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Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

latimes.com

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Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#131

Post by beagle3 »

merinowool wrote: post #55
sametmax wrote: post #11

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…

[flagged]

When I was living in NYC I paid 39% federal + 13.5% state/city - that’s over 50%. Healthcare and children education not included. I was not a home owner, and my other deduction amounted to almost nothing thanks to AMT.

It’s a myth that taxes in the US are low.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#132

Post by saturdaysaint »

I wonder how other aspects of compensation like paid vacation time play into this.

I've fielded interest from a lot of recruiters and interested companies. Moderate pay increases seem easily available - the sticking point is that they will all fight tooth and nail for anything beyond the bare minimum of vacation time. I'm in my late 30's with kids, and my wife is a doctor. There really isn't a realistic pay raise that is worth losing weeks with my family every year.

I wonder how many other people in prime earnings ages with families are running into this resistance from HR departments - it feels like a successful anti-competitive strategy to tamp down on turnover and wages.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#133

Post by martimarkov »

geezerjay wrote: post #93
Nursie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shush, taxes are not 'extreme' in most of Europe, and you get a lot for your money - healthcare for example.

Income taxes tend to cover up to 50% of your income. Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash. Then there are hidden taxes charged throguh other fees being levied, even to access mandatory state services. In the end you get healthcare, but in general the service is practically unusable and you end up having to pay for health insurance anyway. And by the way, a large portion of your taxes is effec…

Yeah up to 50%. Very rarely.

You don’t have to pay VAT if you don’t buy anything. You can just invest your money.

A new passport costs money. You need to pay for one if you want it. That shouldn’t be part of your income tax because nobody knows how often you will need one. Essentially those fees are on per person basis.

The NHS is very useable. I never used to pay for any private health insurance for about 5 years. It might not be convenient for you to wait but that’s your problem. That system works and saves lives... so it is usable.

I don’t even know what you mean by “lost”. Money doesn’t magically disappear. Maybe it’s a more complex system than you can imagine or haven’t thought about it hard enough.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#134

Post by jermaustin1 »

geezerjay wrote: post #93
Nursie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shush, taxes are not 'extreme' in most of Europe, and you get a lot for your money - healthcare for example.

Income taxes tend to cover up to 50% of your income. Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash. Then there are hidden taxes charged throguh other fees being levied, even to access mandatory state services. In the end you get healthcare, but in general the service is practically unusable and you end up having to pay for health insurance anyway. And by the way, a large portion of your taxes is effec…

>Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash.

UPTO 20% of what you SPEND. In the UK you pay 0% VAT toward most food and child stuff. Then 5% toward essential goods and services. THEN full VAT on the rest of the stuff.

But that doesn't equate to 20% of your remaining cash unless you are only buying pre-prepared foods and furniture with your salary, and spending every bit of it.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#135

Post by adventured »

creaghpatr wrote: post #38

Love it when people compile montages of article headlines that circulate every year to encourage the importation of more cheap labor. Here's a recent favorite byline: "America’s labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions, and it could be employers who end up paying [their workers more]. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/the-us-labor-shortage-is-rea... Epidemic proportions!

You get those incredible dueling headlines from the same media outlets of how wages are not rising fast enough, and how we need to have open borders allowing in unlimited low skill, low wage labor. Who will pick the strawberries if we don't import ten million low skill laborers in the next decade? The Koch brothers must have their cheap labor or their industrial profits will suffer. Wages must be carefully constrained or inflation might tick up a bit after a decade of the Fed proclaiming they desperately want more inflation (of course what they actually mean by inflation risk is that business profit margins will take a hit and prices might climb some - if the businesses have pricing power - due to the bottom half of workers earning more).

And that income stagnation at the median? It's amazing what happens when the middle class moves up [1], your natural population growth drops toward zero, but you import tens of millions of low skill, cheap laborers over 30-40 years: your median doesn't move up because you're treading water by offsetting everyone that moved up.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/IOgZLDc.png

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#136

Post by vfc1 »

CamTin wrote: post #98
vfc1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.

I agree, its pretty close to slavery. Theoretically, they could sue you if you don't work, although what happens in practice is that if the freelance is really fed up and talks to the end customer saying they want out (which the hiring company does not want you to do), they want to avoid problems with the customer and they will replace you with someone else after a few months.

What they really don't want to do is to lose the billable position. In practice, a lot of people will just suck it up to the end of the contract and then leave, especially if the contract is less than a year.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#137

Post by jhasse »

DZittersteyn wrote: post #101
jhasse wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have to give away sometimes more than half of it Where? This is the tax in Germany for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/ES...

The highest tax rate in the Netherlands is 51,95% (Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40%). Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes. https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...

> Note that this only covers anything you make over ~70k+ a year, 0-20k is taxed ~35%, and 20-70 is taxed 40%

Which means that you'd need an income over 480k a year to get an effective tax rate >50%.

I hope I calculated that correctly: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+((x-70)*0.5195%2B...

> Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes.

If you count VAT, you'd also need to take into account all the benefits you get in return from the state.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#138

Post by misja111 »

vfc1 wrote: post #48
gt2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?

They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Well that should be easy to fix. Just keep showing up at the office but don't do any work. It shouldn't take too long before your employer gets sick of it.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#139

Post by lewis500 »

I keep reading stories about how it's a puzzle that more jobs are being created but wages aren't going up. Part of it seems to be this new ingenuity at finding marginal workers and getting them to take jobs.

Paul Krugman has a theory that the recession has made companies averse to raising wages, because it's hard to claw wage gains back if there's a recession. So instead they are offering bonuses, because if a recession hits you can just say "we don't have money for bonuses this year" which is a lot easier than saying "everybody's salary is going down." I'd say, while the cause (recession) is right, the companies are doing even more than switching to bonuses: it's also aggressive recruiting, allowing remote work, making workplaces cool, inflating the job's prestige, etc.

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