My advise to people under thirty.

The OP thinks he can tell all people under 30 what to do because he had to fire 15 people in 2 years from what I think is a part time business. That tells me lots. It is not all but it is lots.

Never been on the outside looking in? I do contract work so I go to many different companies in the same highly profitable industry.

Companies that have low pay are the way as I outline in my first post on this thread. They never seem to have good help. Why is this so?

Most companies pay at the mid range... they have adequate help but still have issues with things like failing drug testing, "accidents", poor quality control. Why would this be?

High paying companies can have the above issues but generally to a much lessor degree. The employees are happy to have their jobs and advocate for the company they work with. They must be losing money... Making millions. lol

Because that is the script that is being spewed by every class hustler, union boss, community organizer, occupy Wall Street, and social justice pimp out there... and the media is a willing participant in it.

If all these people honestly thought there was a conspiracy by business owners to screw the working man, I welcome them to take the personal risk of borrowing the money to start their own business. They can work the 115+ hour work weeks for 4 or 5 years to get it off the ground, be the guy that interviews, hires, trains, pays and promotes or fires those employees. They can see if they can make payroll, pay the insurance, utilities, repairs and maintenance, laundry, cleaning, permits, advertising, accounting, and legal expenses, match their employees Social Security and Medicare contributions, pay for their unemployment insurance premiums, and navigate through all the federal, state, and local regulations and red tape. Don't forget about paying for all those employees: Christmas parties, discretionary bonuses, flowers for their relative's funerals, buying Christmas present for their kids when their house burns down, putting that same family up in a hotel for a month, etc...(evil, selfish bosses...)

If they manage to turn a profit, those profits will be taxed as corporate taxes. In the U.S. those corporate taxes are the 3rd highest in the world. Most small businesses in the U.S. are S-Corporations. So once those profits are taxed at the corporate rate, whatever is left over goes into the owner(s) personal tax return and is taxed again.

At this point if there is anything left, that fat cat business owner can rest easy while he is demonized for not paying everyone in his operation a "living wage", or maybe he'll be called an evil 1%er. If that business owner is even marginally successful, he or she will have paid at least 50% (probably closer to 60%) of the profits of their company in taxes between corporate, federal, state, local, and matching payroll taxes.

Anyone who believes there shouldn't be any starting wage jobs in America...Please do me a favor and open your own business and employ these unskilled or no experience employees at $12, $15, $20 and hour, plus the money you will spend on transforming them from unskilled to skilled. Please report back to me and let me know how that works out for you.

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'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich August von Hayek

go back and reread the OP. He found a guy who took the job to move boxes and accepted the added benefit of using a trailer to haul firewood. The guy was a no show twice. Would you take the job and be a no show? The OP wasn't complaining that no one would accept his terms, he was complaining about a lack of work ethic.

And yes, I hire people at $8 all the time. When I was clearing land on my farm a couple of years ago, I had all the help I could afford and more people calling me begging for work. The workers I had would bring friends hoping they could get a few days work also. The farm is in a high unemployment county and some people were happy to get any work they could. I don't know the economic conditions where the OP lives, so I don't have enough info to know if it is a reasonable rate or not. If he lives in NYC, no, it isn't enough. But odds are if he is cutting trees, it isn't in Central Park, and in rural America, $8 is often a good paying job.

This is more proof of just what I was saying. Reread his OP. Look at the bold part. Look up the term "advice".

8 dollars an hour isn't a good paying job.

The OP found crappy workers with the promise of low pay. Who's surprised? Not me.

I briefly mentioned my track record to address your assertion that I "do not understand nor appreciate the nature of employment."

Last year, my family employed two full-time workers: one made an average of $18 an hour, the other $35 an hour. Those number might not make sense for everyone's business, but we never had to wonder for a moment if we were getting our money's worth.

To provide some additional context, ten years ago, I was laid off from a high-paying job and my best option became a minimum wage apprenticeship at age 34 and to deliver pizzas all night in order to make ends meet until I was able to complete the program and begin taking commissioned work as a skilled laborer. So I think I understand and appreciate how things work just fine. Not surprisingly, the pizza joint had a boss who was always complaining about high turnover and how none of his employees cared at all about his business and blah blah blah.

His advise is to show up for work and do a good job regardless of pay. Sure that's good advise.

My advise would be to suggest the young people move for higher wages. Avoid any low pay industries. Put your efforts into what pays well.

There is certainly a thread of resentment running through these posts. I have been by far mostly an employee. I have had my share of bad employers, seen more. One world class bad.
But if the employer was bad enough, I left them. I certainly did not waste my time resenting that they offered less than I felt I was worth. If my judgement was good about my own worth, I soon was employed again.
If other considerations kept me at work, then that is enough to know that the employer provided enough and resentment ill placed.
The only way I can see resentment being created is if I am caught between what I want someone else to do (the employer) and my own desires for myself. And it helps to remember I can't do much about other's behavior so I best look to my own for a solution.

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For we used to ask when we were little, thinking that the old men knew all things which are on earth: yet forsooth they did not know; but we do not contradict them, for neither do we know.

That's always my advice as well. If you think it is so easy or profitable to build a company and pay above market wages, go ahead and do it with your own money. It gets a whole lot harder when it is the future of your business and the income your family relies upon instead of just sitting on the sidelines offering risky advice when you don't even know the man, the company, the local economy, or much of anything else about the situation.

I only disagree in that you mixed up C-corps which get taxed twice and S-corps which are taxed once at the owners rate.

No need to give advice to the good workers under 30 or to imply that they don't already know this info. Maybe giving this speech to those that he is hiring should be part of the training package ( if it is not already).

