US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9238

On November 14 2017 13:41 mozoku wrote:

If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.

The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.

In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.

At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).

On November 14 2017 14:23 Kyadytim wrote:

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.

For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."

This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.

Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.

The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.

On November 14 2017 14:23 Kyadytim wrote:

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.

For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."

This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.

Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.

The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.