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I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

theguardian.com

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Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#131

Post by challenger22 »

bluGill wrote: post #108
taneq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, once you reach a certain level of net worth it's actually relatively hard to become poor again. You have to actively make really poor financial decisions over a long period of time. Buy a boat for $100,000 and it'll cost you money to maintain and run. Buy a boat for $100 million and it'll earn you money if you lease it out or take passengers during the 11 months of the year that you're not using it.

Maybe. It is hard to making money leasing your boat. You need to pay the crew and such. If the market of people wanting to lease a boat is down one year you still have to pay those people. Note that a boat is a bad example on your part. There are lots of other things you can do that are more likely to earn money. For that matter if you can afford a $100 million boat, the crew cost is a line item that you can ignore a…

Interesting bit I learned a while back- boat operating costs run about 10% of capital expense, regardless of size of boat.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#132

Post by c0vfefe »

bigred100 wrote: post #33
locklock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...

Yeah indeed. I wonder why more rich Americans don’t feel shame and embarrassment at such purchases.

Do you also wonder why the entire Western world doesn't give extra penny to global poverty relief? http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Perhaps we're all just flawed, self-centered people trying to keep up with what our environment defines as the good life.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#133

Post by WhompingWindows »

allworknoplay wrote: post #85

This is insane -- paying a $7.25/hr minimum wage to people you call "teammates" and expecting them to stick around is preposterous. In anything but a terrible economic downturn, minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them. Why would anyone stick around, or care to do more than the most basic job requirements? These jobs ar…

He took action and doubled the pay to 15/hr, then it further increased to 16.50/hr. I didn't think he was stumbling on a new lesson, your reading was a bit more cynical than mine. Simply put, he hadn't realized the plight of those on 7.25/hr until he heard what his employees were going through.

How else can we improve things if we don't allow people to change their views? Mocking a CEO for changing his view is the opposite of what we need.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#134

Post by saalweachter »

c0vfefe wrote: post #129
saalweachter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if you take a company like Google, give every engineer a 5% haircut, bring the chefs and cleaning staff and groundkeepers and building maintenance back into the company (rather than contracting out), and distribute the money and stock grants among the support staff.

That'd cause a big morale hit & big incentive for engineers to leave. Support staff are great, but at the end of the day they're not what drives growth for the company.

Eh, you take it out of the stock grant refreshes and the noise of stock fluctuations will make it rather difficult to notice in your total compensation.

EDIT: Also, you're taking income off the top of the tax brackets and giving it to someone at the bottom of the bottom, so you get a tax multiplier where you take $1 from me and give $1.50 to someone else. Also, you probably don't need even a 2% or 3% haircut off the engineers' salaries to make every support position a $100k/year job with full benefits and 401k matching, unless your engineer : support ratio is crazy.

EDIT EDIT: Yeah, pushing everyone to $100k/year is probably overselling the idea. You could still free up a life-changing amount of money for people making minimum or near-minimum wage.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#135

Post by Chris2048 »

mcv wrote: post #105
Chris2048 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. Maybe not all "poor" are the same. Some choose not to stay in school, what do you do then? Guarantee food and shelter anyway? Why work my way up through the humiliation of McJob when I can stay home and prove my worth in Xbox?

Are we still talking about stimulating the economy? Then yes, making sure they have money to spend will ensure they spend it, increase demand, and grow the economy. But yes, reject humiliating jobs. I'm not sure why you'd actively want people to be miserable. But if you want a bigger picture: create better opportunities, and make sure they are accessible to everybody. The whole reason people withdraw from society int…

This feels like the glass-makers fallacy

If the money if free, distributing it will stimulate the economy. But since that money comes from somewhere, any growth due to that distribution competes with the lack of growth due to wherever you took it from,

e.g If you took it via taxes, people have less money to spend because of the higher taxes.

If you took it from the rich because they don't spend it on things, they also don't invest it, meaning banks have less capital.

> reject humiliating jobs

serving fast food is humiliating to people with people who think of themselves as better

> create better opportunities, and make sure they are accessible to everybody.

like free school? and those people who choose not to attend?

You seems to think the only problem is lack of opportunity, it isn't. For example, if a community has a drug problem, a better economy isn't going to fix that.

