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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

#151

Post by vonmoltke »

emilfihlman wrote: post #30
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…

Exactly this. All tech companies in Finland are like "We can't find enough competent coders!" and newspapers are publishing that as is. Well, no shit, because your pay is shit.

> Well, no shit, because your pay is shit.

Or their definition of competent is unrealistic.

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

#152

Post by dreen »

saw-lau wrote: post #7

When accessing from The UK: 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.

Readable on google cache

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

#153

Post by NegatioN »

misja111 wrote: post #130
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…

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

That sounds like a stretch, and you probably need to define what you mean by "basic income not working". For who? Society? Employers? The worker?

Parts of these "youngsters" are probably off doing something related to self-development and fulfilling which might provide benefits for society later on.

In this case they (seemingly) aren't getting any more money from working extra, compared to not working either, since their social benefits are stripped away if they start working. If this was basic income, they would be left with something extra at the end.

In this case there's no incentive to work?

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

#154

Post by morsma »

jhasse wrote: post #137
DZittersteyn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest tax rate in the Netherlands is 51,95% (Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40%). Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes. https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...

> Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40% Which means that you'd need an income over 480k a year to get an effective tax rate >50%. I hope I calculated that correctly: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+((x-70)*0.5195%2B... > Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income…

You don't just count VAT, let's count everything: 150%-250% taxes on energy, ridiculous amount of fees and duties. As a Dane, we're probably the most taxed in the world and for a high earning software engineer it's approaching 75%.

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

#155

Post by misja111 »

throwaway494949 wrote: post #80
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…

If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. I work as a…

Better yet, come to Switzerland and earn > 10K usd/ month; and on top of that, you pay only a fraction of the Swedish taxes.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #126
koolba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 should…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by adventured »

taneq wrote: post #52
Talyen42 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person spends almost exactly as much as they make as income rises. It's a hedonic treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

I'm not sure how much room for hedonic advancement there is when average wage raises are almost exactly equal to inflation.

That's not actually what's happening.

Drop natural population growth toward zero. Import one million low skill, very low income persons per year.

Welcome to the non-merit, non-point based immigration system treadmill of never getting anywhere because you perpetually flood your system with cheap replacement labor.

Tens of millions of Americans moved from the middle class into the top two economic tiers since 1970. And we replaced them with vast amounts of low cost imported labor. If you keep doing that, you will not see meaningful wage growth at the median, you'll only see it in the top tiers.

Most other developed nations are once again correct: the US should move to a common sense points based immigration system. We could merely exactly copy Canada on immigration, and that would dramatically improve the conditions for workers at or below the median.

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

#158

Post by sametmax »

pc86 wrote: post #102
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 many people are experts in a non-JS server language and CSS at the same time? Assuming anyone even falls into that category, how many of them want to work for someone else as opposed to just doing their own thing?

That's what the job offer requests, not what they need or what they will get.

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

#159

Post by CamTin »

vfc1 wrote: post #136
CamTin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree, its pretty close to slavery. Theoretically, they could sue you if you don't work, although what happens in practice is that if the freelance is really fed up and talks to the end customer saying they want out (which the hiring company does not want you to do), they want to avoid problems with the customer and they will replace you with someone else after a few months. What they really don't want to do is to…

What if you just don't show up for work? They fire you, right? Do you have to pay some big cash penalty? Or is the hesitance just that you can't get a reference for your next gig?

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

#160

Post by athenot »

gt2 wrote: post #42
vfc1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001. The software developer golden age was in the mid-nineties here in Europe, and then the rates and salaries have stagnated (but not the inflation). Also, the contractual conditions are getting worse. We are now many times offered contracts with a ter…

How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?

Paiment in Europe is often late, from 30 to 90 days. So if relations between the contractor and the company go bad, there's quite a bit of money that can be caught up.
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