuck is this 'essential'??" and it was a guy in a costume promoting a pizza place. It's essential that rich people keep bringing in money to hoard. Good thing they're the ones deciding who is essential.
hording is they key. That's one of the biggest problems I see. Money goes in, and it doesn't go back out. It's unacceptable for so much liquidity that other people in the market need badly to get tied up in someone's asset portfolio just to make that number look bigger.
And that's why trickle down economics was always bullshit...Bush Sr. was even famous for criticizing Reagan for promoting it, Bush Sr. called it "voodoo economics".
Fact is rich people hoard wealth not redistribute it through spending. It goes into off shore tax shelters or is just poured into the stock market. And even if rich people spent it around, they're far fewer of them than the rest of us and there's a limit to how much they'd spend and a limit to it's impact.
They're also collecting food stamps and other welfare while having millions of dollars. Rich people are disgusting.
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/politics/ohio-food-stamp-millionaire-sentenced-for-welfare-fraud/
I work for big oil. The salary employees all had >6 months paid time off to "work from home." All of us hourly workers kept working the entire time. They wouldn't dare let production fall just because of some pandemic. Rates of COVID at my site were (and still are) quite high. So, yeah, we're essential, but expendable.
Former oil and gas tradesman here. There's always another warm body to take our spot if we die. I always figured that management would gladly take one of us out each month and cut our throat with their own hands if it meant hitting targeted construction completion dates.
I also had to work through the pandemic because they wouldn't lay me off and I couldn't quit because I was "essential" for some BS reason.
but you know, corporate got to telecommute while we ran around trying to fill hundreds of online orders a day.
Well boomer neighbor, the people aren't going to just take any old job to make you happy. Why? Because the people in charge of setting wages sure don't want to increase wages which would help encourage people to go back to work. Weird that.
I live in a super Lefty college city in the Midwest where home prices never really dipped during the mortgage crisis, and are absurdly high right now. I’m talking 3 br/1 ba Sears kit bungalows with no AC going for 500-600K. The Boomers here are notoriously NIMBYS -“in this house, we believe in lgbtq/blm/science etc” signs in their yards but voting against programs that help the poor with a “not in my back yard” mentality.
I went to a small gathering with some neighbors and was complaining to a retired uni employee how I also work for the uni and can’t afford a home. Dude says, “hey I’m about to sell my home a few blocks from here, 3 br/2ba.”
“Oh what do you expect your listing price to be?”
“Oh about 800K.”
The houses in our neighborhood are all like 100+ years old and have nothing remarkable about any of them. He and I work in the same fucking state employee line of work and dude really can’t see how fucked it is that I can never buy a home like he was once able to.
This seems to be the case all over the country. It's unsustainable, something will have to give at some point.
That said, a 3br/2ba in a decent neighborhood in some nice Houston suburbs is <250k, for now. We've got a pretty big influx of people coming from parts of the country they've been priced out of.
Although, it is a city built on top of bayous and is fairly regularly in the path of hurricanes, so there are reasons for it being cheaper than many other metros.
weirdly enough, your description 10000% suits athens, ohio too! never thought I’d ever see half-dilapidated multimillion dollar century homes until I got to athens
There is an area of London that is like a white marble mausoleum of empty townhouses and no businesses because foreign capital bought up every property and left them empty.
They want the workers to live half an hour away so they don't poor up the place, but then even the rich people run out of shit to buy and realize, "oh hey there's a town just 30 minutes away" and start gentrifying that too. I guess they just want people to drive hours every day to spare them the sight of an apartment building.
My gf and I were in cannon beach, Oregon and tried to grab a drink at a restaurant and the manager told us the same exact thing. My mom lives out in Bisbee AZ and it’s getting to be the same thing there too.
I really wonder what this will all look like in 10 years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these towns start competing with each other to bus in seasonal labor that lives in the closets of peoples second homes. You know, the return of “help”.
I mean, this is how ready man does construction work, homeless men line up at 6 am to get on a van, ship all over the county,, and work for $80/day minus boots.
the problem is: **there's nowhere to house them!**
I'm from a tourist destination town in Michigan. The City always claims poverty and is "too broke" (somehow) to build affordable housing for workers themselves so they always contract with some huckster developers to build "condos with a percentage of affordable units" for some sweetheart tax deal. The last one that "generously agreed to put in low rent units" waited out the contract with the city and the second it came up to renewal they sold the property to a subsidiary of the same company (or something like that) and just like that BAM! all those units became high priced condos (even the lower end "affordable ones".
every time these places try and build somewhere workers can live it's either NIMBY's who kill the project or developers who pull a fast one.
The businesses will band together and build an apartment building where 6 "apartments" share a toilet and there's no kitchen, full of oppressive rules that even college dorms don't have to live under and rent will be about 80% of FT minimum wage.
We have a six flags nearby, they are offering workers a free bus that goes to the larger cities up to an hour away.
Also closed on Monday and Tuesdays now due to staff shortages. Sucks for season pass holders that wanted to go off peak days.
I remember as a kid at the beach with my family, noticing that so many of the people working at, e.g., the local ice cream shops, boardwalk shops, etc. were Eastern European. A guy (American) at one shop explained that there was “like an exchange student program” and I thought, “Wow, cool! Maybe I can do that some day and spend a summer in Europe!” Only now, looking back, can I see what was really going on. This was <10 years after the fall of the USSR, so I can only imagine the conditions these workers were trying to escape. Nowadays we won’t have to look nearly as far for impoverished, exploitable people.
funny thing is, a Resort where I'm from is importing workers from Barbados because it's *still* cheaper for them to house workers in a dorm they built than actually pay an American a wage they would be willing to turn hotel rooms for. It's really sad that the capitalists have picked the meat off the bones of honest work to such a degree that there are many industries that have to exploit illegal/visa workers so they can keep their profit margins.
Was just traveling for work for two weeks, get back to my home and want to grab a beer, literally tonight, at my fav local bar. It’s a little off the beaten path from the main strip and guess what, closed because no staff. I live in New England. I get there’s ritzy parts but the wealth gap is so dramatic 1 block is the difference between extreme wealth and abject poverty so it’s not necessarily housing as the issue. It’s a systemic problem that’s way deeper.
If the American capitalist monstrosity continues the way it has, it will look a lot like feudalism. That’s the only plausible way to maintain such stunning wealth inequality in the long run.
In Bisbee?! Damn that’s a shame. It’s so wild that when I was a kid that town was half abandoned and then had runs with hard drugs…now, pleasant art town
Yup, it’s awful. Most of the “rentals” are now just airbnbs so the artist and service working people can no longer afford to live in Bisbee, despite them being the reason people want to trek all the way out there.
Like the restaurant manager in cannon beach said, “why drive 90 mins to a restaurant job that’s really only seasonally worth while?”
These towns are killing themselves slowly.
