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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

#231

Post by auiya »

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…

"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"

Minimum wage says to employees that if slavery weren't illegal and it wouldn't be a PR nightmare to do so besides, they would totally pay you nothing and expect servitude.

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

#232

Post by zaroth »

mcguire wrote: post #164
coredog64 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In economic theory, this is what’s known as an efficiency wage. If you pay more, there’s more competition for your openings and you attract a better class of employee. As other comments have pointed out, simply raising the minimum wage doesn’t accomplish the same thing. Instead, all those people who were marginal at $7-8/hour simply don’t get hired, and employers use automation or forego the opportunities that additi…

For your second paragraph, that is a bit more complicated than simple economic theory might say. For one thing, someone has to cook the fries, sweep the back room, and help customers. Unless you invent insanely cheap and powerful automation or raise the wage to a point that it's uneconomic to open a new store (and please take the employers who say "if you raise the minimum wage, I'm going to take my marbles and go ho…

But that’s exactly what happens. A marginally profitable store becomes an unprofitable store and shuts down. Fewer stores serving the same customers more efficiently are able to afford paying the remaining employees the new prevailing wage.

There’s a lot of slack in how many customers per hour a team can serve in a fast food restaurant. Look at In N Out burger at lunch time versus the average Wendy’s.

You can pay an experienced team 2x to serve 5x as many meals. But you’ll need 1/5th as many restaurants.

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

#233

Post by csallen »

JimBrimble35 wrote: post #149
toasterlovin wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Lots of things persist because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. Probably what’s going on here, in my opinion.

I think what you are identifying as incompetence is, in fact, well-aged malice. The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is. The fact that this article's author seems to find it novel to trickle down the proceeds of the company to the bulk of it's employees is a pretty good indication of that.

> The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is.

So in other words: It no longer requires any malice to pay this way, as it's just a cultural norm in the business world.

By the way, it's also a cultural norm in the US to complain about the lack of generosity among those richer than you, and yet spend almost 100% of your salary helping yourself, when you could just as easily spend it on those less fortunate. Charitable donation is trivially easy, even easier than raising the minimum wage at your company. Yet how many people in these comments are highly-paid millennials who would rather buy the newest iPhone than donate that money to those in need?

If we want to understand the psychology of those at the "top," we need only look no further than ourselves. Unless you're at the bottom, you're also at the top as far as people less fortunate than you are concerned.

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

#234

Post by zaroth »

faster wrote: post #225
Const-me wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor market is a market, too. Who will lose business unable to hire enough employees? Unemployment rate in US is very low at the moment, well under 4%. Last time it was this way in 1970.

There are several metrics for unemployment. One of them is around 4%. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

... And the last time that one was this low was 1970. There’s no arguing the US has been absolutely crushing it in terms of jobs creation for several years now.

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

#235

Post by lotsofpulp »

lifeformed wrote: post #202
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…

Employees under employer B would quit and work for employer A instead.

Employer A can’t hire infinite number of employees.

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

#236

Post by skinnymuch »

Kalium wrote: post #136
saalweachter wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of the non engineering staff would still be other white collar jobs, no? Sales, admin, HR, etc. $100K is a high number OP reached for, but I’d think a vast majority of Google’s job total comp is in the 6 figures. Or close to it with some junior employees not in certain cities.

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

#237

Post by zaroth »

mywittyname wrote: post #223
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make th…

How much would you expect a person to make who manages and is responsible for the entire operations of a store with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars?

And who perhaps spent 5-10 years learning and developing those skills by rising up the ranks in that company.

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

#238

Post by zaroth »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #120
ap3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think anyone expects “loyalty and sacrifice” for minimum wage at Walmart! sacrifice? c’mon

They will always ask you to work harder, put on more responsibilities, maybe stay a little late after you clock out to tidy up, always.

You’re fine up until that labor violation at the end there. The state will quickly fine them for that, and any manager worth $100k knows better than to ask it.

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

#239

Post by auiya »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #173
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make th…

> There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. The problem is fundamentally this: A typical Wal-Mart store has around 300 employees. If you take the manager's entire $100,000 and distribute it to the employees, they each get less than $500…

And yet there are stores like Costco which do pay their employees quite comfortable wages and manage not to immediately bankrupt themselves. How is this so?

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

#240

Post by yeahitslikethat »

dahart wrote: post #168
WhompingWindows wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

I’m so torn! I agree completely with you and I want to give the charitable interpretation and I want this to set a good example for other CEOs. That’s how I was feeling reading the article, but all of a sudden after I finished I started thinking this is nuts. 500 people is not that many to be that far out of touch with employees. It’s one thing at Walmart or McDonalds, but at a healthcare company with only 500 to hav…

Is because the top tax brackets were reduced so much under Reagan, it made sense to pay out all the profits to a few at the top rather than the hundreds or thousands below. Now is easier with computers but the execs got greedy.
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