> The whole reason people withdraw from society

people don't withdrawn from society fully, they just stop contributing to it. They need society for food, shelter etc. You are suggesting they get these things unconditionally, ensuring their withdrawal is indefinitely viable.

And drug addicts aren't simply poor, that's an entirely different issue.

> And if rich kids drop out of school..

So what? The state, and by extension the taxpayer, don't fund that, so it's none of our business how that works out. The state shouldn't micromanage all of society to ensure equal outcomes for all, and if it did it would need far more power than it has now.

A "rich" kid isn't guaranteed anything beyond what their rich parents decide, and I'm not going to tell someone how to spend their money.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#136

Post by Kalium »

saalweachter wrote: post #134
c0vfefe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd cause a big morale hit & big incentive for engineers to leave. Support staff are great, but at the end of the day they're not what drives growth for the company.

Eh, you take it out of the stock grant refreshes and the noise of stock fluctuations will make it rather difficult to notice in your total compensation. EDIT: Also, you're taking income off the top of the tax brackets and giving it to someone at the bottom of the bottom, so you get a tax multiplier where you take $1 from me and give $1.50 to someone else. Also, you probably don't need even a 2% or 3% haircut off the…

Google's published numbers put their engineering headcount at below half their overall headcount.

I'm not sure a 3% haircut on engineers at Google would give them enough funds to make every support position $100k while also doing what you suggested and bringing all the contracted services in-house.

If we assume a 3% haircut on an average engineering compensation of $250k, and 45% of the organization, you have $6k and change per support headcount. And this is without bringing TVCs in-house.

Unless the support staff are all making right about 95k, this seems like it might not quite work out.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#137

Post by [deleted] »

BioMeditate wrote: post #78
dhx wrote: post #67

> My HR staff suggested that we re-think our recruiting and training – which made sense – but I thought that we could do more. I thought we needed to reconsider how we supported and paid our team. Sounds like a situation right out of Yes, Minister. HR staff not being forthcoming with the obvious answer of increasing pay to lower attrition rates from 30-40% due to the attitude of the board/CEO and anticipation of thei…

I've always wondered if companies even need a HR? Especially when they are huge separate departments.

[deleted]

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#138

Post by rayiner »

toss1 wrote: post #111
lotsofpulp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposes employer A chooses to pay their employees more than other employers. Employer B chooses to pay their employees less. Both employers are selling products or services that the purchaser finds the same, i.e. they have no preference for who they buy it from. Employer B takes the money they save by paying employees less, and invests in newer, better facilities or R&D or whatever. Now employer B is selling a bette…

True, but Employer-B now has employees who DGAF about anything in the business, and often have an adversarial, even 'eff them! attitude to the business. Employer-B's customer service and general care of its facilities & inventory will suck, and they will have much higher turnover costs, even if they have better products. So, what is the relative advantage? Moreover, the article was specifically about the tradeoff in…

People are willing to put up with shitty service to save a couple of bucks. Not everyone, but almost everyone. People prove it time again. See the success of no frills airlines like Ryanair and Spirit.

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#139

Post by [deleted] »

vishnugupta wrote: post #44
locklock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...

> you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not This is a great insight which unfortunately doesn't get much attention in the inequality debate. I'm now rich enough to be in the top 0.5% of the world. The marginal utility/value of money is so low for me that I've begun valuing my time and…

[deleted]

Re: I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

#140

Post by c0vfefe »

saalweachter wrote: post #134
c0vfefe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd cause a big morale hit & big incentive for engineers to leave. Support staff are great, but at the end of the day they're not what drives growth for the company.

Eh, you take it out of the stock grant refreshes and the noise of stock fluctuations will make it rather difficult to notice in your total compensation. EDIT: Also, you're taking income off the top of the tax brackets and giving it to someone at the bottom of the bottom, so you get a tax multiplier where you take $1 from me and give $1.50 to someone else. Also, you probably don't need even a 2% or 3% haircut off the…

What you're saying makes rational sense, but people's egos are not rational. It's the principle of the thing: why tolerate a pay cut when there's a long line of companies in the valley itching for your skills?
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