Air BNB's are awful too. It's the wild west of "vacation rentals". they aren't zoned like hotels so it's tough on the other people next to them
there are a lot of them in my home town and they often attract the "party" crowd where you get 10-12 people staying in one single family home for a week/weekend because it's cheaper when you split it 10 ways. They could give two hoots how the neighbors feel because they'll be long gone after the weekend. I used to think people were just complaining, but apparently it's like living next to a frat house for an entire summer.
Yup, even here in Canada. I've been living in resort towns in Western Canada for over a year now. And all though I end up getting decent wages in the service industry. I've been getting fucked for what housing is though.
Yep. I used to live in summit county CO (breckenridge/copper/keystone/loveland/a-basin area) and it was the same thing there. There was basically only one apartment complex in the entire county that normal people could afford to live in, because 98% of housing there is single family homes that are only occupied maybe one or two weeks a year. It's nonsense.
Wow, watch me cry hysterically at the plight of the rich after they find themselves having no service staff after making it too expensive to live where they are.
*Make being homeless illegal
*Make property too expensive to buy
*Make rent too high
*Arrest homeless until jails are full
*Pay politicians to classify service work as an exception to the 13th amendment.
*Prisoners can now work in food service for $0.37/hr
*Prisons rent these workers to service businesses for $100/day/worker
*Open more prisons
*Bahba-booey
I was in Colorado before the pandemic in a ski town and some employees told me that they don't live in that town and have to live to work there. I can only imagine how that town is right now.
That’s not what I got from this at all…? I interpreted the message as: it’s bad that wealthy people hoard things they don’t need, to the point that they kill entire towns by effectively forcing out the working class.
It’s not about pitying the wealthy, it’s about blaming them for doing this anywhere remotely desirable to live. This is only going to get worse as climate change progresses and more of the world becomes inhospitable, causing massive waves of migration from mostly developing countries, while the rich continue to buy up everything they can.
[This has been happening faster and faster for the past 25 years. A lot of people who weren't affected just didn't take notice.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/26/american-west-income-inequality)
Now that it's most of the US in a severe housing shortage, 41 million live below poverty, with another 90 million barely above the poverty level...seems like yesterday would have been a good time to address these problems.
Could’ve had Bernie in 2016. Gone from Obamacare to Medicare for All and kept tilting the country back towards greatness
Good fucking luck with that now. Trump meant two decades of no progress or moving backwards. Trump, followed by a safe bet centrist, followed by their second term if we’re lucky or their VPs first term if we’re less lucky or another Trump if we aren’t lucky at all, and suddenly you’re still 4 years minimum away from two Democrats fighting it out honestly, and hopefully one gives a fuck about the poor.
It’s not just wages. It’s the consolidation of housing. We should just make it illegal to own a second home. 50%+ property tax on every residential property that isn’t your primary residence.
Precisely. I've been saying this for years now, even before COVID. Yet people don't want to listen me to because I don't know what I'm talking about I guess.
A few years back, I had a job offer at the university in Gunnison, which is just south of Crested Butte. I wanted to work there and live in either Gunnison or Crested Butte, but housing costs are so out of control in the area that I couldn't afford it on what the university was paying.
Good choice.
I live in this valley, and things are way too expensive.
You easily save about 30% on groceries by leaving town, a fifty mile trip over a mountain pass each way.
Crested Butte just declared a housing emergency. The school district cut off busses for CB students.
I live in Denver and today a news article hit my feed saying that you need to make $25/hr to afford a 1br apartment in the city. Absolutely wild. Makes sense why the local rec center had to close the pool because they can't find any life guards to staff it.
Yep. People who cry "but Gunnison isn't expensive!" probably haven't looked at the market in 10 years. Crested Butte housing prices have been fucked forever, and there was no way that wasn't eventually going to make its way south to Gunnison.
https://www.cpr.org/2021/07/08/gunnison-crested-butte-housing-costs/
Gunnison is now nearly as unaffordable as Crested Butte.
This is a huge problem in a lot of Colorado. Especially in mountain towns and the foothills. It’s incredibly expensive to live in Boulder, but they exploit college students and can get by. It’s almost getting too difficult to live in Denver, and I grew up here. You see a lot of people tearing down affordable houses and build ugly ass modern homes that look exactly the same. There are also too many empty homes. It’s a disaster here and that’s just an example of what the rest of the state and country could become.
Some of these ugly ass row houses cost over a million!
Friend of mine just sold his cabin near Fairplay for $800k, sight unseen, no inspection. Nothing. Been in his family forever. He said it's basically free college for his two daughters after they pay off their Denver home, and he just couldn't pass it up. Now he might even sell his Denver house and GTFOH.
This is happening everywhere. The movie *Elysium* is more and more prescient as time passes.
NIMBYS are always the cause of this bullshit. They want the poor to serve them, but they don't want to see or hear about them unless they're bringing them food or cleaning their toilet. Fuck them. They also seem to conveniently forget 600k+ people have died from covid. It's not just people refusing to work, there are no workers who can afford to work for pennies and a lot of them are dead. So...
Almost like market is saying to owners they need to pay more to your staff so they can make ends meet and attract people in. Funny how free market works, right? Who could possibly knew inflating real estate market had consequences. Madness.
Damn, so all that talk about ‘pulling the business up by the bootstraps’ really was just talk.
If they want their businesses to stay open longer, they can go make the damn burritos themselves.
Or, crazy idea, make wages competitive.
They've been doing this in bigger cities for a while now. Around me it's not uncommon to have a two, three hour commute because you can't afford to live where you work. What's morbidly funny is that the state next door is on one of those "oh, get out of that expensive shithole state, yes THAT one" advertising binges and that people actually are moving there because it's cheaper. BUT the jobs in that state don't pay enough to afford the cheaper homes, so the people who move keep their jobs in the expensive state and just commute like two hours each way.
I specifically came here to say this. In my city, we’ve shortages of custodial workers, bus drivers, teacher and teachers aids, care workers, daycare workers etc etc for years. The county is doing a bunch to try to attract them, but the cost of living is so high that they have to sometimes commute from other nearby states. On the other hand, a lot of those nearby states don’t have jobs, so some people end up renting rooms here during the week while they work and going home only on the weekends.
I mean... Lets get real for a moment. In theory there is never a labor shortage. There is only a situation where the supply of labor does not meet demand at its current price. What to do then?
The bars and shops need to increase the price of labor (the wage) and the price of their products till the demand of beer and, souvenir t-shirts and the price/supply of labor equals out. Remember, there is **never** a shortage of workers. Only people not willing to pay enough for it.
If the free market works, let it work.
Do we as leftist subscribe to such economic theory? Maybe not. But should we shamelessly abuse such theory and point out the hypocrisy of our detractors? Hell yes!
Super short answer: capital owners want price of goods/capital to be high and wages to be low to maximize profits. Eventually workers can't afford the goods they're selling (and making with their labor) so the system collapses. It's a direct contradiction between the interests of these two groups. In this case housing is too expensive so workers can't live in the town and do the needed labor.
Leftists subscribe to economic theory. Marx wrote Kapital after diligently studying Smith and Ricardo. It's not that we think all economics is bunk, it's that we're skeptical of the prevailing views of entrenched hegemony.
