Try this one, from Pete Seeger's 1963 concert in Carnegie Hall which gave a lot of white America their first taste music from the Civil Rights Movement and also this song that Malvina Reynolds wrote in response to the miner's strikes in Kentucky.

Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNmArOgUYPo

It's a gorgeous song. The concert was until June 8, 1963, but some of these songs Seeger had been singing for a while in smaller venues. The Carnegie Hall concert was the first (I think) major venue after his sabbatical that turned into a "mondical and tuesdical" as a result of his refusal to be cowed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

^{robots... he forgot the robots...}

The People, United, Are Not Going to Get Very Far. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/amazon-workers-union.html

^{"I owe my soul to the company store."}

A tight job market and tighter housing market has some Vermont employers creating employee housing

https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/money/2022/04/10/employer-provided-housing-possible-solution-filling-jobs-vt/7243630001/


^{BTW, employee housing is taxable as income.}

>company store

'Truck wages' coming soon?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_wages

>>company store

The paradox in all this is that one of the root problems in America is that jobs have "benefits" instead of just wages. So there's this huge overhead, especially with respect to medical insurance. Frankly, businesses should not be allowed to offer medical insurance to their employees. But then one solution to the problem is to add another layer of benefit, the housing subsidy.

I feel like that's moving in the wrong direction as a society, but as an individual business owner, there is a lot of pressure to move in this direction.

We have lived in company housing for a time. Most people who work here live in company housing for their whole careers. You retire or lose your job, you have X days to vacate. That's a unique situation because you can't own property within 30 minutes of work and it has become super expensive to own property within 1 hour. Everyone pays rent. There is no free housing, so it isn't counted as income.

The hotel I was at is on private land, but there is a shortage of housing in that small town too and challenges for building more. They were able to cut a deal with local landlords that an employee can't cut. For example, they would rent 12 houses for the summer and guarantee an income to the homeowner. There is no way a seasonal employee could manage this. They don't know who to contact. They don't have the resources to secure the house in advance. They would be on their own to find roommates.

Also, one of the towns mentioned in the article is the ski town my dad lives in. Housing has long been a problem in ski towns. But as the second-home and vacation-rental markets boomed, there is no housing at a reasonable price. One solution would be to pay people enough to live there. The problem is that a basic, family restaurant cannot survive with $150,000/year waiters. A hotel cannot survive with $140,000/year housekeepers. So as an individual hotel looking to survive, you have to either find a way to get that price down or you go out of business.

The problem that I see in our area is that a lot of employee housing is very small, often a shared room and commonly a single room. It's super unfriendly to families. So you end up with a workforce that basically has to be young and predominantly single. As soon as people start thinking about a family, they start looking for places to move to.

The thing that I keep rattling around in my head is just how, as a society, we manage seasonal work. I can work 2000 hours per year splitting my time between, say, park ranger in the summer and lift attendant in the winter. However, since both jobs are only 1000 hours per year, I do not qualify for any benefits at either one. This is a problem even for people who have year-round jobs in places subject to large shifts in seasonal demand. Again, at the hotel, there are a lot of jobs that will drop to one or zero shifts per week in low periods, and then go to 60 hours per week in crunch periods.

People with money want to be able to ski, go to the beach, play golf, visit national parks, but our society is doing a poor job of figuring out how to manage an elastic workforce in a way that is sustainable. A lot of the current labor crunch in hospitality is that people who were unable to get full-time work previously, are getting full-time year-round work. And in the US with our benefits system, it's way better to be a $15/hr employee with a regular 40 hours and full benefits than to be a $30/hr employee at a place that is boom and bust and doesn't provide enough annual hours to give you benefits.

We're seeing that in the park this year. There will be limited services because the number of people willing to take a six-month job has collapsed. There will be a major shortage of bus drivers. There's just too much full-time opportunity elsewhere. But even seasonal rangers are completely different now. When I became a ranger there were over 400 applicants for six spots. This year I think they ended up with spots unfilled.

Post WWII zoning laws play into this living quarters scenario.  We used to have "auxiliary living units" (ie. mother in law appts, apartments above garages) or 6 flat buildings mixed in with single family homes in the old street car suburbs.  Then we got all fancy after the war with zoning laws that said you can't mix things up.  Anyway those provided a lot of affordable housing diluted in with solid single family neighborhoods.

>robots win
some

Chipotle is testing robots to replace some human workers
https://bgr.com/business/chipotle-is-testing-robots-to-replace-some-human-workers/

>coalmine canary

Howard Schultz blasts unions as 'outside force' trying to disrupt Starbucks
https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/howard-schultz-prods-starbucks-managers-to-step-up-union-busting-in-leaked-video/

+
U.S. labor board sues Starbucks over union retaliation claims
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/23/us-labor-board-sues-starbucks-over-union-retaliation-claims.html