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This is insane -- paying a $7.25/hr minimum wage to people you call "teammates" and expecting them to stick around is preposterous. In anything but a terrible e

This is insane -- paying a $7.25/hr minimum wage to people you call "teammates" and expecting them to stick around is preposterous. In anything but a terrible economic downturn, minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them. Why would anyone stick around, or care to do more than the most basic job requirements? These jobs are totally disposable to employees, just as the employees are disposable to the company. If you don't want your employees to leave, don't treat them as disposable, and don't belittle them by pretending you're a team. This guy thinks he stumbled on some grand new lesson, and it's hilariously terrible.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know.
- 14 7y ago
  I am guessing they don’t expect loyalty but rather desperation and the need to pay bills. Use the person until they move on and get a new one. I make about 9$ an hour above minimum wage and I can not even fathom how a person on minimum wage survives.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    That may be the pragmatic assumption, but I've worked my fair share of low paying jobs, and there's a ton of talk of being part of the team.
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      There's a difference between what leadership will say publicly & what they really mean. Reading between the lines of retail manager's inspiring speeches will reveal that their personal careers are directly affected by the store's bottom line, and they're certainly not going to explicitly acknowledge their employees' desperation as a motivational tool.
- ap3 7y ago
  Why do you think anyone expects “loyalty and sacrifice” for minimum wage at Walmart! sacrifice? c’mon
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    They will always ask you to work harder, put on more responsibilities, maybe stay a little late after you clock out to tidy up, always.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      You’re fine up until that labor violation at the end there. The state will quickly fine them for that, and any manager worth $100k knows better than to ask it.
      - blacktonystark 7y ago
        Well, most managers at any pay scale definitely act like they don't know better.
  - ensignavenger 7y ago
    Walmarts min pay is a lot higher than min wage in most states.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Supposes employer A chooses to pay their employees more than other employers. Employer B chooses to pay their employees less. Both employers are selling products or services that the purchaser finds the same, i.e. they have no preference for who they buy it from. Employer B takes the money they save by paying employees less, and invests in newer, better facilities or R&D or whatever. Now employer B is selling a better product than employer A. Who will customers choose to purchase from? Who will lose business, and end up having to fire employees? To be a successful business, compensation decisions can't be based on people's feelings. You have to consider when a new store or hotel or restaurant will come around and put them out of business, and stay ahead of the curve. You pay what you need to to get the job done. There are some good examples like Costco, but there are only so many people with sufficient disposable income who can afford to shop at Costco and similar stores, and they're not competing with Walmart/CVS/Dollar Store or other bottom tier vendors.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    But employer B also can now remove employees due to the investments they made in automation - if they can remove the workers entirely they'll have even more money to invest in making a better product to edge out employer A. At the end of the day the worker always loses.
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      > At the end of the day the worker always loses. Rise up comrades, and shake off the bourgeoisie! /s
    - close04 7y ago
      That’s a bit oversimplified. Automation doesn’t fix everything, it may not be a useful option regardless of how much money you just saved. It’s more likely the best employees will move towards the company that pays more, along with their experience and know how, probably producing a better product. On one side you’ll have the best people and on the other side you’ll have ones that may be good but also very upset about the disparity. I would still question if saving on personnel brings the most benefit in most cases. It’s short term benefit, enough for an executive to get the bonus. It may also be long term if everyone is doing it so an employee has no option.
- beat 7y ago
  Economics is amoral. It doesn't know good from evil. The biggest mistake on the right is thinking that capitalism is Good. The biggest mistake on the left is thinking that capitalism is Evil. It just is. It's like thermodynamics. If you get burned by a hot stove, it doesn't mean physics is evil. And it doesn't mean getting burned is just your imagination, either. Without intelligence guiding them, such systems can easily destroy themselves with feedback loops. Power differentials etc, in an amoral environment, lead to low-level employees getting screwed and owners/upper management getting rich. This feedback loop can eventually destroy a company, or a society. So what I find hard to understand isn't that employees go along with this system that screws them (they need to eat, y'know?), but rather that they think it's good, that it's what's best for everyone, that maximized profits will be equitably distributed. We have an angry, populist working class that has completely accepted the systematic inequalities of neoliberal-flavored capitalism, and the socialist welfare-state hacks that come with it mostly to keep the whole thing from self-destructing this year at least. They're mad they're getting screwed, but think their bosses are completely right to screw them. It's really hard to grok that.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    > Economics is amoral Such a thing does not exist. It is the study of exchange between individuals, any model that brings down morality to 0 will not be useful, practical or a applicable. There is a reason why the most iconic political economists were all philosophers!
    - beat 7y ago
      When you buy something from Amazon, is it an exchange between individuals? When you get a paycheck from a corporate employer, is it an exchange between individuals? No, that makes no sense. It's an exchange between an individual and an abstract legal/financial entity that engages in economic activity, but is in no rational way a human being. And what about B2B exchange? Clearly, it's economics, but when Wal-Mart buys a wholesale lot of shampoo from Proctor & Gamble, it is absurd to think of that as "between individuals".