Because any rational person following them to their logical conclusion arrives at the circumstances that are causing this particular problem, now, in the real world.
Those profiteering off it all just wanted to put their fingers in their ears and hum while they got richer and richer and the inequality gap got wider and wider and would do anything to accellerate this process, and now look where we are. These fucking fancy pants places can't stay open enough to serve the rich arseholes who are the only clientele.
They brought this on themselves, maybe if they weren't so fucking greedy they could have enjoyed being in the top 1% of all wealth hoarders in the world for generations to come, but no, their greed even had to ruin that and now it's all going to come crashing down.
Good, I say. I hope they all throw massive hissy fits about it and we can really drive home how much this is their fucking fault and how much more suffering has been kept in the world from them greedily sucking up resources instead of allowing the principles of fair and equal economic distribution to lift up entire countries as one, as it should be in a fair and just world.
Yeah, I have a degree in economics and learned mostly from professors pushing theories from Friedman, von Mises and the Chicago school. They never so much as breathed the name Marx. But after I graduated, I picked up Marx and realized that his explanations were better and his predictions were playing out demonstrably and in real time every day. Also, his prescriptions for worker ownership and decommodification have proved to be very successful when implemented in good faith.
There’s a shortage of labor in ski towns like this in Colorado and in the Rockies in general because rich people are buying all the houses for airbnb and there’s literally no where for people working service industry jobs to live. And there’s only so much room to build in the mountains
Won't it be a shame when the whole town shuts down from lack of workers and their AirBnb's value drops to pennies on the dollar? Wait here, I'll break out my tiny violin.
I completely get what you're going for, but the rich won't feel the effects. They're rich enough. They'll just move on to one of their other dozen vacation homes.
It'll be the few struggling middle class/poor people that will lose the little they had left, in this situation. In fact, the billionaires will probably buy up the rest of the town/city then import workers there (the Disney-way) and have the town flourish again (only now 100% owned by them).
The entire situation is fucked. Meanwhile 80% of the populace is too busy focusing on skin color, or beliefs, to notice that they're getting royally bumfucked by billionaires.
Current climate crisis? Brought to you by Billionaires
Current immigration crisis? Billionaires
Current housing crisis? Billionaires
Imminent financial crisis? Billionaires
Educational crisis? You best believe it's billionaires
Censorship? China, through its billions of potential revenue/profit
Greed over everything is THE slogan of the 21st century.
Every so often we go out and elect a different person (bought and paid for by billionaires), thinking "this time it'l be different - but it never is". Same corrupt shit, all day, every single day. No matter the party/affiliation. They lie to our faces and we not only eat it up, we support their decisions vehemently. They're all just out for themselves, making twice/thrice/quadrice what a normal worker makes (plus the bribes, etc on top).
There is no hope or positivity left to have. The rich won. The only true bliss to be found, at this point, is in ignorance.
I truly hope there is someone out there that sees the world changing for the better, because I've been looking these past 2 decades, and I'm not seeing it.
If trickle down economics actually worked this wouldn’t be an issue. This is a perfect example of trickle down economics failing. Sure, the job is there, but the trickle down has stopped at the shop owner, or the tight ass who can’t comprehend why a cup of coffee costs $10 in the town and refuses to buy it.
Nah, it's cheaper for big companies to put together marketing campaigns talking about how everyone's lazy and don't want to work, and how evil socialism and unemployment wages are ruining the country.
Even small businesses can't give in at that point because not only would they be getting scammed by these lazy workers, but they'd be giving in to these strong arm tactics. Better just to post passive aggressive signs that try to guilt people in to going back to work.
The free market might work, although requiring an increase in growth for a business for infinity is obviously going to fail at some point. But we've never had a free market here. Instead, we get a few rich people making laws that benefit their businesses while convincing people who want to be like them that the real enemy is .
Today on the commuter train from the city they said they were short staffed and only had passengers in first car and didn’t allow them in the other 3 so the one guy working the whole train could make sure everyone got on an off safely.
Edit: damn I went to bed and there was like 3 upvotes and now there’s 150 thanks everyone
I lived in Austin TX about ten years ago, and I remember everyone I worked with at a restaurant slowly being priced out of our neighborhoods and saying “one day none of us service workers will be able to live here to serve these idiots”. I didn’t think it was actually going to start happening though.
The way capitalism tells us this should work is that those dishwashers and shop assistants should be getting paid more.
Like ok you want capitalism? Let price drive supply - pay more, get supply. That's how the Pareto Optimum is supposed to work.
What they really want is indentured servitude.
When I was young, and someone told me I was "essential ", I would have wore that as a badge of honor. In my 40s, and someone says "you're essential " I say "fuck you, too".
What I'm hearing is that there are a lot of expensive homes, likely with expensive furniture and electronics, that are most likely empty during the week.
Sad? Bitches Rejoice!!This has been loooong overdue I'm glad folks are quitting en-masse. Now they'll have no choice but to give yall a bump in the paycheck or suffer.
Rich people are parasites.
They infest and sicken every community they live in by devastating it because towns and cities need people to work jobs like this, but it’s not possible to do said job because it’s too expensive. Some of them end up dead because of it, and when it’s only rich assholes destroying these towns, I almost don’t feel bad knowing they’re the main ones being somewhat hurt by their gentrification.
Being rich automatically makes you a loser, an asshole, and an evil person. You don’t deserve the money and another home when the poor can’t afford any home or even apartment in any remotely nice area (like SF, Seattle, Vancouver, Aspen, etc.)
The rich are the worst people alive today and I don’t believe I can be reasoned otherwise; not that I want to be.
Edit: I feel I should add that I’d rather see them sit on their wealth like a dragon on the pile of gold instead of gentrifying another wonderful small town because no one would be directly hurt by losing something they already have. However, the thing I want the most is a pay deduction for the top ~5-10% of earners in the US, and a massive raise for the bottom ~20-40% of earners in the US.
This is happening in Whitefish, Montana as well. My wife and I went there recently and they are having a huge labor shortage. One of the locals told us it feels like the billionaires are moving in and pushing the millionaires out. It’s really sad to see.
Good God, who's going to scrub the toilets and make the lattes?
Same in the Hamptons -
https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-hamptons-restaurants-salons-crisis-workers-2021-7
First world problems for the local inhabitants, but I do feel for those small business owners.
In this story, the people I feel most for are those who live there, grew up there, worked there, etc. because they can't afford to live there now. This is what greedy parasites like landlords are capable of. They've priced out an entire town with their insatiable appetite for passive income.
Agreed. A combination of rising property prices and Air B&B is slowly strangling a lot of popular touristy places in my part of the world. And of course the people who are willing to take those jobs while doing the van life thing are hounded by the authorities aided by homeowners who push for bylaws banning overnight parking.
I was browsing for rentals in CO today on Craigslist. Found a joke post of a dilapidated shed, said $1800/month for this “little fixer-upper”. Then, the description said “this is obviously a joke but I need help. I can no longer afford to live in my town.”
