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IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

fortune.com

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Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#171

Post by throwaway7ahgb »

defrost wrote: post #55
from-nibly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because raising kids isn't contributing to society.

That's exactly why child care workers who look after packs of 15 to 20 kids at a time should be highly valued and paid a decent wage. It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, huntin…

I always tell my wife, if she wants to have a lot of kids we have only two options.

1) We move close to my or her family.

2) We get a lot more money.

I don't see anyway around it, we need family support or money to pay someone else to help.

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#172

Post by throwaway7ahgb »

39896880 wrote: post #29
from-nibly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because raising kids isn't contributing to society.

Contributing to the household income. It takes 2 incomes to live anywhere but BFE in the US.

BFE?

I'm guessing this is some slur for rural areas. You know the ones that typically have large families?

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#173

Post by throwaway7ahgb »

prmoustache wrote: post #83
yellow_postit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a regressive view — a household that can only function on 2 incomes is more stressful than one that can operate on 1. Not saying earning potential needs to be the same — but claiming 1 is worse than 2 doesn’t hold water and is a pathological case. In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”

We like it or not 1 person in the household taking care of the kids skew the relationship between 2 adults into dependentship as the one working outside perceived to be the one bringing the income (while both should) and the one taking care of the kids and household end up feeling dependent. Some may try to be objective and tell yourself the other one is contributing as much, that is not the way it works in our guts,…

The situation you describe has been happening for most of humanity.

IMO society is worse now with dual income + strangers raising children.

The only major benefits I've seen are 1) Woman have access to birth control 2) Women have equal rights. Everything else is debatable as "better".

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#174

Post by pembrook »

reaperman wrote: post #76
djbusby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart had a recent profit of like $5B. How is that not having money? https://stock.walmart.com/financials/quarterly-results/defau...

$5B (quarterly profit) is $2,400 per employee, and a 3.2% profit margin on $611B of annual revenue. Yes, an extra $9,600 annual pay for each employee would make a huge difference to many, but how low of a profit will shareholders tolerate below 3.2%? Maybe a better argument would be to find a larger bucket (much larger than $5B/quarter) where Walmart could perhaps reduce spending and redirect that to rank-and-file em…

They made $11.292B total profit for all of 2023.

Also, what's more likely; One of the most efficient supply chain coordination companies in history with razor thin margins is leaving tons of cost savings on the table...or...random internet commenters like us don't actually know that much about Walmart's business nor the basic economics of labor markets?

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#175

Post by pembrook »

gbear605 wrote: post #87
callalex wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they distributed that evenly to every single employee it would only work out to $2k/person. Not nothing, but not life changing.

It was $2k/person per quarter, when most of those employees are making around $30k per year (average of $31k per one source I found). That’s a 30% raise on near-poverty salaries - that’s definitely life changing!

You're basing that off of one of their highest profit quarters ever. 3X the average profit last year.

Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public market), investors will no longer invest in the company. Being a capital starved business with insanely high COGS is a recipe for collapse the minute you have a downturn.

And you'll probably say, "good! then the mom-and-pop stores will come back!" But the mom-and-pop stores, while aesthetically more pleasing to the elite, are in fact a far less efficient way to distribute food product so that would actually dramatically raise prices for consumers and decrease salaries & quality of life in many rural areas.

Turns out things are the way they are for a reason, and there's no grand conspiracy keeping people down.

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#176

Post by itsoktocry »

HelloNurse wrote: post #154
amtamt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considered "valued" vs considered "useful" is probably the analogy that should be used here. Subsidizing childcare signals "we value you", while flat increae is signaling "you are useful to us", which can make a lot of impact on moral.

The message of subsidized childcare is not generically "we value you", but "we want you to have children while you work for us", which for most employees is more important than money. Compare to companies that avoid hiring women to avoid dealing with maternity leave.

I live in a country with generous maternity leave. I have a family, and we're grateful we could access it. But maternity leave is tricky for businesses.

My anecdote: I worked for a company whose long-time CEO retired. After an involved search, the company found a replacement. She was onboarded and started getting in a groove, then 6 months in it was announced she would be leaving for a year of maternity leave. So we had to find another CEO. 10 months later the original hire decided she would not be returning to the role (she's under no obligation to). No problem, except the replacement CEO assumed this was a temporary position, so she already had another job lined up after her term. Once again, we were searching for a new CEO...

