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Should be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually

Should be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually deserve given actual work value etc)

pasquinelli 10y ago
What someone gets paid has to be, overall, less than what they earn, overall. Otherwise it'd be uneconomical for their employer.
- dropit_sphere 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "overall," but isn't this trivially contradicted? Salesman A sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $20. Salesman B sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $41. The owner is up $20 from Salesman A, and down $1 from Salesman B, and can merrily continue overpaying Salesman B. "But no owner would do that because it's obvious that this is ridiculous." Certainly. But replace "Salesman A" with "QA Lead," and "Salesman B" with "Director of HR," and who knows who's contributing how much?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    In theory: marginal productivity of labour. E.g., you start adding and/or cutting sales, QA, and director positions and see how the organisational performance responds. You'll also typically find (unless, say, you're a Google, Apple, Intel, and Cisco colluding with illegal mutual noncompete agreements on labour) that you're taking prices from the market on what people demand to be paid. In practice, the information's far less clear, and rules of thumb or gut feels get invoked a fair bit. But overall, yes: companies which are aiming for profitability have to balance their costs, including labour, with revenues.
- quadrangle 10y ago
  Although it's stretching far outside this immediate generational discussion, he premise that employers should profit by always paying employees less than the value they generate is itself the very definition of capitalist exploitation. There's absolutely no reason this type of profit-driven employment relationship is the only way to structure a successful economy for a society. Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.

Should be "get paid less". We really need to end the framing of whatever people are paid as assuming that it's equal to what they earn (as in what they actually deserve given actual work value etc)

pasquinelli 10y ago

What someone gets paid has to be, overall, less than what they earn, overall. Otherwise it'd be uneconomical for their employer.

dropit_sphere 10y ago
Not sure what you mean by "overall," but isn't this trivially contradicted? Salesman A sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $20. Salesman B sells $100 of product @ 40% margin, bringing in $40 of "profit," and is paid $41. The owner is up $20 from Salesman A, and down $1 from Salesman B, and can merrily continue overpaying Salesman B. "But no owner would do that because it's obvious that this is ridiculous." Certainly. But replace "Salesman A" with "QA Lead," and "Salesman B" with "Director of HR," and who knows who's contributing how much?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  In theory: marginal productivity of labour. E.g., you start adding and/or cutting sales, QA, and director positions and see how the organisational performance responds. You'll also typically find (unless, say, you're a Google, Apple, Intel, and Cisco colluding with illegal mutual noncompete agreements on labour) that you're taking prices from the market on what people demand to be paid. In practice, the information's far less clear, and rules of thumb or gut feels get invoked a fair bit. But overall, yes: companies which are aiming for profitability have to balance their costs, including labour, with revenues.
quadrangle 10y ago
Although it's stretching far outside this immediate generational discussion, he premise that employers should profit by always paying employees less than the value they generate is itself the very definition of capitalist exploitation. There's absolutely no reason this type of profit-driven employment relationship is the only way to structure a successful economy for a society. Anyway, to the exact topic at hand: The consolidation of power by corporations and capital basically means a different power structure. We can accept the profit premise and still recognize that the employees' pay goes up and down in relation to their power in the relationship. Before unions, employers were happy to pay poverty wages and profit handsomely. Yes, there's a point where no profit or actual loss means they can't keep the employee, but there's a huge margin between the cheapest dirt pay you can get a desperate immigrant to accept and the pay you can manage to pay an organized, powerful union employee while still profiting. The power balance between employees and employers has changed over the last couple generations with the rise of unions and public works and minimum wage and worker protection laws and then today's conglomerations of oligarchies and the undermining of unions and of laws that protect workers' interests.