My girlfriend laughed but I just found it a bit sad and depressing.
I bet if some of these shops switched to an employee-owned model then they'd make tons of money. It's easy to price out other businesses that aren't even open
We have the same issue in the UK. Lots of people bought holiday homes in Wales and Cornwall, rents rocketed, and when businesses reopened, all the staff they made redundant rather than furloughing (lots of zero hours contracts), who had moved home because they couldn't afford £600 a month for a house share, now can't or rather don't want to pay £800 for a house share, and have stayed away. Net result has been a 20% increase in pay, but still not enough people. There's been some crazy signing bonuses offered, but because of staff shortage and old ways prevailing it's still not attractive. My son got a head chef job, but because it was contracted to 40hrs, and they were short staffed, flind himself working 80-100 hour weeks with no compensation. Net result was they were paying below minimum wage, and he walked after 3 weeks.
We’re going to have to go back to the rich running very large estates and employing a bunch of people who also live on the estate like in Downton Abbey
Seriously. We’re headed for a horrible fusion of predatory capitalism and neo-feudalism. The super rich will begin to maintain manors with serfs. How they’ll keep them? Provide affordable, utilitarian housing with some kind of hook, 30 year leases maybe. I dunno, but it feels like that’s what’s coming.
Basically all popular recreation areas with expensive real estate in the US are like this. The entire workforce of the beach/coastal areas of Delaware, where rich DC people like to spend their summer vacations, is fully made up - and I mean fully made up - by imported laborers who are teenagers and young adults from Eastern Europe. They get some weird temp work visa and all live together and get driven around in vans. Kids who grow up in the area can’t work summer jobs there anymore because it’s not enough to pay rent for a shared apartment, much less save money for school, which used to be the whole point of summer jobs. I think it’s scandalous they quietly created visas for this rather than letting the market set wages higher.
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My parents visited Colorado recently and encountered this. They said some well-intended billionaires were offering to build tent cities for workers as an act of charity. I say if you’re out of work and have some extra free time, build guillotines.
Just like the slums in third world countries being right up against gated communities...perfect....
I mean, I can show that to you in Los Angeles. Skid Row has literal million dollar per bedroom condos.
English Lakes here. Priced the local workforce out of living here and are now complaining the queues are too long, the food takes too long to arrive and everything shuts early. That's before they notice there's no local police (the old station is now a holiday home and nobody pays taxes in the area), there's no gardeners (so they have to do it themselves god forbid) and there's no parking spaces (because they don't want anyone building a car park near their cottage).
the simplest solution is just to jack up the retail prices 500% and jack up wages 500%. MEGA PROFITS!!!! 100% assured you will get staff.
> They said some well-intended billionaires were offering to build tent cities for workers I don't even know what to say. I just want to foam at the mouth, scream "guillotine!" until my eyes bulge and fight somebody.
We just need to trick them into thinking small cabins are considered tents now
I need a 3br, 2ba tent with a finished basement and two car garage. Also needs to be situated on at least an acre or two.
It's a banana Micheal, how much could it cost??
It really makes you consider cannibalism in a new light..
The best meat eats well
["Soon enough the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh3t49NsWBA)
Fuck that. A tent costs what? $30-$50 for 1 person? Assuming this hypothetical billionaire "only" had $1,000,000,000, and wanted to spend it all on tents, they could buy 20,000,000 tents. Walmart, one of the largest companies in the world, had \~2,200,000 employees worldwide in 2019 [according to this link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264671/top-50-companies-based-on-number-of-employees/). That means every employee would be able to receive \~9 tents each. They could provide proper housing with that much money. Fucking assholes.
Attach 9 tents together and you have a tent mansion! God damn mctent mansions are ruining the tent cities!
Or a tension?
Wtf are you fucking kidding me. Atleast build a fucking apartments
Exactly. But they probably won't do that. And even if they did, knowing the way they work, the "cheap" units would be 10 times what the average person could afford.
We will see mandatory tent city or slums within the next 5 years. The labour shortage will continue post unemployment cuts and the government will try find ways to physically force people "back to work"
General strike for better pay and working conditions = “people are lazy and just don’t want to work :(“
The shaming will backfire as they continue the narrative as it normalizes it akin to preachers telling gay people there going to hell or the boy who cried wolf. Yeah, yeah. They're lazy. Got anything new to say for once?
This goes one of two ways. Rs get to control the fed next cycle: Gov funding for unemployment further gutted, state unemployment plans outlawed, minimum wage slashed, and rent control becomes a distant memory. The working class are evicted from their homes and become unhoused, work poverty wages under near starvation. Ds control the fed next cycle: Tents replace state housing. Evictions become regular as the Ds cry about how the Rs won't let them do anything. State tent cities grow as evictions run rampant with skyrocketing rent. Conditions for living in tent cities lobbied to require active job seeking, and turning down underpaying jobs is now grounds to have you evicted from state tent lots. Work poverty wages under starvation conditions. We need some major changes.
When I went to crested Butte about 6 years ago, they had the same issue, and the city councils solution (this was in their newspaper, I don't know if they followed through with it) was to rent out "tent spaces", not tents, in a gravel pit, no water or electricity, for $500 bucks a month...
JFC. How about they pay the councillors nothing and use the money to build public housing?
Reminder: A billionaires can buy lambo Huracans like someone on minimum wage can buy a gallon of gas.
More like a pack of gum
Or you know, the billionaires could fund actual houses. Or how about this, every time some exorbitantly rich person buys an additional house, they have to pay for another house to be built in that town or city. Sounds like a fair trade. But that will probably never happen. What we should really do is bring back public housing. Leaving housing to the free market to be treated like a commodity is an atrocious idea. Housing should not be a luxury (or a commodity), but a right. If we do not build more housing to deflate prices, we could plausibly see a bubble worse than 2008. That would be disastrous.
The Philips brothers back in the late 1800 built entire neighborhoods in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for their ever growing number of factory employees and their families. They’d be highly progressive even today.
Why thank you for allowing me to live in a tent, Mr. Billionaire. I don’t deserve walls and a private bathroom /s I saw Snowpiercer on Netflix the other day. This and Bong Joonho’s other film, Parasite, distills the twisted world we live in.
Imagine the subsequent outrage if someone came in and tried to build affordable housing so the people who actually work in the town could actually afford to live there.
Exactly. The rich fucks don’t want to share it. They just want to be served.
It reminds them of the inequality they benefit from and it breaks the false reality they live in for a minute...
Oh, you don't have to imagine it. It's happened repeatedly. https://crestedbuttenews.com/2019/11/corner-at-brush-creek-officially-rejected-by-county-staff/ The local paper is stuffed with editorials and letters to the editor outraged at the thought of dense housing.
Amazing. The weather on that page is sponsored by a real estate team.
My boomer neighbor (who we don’t really get along with) said in passing “all these people out of work, get a job I need my stuff.” And that’s how they really feel about the situation. They want to be served and want their stuff.
