[HN Gopher] Kitchen staff were canaries in the coal mine (2022)
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Kitchen staff were canaries in the coal mine (2022)
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-09-27 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (economistwritingeveryday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (economistwritingeveryday.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Bad service is a sign of a better world_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41674275 - Sept 2024
|
| (referenced and written by blog author in post above)
| paulcole wrote:
| > If the daily threads at on r/nursing subreddit are even mildly
| representative, the status quo in nursing is unsustainable
|
| Call me a skeptic but every career subreddit is dominated by the
| whiniest complainers imaginable (easily lapping even the HN
| commenters who froth at the mouth at the thought of RTO).
|
| Using this as a key point of an article seems flimsy at best.
|
| > Personally, I'm betting on two out of the three, but I'm not
| telling you which two.
|
| Also lol at this.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "US nursing crisis" are the search keywords you will want to
| use.
|
| https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4304685-americas-nurs...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2024/06/07/health-care-worker-shortage...
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
|
| https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-sh...
|
| https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2023-04-13-study-projects-...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/
| vundercind wrote:
| The teaching trend is very, very real. Public schools are in
| crisis due to the dual shocks of Covid and inflation (which
| came on top of years of underinvestment and declining quality
| of the work environment, so the whole thing was already
| teetering before that shove) and nobody's even talking about
| spending what it'll take to fix them. The low-COL-adjusted-comp
| areas are worst-hit, but a marked decline in quality is in
| store for the whole sector, largely due to staff shortages and
| an associated, unavoidable decline in average quality.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| You post problems in addition to COVID and Inflation but you
| barely scratch the surface. No Child Left Behind, School
| vouchers, defunding public colleges, the list goes on and on
| and on as to how we've been chipping away at education.
| vundercind wrote:
| Yep, you're spot-on. The sector'd been taking a pummeling
| for years and years, that was just the final one-two punch
| (and a doozy, at that). If there's a third thing, it's the
| renewed and persistent negative political attention on
| schools from the right over the last eight years.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Could private school vouchers and magnet schools fix it?
|
| I feel like a lot of problems with teaching is due to
| overregulation from department of education and increasing
| scope bloat of their responsibilities.
|
| Just stick to mass daycare with curriculum model and allow
| free competition from private sector and it should be fine.
|
| The best compensated teachers are the ones that achieve
| results: train champions and elevate students to their
| highest potential.
|
| Its not going to happen at public school
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Magnet schools are public schools, but usually with more
| motivated students or involved parents. The more motivated
| students part can help, it's more enjoyable to go to work
| teaching when most of the class wants to be there.
| jghn wrote:
| > Could private school vouchers
|
| Ask Arizona how it is going [1]
|
| [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-school-
| vouchers-b...
| Terr_ wrote:
| "To open our meeting, good news: This year we managed to
| direct a ton of public tax dollars towards our favorite
| private entities and churches, and the budget shortfall
| gives us an excuse to strangle other safety-net programs
| we already didn't like!" /s
|
| As a note for non-US folks, individual states cannot
| print currency the same way the federal government can,
| so budget shortfalls on that level are a lot more
| immediate and impactful.
| diddid wrote:
| It was an interesting read, but it only says how much
| they spend on school vouchers. I didn't see a spend for
| the standard public schools. They said the average
| voucher was 7k which is almost for sure lower than what
| public school is charging per student. Maybe they just
| need to add an income requirement to it and if you make
| too much no voucher.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/2024/public-s...
|
| ~$10k, so yes the voucher is less than what the public
| school students are getting (directly from their teachers
| and indirectly through other school services and
| faculty).
| slt2021 wrote:
| I read the article and think that Arizona's problems are
| not inherent to the voucher system per se, just how they
| administered it. People found a loophole.
|
| Need to tie closely the money coming out with the voucher
| and the corresponding decrease in spend on public school
| system
| panzagl wrote:
| Private schools (and charters) usually pay worse than
| public schools.
| slt2021 wrote:
| private schools face fierce competition and immediate
| feedback loop from parents.
|
| public school system is not accountable at all to
| parents.
|
| this makes sure that interest of school and parents and
| kids are aligned and no political bs coming from above
| like DoE
| jgeada wrote:
| Private school vouchers are the worst idea ever.
|
| How's removing yet more funding for public schools supposed
| to be an answer to public schools don't have enough
| funding?
|
| As the funny paraphrasing goes
| (https://x.com/teedjvt/status/1685251077753430016) "I don't
| really like the city parks. I want to join a country club
| so my kid doesn't have to play with 'those' kids and I want
| the city parks system to pay for my membership"
| slt2021 wrote:
| public school system is full of grift, politically
| appointed and allocated resources, and zero
| accountability.
|
| if you face inefficient system that cannot manage
| resources - you cannot pour more resources and expect
| better results.
|
| as a proof you can look at Chicago, DC and Baltimore
| school systems that have the highest per capita spend and
| the lowest academic achievement metrics.
|
| we just need to provide parents an option to opt-out of
| crooked system
| diddid wrote:
| I think the lack of quality is not being driven at the
| individual teacher level and isn't related to covid at all.
