4 ms·

This is essentially a loophole and there must be a way to close it. Maybe it's naive to think its as simple as being slightly more verbose: "Salary tied to low

This is essentially a loophole and there must be a way to close it. Maybe it's naive to think its as simple as being slightly more verbose: "Salary tied to lowest paid employee or contractor"

daemin 10y ago
Well technically running separate businesses for each salary tier would still get around it. The CEO's pay would be the combination of all of the individual CEO salaries that they would be doing. Also cleaning and administration services wouldn't be contractors, but services bought from another company. So that wouldn't count either.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Point of interest: sometimes technical people forget that the law doesn't work the way that computers do. If you close all reasonable loopholes and make your intent clear when you write the law, a judge (at least here in the US, I know the UK has a slightly different system) is not going to say "Oh, that's undefined behavior, you get a free pass." He or she is going to say "That's undefined behavior, but you're trying to circumvent what was clearly the intent of the law. Bring yourself into compliance or face further penalties."
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Asperger's is useful in programming, not so much in Law.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      My friend and I started a habit of prefacing humorously pedantic rebuttals with "Well, actually...", but also calling each other on it when we did so involuntarily. It's surprising how often we had cause to (although maybe we're both borderline).
  - daemin 10y ago
    Well I don't actually consider the options I've presented to be that far fetched. For all the places that I've worked, the cleaners have always been part of another company, one that was contracted to provide cleaning services. There's also firms and contractors that provide bookkeeping services for small businesses. I'm sure a lot of other administrative tasks could be outsourced as well. Having these services provided by other companies would raise the minimum salary in a company quite a lot. The other thing companies do is set up plenty of shell/thin corporations around the world, assign the IP rights to those in minimal tax countries, and then charge massive internal fees so that all the rest of the organisation barely makes a profit. This sort of thing seems to be the same level of loop-hole as setting up multiple companies so that the CxO's can get paid more. Of course that's forgetting that most of the CxO pay is actually in stock and options, and not so much is in cash, so I don't know how much a law capping CEO pay would do. Some notable CEO's have actually taken just $1 of actual cash for payment (because legally they have to be paid something to receive company perks).
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      >The other thing companies do is set up plenty of shell/thin corporations around the world, assign the IP rights to those in minimal tax countries, and then charge massive internal fees so that all the rest of the organisation barely makes a profit. This sort of thing seems to be the same level of loop-hole as setting up multiple companies so that the CxO's can get paid more. All it takes to end this practice is for the tax authorities to take a dim view of it. Starbucks and Google were both caught by this and although they didn't pay a fine as large as they should have done, with a nod and a wink, they did end up paying more. The economic system is nowhere near as immutable to change as certain people would like you to believe. The swift reaction by BlackRock to the government simply making noises in particular was noteworthy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/15/blackrock-demands-cuts-to-executive-pay-and-bonuses https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/15/blackrock-d...
  - waqf 10y ago
    That's easy to apply to a common-sense law like "Don't cut other people's limbs off without their permission". It's not so easy to apply to a law written in terms of concepts like "two employees of the same company", because "company" is itself something that only exists as a legal construct and "employee" already has a specific legal meaning that's significantly different from its common-sense one.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      True, but prosecution at the levels we're talking about is as much a political exercise as a legal one. Wikipedia's background is weak, but Northern Securities Co. v. United States in 1903 [1], one of the first major anti-trust prosecutions, was equally novel by the fact that the US government was choosing to prosecute it at all. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) had been on the books for better than a decade. Under a unified government, applicability is rarely as much of a question as enforcement. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._U...
LgWoodenBadger 10y ago
Aggregate everyone involved (regardless of company) into one category and do the math that way.
- daemin 10y ago
  I've thought about this and it can't easily be done. Where would you draw the line between the company providing a service or being essential to the product? For example in clothes manufacturer, which contracts out the making of its clothes to a company in another country. Would the people employed by that other company be counted?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  A "maximum wage law" might well be the most effective "minimum wage law" we could devise. But this does leave patent-holders and large shareholders (and real estate moguls) still scooping up an outsized share of GDP. That would be okay by me, IF network effects were being regulated or prosecuted (including under the Sherman act) so that public utilities were being supervised as such. But that's exactly what hasn't been happening for forty years and more, now.