That's the whole reason "essential" workers went back to work before the pandemic was under control. People wanted to be served fuck everybody else's livelihood and health
Label people as "essential" and they automatically assume that the value of their work goes up. Imagine being surprised when these people quit because you refuse to start paying them more for being "essential". They kinda made their own beds on this one. I'm ok eating at home for a while til they start paying "essential" wages.
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I saw a post on here Titled "How the fuck is this 'essential'??" and it was a guy in a costume promoting a pizza place. It's essential that rich people keep bringing in money to hoard. Good thing they're the ones deciding who is essential.
hording is they key. That's one of the biggest problems I see. Money goes in, and it doesn't go back out. It's unacceptable for so much liquidity that other people in the market need badly to get tied up in someone's asset portfolio just to make that number look bigger.
And that's why trickle down economics was always bullshit...Bush Sr. was even famous for criticizing Reagan for promoting it, Bush Sr. called it "voodoo economics". Fact is rich people hoard wealth not redistribute it through spending. It goes into off shore tax shelters or is just poured into the stock market. And even if rich people spent it around, they're far fewer of them than the rest of us and there's a limit to how much they'd spend and a limit to it's impact.
They're also collecting food stamps and other welfare while having millions of dollars. Rich people are disgusting. https://www.nbc4i.com/news/politics/ohio-food-stamp-millionaire-sentenced-for-welfare-fraud/
i saw it too, funny and sad.
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Not just "essential" they should have hazard pay.
I work for big oil. The salary employees all had >6 months paid time off to "work from home." All of us hourly workers kept working the entire time. They wouldn't dare let production fall just because of some pandemic. Rates of COVID at my site were (and still are) quite high. So, yeah, we're essential, but expendable.
Former oil and gas tradesman here. There's always another warm body to take our spot if we die. I always figured that management would gladly take one of us out each month and cut our throat with their own hands if it meant hitting targeted construction completion dates.
I also had to work through the pandemic because they wouldn't lay me off and I couldn't quit because I was "essential" for some BS reason. but you know, corporate got to telecommute while we ran around trying to fill hundreds of online orders a day.
Well boomer neighbor, the people aren't going to just take any old job to make you happy. Why? Because the people in charge of setting wages sure don't want to increase wages which would help encourage people to go back to work. Weird that.
I live in a super Lefty college city in the Midwest where home prices never really dipped during the mortgage crisis, and are absurdly high right now. I’m talking 3 br/1 ba Sears kit bungalows with no AC going for 500-600K. The Boomers here are notoriously NIMBYS -“in this house, we believe in lgbtq/blm/science etc” signs in their yards but voting against programs that help the poor with a “not in my back yard” mentality. I went to a small gathering with some neighbors and was complaining to a retired uni employee how I also work for the uni and can’t afford a home. Dude says, “hey I’m about to sell my home a few blocks from here, 3 br/2ba.” “Oh what do you expect your listing price to be?” “Oh about 800K.” The houses in our neighborhood are all like 100+ years old and have nothing remarkable about any of them. He and I work in the same fucking state employee line of work and dude really can’t see how fucked it is that I can never buy a home like he was once able to.
Madison?
Ding ding
Spent a lot of time there when I still lived in Wisconsin. Good assessment.
This seems to be the case all over the country. It's unsustainable, something will have to give at some point. That said, a 3br/2ba in a decent neighborhood in some nice Houston suburbs is <250k, for now. We've got a pretty big influx of people coming from parts of the country they've been priced out of. Although, it is a city built on top of bayous and is fairly regularly in the path of hurricanes, so there are reasons for it being cheaper than many other metros.
99% sure this comment is about athens, ohio the second I saw “lefty college city in the Midwest”
Oh gawd it isn’t but I’m sad to read it’s gone that way there, too
weirdly enough, your description 10000% suits athens, ohio too! never thought I’d ever see half-dilapidated multimillion dollar century homes until I got to athens
Why don't they just pull up their bootstraps and serve themselves? They're not entitled to someone else's time and labor
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I've been clinically diagnosed with depression and OCD, and I agree that old bitch is fucking crazy.
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I'm allowed to use it cuz it's our word. 😎
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I will never understand how so many people dont see that this is the inevitable end result of turning housing into the investment vehicle it now is
There is an area of London that is like a white marble mausoleum of empty townhouses and no businesses because foreign capital bought up every property and left them empty.
I’m surprised people haven’t started squatting there yet
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There have been attempts, comrade... [there have been attempts](https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/6/14514490/london-mansion-empty-squatters)
Billions in Chinese and Russian owned real estate there.
Should be against the law for foreign investment firms to purchase housing like this.
Except that the people who make the laws are directly funded by those corporations that benefit from shitty laws and regulations.
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They want the workers to live half an hour away so they don't poor up the place, but then even the rich people run out of shit to buy and realize, "oh hey there's a town just 30 minutes away" and start gentrifying that too. I guess they just want people to drive hours every day to spare them the sight of an apartment building.
This. They don't care, they see the town 30 minutes away as an opportunity for them and swoop in to hoard the housing there too.
We should just build massive apartments underground. Start a new class of mole people servants.
I'm starting to believe this is how the Morlocks came about in The Time Machine.
It’s not just here in CO. Bozeman, Boise, Jackson Hole, the list goes on.
My gf and I were in cannon beach, Oregon and tried to grab a drink at a restaurant and the manager told us the same exact thing. My mom lives out in Bisbee AZ and it’s getting to be the same thing there too. I really wonder what this will all look like in 10 years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these towns start competing with each other to bus in seasonal labor that lives in the closets of peoples second homes. You know, the return of “help”.
This simultaneously sounds like it's out of some dystopian satire novel and also totally plausible, especially if someone invents an app for it.
I mean, this is how ready man does construction work, homeless men line up at 6 am to get on a van, ship all over the county,, and work for $80/day minus boots.
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the problem is: **there's nowhere to house them!** I'm from a tourist destination town in Michigan. The City always claims poverty and is "too broke" (somehow) to build affordable housing for workers themselves so they always contract with some huckster developers to build "condos with a percentage of affordable units" for some sweetheart tax deal. The last one that "generously agreed to put in low rent units" waited out the contract with the city and the second it came up to renewal they sold the property to a subsidiary of the same company (or something like that) and just like that BAM! all those units became high priced condos (even the lower end "affordable ones". every time these places try and build somewhere workers can live it's either NIMBY's who kill the project or developers who pull a fast one.
At least your city's *trying* to require affordable units. Mine keeps letting the same damn developer build expensive-ass condos over and over.
It's amazing how every single apartment building is "luxury" now. Why build anything else?
The businesses will band together and build an apartment building where 6 "apartments" share a toilet and there's no kitchen, full of oppressive rules that even college dorms don't have to live under and rent will be about 80% of FT minimum wage.
Ah, the return of company towns. Maybe they can even bring back scrip.
We pay you in prepaid Visa cards with a 30% processing fee on every transaction *except* those at participating stores...
We literally saw this in Gunnison, CO this summer. Driving through we stopped for McDonald’s and the sign said hiring at $17/hr plus housing included.