All of a sudden you're working for a company that's had 5 CEOs in 3 years. That's a hard thing for a company to deal with. People will say, "that can happen anyway!". Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong, and yet an incredibly destabilizing environment resulted and the business suffered.

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#177

Post by vintermann »

bitcharmer wrote: post #149
vintermann wrote: post #93

> “IKEA respects the rights of co-workers to join, form or not to join a union of their choice without fear of reprisal, interference, intimidation or harassment,” a spokesperson said. From my understanding, it's illegal to not say this in the US - or at least, saying something that would contradict any of it will land you in hot water with NLRB. How much they actually respects the rights of workers, is another quest…

You make it sound as if the US is a paragon of workers rights. From what I can say it's pretty bad in the land of the free. Nowhere near the civilised world at least.

That is not the intention, it obviously isn't. But oddly enough, this is one of the areas there are some real force behind labor law in the US. If a manager or spokesperson at the company ever said something that contradicted what the IKEA spokesperson said, they could quickly be forced to backtrack and issue a statement like what they actually said.

Former NLRB employee and lawyer Matt Bruenig loves trolling people with this on social media. If anyone with employment responsibility is blustering against unions in social media, he'll send an NLRB complaint about "threatening retalitation for protected activity". You don't need "standing" to do this, by design. The targets are quickly told by their laywers to back down, because the law really is amazingly strict on this.

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#178

Post by addicted »

vintermann wrote: post #177
bitcharmer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound as if the US is a paragon of workers rights. From what I can say it's pretty bad in the land of the free. Nowhere near the civilised world at least.

That is not the intention, it obviously isn't. But oddly enough, this is one of the areas there are some real force behind labor law in the US. If a manager or spokesperson at the company ever said something that contradicted what the IKEA spokesperson said, they could quickly be forced to backtrack and issue a statement like what they actually said. Former NLRB employee and lawyer Matt Bruenig loves trolling people…

Ironically the Supreme Court further watered down what regulatory actions the NLRB can take against companies retaliating against unionizing workers just a couple of days ago.

US law is actually pretty good as far as worker’s rights are concerned. The problem is that successive U.S. administrations (both Democratic and Republican) have failed to enforce the law. The Biden administration has been a welcome exception in this regard.

The other, bigger, problem is that US law is no longer decided in the legislature and is being unilaterally rewritten by the Supreme Court which is quite decidedly anti union and has been rolling back all sorts of protections which are clearly enshrined in law but have been “interpreted” (in quotes because now they don’t even pretend to be interpreting the text differently) out of it by the Supreme Court.

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#179

Post by sofixa »

Edd1CC wrote: post #142
kreyenborgi wrote: post #122

Because it costs them less than onboarding. IKEA would never pay more than they can get away with: https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-... (TIL Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA's founder, was a part of the pro-nazi Nysvenska party during WW2. If he were from occupied Norway, he would never even have gotten the chance to start IKEA, people didn't buy from quislings. But Sweden was neutral, a very different…

Sweden was "neutral" but big on nazism topics such as eugenics. I spoke about this yesterday with some Swedes (I recently moved to Sweden).

> Sweden was "neutral" but big on nazism topics such as eugenics.

Social Darwinism, including eugenics, was quite socially acceptable until the Nazis made it unpopular by association, and even then many countries (US, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, I forget which one in Latin America that sterilised poor women without telling them, etc.) still continued practising some parts of it for decades after. It only really became accepted as flat out wrong in the developed world what, in the 70s-90s (as an example, Canada's last residential school closed in 1997)?

Re: IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries

#180

Post by sofixa »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #129
Iulioh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of high end ikea stuff is REALLY good, it's not all honeycomb crap. Honestly it's ikea or luxury stuff, anything else does not make sense. You can't beat ikea quality and quality at any price point.

Bullshit. Amish folks are feeling the economic pain of high interest rates and have seen sales slow significantly. You can get crazy good deals on Amish made furniture right now, and both from in terms of the quality of materials and the quality of the assembly, it will be superior to anything at similar price point to Ikea. Folks keep acting like it's still 2022 and that we are somehow in a ZIRP era. It's not, and m…

Cool, how are Amish folks' shipping and return policies?
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