      - 7y ago
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. The problem is fundamentally this: A typical Wal-Mart store has around 300 employees. If you take the manager's entire $100,000 and distribute it to the employees, they each get less than $500/year, a raise of less than $0.25/hour. Meanwhile you're never going to get a good manager for the price of a stock clerk, because it's skilled vs. unskilled labor. But you still need a manager. And nice as it would be to pay all 300 employees $100K/year, that would immediately bankrupt the store. Moreover, it would be more than the amount it would cost to automate most of those jobs. This is not a problem with glib or moralistic solutions. And the solutions that do exist are probably more along the lines of making housing cost less so lower income people can afford it, rather than chastising the employers who actually employ unskilled workers.
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    > And nice as it would be to pay all 300 employees $100K/year, that would immediately bankrupt the store I don't think everyone necessarily expects $100k/employee. But many (most?) of them work for 30-35 hours per week - not out of choice, but because their schedule is controlled by the management. And they've generally been paid at or under $10/h. In the last few years there's been moves to increase that, but even moving from full time (which not everyone gets) at $10/hr to, say, $14/hr... That's $28k? Loaded cost with taxes and stuff might be ... $35k? $40k? Maybe? That's still a far cry from "we can't afford to pay everyone $100k". Sure, you can't, but that doesn't explicitly justify paying most people $9/h part time when they want full time (and the store has a need for full time staff, they just don't want to have to provide X benefits that come with full time).
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > In the last few years there's been moves to increase that, but even moving from full time (which not everyone gets) at $10/hr to, say, $14/hr... That's $28k? Loaded cost with taxes and stuff might be ... $35k? $40k? Maybe? That's still a far cry from "we can't afford to pay everyone $100k". Sure, but that's the point. Should the manager not get $100K just because there is no way the employees could? What if that's what it takes to get a good manager? And even at the numbers you're suggesting, multiplied by hundreds of employees, turns into millions of dollars a year. That's more than the store's entire profit. And it's also still above the threshold where it becomes profitable to automate many of those jobs. > Sure, you can't, but that doesn't explicitly justify paying most people $9/h part time when they want full time (and the store has a need for full time staff, they just don't want to have to provide X benefits that come with full time). But whose fault is that? Employers generally shouldn't provide any "benefits" -- they originally came about as a tax dodge at a time when non-monetary benefits weren't considered taxable income to the employee, and that's still the primary reason they exist. Company cars disappeared when they became taxable income, employer-provided health insurance didn't because it's still a tax deduction. But in every case the employees would be better off with the equivalent in cash and the only reason they don't have it is dumb laws. It's even worse for low income employees because the rules keep trying to "help them" by giving employers huge incentives to cut their hours.
- will_brown 7y ago
  >How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know. All those Walmart store managers make 6 figures as you say, some as much as $250k, but the one thing they can always fall back on is they all started out as a low paid Walmart employee as well. It doesn’t change the inequality dynamics but it’s better than something like this story of the healthcare execs making $300k+ bonuses compared to their minimum wage coworkers, where the execs never started out making min wage with the company...or consider the horror story’s of those certain tech companies who don’t even treat low wage employees as regular workers and encourage regular high wage workers not to socialize with the low wage workers.
  - ensignavenger 7y ago
    I didn't know that Walmart store managers were that well paid. And to be certain, they pay a lot more than 7.25/hr to their lowest paid employees!
- mywittyname 7y ago
  How much would you expect a person to make who manages and is responsible for the entire operations of a store with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars?
  - zaroth 7y ago
    And who perhaps spent 5-10 years learning and developing those skills by rising up the ranks in that company.
- csdreamer7 7y ago
  I would focus on dividends and executive salaries over store manager's pay. Executives want store managers to be loyal to control theft. Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96 per quarter * 4 = $22,478,260,000 per year spent on dividends alone. If you take all that money and give it to the 2.1 million employees listed that comes to $10,703 a year in additional wages alone. I haven't even looked at executive salaries or the costs from lawsuits Walmart gets from it's shady tactics. Or that many employees are part time and the per hour wage increase would be much higher than it indicates.
leesec 7y ago
The lesson isn't terrible, employee's should be paid more, but yeah to act like this is a grand discovery seems a bit absurd.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
He took action and doubled the pay to 15/hr, then it further increased to 16.50/hr. I didn't think he was stumbling on a new lesson, your reading was a bit more cynical than mine. Simply put, he hadn't realized the plight of those on 7.25/hr until he heard what his employees were going through. How else can we improve things if we don't allow people to change their views? Mocking a CEO for changing his view is the opposite of what we need.
- nanoservices 7y ago
  I agree with you about allowing CEOs room for growth and increased understanding. This case though really points out the glaring problem we have today, it shouldn't take a more than a basic high school diploma to understand that $7.25 is an unlivable wage. I'm sure the CEO has had to go out for dinner with his family and is able to do quick mental math to realize that most of his employees would have to work for days to be afford a meal like that.