| Covid made the issues that already existed visible. Removing
| AP classes and charter schools, graduating kids missing
| credits, downplaying test results, and failing to properly
| address poor student behavior are all usually made at the
| district level. I don't think increased funding would change
| any of that and I think a lot of good teachers would still
| quit.
| slt2021 wrote:
| the highest per student spend is at the most failing and
| underperforming school systems: Chicago, DC, Baltimore -
| and they haven't showed a trend to improve at all and keep
| demanding more and more resources
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Honest question: what is the appropriate level of investment?
| According to the national center for education statistics [0]
| Spending per pupil went up 13% from 2010 to 2021 _after_
| accounting for inflation, so that 's a real increase of 13%,
| not a nominal increase. And 80% of those dollars are going to
| staff.
|
| I'll admit that I'm anything but an expert, but a real
| increase in spending of 13% across a decade does not sound
| like years of underinvestment. I'm happy to be educated on
| this topic, but from an outsider perspective, it just doesn't
| seem like the issue.
|
| [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmb
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Using this as a key point of your article seems flimsy at
| best.
|
| For nursing... just ask literally _any_ nurse and they 'll chew
| your ear off. I happen to know some via local volunteer
| emergency service work and they're _all_ on the verge of
| burning out, only staying in because they don 't want to leave
| their patients and colleagues.
| dividefuel wrote:
| There seems to be a broad understanding among those in these
| fields that these jobs just keep getting worse, and so people
| are quitting. They may be getting worse for different reasons
| (worse conditions, less satisfaction, declining pay, more
| qualifications needed, etc etc), but there's a net sense of
| dissatisfaction. For people new to the job, there's usually an
| initial shock that the job is so far removed from its mission
| that there's no personal satisfaction, and they ultimately
| leave.
| im3w1l wrote:
| (2022)
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Labor shortages in nursing, cooks, and teachers. But unemployment
| increasing since 2022. Sounds like it might work itself out?
| behringer wrote:
| you'd have to be a complete idiot (or love the craft so much
| you don't care what it costs you) to go to school for nursing
| or teaching in the US. Now chef'ing, that's not a half bad idea
| :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But unemployment increasing since 2022. Sounds like it might
| work itself out?
|
| No. Partially because these are high stress jobs and not
| everyone is willing to take them - and honestly, no one
| _should_ become a nurse or a teacher if they don 't want to,
| because the damage potential is so high, partially because
| becoming a teacher takes _a lot_ of study and in the US it
| carries the non-insignificant chance of getting shot.
| behringer wrote:
| And yet school administration and hospital administration are
| making more money than ever. There's no labor shortage, there's a
| pay shortage.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Really there is just a housing shortage. Every road of
| struggling lower/middle class finances leads back to housing
| being outrageously expensive. All these other costs/wages are
| in mostly functional and liquid markets. They are being
| priced/valued more or less correctly.
|
| Except housing. It's artificially choked to bolster home values
| by home owners.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Teachers and nurses still don't get paid enough even in cheap
| places, where housing is extremely affordable like Detroit,
| Cleveland, all of Mississippi, etc.
|
| So maybe it's a bigger problem in HCOL areas like California,
| but it's a problem everywhere.
|
| The problem is, in the last ~20 years we went from ~7% of the
| population being retired to ~20%. Over the next 10 years,
| it's going to get close to ~30%.
| dividefuel wrote:
| I can't imagine that nursing's problems are just
| fundamentally housing. Tracing back rough work schedules,
| unreasonable administration expectations, and hostile
| patients to housing costs feels like a stretch.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Pay is part of the problem, but also prioritizing profit margin
| above all else.
|
| The fundamental problem is if you understaff and overwork your
| employees, you make more money. The actual drop in quality for
| the service doesn't degrade enough to stop people from using
| it.
|
| This is why hospitals are horror stories of nurses/doctors
| working 60+ hour weeks with no vacation and managing a huge
| patient load. It's because admin has found that even if you
| don't have enough nurses, that just means 1 or 2 patients
| suffer or wait in line for longer. Perhaps someone dies, but in
| the meantime you'll save 10s, 100s of thousands or even
| millions of dollars over the course of a year.
|
| It's a pay problem, but it's also a staffing problem.
| wffurr wrote:
| Working conditions too. Pretty bad for nursing and teaching.
| avidiax wrote:
| People still work in literal coal mines, and their pay is still <
| $31/hour.
|
| This discussion is about an effect at the margins. The marginal
| nurse that decides to quit, the low-seniority teacher that is
| paid less than their peers for the same work.
|
| When the canary dies in a coal mine, everyone is in danger. But
| when working conditions worsen, only those employees at the
| margins (close to retirement, low seniority, worse than average
| assignment) will leave.
|
| The question is whether there is some exponential effect on
| service from decreasing kitchen/nursing/teaching staff. Those
| fields all look like they have linear degradation of service to
| me.
|
| https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/coal-miner/united-st...
