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

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

#191

Post by CalRobert »

matsemann wrote: post #131
CalRobert wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits. Give people the money and let them use it how they like. When I lived in California I LOVED the parking cash-out law, it meant a few thousand more a year because I rode a bike to work and didn't need a parking spot. Although, one challenge with things like childcare is that if you applied this on a society-wide level you wind up with childless people having more money…

Yup, I don't have kids myself, but like that my company offers benefits to parents. It keeps the company more diverse and more enjoyable for me as well in a sense. > It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits. In some cases it also makes economical sense. It can cost a company $1000 to give you a benefit, but to buy it yourself would cost $2000 (and the difference is even greater if the benefit isn't taxed at t…

Interesting, is this not taxed? In some places this sort of thing is taxed the same as "benefit in kind" or similar.

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

#192

Post by cess11 »

tored wrote: post #165
cess11 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the lying? Kamprad was adjacent to Nysvenska rörelsen, a lifelong friend of it's founder Per Engdahl, who also supplied the initial funding for IKEA. It's insane to claim that Olof Palme caused a shift away from parliamentary reformism. And no, we've never had anyone pay "more than 100% in taxes". That's a myth, based on Astrid Lindgrens pretty weird propaganda story about it. The antagonism between labour and ca…

I have not lied, another smear from you. It doesn't matter what Kamprad's political opinions was in his youth, using socialism to take over private companies as the Social democrats did is still wrong regardless. Are you going to call the family Rausing (creator of Tetra Pak) for fascist as well because the didn't want union bureaucrats to take over their creation? In what way would union bureaucrats be better stewar…

Obviously you belong to the same political movement as he did. A few years before his death he said in an interview the his friend Per Engdahl was a great man. He was a fascist when he died.

It made a solid impression on IKEA as a company. It's why unions have never been able to form there, it's why the company 'culture' has a distinctly parasocial 'family'-character, it's why the trust invests heavily in keeping refugees in desert camps, it's why Kamprad was disgusted by the idea to pay taxes, it's why IKEA does its sourcing in countries like Russia, Romania and so on, and avoids ecological destruction in Sweden.

Your link confirms what I wrote earlier. Maybe you know someone who could help you translate it?

You're using radical in some highly personal sense, in common parlance it means you're trying to cause social and political change through means like civil disobedience, direct action, mutual aid, militant revolution, rather than parliamentary deliberation and compromise.

Palme was likely murdered by the fascist Gladio/Stay Behind network. So yes, it's how the political hegemony you support usually does it. Either buy the mafia and make money from drugs, or hire upper class murderers that are already financed by their exploitation of workers.

Kamprad had some luck and Engdahl had some money. He wasn't special, Sweden has been lenient with fascists and oligarchs during all of modernity.

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

#193

Post by Viliam1234 »

Libcat99 wrote: post #170
defrost wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.

We should probably also redesign schools so that they need fewer teachers. For example, above certain age it is a waste of time if the teacher has to explain the same concepts over and over again to each class -- kids could instead watch a video, and then discuss it with the teacher.

Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.

People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.

If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.

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

#194

Post by tored »

cess11 wrote: post #192
tored wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not lied, another smear from you. It doesn't matter what Kamprad's political opinions was in his youth, using socialism to take over private companies as the Social democrats did is still wrong regardless. Are you going to call the family Rausing (creator of Tetra Pak) for fascist as well because the didn't want union bureaucrats to take over their creation? In what way would union bureaucrats be better stewar…

Obviously you belong to the same political movement as he did. A few years before his death he said in an interview the his friend Per Engdahl was a great man. He was a fascist when he died. It made a solid impression on IKEA as a company. It's why unions have never been able to form there, it's why the company 'culture' has a distinctly parasocial 'family'-character, it's why the trust invests heavily in keeping ref…

No, I'm not part of that movement, another smear, directly from the communist handbook. But you will get nowhere with that here.

It is of course fine to question IKEA's business practices, myself is critical of many, personally I'm all in favour of unions as a union member myself, what is not okay is for bolsjeviks to steal companies by using the force of the government and undermine the entire economic model of society in a similar fashion what happened to the kulaks.

> Your link confirms what I wrote earlier.

No, read again, it confirms that Astrid Lindgren payed 101.06% in taxes. And Astrid Lindgren was not the only one affected by this extreme taxation.

Confirmed by this report https://cms.ratio.se/app/uploads/2014/11/den_svenska_modelle...

