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Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

latimes.com

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Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#121

Post by dredalious »

sametmax wrote: post #11

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…

How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I'm a bit in the same street as you (freelancer, Belgium, previous experience with remote work).

More on topic, I hear the same in Belgium, they want someone to work 24/7 basically for free and then they are surprised that the guy they hired isn't some kind of magical being that knows every language (for some reason this goes for both natural and programming languages) and framework and whatnot.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#122

Post by swarnie_ »

swebs wrote: post #95
muse900 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work. The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the min…

>The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros Is there a limit to how long you can collect unemployment? In Finland if you still haven't found a job in about a year, you stop getting payments altogether. And while getting payments, you still have to prove that you're actually searching for a job and not just trying to scam taxpayers.

Similar system in the UK, you have to demonstrate you're applying for jobs. If you're offered something and you refuse to take it your cut off.

I think they may even force you in to unpaid/extremely low paid work if you cant get something yourself.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#123

Post by CamTin »

sharemywin wrote: post #56
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. This is fully intended. It keeps the proletariat in tatters. With threats to food and lodging, they won't protest and won't rise up. It's a very effective means of control. Bread and circuses, people.

I thought Bread and circuses refers to the opposite. give the people just enough bread and circuses to keep them from rising up.

Right, the bread and circuses are the bit that keep us distracted from the important bit, which is our disenfranchisement as citizens. Now it takes the place of shareholders/bankers/pension fund managers seizing all the power in society by buying politicians, setting themselves up as monopolists (and, for labor, monopsonists), and generally being in charge of every decision that citizens (as consumers and producers) might conceivably make in a way adverse to those in power.

The great thing about our system is that the ruling class even make money on the bread (farm subsidies, school lunch programs designed mainly as more farm subsidies rather than as a way to feed schoolkids healthy food, more farm subsidies) and the circus (monopolistic ISPs, cable companies, media holding companies, and content aggregators, now seemingly in the process of all merging into one by gobbling each other up) parts too!

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#124

Post by harias »

thg wrote: post #82
Zeebrommer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you read this article? I'm in Europe and run into a message saying "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." with the LA time…

Here you go: https://outline.com/vKj7vM Basically, whenever there's a website like this that annoys me, I just copy the URL and Outline it: outline.com/$url No clicking through annoying dialogs, or having to use a vpn.

Same here. It works for paywalls too! I wonder what their business model is though.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#125

Post by Waterluvian »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #111
eloff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarre. Even Amazon Seattle pays 2x the salaries of Amazon Vancouver, even although they are separated by only 200km and are the same company! I ask every Canadian developer I meet, why are you still here? I like living in Canada, so I work remotely even although I don't really like remote work. Instant 70% raise.

Is there any difficulty in working across the border like that? I work for a Canadian company due to having my roots here and find the thought of dealing with remote work in another country intimidating. Is it much hassle?

It's been completely painless because the company is using a Canadian company to handle my salary and tax info, and they got me Canadian extended health insurance.

It's actually kind of awesome. They bump up my Canadian salary to match their USD official salary any time the exchange rate goes bonkers. So the more Trump does Trump, the more I'm paid.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#126

Post by EthanHeilman »

koolba wrote: post #63
muse900 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work. The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the min…

> The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, There are always people who don't just want to live off the dole. Also a lot of the people who complain about crappy entry level wa…

>That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?

Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do.

I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world.

Edit1: Fixed typo, thanks PaulRobinson

Edit2: Added Anecdote

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#127

Post by na85 »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #108
vfc1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK I guess it depends a lot on the region, those are not, for example, London rates, right?

I do contract webdev work for a multi-national in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. The london office posted a job that is exactly what I do but is paid 5 times less. At the Edinburgh office, 7 times less. Same company, same upper-upper-upper management, but VASTLY different pay scales. Its nuts to think about, especially when I can rent a full 3 bed/3 bath house with basement and garage for about 2 times less th…

Part of that cost of rental is location. London is a world class city, highly desirable by millions of people as a place to live.

Connecticut isn't.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#128

Post by getsugablitz2 »

CamTin wrote: post #98
vfc1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.

My bet would be that the contract's early termination would lead to some heavy penalty that effectively forces them to continue.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#129

Post by sdhgaiojfsa »

pjmorris wrote: post #99
snarf21 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely correct however the one dichotomy is that we are also the collective shareholders (obviously not majority). People love seeing their 401K go up 15% annually year over year. That is only happening because of this funneling. Collectively we need to stop wanting it both ways. We want cheap goods but then complain about offshoring and outsourcing of labor. Look at dollar stores: Their boom happened alm…

> we are also the collective shareholders (obviously not majority) It's that 'not the majority' thing that's the fly in the ointment. I owe this claim a link, but most shareholders are part of the wealthy and/or the professional classes, skewing stock gains toward a few, and away from the many. EDIT: Added link supporting claim. Per WP article, chart 'Stock ownership is heavily concentrated', top 20% of US households…

Most shareholders (holders of the wealth represented by companies) are members of the wealthy class? :P You don't say.

I'm of two minds on this. Wealth and income are not the same. You get wealth by not consuming all of your income, and instead by investing it. Of course, if you have just enough income to survive, then you cannot accumulate wealth. But most people (in the US) are not in that boat. One of the phenomena that continuously fascinates me are the differences in wealth accumulation between people in the same income brackets. Sometimes there are good reasons for it (e.g. medical issues), but my sense is that in the vast majority of cases, there is simply a difference between the elective consumption levels of different households.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-income-and-weal...

For example, I have a sibling whose wealth is in the 98th percentile for his age bracket. However, his income has never been above the 60th percentile, and has often been lower. This is an example of how a certain attitude about consumption can have a strong impact on wealth accumulation.

I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. But, as a saver, I'm biased towards targeting high-income more than high-wealth.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#130

Post by misja111 »

muse900 wrote: post #41
sametmax wrote: post #11

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work. The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the min…

Interesting, would this be a case that shows that basic income wouldn't work?
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