| RangerScience wrote:
| I think the idea with the "canary in a coal mine" isn't that
| it's the margins that are at risk - it's a signal that those
| margins have _moved_.
|
| When working conditions worsen, and those at the previous
| margins leave, does that mean there's now _new_ people in the
| margins who were "safe" before?
| vundercind wrote:
| Good high-seniority teachers can walk out of their job and
| straight into the white-collar office job world for more money
| and usually less bullshit. Probably even a remote role for
| extra improvement to QOL. It's _far_ from just new teachers
| leaving (that's always been a thing).
| pipes wrote:
| Two siblings who are teachers, and a parent who was a
| teacher. What sort of white collar work can they get? Only
| example I can think of is a teacher who left after two years
| and got a job as a Business analyst at my place of employment
| (they were in their 20s). I've honestly never seen any other
| teacher do this. Teachers are very underpaid in the UK, but
| they do have great job security and pension security. Not to
| mention amazing holidays. Neither of my siblings would give
| this up.
| ajb wrote:
| Good analysis. Not sure I agree that they are all linear in
| degredation. Anything that serves a queue has superlinear
| degredation; as the service rate goes over the arrival rate.
| We've hit that tipping point in the UK and waiting times for
| access to medical treatment have ballooned; in our case
| aggravated by the exit of GPs.
|
| Kitchen staff also serve a queue, but I don't think that will
| have the same effect as people always have the option of eating
| at home.
| dividefuel wrote:
| Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As
| others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your
| patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake.
| Mistakes are often, as far as I understand, held against the
| nurse, so you could lose your license. At a certain point, the
| risk becomes too great and you're better off quitting.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen.
| As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher
| your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a
| mistake
|
| Or your burden becomes insufferable and you burn out and
| quit.
| jp57 wrote:
| If everyone dies when the canary dies, then there wasn't much
| point in bringing it down there. The canary _is_ at the
| margins, and thus it dies first when the gas comes. When it
| dies, everyone else should GTFO, because if the gas gets worse,
| they 're next.
| jppope wrote:
| Probably something that can be learned from this information, but
| I doubt the conclusion the author arrived at is correct.
| k__ wrote:
| My partner worked as a nurse for almost a decade. In the end they
| were in psychiatry, most chill job you can get as a nurse if you
| don't want to go into management. No manual labor, only bringing
| people their meds and writing down what they did all day. It
| still sucked. The pay was bad and the night-shifts and constantly
| covering for sick coworkers took their toll.
|
| In the end they switched to a study assistant job. Better pay and
| they can work whenever they like, even from home for half of the
| tasks.
| tqi wrote:
| > The only solution will be to raise compensation for teachers
| and bring labor into the industry and, well, the failure to raise
| teaching salaries is maybe the single greatest of example of the
| divergence between what people publicly support and what they
| actually vote for.
|
| It's hard to read sentences like that and wonder "what more do
| you want?" Yes teachers should get paid more. The average teacher
| in the SFUSD gets paid ~$84K, which is clearly not enough for the
| city. But the district has an annual budget of 1.3 billion
| dollars for less than 50K students. Maybe the district should
| spend more of the money it already has on teacher salaries
| instead of wasting money and time on stupid / mismanaged
| projects[1][2][3].
|
| [1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/12/san-francisco-unified-
| schoo... [2] https://missionlocal.org/2022/10/firm-awarded-no-
| bid-contrac... [3]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/arts/design/san-francisco...
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I wouldn't use SF as a baseline for anything. It's way outside
| the norm for any metric you could pick. That's $30k/student.
| Try Oshkosh, WI or something. $13k/student.
| willcipriano wrote:
| OECD average is 9k.[0]
|
| US spends more per student than everyone else save Luxemburg,
| Switzerland, Austria and Norway.
|
| [0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't disagree with that. But as soon as you bring SF or
| NYC into a discussion about general issues in the US, Im
| out. Those places are extremely unique outliers and don't
| represent normal life for the majority of US citizens or
| cities.
| slt2021 wrote:
| these places are held captive to internal political
| clique, regulatory capture, and union
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Is there a useful way to separate the effects that wages not
| keeping up with inflation has on workforce retention has from the
| effects that customer/student/patient violence towards staff has
| on workforce retention?
|
| My gut instinct tells me that the latter would be a much bigger
| driver of resignations but I'm not involved in these industries
| so maybe the former matters more to them.
| miki123211 wrote:
| What I find very interesting about the examples here is they
| cover the whole spectrum of government-managed to free market.
|
| Most teachers are employed by state-owned schools, and as far as
| I understand, they're very often unionized in the US. Nursing is
| mostly private but regulated, probably with some mix of non-
| profits / government thrown in. Restaurants are as free market as
| it gets, there are both large chains and small restaurants,
| there's lots of competition, most customers have more than one
| option, reviews exist and a lot of people are repeat customers,
| making it hard to overpromise, underdeliver and stay in business.
|
| I don't have the answers as to why this is a problem, but clearly
| "evil capitalists", "mismanaged government", "underregulation" or
| "overregulation" are not it.
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