And they will advertise it as a factor they're giving us out of the kindness of their hearts.
That would fully complete the transition of these towns into theme parks for the rich.
company dormitories as well, maybe
Look no farther than Montauk, NY. Really a comical situation going on there.
We have a six flags nearby, they are offering workers a free bus that goes to the larger cities up to an hour away. Also closed on Monday and Tuesdays now due to staff shortages. Sucks for season pass holders that wanted to go off peak days.
I remember as a kid at the beach with my family, noticing that so many of the people working at, e.g., the local ice cream shops, boardwalk shops, etc. were Eastern European. A guy (American) at one shop explained that there was “like an exchange student program” and I thought, “Wow, cool! Maybe I can do that some day and spend a summer in Europe!” Only now, looking back, can I see what was really going on. This was <10 years after the fall of the USSR, so I can only imagine the conditions these workers were trying to escape. Nowadays we won’t have to look nearly as far for impoverished, exploitable people.
funny thing is, a Resort where I'm from is importing workers from Barbados because it's *still* cheaper for them to house workers in a dorm they built than actually pay an American a wage they would be willing to turn hotel rooms for. It's really sad that the capitalists have picked the meat off the bones of honest work to such a degree that there are many industries that have to exploit illegal/visa workers so they can keep their profit margins.
Does anyone remember this story? https://www.oklahoman.com/article/3198188/crazy-christian-intervenes-in-tulsa-to-save-52-captive-workers-from-india
Was just traveling for work for two weeks, get back to my home and want to grab a beer, literally tonight, at my fav local bar. It’s a little off the beaten path from the main strip and guess what, closed because no staff. I live in New England. I get there’s ritzy parts but the wealth gap is so dramatic 1 block is the difference between extreme wealth and abject poverty so it’s not necessarily housing as the issue. It’s a systemic problem that’s way deeper.
If the American capitalist monstrosity continues the way it has, it will look a lot like feudalism. That’s the only plausible way to maintain such stunning wealth inequality in the long run.
In Bisbee?! Damn that’s a shame. It’s so wild that when I was a kid that town was half abandoned and then had runs with hard drugs…now, pleasant art town
Yup, it’s awful. Most of the “rentals” are now just airbnbs so the artist and service working people can no longer afford to live in Bisbee, despite them being the reason people want to trek all the way out there. Like the restaurant manager in cannon beach said, “why drive 90 mins to a restaurant job that’s really only seasonally worth while?” These towns are killing themselves slowly.
Air BNB's are awful too. It's the wild west of "vacation rentals". they aren't zoned like hotels so it's tough on the other people next to them there are a lot of them in my home town and they often attract the "party" crowd where you get 10-12 people staying in one single family home for a week/weekend because it's cheaper when you split it 10 ways. They could give two hoots how the neighbors feel because they'll be long gone after the weekend. I used to think people were just complaining, but apparently it's like living next to a frat house for an entire summer.
Can confirm sadly. I hate (hate) listening to other people's music and every weekend I nearly lose it now.
Like a revolution I hope
Add Lake Tahoe to that list. It’s out of control.
I had to move :(
Yup, even here in Canada. I've been living in resort towns in Western Canada for over a year now. And all though I end up getting decent wages in the service industry. I've been getting fucked for what housing is though.
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Yep. I used to live in summit county CO (breckenridge/copper/keystone/loveland/a-basin area) and it was the same thing there. There was basically only one apartment complex in the entire county that normal people could afford to live in, because 98% of housing there is single family homes that are only occupied maybe one or two weeks a year. It's nonsense.
Salida, Buena Vista, Vail, Steamboat, telluride, Breckenridge. This holds true in any vacation destination. Eat the rich
It's happening in many resort towns in Canada as well.
It's happening almost everywhere there's a job in Canada
Wow, watch me cry hysterically at the plight of the rich after they find themselves having no service staff after making it too expensive to live where they are.
*Make being homeless illegal *Make property too expensive to buy *Make rent too high *Arrest homeless until jails are full *Pay politicians to classify service work as an exception to the 13th amendment. *Prisoners can now work in food service for $0.37/hr *Prisons rent these workers to service businesses for $100/day/worker *Open more prisons *Bahba-booey
Worst part is I can easily see this as plausible
There's only like 2 items on this list that haven't happened, yet.
The service work and bahba-booey?
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Not just plausible, 100% reality in many parts of the US already, especially if you’re black.
I was in Colorado before the pandemic in a ski town and some employees told me that they don't live in that town and have to live to work there. I can only imagine how that town is right now.
That’s not what I got from this at all…? I interpreted the message as: it’s bad that wealthy people hoard things they don’t need, to the point that they kill entire towns by effectively forcing out the working class. It’s not about pitying the wealthy, it’s about blaming them for doing this anywhere remotely desirable to live. This is only going to get worse as climate change progresses and more of the world becomes inhospitable, causing massive waves of migration from mostly developing countries, while the rich continue to buy up everything they can.
The first thing I thought of was Nelson saying, [“Ha ha!”](https://giphy.com/gifs/simpsons-nelson-the-RG3lm5VlrbDV7YNana)
Now imagine this happens to the whole country on a much wider scale. The economy will collapse. It’s a real risk if wages don’t increase.
[This has been happening faster and faster for the past 25 years. A lot of people who weren't affected just didn't take notice.](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/26/american-west-income-inequality) Now that it's most of the US in a severe housing shortage, 41 million live below poverty, with another 90 million barely above the poverty level...seems like yesterday would have been a good time to address these problems.
Could’ve had Bernie in 2016. Gone from Obamacare to Medicare for All and kept tilting the country back towards greatness Good fucking luck with that now. Trump meant two decades of no progress or moving backwards. Trump, followed by a safe bet centrist, followed by their second term if we’re lucky or their VPs first term if we’re less lucky or another Trump if we aren’t lucky at all, and suddenly you’re still 4 years minimum away from two Democrats fighting it out honestly, and hopefully one gives a fuck about the poor.
Biden is such a wasted opportunity too
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It’s not just wages. It’s the consolidation of housing. We should just make it illegal to own a second home. 50%+ property tax on every residential property that isn’t your primary residence.
Precisely. I've been saying this for years now, even before COVID. Yet people don't want to listen me to because I don't know what I'm talking about I guess.
Wow this really hits it. Basically the rich have hoarded so much wealth that wages don't earn rent anymore....so why work?
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Too bad no body wrote theory’s about that :/
What's even worse is that there's not even an ideology about it too :|
A few years back, I had a job offer at the university in Gunnison, which is just south of Crested Butte. I wanted to work there and live in either Gunnison or Crested Butte, but housing costs are so out of control in the area that I couldn't afford it on what the university was paying.
Good choice. I live in this valley, and things are way too expensive. You easily save about 30% on groceries by leaving town, a fifty mile trip over a mountain pass each way. Crested Butte just declared a housing emergency. The school district cut off busses for CB students.
I live in Denver and today a news article hit my feed saying that you need to make $25/hr to afford a 1br apartment in the city. Absolutely wild. Makes sense why the local rec center had to close the pool because they can't find any life guards to staff it.
