Labor shortage or terrible jobs?
Well, there&#x27;s a straightforward (I don&#x27;t say easy) way to fix this: you require a high enough minimum wage (and healthcare, and sick leave, and etc.).  It&#x27;s not like the restaurant owner has the option of just deciding to pay twice or three times the labor costs, and trust that their customers will be happy to cover the difference, if their competitors don&#x27;t have to do the same.<p>Because, those restaurant (and retail and etc.) business owners are mostly not the ones making big money.  Restaurants, in particular, are horribly low margin.<p>The end result of getting rid of &quot;terrible&quot; jobs, is that everything at the restaurant costs 2-3x as much, and so on at the many other businesses (agriculture?) which rely on cheap labor.  Which means all those people in professional class jobs (e.g. programmers) will find that their salary doesn&#x27;t go nearly as far as it used to.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m ok with that, I think it&#x27;s the right thing to do.  But it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s the small business owners that are standing in the way of it; they cannot pay higher wages if their competition is not, so it has to be mandated.  What&#x27;s standing in the way of it is that this would be, at least temporarily, quite inflationary, and we have a professional class that is accustomed to not having to pay much for anything except houses.