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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

#301

Post by mywittyname »

ryhamz wrote: post #246
mywittyname wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm nowhere near executive compensation and I would just tap my savings for 2 months. I think you'd have to limit their usage of previously acquired funds. Once you're rich, you can ride out a 2 month storm like it's nothing.

The goal is not to impose hardship on them, but instead remind them for two months out of the year just how little minimum wage actually is. Most of them could probably blow that $500 paycheck on a single trip to the grocery store.

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

#302

Post by jakelazaroff »

DuskStar wrote: post #258
jakelazaroff wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sure. But I don't think this is a sufficient defense — at the extremes, cultural norms can result in horrific things even though individual actors may not be motivated by malice. > By the way, it's also a cultural norm in the US to complain about the lack of generosity among those richer than you…

> But even if I were to donate 100% of my salary, it would barely dent things for those 500 employees. There's a lot more people like you than billionares in the world, though.

Agreed, and people like me should donate more! But can we agree that to whatever degree the extreme upper class disproportionately controls the country's wealth, they should also disproportionately shoulder the burden of helping those beneath them?

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

#303

Post by JimBrimble35 »

toasterlovin wrote: post #298
JimBrimble35 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't incompetence, it's complacent acceptance of a toxic norm for personal gain.

Fine, incompetence is the wrong word, but malice isn't the right word.

I think that if you look at the history of the trend, and the politics behind it. The decreases in top marginal tax rate, decreases in corporate tax rates. It starts to really _feel_ malicious. Although you're probably right, I don't think that all of the current c-suite occupants in the nation are acting out of malice.

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

#304

Post by beat »

conanbatt wrote: post #282
beat wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When you buy something from Amazon, is it an exchange between individuals? 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.

Ok, even if you take humans as the motivating agent... how does it become a moral act? How is an exchange of money for goods/services an inherent good, or an inherent evil for that matter?

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

#305

Post by pxc »

csallen wrote: post #288
pxc wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't disagree with you that the system itself has issues. 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…

Fair enough.

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

#306

Post by conanbatt »

beat wrote: post #304
conanbatt wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you buy something from Amazon, is it an exchange between individuals? 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.

Ok, even if you take humans as the motivating agent... how does it become a moral act? How is an exchange of money for goods/services an inherent good, or an inherent evil for that matter?

Is it done under coercion? Is the exchange forbidden, or punished? Is the exchange harming an innocent third party? Is the exchange guaranteed by a third party? etc.

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

#307

Post by Kalium »

Frondo wrote: post #265
mercer wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the calculation! I think limiting it to the 24 execs is still a bit on the conservative end of things (as far as equalizing pay goes), but it's interesting to think on. I'm actually surprised how merely broadening the calculation a bit already results in a quite significant amount. 5k is quite a bit! Anyways, thanks again :).

What I'd like to see is what the numbers look like if you: 1) Pegged the CEO lowest-paid worker ( or contracted worker , so you can't just contract out the janitors) to no greater than 10 to 1. 2) Balance out the next few layers of management to reflect that cap. 3) And see what pay looks like for the lowest-paid workers. If you don't like 10-to-1, maybe we do 20-to-1. Find a nice low ratio, though, and if people wan…

Very minimally different, I rather strongly suspect. You'd probably get larger shareholder dividends, but not that much larger.

There's this idea we're dealing with here that there's massive, virtually untapped, make-everybody-well-paid amounts of money being wasted on management overhead. It's a very reasonable idea. Managers at the top get paid an amount of money that's clearly and obviously incredibly excessive and has absolutely no connection to anything!

Yet, it might be worth considering that this might not actually be true in the important broad sense. What if there isn't a vast pool of money locked up in management salaries that would dramatically improve the lives of workers? What if there isn't the "fix the car money" or "send a kid to college money" another poster was rhapsodizing about for every worker? Might it be worth considering that in most cases, managers aren't actually paid vastly more than their direct reports?

Besides, there are plenty of ways to structure businesses that would get around something as simplistic as a compensation ratio.

There will always be another "But what if we run the numbers differently?" scenario.

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

#308

Post by Kalium »

asdff wrote: post #251
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.

That's a terrible mentality. Exponential growth is not sustainable. The worst thing about technology companies these days is that putting out a polished product and covering overhead + emergency funding is seen as a failure. Products must be modified to extract money from the consumer at every turn, and the market cap must rise and rise. If engineers would leave a company because its no longer growth driven, then our…

Last time someone tried to teach me empathy, all I learned is that they had a poor understanding of how emotions connect to actions. They assumed that if I had a real, true, genuine emotional experience of empathy then I would be compelled to take some specific action. Generally the action assumed is either something directly to alleviate the perceived pain or the one prescribed by the person evoking the empathy.

I find these notions curious, and rather at odds with how I expect thinking humans to interact with the world around them.

Perhaps there's something else you think our universities might be failing to teach?

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

#309

Post by DuskStar »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #302
DuskStar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But even if I were to donate 100% of my salary, it would barely dent things for those 500 employees. There's a lot more people like you than billionares in the world, though.

Agreed, and people like me should donate more! But can we agree that to whatever degree the extreme upper class disproportionately controls the country's wealth, they should also disproportionately shoulder the burden of helping those beneath them?

As far as I'm aware, they already do disproportionately shoulder that burden - not just disproportionately to their proportion of the population, but also relative to their share of the country's income. What level of disproportionality is sufficient for you?
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