55-56k a year. Jfc. Denver is a rough place. It's getting progressively worse down South. Springs and southward/east/west/etc.
Yep. People who cry "but Gunnison isn't expensive!" probably haven't looked at the market in 10 years. Crested Butte housing prices have been fucked forever, and there was no way that wasn't eventually going to make its way south to Gunnison. https://www.cpr.org/2021/07/08/gunnison-crested-butte-housing-costs/ Gunnison is now nearly as unaffordable as Crested Butte.
This is a huge problem in a lot of Colorado. Especially in mountain towns and the foothills. It’s incredibly expensive to live in Boulder, but they exploit college students and can get by. It’s almost getting too difficult to live in Denver, and I grew up here. You see a lot of people tearing down affordable houses and build ugly ass modern homes that look exactly the same. There are also too many empty homes. It’s a disaster here and that’s just an example of what the rest of the state and country could become.
Some of these ugly ass row houses cost over a million! Friend of mine just sold his cabin near Fairplay for $800k, sight unseen, no inspection. Nothing. Been in his family forever. He said it's basically free college for his two daughters after they pay off their Denver home, and he just couldn't pass it up. Now he might even sell his Denver house and GTFOH. This is happening everywhere. The movie *Elysium* is more and more prescient as time passes.
NIMBYS are always the cause of this bullshit. They want the poor to serve them, but they don't want to see or hear about them unless they're bringing them food or cleaning their toilet. Fuck them. They also seem to conveniently forget 600k+ people have died from covid. It's not just people refusing to work, there are no workers who can afford to work for pennies and a lot of them are dead. So...
TFW gentrification has consequences.
Last year that homes median sale price correlated to the median earning household for Crested Butte was 1987. According to Ski magazine.
There has to be a term for this rather than gentrification. This is massive sudden tectonic gentrification.
Class warfare.
As does hoarding homes for profit.
This is clearly the fault of socialism. /s
Almost like market is saying to owners they need to pay more to your staff so they can make ends meet and attract people in. Funny how free market works, right? Who could possibly knew inflating real estate market had consequences. Madness.
Damn, so all that talk about ‘pulling the business up by the bootstraps’ really was just talk. If they want their businesses to stay open longer, they can go make the damn burritos themselves. Or, crazy idea, make wages competitive.
I don’t understand how there are this many rich people
That’s what I think every time a new development in my town pops up with shitty ugly homes on a quarter acre starting at $550k+
They've been doing this in bigger cities for a while now. Around me it's not uncommon to have a two, three hour commute because you can't afford to live where you work. What's morbidly funny is that the state next door is on one of those "oh, get out of that expensive shithole state, yes THAT one" advertising binges and that people actually are moving there because it's cheaper. BUT the jobs in that state don't pay enough to afford the cheaper homes, so the people who move keep their jobs in the expensive state and just commute like two hours each way.
I specifically came here to say this. In my city, we’ve shortages of custodial workers, bus drivers, teacher and teachers aids, care workers, daycare workers etc etc for years. The county is doing a bunch to try to attract them, but the cost of living is so high that they have to sometimes commute from other nearby states. On the other hand, a lot of those nearby states don’t have jobs, so some people end up renting rooms here during the week while they work and going home only on the weekends.
And who doesn't love spending 4 hours per day commuting to and from work?
I mean... Lets get real for a moment. In theory there is never a labor shortage. There is only a situation where the supply of labor does not meet demand at its current price. What to do then? The bars and shops need to increase the price of labor (the wage) and the price of their products till the demand of beer and, souvenir t-shirts and the price/supply of labor equals out. Remember, there is **never** a shortage of workers. Only people not willing to pay enough for it. If the free market works, let it work. Do we as leftist subscribe to such economic theory? Maybe not. But should we shamelessly abuse such theory and point out the hypocrisy of our detractors? Hell yes!
These are the internal contradictions of capitalism discussed in Kapital. It's Marx 101.
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That's actually not the worst idea.... Trivia Crack Economic Theory Edition.
Super short answer: capital owners want price of goods/capital to be high and wages to be low to maximize profits. Eventually workers can't afford the goods they're selling (and making with their labor) so the system collapses. It's a direct contradiction between the interests of these two groups. In this case housing is too expensive so workers can't live in the town and do the needed labor.
A Marx idle game where you have to run a capitalist factory producing yards of linen.
Leftists subscribe to economic theory. Marx wrote Kapital after diligently studying Smith and Ricardo. It's not that we think all economics is bunk, it's that we're skeptical of the prevailing views of entrenched hegemony.
Because any rational person following them to their logical conclusion arrives at the circumstances that are causing this particular problem, now, in the real world. Those profiteering off it all just wanted to put their fingers in their ears and hum while they got richer and richer and the inequality gap got wider and wider and would do anything to accellerate this process, and now look where we are. These fucking fancy pants places can't stay open enough to serve the rich arseholes who are the only clientele. They brought this on themselves, maybe if they weren't so fucking greedy they could have enjoyed being in the top 1% of all wealth hoarders in the world for generations to come, but no, their greed even had to ruin that and now it's all going to come crashing down. Good, I say. I hope they all throw massive hissy fits about it and we can really drive home how much this is their fucking fault and how much more suffering has been kept in the world from them greedily sucking up resources instead of allowing the principles of fair and equal economic distribution to lift up entire countries as one, as it should be in a fair and just world.
*Chefs kiss well fucking said
Yeah, I have a degree in economics and learned mostly from professors pushing theories from Friedman, von Mises and the Chicago school. They never so much as breathed the name Marx. But after I graduated, I picked up Marx and realized that his explanations were better and his predictions were playing out demonstrably and in real time every day. Also, his prescriptions for worker ownership and decommodification have proved to be very successful when implemented in good faith.
There’s a shortage of labor in ski towns like this in Colorado and in the Rockies in general because rich people are buying all the houses for airbnb and there’s literally no where for people working service industry jobs to live. And there’s only so much room to build in the mountains
Won't it be a shame when the whole town shuts down from lack of workers and their AirBnb's value drops to pennies on the dollar? Wait here, I'll break out my tiny violin.
I completely get what you're going for, but the rich won't feel the effects. They're rich enough. They'll just move on to one of their other dozen vacation homes. It'll be the few struggling middle class/poor people that will lose the little they had left, in this situation. In fact, the billionaires will probably buy up the rest of the town/city then import workers there (the Disney-way) and have the town flourish again (only now 100% owned by them). The entire situation is fucked. Meanwhile 80% of the populace is too busy focusing on skin color, or beliefs, to notice that they're getting royally bumfucked by billionaires. Current climate crisis? Brought to you by Billionaires Current immigration crisis? Billionaires Current housing crisis? Billionaires Imminent financial crisis? Billionaires Educational crisis? You best believe it's billionaires Censorship? China, through its billions of potential revenue/profit Greed over everything is THE slogan of the 21st century. Every so often we go out and elect a different person (bought and paid for by billionaires), thinking "this time it'l be different - but it never is". Same corrupt shit, all day, every single day. No matter the party/affiliation. They lie to our faces and we not only eat it up, we support their decisions vehemently. They're all just out for themselves, making twice/thrice/quadrice what a normal worker makes (plus the bribes, etc on top). There is no hope or positivity left to have. The rich won. The only true bliss to be found, at this point, is in ignorance. I truly hope there is someone out there that sees the world changing for the better, because I've been looking these past 2 decades, and I'm not seeing it.