  Marginalskatten var runt mitten av 1970-talet mycket hög (se figur 4); den högsta 
  marginalskatten var i mitten av 1970-talet runt 87 procent. Beaktades även 
  förmögenhetsskatten kunde marginalskatten överstiga 100 procent för kapitalinkomster 
  och för rörelsekapital kunde marginalskatten också överstiga 100 procent om hänsyn
  togs till både inkomstskatt och egenavgifter (Grosskopf & Rabe, 1991). 
  Detta uppmärksammades av Astrid Lindgren och föranledde henne att skriva en saga om 
  Pomperipossa (Pomperipossa i Monismanien, 1976) som levde i ett
  fantasiland (Monismanien), framställt som en idyll i mångt och mycket men
  där Pomperipossa tvingades att betala mer i skatt än vad hon tjänade (102 procent).
  Astrid Lindgren beskrev på ett målande sätt Sverige och sin egen situation vilket
  ledde till ett skatteuppror i Sverige och att den 100 procentliga marginalskatten
  ganska snart justerades nedåt (Grosskopf & Rabe, 1991) även om marginalskatten 
  på rörelsekapital fortfarande kunde uppgå till 90 procent.
Never trust left wing radicals on history or on anything actually. Lies are part of their ideology in order to turn society upside down.

And why are you denying it? This is what your movement wanted and still wants, that we all should be tax slaves under an anonymous bureaucracy.

In every answer you keep bringing in irrelevant arguments, but that is typical of left wing radicals, they need to create a myth that they are fighting the good fight against all these fascists, so that they can impose a tyranny on all of us.

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

#195

Post by tsunamifury »

smcin wrote: post #77
tsunamifury wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No obviously not

Anecdotally, do you find it tends to be true?

Yea it's pretty common in the Midwestern owners mindset. They see pain as a motivator and a grit builder. It's what commonly limits the midwest from building advanced tech these days IMO. They simply don't value building a 'better life' and enjoy the power structure as it is.

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

#196

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

jfim wrote: post #12
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #11

Can someone explain to me why corporate management seems unable to grasp the concept of properly paying and providing benefits for their employees to increase retention and have more successful hiring? Like...is it actual incompetence? Or do they know it's the answer, but just don't want to do it? I just can't grasp why a manager would refuse to provide proper pay and benefits and then get a Surprised Pikachu face wh…

Because the dollars are easy to measure, but the employee happiness and other fuzzier metrics aren't. Just like we've known for a while that getting software developers their own offices increases productivity (but costs money/doesn't look trendy), or that getting rid of senior aeronautical engineers might lower quality over time (but saves money).

> employee happiness and other fuzzier metrics aren't.

I'd think turnover rate could act as a proxy for employee happiness.

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

#197

Post by akira2501 »

FarMcKon wrote: post #184
akira2501 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this kind of scheme is still possible They used to be in Switzerland for the tax structure anyways. The move back to Sweden and the lax regulation was designed to repatriate the business. > species threatening problems The human species is facing a threatening problem? I think I know the problems you're talking about, but it seems to me, they're mostly threatening to the current social and economic order, and not t…

"It Could Be Worse" is the absolute worst apologist argument, for anything. Please never excuse something bad, because you can imagine, or see somewhere else something even worse.

It's not apologia. It's pointing out that this "planet ending doom and gloom" meme driven attitude is not well aligned to the problem being discussed.

I would personally attempt to avoid using language that people could interpret as moral bullying.

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

#198

Post by StackRanker3000 »

autoexec wrote: post #150
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.

Not only would it be life changing for most of their employees, but consider how much the executives are making ( https://www1.salary.com/WALMART-INC-Executive-Salaries.html ) How much do you think Suresh Kumar's life would change if he made 10 million next year instead of 14.5 million? Do you think he would have to stop buying the groceries he usually does, or that he would have to cancel a vacation? It wouldn't cha…

How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? When you have 2.1 million people working under you, you don’t need to skim much from each of their individual output to make a lot of money.

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

#199

Post by RestlessMind »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #110
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.

Is there really a perceived difference on the employees side? If anything subsidized childcare feels like charity and I don't want charity, I want to be paid well for my work, so I can take care of my family.

> Is there really a perceived difference on the employees side?

Only if we could generalize all the employees! I am sure there are some who feel better to have holiday gifts, holiday parties, token recognition rewards etc. And there would be some who just evaluate everything on the basis of cold hard numbers. A good company should have policies to cater to as many employees as possible.

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

#200

Post by imp0cat »

switch007 wrote: post #111
imp0cat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712344 Here's my own (sry) post on how to pick the good stuff.

Person I quoted said good high end. I think you've interpreted good as just "looks good", based on that first minute of the video, which only talks about style. ÄPPLARYD is a cheaply made sofa that looks nice, with very poor quality fabric just like all IKEA sofas these days I'm fine with people saying it looks nice but it's tiring when people say it's "high end" and "high quality" and well made

The op said "high end ikea stuff" as in not honeycomb, but real timber - which is what the video is about. Yeah, it's long, but very comprehensive.
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