281–290 of 325 posts
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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.
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> Economics is amoral Such a thing does not exist. It is the study of exchange between individuals, any model that brings down morality to 0 will not be useful, practical or a applicable. There is a reason why the most iconic political economists were all philosophers!
When you buy something from Amazon, is it an exchange between individuals? When you get a paycheck from a corporate employer, is it an exchange between individuals? No, that makes no sense. It's an exchange between an individual and an abstract legal/financial entity that engages in economic activity, but is in no rational way a human being. And what about B2B exchange? Clearly, it's economics, but when Wal-Mart buys…
Yes. You exchange your labor, divided into an unseen number of customers for another one's labor, divided into an unseen number of customers.
Remove individual interactions and see everything disappear. Its the building block of society.
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The cost of technology falls much faster than wages rise. Wages currently are responsible for about 4% of the cost of the burger. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q3/study-raisi...
So you're saying that by increasing the cost of the burger by ~5% some of their employees could double their salaries? That's great!
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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…
> 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/year, a raise of less than $0.25/hour.
Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96 per quarter * 4 = $22,478,260,000 per year spent on dividends alone. If you take all that money and give it to the 2.1 million employees listed that comes to $10,703 a year in additional wages alone. I haven't even looked at executive salaries or the costs from lawsuits Walmart gets from it's shady tactics. Or that many employees are part time and the per hour wage increase would be much higher than it indicates.
> And nice as it would be to pay all 300 employees $100K/year, that would immediately bankrupt the store. Moreover, it would be more than the amount it would cost to automate most of those jobs.
No one is asking Walmart to pay a bagger 100k a year. Most people are asking a decent wage for where they live. For most places that is $15 an hour... $30k a year. In California that is more. If Walmart can't pay that then maybe they deserve to fail and Costco, which does pay well and comply with the law, can take their place.
Compared to Microsoft or Apple, which can easily afford to pay the contract labor they use in place of union janitors, technicians, drivers, etc. Despite their margins they still use it and those people live in poverty because of it.
Walmart overall is a poor example as they push lower costs at every level including using dubious or illegal tactics. Certain property tax strategies, pressuring employees to work on unrecorded hours, pushing manufacturers to low cost sweat shops overseas.
These costs don't show up in people's wages, the products they buy, or a company's 10-k. They show up in the quality of life in our towns, the unemployment rate, and the budgets of our governments. Microsoft, Apple, Wall Street banks, even McDonalds is a better example. (McDonalds operating margin is 42% compared to Walmart's 3.34%. Source: MSN Money.)
I wish redistribution to the very bottom was a bigger part of the political debate. Our politics is currently focused on redistribution from the very top to the middle class. (Stuff like free college or universal healthcare would primarily benefit the top half, because those folks are the ones who are in a position to be accepted to and attend college, and aren’t already covered by Medicaid.) The math of that is toug…
That’s interesting. I’ve always seen the promotion of free college and universal healthcare as one of promoting equal opportunity to all. While the lowest income groups have historically had low college participation, I saw it as a reflection of a class of people not even daring to dream an impossible dream, as it would cost too much. Making it free would of course change the idea around it.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -
Free college has always been a poor-to-the-middle class program.
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…
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…
Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96 per quarter * 4 = $22,478,260,000 per year spent on dividends alone. If you take all that money and give it to the 2.1 million employees listed that comes to $10,703 a year in additional wages alone. I haven't even looked at executive salaries or the costs from lawsuits Walmart gets from it's shady tactics. Or that many employees are part time and the per hour wage increase would be much higher than it indicates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Redistributing Walmart's store managers wealth is a really poor example when you don't even look at executive salaries or dividends. > 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/year, a raise of less than $0.25/hour. Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96…
Where did you get those dividend values? According to this [0], annual dividend was $2,08 per share for fiscal year 2019.
[0] - https://news.walmart.com/2019/02/19/walmart-raises-annual-di...
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> 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 spe…
> Unless you're at the bottom, you're also at the top as far as people less fortunate than you are concerned. Analyzing this situation in terms of a qualitatively homogeneous property differing between people only in magnitude (income or wealth) is a mistake, in my opinion. (And so is taking a psychological approach.) The most important thing the people at the ‘top’ have here is not any particular amount of money or…
But the comments here are primarily attacking the "greed" of people richer than them, who would rather spend more money on themselves than on those in need. They're making a psychological argument, and so I am responding in kind by pointing out that these very complainers are hypocritically spending their paychecks the same way: on themselves, not on those in need.
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Have you heard of Giving What We Can - an international community of people who pledged to give at least 10% of their income to charities they think are most effective at helping others? https://www.givingwhatwecan.org I really recommend focusing on cost-effectiveness when you give, however much or however little you give. See GiveWell for amazing research!
Ah yes, non-religious tithing.
Should we give up not working at weekends because it's a "non-religious sabbath"?
10% is a nice round figure. It's small enough that many people can afford to give up that fraction of their income without getting into money trouble. It's large enough that many people will be doing a really substantial amount of good to the world if they give that much of their income to well-chosen charities. And, yes, it happens that some religions have used the same figure, which probably helps "give 10% of your income" seem like a reasonable thing to suggest.
Is there anything bad about any of that? If there is, I don't see it.
I don't claim that there's anything optimal about giving 10% of your income. But I don't see any reason to sneer at people for doing it, either.
It's amazing this article even needs to be written. You'd think the executives pulling in these crazy salaries would be competent enough to know that paying their "team members" next to nothing is going to result in high turnover and be a bad business decision in the long run. This article frames his choice to actually pay his employees as some big discovery, but it's not. The fact is, execs already know, but they pu…
It's more that they are out of touch, IMHO. They have absolutely no concept of how far $7.50/hr goes so they just say their employees need to budget better. Perhaps if senior executives received minimum wage paychecks for two months (and no bonuses), they might gain some empathy.
Poverty tourism is bollocks.