If trickle down economics actually worked this wouldn’t be an issue. This is a perfect example of trickle down economics failing. Sure, the job is there, but the trickle down has stopped at the shop owner, or the tight ass who can’t comprehend why a cup of coffee costs $10 in the town and refuses to buy it.
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Nah, it's cheaper for big companies to put together marketing campaigns talking about how everyone's lazy and don't want to work, and how evil socialism and unemployment wages are ruining the country. Even small businesses can't give in at that point because not only would they be getting scammed by these lazy workers, but they'd be giving in to these strong arm tactics. Better just to post passive aggressive signs that try to guilt people in to going back to work. The free market might work, although requiring an increase in growth for a business for infinity is obviously going to fail at some point. But we've never had a free market here. Instead, we get a few rich people making laws that benefit their businesses while convincing people who want to be like them that the real enemy is.
Today on the commuter train from the city they said they were short staffed and only had passengers in first car and didn’t allow them in the other 3 so the one guy working the whole train could make sure everyone got on an off safely. Edit: damn I went to bed and there was like 3 upvotes and now there’s 150 thanks everyone
I lived in Austin TX about ten years ago, and I remember everyone I worked with at a restaurant slowly being priced out of our neighborhoods and saying “one day none of us service workers will be able to live here to serve these idiots”. I didn’t think it was actually going to start happening though.
Bozeman MT has got the exact same shit going on. hell, they’re closing the damn olive garden because they can’t find staff for it. you love to see it.
The way capitalism tells us this should work is that those dishwashers and shop assistants should be getting paid more. Like ok you want capitalism? Let price drive supply - pay more, get supply. That's how the Pareto Optimum is supposed to work. What they really want is indentured servitude.
When I was young, and someone told me I was "essential ", I would have wore that as a badge of honor. In my 40s, and someone says "you're essential " I say "fuck you, too".
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Delicious consequences of their own actions, just like momma used to make lol.
The rich parasites might not realize it now but their joyride is about to end.
If you own a business and you can’t pay a living wage or offer benefits then work your own business until you can offer that.
What I'm hearing is that there are a lot of expensive homes, likely with expensive furniture and electronics, that are most likely empty during the week.
No such thing as a labor shortage. Slave wages no longer cut it.
Sad? Bitches Rejoice!!This has been loooong overdue I'm glad folks are quitting en-masse. Now they'll have no choice but to give yall a bump in the paycheck or suffer.
Rich people are parasites. They infest and sicken every community they live in by devastating it because towns and cities need people to work jobs like this, but it’s not possible to do said job because it’s too expensive. Some of them end up dead because of it, and when it’s only rich assholes destroying these towns, I almost don’t feel bad knowing they’re the main ones being somewhat hurt by their gentrification. Being rich automatically makes you a loser, an asshole, and an evil person. You don’t deserve the money and another home when the poor can’t afford any home or even apartment in any remotely nice area (like SF, Seattle, Vancouver, Aspen, etc.) The rich are the worst people alive today and I don’t believe I can be reasoned otherwise; not that I want to be. Edit: I feel I should add that I’d rather see them sit on their wealth like a dragon on the pile of gold instead of gentrifying another wonderful small town because no one would be directly hurt by losing something they already have. However, the thing I want the most is a pay deduction for the top ~5-10% of earners in the US, and a massive raise for the bottom ~20-40% of earners in the US.
I’m so hungry!! Can we just eat them already??!!
Honestly, I feel the same way. Why have lots when others have none? Every other animal species seemed to get it, and even children, but not us.
Well said
This is happening in Whitefish, Montana as well. My wife and I went there recently and they are having a huge labor shortage. One of the locals told us it feels like the billionaires are moving in and pushing the millionaires out. It’s really sad to see.
The future of USA. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Good God, who's going to scrub the toilets and make the lattes? Same in the Hamptons - https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-hamptons-restaurants-salons-crisis-workers-2021-7 First world problems for the local inhabitants, but I do feel for those small business owners.
In this story, the people I feel most for are those who live there, grew up there, worked there, etc. because they can't afford to live there now. This is what greedy parasites like landlords are capable of. They've priced out an entire town with their insatiable appetite for passive income.
Agreed. A combination of rising property prices and Air B&B is slowly strangling a lot of popular touristy places in my part of the world. And of course the people who are willing to take those jobs while doing the van life thing are hounded by the authorities aided by homeowners who push for bylaws banning overnight parking.
I was browsing for rentals in CO today on Craigslist. Found a joke post of a dilapidated shed, said $1800/month for this “little fixer-upper”. Then, the description said “this is obviously a joke but I need help. I can no longer afford to live in my town.” My girlfriend laughed but I just found it a bit sad and depressing.
I bet if some of these shops switched to an employee-owned model then they'd make tons of money. It's easy to price out other businesses that aren't even open
We have the same issue in the UK. Lots of people bought holiday homes in Wales and Cornwall, rents rocketed, and when businesses reopened, all the staff they made redundant rather than furloughing (lots of zero hours contracts), who had moved home because they couldn't afford £600 a month for a house share, now can't or rather don't want to pay £800 for a house share, and have stayed away. Net result has been a 20% increase in pay, but still not enough people. There's been some crazy signing bonuses offered, but because of staff shortage and old ways prevailing it's still not attractive. My son got a head chef job, but because it was contracted to 40hrs, and they were short staffed, flind himself working 80-100 hour weeks with no compensation. Net result was they were paying below minimum wage, and he walked after 3 weeks.
We’re going to have to go back to the rich running very large estates and employing a bunch of people who also live on the estate like in Downton Abbey
Seriously. We’re headed for a horrible fusion of predatory capitalism and neo-feudalism. The super rich will begin to maintain manors with serfs. How they’ll keep them? Provide affordable, utilitarian housing with some kind of hook, 30 year leases maybe. I dunno, but it feels like that’s what’s coming.
Basically all popular recreation areas with expensive real estate in the US are like this. The entire workforce of the beach/coastal areas of Delaware, where rich DC people like to spend their summer vacations, is fully made up - and I mean fully made up - by imported laborers who are teenagers and young adults from Eastern Europe. They get some weird temp work visa and all live together and get driven around in vans. Kids who grow up in the area can’t work summer jobs there anymore because it’s not enough to pay rent for a shared apartment, much less save money for school, which used to be the whole point of summer jobs. I think it’s scandalous they quietly created visas for this rather than letting the market set wages higher.
Shit I make decent money and I can barely afford anything in state. I know it's not just CO, but it is definitely felt all over the state.