Many industries are not highly profitable. Many operate on razor thin margins. These industries are typically the most competitive. This doesn't mean necessarily that all jobs in these areas have to be low paying, just that the labor used in these industries MUST be uber efficient...meaning that there isn't room to pay $11/hour for ANY employee for very long that is only making the company $10.85/hour.

Perhaps, since your frame of reference is with "many different companies in the same highly profitable industry" you are used to an atmosphere where the companies can afford to pay $20/hour for people that are only worth $8. Or maybe those companies have large enough margins to pay an army of HR personnel to screen and do background checks, and personality tests on all applicants. Or maybe your industry doesn't need people analytical skills, or interpersonal skills for menial tasks and can use those high profit margins to use mechanization therefore eliminating lower skilled employees.

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'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Your missing the point...

The OP said to work hard in a low paying job. So he could maintain the status quote of hiring low payed unskilled workers.

I suggest he change his business model so he can afford higher payed workers so the issue he is having is mitigated or eliminated. If he can't change his structure so he doesn't need low skilled low pay workers. External forces will always sap his energies. At some point it will put him out of business.


More simply... There are reasons companies stop growing. Some business stop at 100 thousand, some 1 million, some 100 million. It's never what the owner thinks it is. They blame the workers. The Foreman. The sales dept. The managers. The plant managers... on and on. The issue lies with the owner. His inability to give the business the direction it needs. Blaming a generation for his troubles is at best laughable.

I worked at crappy low paying jobs. That's were I learned I wanted something different. But that did not mean I just up and quit without notice or stole from them or hated them. It was their choice to offer- mine to accept. Or not.

But as long as there is unlimited immigration competing for jobs and as long as work can be shipped away and as long as government subsidies and attitudes create what is in essence options other than work, this will be the world we live in- some very lucrative work and much less valued. Labor is not a rare commodity, much less pay buying quality work.

I have seen some signs of change every recently but, until there is attention paid to work and its value, this will be the world in which we live.

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For we used to ask when we were little, thinking that the old men knew all things which are on earth: yet forsooth they did not know; but we do not contradict them, for neither do we know.

Sure he does.

Nowadays, because of the government dole, most do. And in the process, learn some wonderful and valuable life lessons that will keep them poor for life.

The example I gave was not some farmer hiring PharmD's (who normally start at $55/hr), but a farmer in a highly rural area hiring high school boys for $5/hr, two meals and transportation thrown in, to hoe cotton.

It's a low-skill, temp job that puts $120-$160 in a 16 year-old's pocket and teaches the kid a bit about working for money. Just like when I was a young lad, hauling hay for 5 cents a bale, the cattle we used to help worm or the fence I used to help build.

Like most folks, I've left a job or two. But unlike a lot of people, I've never been shown the door.

Maybe it's because of those lessons I learned in the hayfield or working in the sawmill...The man I worked for didn't come knocking on my door and drag me off to work. I showed up at the man's farm or place of business and asked for a job. Wages were agreed upon, you shook hands and then you were expected to bust butt for those dollars, because if I can't make my employer money, I'm worthless as an employee.

When you agree to take a job, it's not always about the worth of the dollar. Sometimes, you learn the worth of the man.

If given the choice between an $8/hr job and government assistance, I'll take the job. And ask for overtime.

As I've said many times... I would counsel any young people away from low paying industries. I don't particularly care if the industry makes it as a whole. So If for example small scale wood cutting can only compete by offering jobs with low pay they will go into the dust bin of history and I say good riddance. The enterprise simply isn't lucrative and should be avoided.

Yes and some people seem to think profit margins are high. Well they are Low very low.
Those that stock shelves at grocery departments surely can't get much at all above minimum.
Why you ask.
Because the store itself is ONLY working on a 1.3% MAYBE as high as 3% profit margin, but that is few and far between. Let that sink in awhile.
Some seem to think business are making a killing out there they are not when talking about Mom and Pop, or even a small business they have to watch what they pay in wages cause that cuts directly into their bottom line which is LOW already.
It costs money overhead and it is getting harder and harder for small one owner populations to keep going as utilities and cost of keeping their doors open is shrinking like it hasn't in years. To pay over what they can afford to keep the lights on is a death sentence. A 8 Bucks an hour was never meant to a living wage it is a Learning wage to get you a better position down the road.
Why is that so hard to understand. And a party time job is just that Part Time and never was meant to be a high paying job.

You WORK and when the job is done in a few months whatever you if THAT is your trade in life, is to move from one Part Time job to another THAT is what you can expect to get paid. A Part Time Minimum or slightly higher and that is IT! Period. Get trained get educated and Learn that life is full of hard knocks. And the Gravy Train is ending for you, get up tighten your boot straps and work, quit relying on government handouts.
That Gravy Train may come to a screeching halt also in the future.

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Oh my, dishes yet to wash and dry

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Thanks for agreeing with me... The advise for the youth should be to find high paying work.

You know I keep going back to the OP because you keep saying he said that. But he didn't unless you think that showing up is the same as hard work.
Maybe the OP has a business that is unlikely to grow into a multi million dollar corporation. Maybe competition is so tight for the work he does that he could never pay more and keep in business. Maybe he is a tightwad of the first order. All are his choice.
But that does not make what he said wrong- an employee must be able to produce more than he is paid to be worth the effort of hiring him. Showing up when you have promised is a minimum requirement.

__________________
For we used to ask when we were little, thinking that the old men knew all things which are on earth: yet forsooth they did not know; but we do not contradict them, for neither do we know.

Those no good rotten students must be dumb not to work for a pittance and gain a life lesson....

Maybe the lesson learned is they value their time more than the potential employer.