I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by webninja » Fri, May 17, 2019, 4:33 AM UTC

setr wrote: post #204

mcguire wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One interesting question: is the tipping point for switching to automation in the range of the minimum wage? Does increasing wages move you across that tipping point, or is it cheaper to get rid of employees no matter what the minimum wage is?

The existence of minimum wage at all enforces the property — you can otherwise just keep lowering pay until its not worth replacement (eg india can get away with paying very low wages, so the threat of automatic replacement isn’t nearly as high). So the real question is: at what point does minimum wage draw automation as a response? And that of course depends on the economics of automation at any given point in time…

They also have a caste society where racism is okay. But in America, everyone is supposed to be considered equal.

India is also a place where if you were to have 10 children and 6 of them survived, that’s good odds. In America, if you have 10 children and 1 dies, that’s a tragedy.

Source: I lived there for a few months.

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

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Post by webninja » Fri, May 17, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #138

toss1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon is a pretty good example of people willing to pay more for being able to return anything for almost any reason. There’s more comfort behind the click so more people buy noticeably more.

I still prefer Southwest over Spirit and any other airline but i’m just one anecdote.

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

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Post by bryan_w » Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:43 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #247

maxxxxx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“t makes no sense to me why the CEO and higher ups of the company I work at still work there. ” My theory is that they simply like their work and get satisfaction from it. They get paid a lot but they also work a lot and I can’t imagine anybody doing this to themselves if they didn’t genuinely like it.

If that were the case, most executives would stay put for decades and take pride in their company. Executives are mercenaries, staying for a few years and moving once someone offers a bigger slice of pie. Lots of people are addicted to exponential growth and wealth and blinded by the damage this behavior wreaks on everyone else. The work argument is bullshit too. I'm convinced with a few months of hands on training,…

If it's so easy, why aren't you one?

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

#314

Post by gremlinsinc » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

ohaideredevs wrote: post #244

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.

You can't gain empathy when something is temporary. Most of the stress of being poor comes of worry about how to handle long term problems / the fact that life has no point except slaving away. That cannot be replicated without genuinely taking everything away from a person.

They need a show like undercover bosses, but instead the CEO must live on 7.50 for an entire year, and work as their own employee they have 0 access to savings, they cannot use credit either, and they are given 1 suitcase of clothes, a cellphone, laptop, and some feature comforts for their tiny apartment like a 32 inch tv.

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

#315

Post by frobozz » Fri, May 17, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

whytaka wrote: post #257

rayiner wrote: post #159

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.

Part of the problem with the free college issue is that the extra time spent in full-time education is not free. It's another 3 or more years of not earning a proper full time wage. It's also (in my country) a time when you are explicitly not eligible for those benefits available to the unemployed.

When you reach school leaving age, you have a choice, start full time paid work now (with the social safety net if you can't find work), or spend at least 3 more years of full time education without that safety net, doing part time work when you can, possibly taking loans, all in the hope that you'll get a much better paid job at the end of it (which, nowadays, is not a given).

It also isn't just a case of poor kids with good potential not having the money to pay for higher education, but also of poor kids with good potential not having the grades to get into higher education.

Home factors (sleep, nutrition, reading at home, stress, extracurricular activities, peer pressure from the wrong crowd) make a significant difference to education outcomes in children.

Universal healthcare, on the other hand, is truly about equal opportunity for all. Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community. No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

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

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Post by csallen » Fri, May 17, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #250

csallen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> 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.

At which point you are better served by targeting the cultural norm and the harm it does, rather than shaming the individuals following it as malicious. Not only is it more accurate, but it's more effective.

> When we complain about people above us, we're (usually) not chastising individuals but calling for systemic solutions to these issues.

I wish this was the case, but 99% of the rhetoric I see is chastising individuals.

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

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Post by EliRivers » Fri, May 17, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

Konnstann wrote: post #90

EliRivers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that a popular philosophy is that they're rich because they deserve it; they're simply better people. There's no shame to be had; it's simply the natural order of things, it's morally right.

While I agree with the absurdity of rich people being "better" than the less wealthy, what makes someone "deserve" to be rich? I would argue that no one deserves to be poor, but whether or not it is morally correct to buy nice things doesn't sound to me like a debate worth having. At what point does someone need to be ashamed of the money they make? Is anything over the $50k figure that is quoted as the maximum happi…

What makes someone deserve to be rich, under this philosophy? I understand that's not part of it. Maybe some of them deserve to be rich for being clever, some deserve to be rich for working hard, there are many reasons. The point is that they clearly do deserve it because they are rich.

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

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Post by Frondo » Fri, May 17, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #307

Frondo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I have no reason to believe that it's minimally different, and I'm curious what reason you do, aside from it's comforting.

When 10 people own as much as half of the population of the country, there's something there. Calling it not "a vast pool of money" might be semantics, because there's definitely something there.

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

#319

Post by diogenescynic » Fri, May 17, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

ohaideredevs wrote: post #244

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.

You can't gain empathy when something is temporary. Most of the stress of being poor comes of worry about how to handle long term problems / the fact that life has no point except slaving away. That cannot be replicated without genuinely taking everything away from a person.

>You can't gain empathy when something is temporary. Most of the stress of being poor comes of worry about how to handle long term problems

This was a really insightful comment. I had never thought about it that articulately, but yeah if you are only dealing with stress temporarily, you can't even comprehend what it's like to deal with that FOREVER. It's just an impossible concept to grasp for someone who has that level of a safety net.

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

#320

Post by diogenescynic » Fri, May 17, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

gremlinsinc wrote: post #314

ohaideredevs wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't gain empathy when something is temporary. Most of the stress of being poor comes of worry about how to handle long term problems / the fact that life has no point except slaving away. That cannot be replicated without genuinely taking everything away from a person.

They need a show like undercover bosses, but instead the CEO must live on 7.50 for an entire year, and work as their own employee they have 0 access to savings, they cannot use credit either, and they are given 1 suitcase of clothes, a cellphone, laptop, and some feature comforts for their tiny apartment like a 32 inch tv.

I'd pay money to watch Angelo Mozilo go through that.