This is essentially a loophole and there must be a way to close it. Maybe it's naive to think its as simple as being slightly more verbose: "Salary tied to lowest paid employee or contractor"

daemin 10y ago

Well technically running separate businesses for each salary tier would still get around it. The CEO's pay would be the combination of all of the individual CEO salaries that they would be doing. Also cleaning and administration services wouldn't be contractors, but services bought from another company. So that wouldn't count either.

ethbro 10y ago
Point of interest: sometimes technical people forget that the law doesn't work the way that computers do. If you close all reasonable loopholes and make your intent clear when you write the law, a judge (at least here in the US, I know the UK has a slightly different system) is not going to say "Oh, that's undefined behavior, you get a free pass." He or she is going to say "That's undefined behavior, but you're trying to circumvent what was clearly the intent of the law. Bring yourself into compliance or face further penalties."
- sitkack 10y ago
  Asperger's is useful in programming, not so much in Law.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    My friend and I started a habit of prefacing humorously pedantic rebuttals with "Well, actually...", but also calling each other on it when we did so involuntarily. It's surprising how often we had cause to (although maybe we're both borderline).
- daemin 10y ago
  Well I don't actually consider the options I've presented to be that far fetched. For all the places that I've worked, the cleaners have always been part of another company, one that was contracted to provide cleaning services. There's also firms and contractors that provide bookkeeping services for small businesses. I'm sure a lot of other administrative tasks could be outsourced as well. Having these services provided by other companies would raise the minimum salary in a company quite a lot. The other thing companies do is set up plenty of shell/thin corporations around the world, assign the IP rights to those in minimal tax countries, and then charge massive internal fees so that all the rest of the organisation barely makes a profit. This sort of thing seems to be the same level of loop-hole as setting up multiple companies so that the CxO's can get paid more. Of course that's forgetting that most of the CxO pay is actually in stock and options, and not so much is in cash, so I don't know how much a law capping CEO pay would do. Some notable CEO's have actually taken just $1 of actual cash for payment (because legally they have to be paid something to receive company perks).
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    >The other thing companies do is set up plenty of shell/thin corporations around the world, assign the IP rights to those in minimal tax countries, and then charge massive internal fees so that all the rest of the organisation barely makes a profit. This sort of thing seems to be the same level of loop-hole as setting up multiple companies so that the CxO's can get paid more. All it takes to end this practice is for the tax authorities to take a dim view of it. Starbucks and Google were both caught by this and although they didn't pay a fine as large as they should have done, with a nod and a wink, they did end up paying more. The economic system is nowhere near as immutable to change as certain people would like you to believe. The swift reaction by BlackRock to the government simply making noises in particular was noteworthy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/15/blackrock-demands-cuts-to-executive-pay-and-bonuses https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/15/blackrock-d...
- waqf 10y ago
  That's easy to apply to a common-sense law like "Don't cut other people's limbs off without their permission". It's not so easy to apply to a law written in terms of concepts like "two employees of the same company", because "company" is itself something that only exists as a legal construct and "employee" already has a specific legal meaning that's significantly different from its common-sense one.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    True, but prosecution at the levels we're talking about is as much a political exercise as a legal one. Wikipedia's background is weak, but Northern Securities Co. v. United States in 1903 [1], one of the first major anti-trust prosecutions, was equally novel by the fact that the US government was choosing to prosecute it at all. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) had been on the books for better than a decade. Under a unified government, applicability is rarely as much of a question as enforcement. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._U...

LgWoodenBadger 10y ago

Aggregate everyone involved (regardless of company) into one category and do the math that way.

daemin 10y ago
I've thought about this and it can't easily be done. Where would you draw the line between the company providing a service or being essential to the product? For example in clothes manufacturer, which contracts out the making of its clothes to a company in another country. Would the people employed by that other company be counted?
Nomentatus 10y ago
A "maximum wage law" might well be the most effective "minimum wage law" we could devise. But this does leave patent-holders and large shareholders (and real estate moguls) still scooping up an outsized share of GDP. That would be okay by me, IF network effects were being regulated or prosecuted (including under the Sherman act) so that public utilities were being supervised as such. But that's exactly what hasn't been happening for forty years and more, now.