- minikites 7y ago
  >Simply put, he hadn't realized the plight of those on 7.25/hr until he heard what his employees were going through. The fact that he needed to hear what his employees "were going through" to justify paying them more than literal poverty wages is a problem. That shouldn't require a learning experience, it should be a day 1 realization.
- dahart 7y ago
  I’m so torn! I agree completely with you and I want to give the charitable interpretation and I want this to set a good example for other CEOs. That’s how I was feeling reading the article, but all of a sudden after I finished I started thinking this is nuts. 500 people is not that many to be that far out of touch with employees. It’s one thing at Walmart or McDonalds, but at a healthcare company with only 500 to have 20 execs making millions and employees at minimum wage in the first place, and for the execs to not know what their pay ratio is -- meaning not knowing how many employees could be hired for the amount of money they’re each paid -- seems like more than an oversight, and is definitely one more example of the hundreds of stories we’ve heard about how crazy modern business has become. So, anyway, I agree with you and I agree with the parent comment too, it is insane.
autokad 7y ago
> "Why would anyone ... care to do more than the most basic job requirements?" They are called promotions or achievements for your next role. That's a terrible attitude to have above, and as someone who started out working minimum wage, people who had that attitude generally didn't do as well.
blacktonystark 7y ago
"I figured out if I treat my slaves better than the plantation down the road, I would get more results!" -CEOs Slavery is the problem, not the treatment. Making 200x more than the people who actually know how to do the job that makes your company run is ridiculous and the core issue.
yoz-y 7y ago
Somewhere there was a quote; Paying minimum wage is like saying: "I would like to pay you less, but it is illegal to do so."
Sharlin 7y ago
I'm afraid many people are just terrible at empathy, and imagining how it is to live a life very different from their own. As they say, the greatest privilege of them all is the ignorance of how privileged you are.
markbnj 7y ago
I worked at a pharma sales company for a bit that was losing money. This was shortly after a startup I cofounded back in the 90's was sold, and was my first (and only) "senior exec" position after that transaction (afterward I went back to engineering). I remember attending a nearly four hour meeting where the senior executive team and CEO spent the entire time strategizing ways to increase the executive bonuses. I noted that perhaps we should address that after we solved the "losing money" problem, and you would have thought I had suggested kidnapping the CEO's mother. The lesson I took from that is that senior management can be _amazingly_ out of touch, and one hundred percent convinced of their own merit and entitlement, regardless of what's going on with the business.
auiya 7y ago
"minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them" Minimum wage says to employees that if slavery weren't illegal and it wouldn't be a PR nightmare to do so besides, they would totally pay you nothing and expect servitude.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know.

14 7y ago
I am guessing they don’t expect loyalty but rather desperation and the need to pay bills. Use the person until they move on and get a new one. I make about 9$ an hour above minimum wage and I can not even fathom how a person on minimum wage survives.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  That may be the pragmatic assumption, but I've worked my fair share of low paying jobs, and there's a ton of talk of being part of the team.
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    There's a difference between what leadership will say publicly & what they really mean. Reading between the lines of retail manager's inspiring speeches will reveal that their personal careers are directly affected by the store's bottom line, and they're certainly not going to explicitly acknowledge their employees' desperation as a motivational tool.
ap3 7y ago
Why do you think anyone expects “loyalty and sacrifice” for minimum wage at Walmart! sacrifice? c’mon
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  They will always ask you to work harder, put on more responsibilities, maybe stay a little late after you clock out to tidy up, always.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    You’re fine up until that labor violation at the end there. The state will quickly fine them for that, and any manager worth $100k knows better than to ask it.
    - blacktonystark 7y ago
      Well, most managers at any pay scale definitely act like they don't know better.
- ensignavenger 7y ago
  Walmarts min pay is a lot higher than min wage in most states.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Supposes employer A chooses to pay their employees more than other employers. Employer B chooses to pay their employees less. Both employers are selling products or services that the purchaser finds the same, i.e. they have no preference for who they buy it from. Employer B takes the money they save by paying employees less, and invests in newer, better facilities or R&D or whatever. Now employer B is selling a better product than employer A. Who will customers choose to purchase from? Who will lose business, and end up having to fire employees? To be a successful business, compensation decisions can't be based on people's feelings. You have to consider when a new store or hotel or restaurant will come around and put them out of business, and stay ahead of the curve. You pay what you need to to get the job done. There are some good examples like Costco, but there are only so many people with sufficient disposable income who can afford to shop at Costco and similar stores, and they're not competing with Walmart/CVS/Dollar Store or other bottom tier vendors.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  But employer B also can now remove employees due to the investments they made in automation - if they can remove the workers entirely they'll have even more money to invest in making a better product to edge out employer A. At the end of the day the worker always loses.
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    > At the end of the day the worker always loses. Rise up comrades, and shake off the bourgeoisie! /s
  - close04 7y ago
    That’s a bit oversimplified. Automation doesn’t fix everything, it may not be a useful option regardless of how much money you just saved. It’s more likely the best employees will move towards the company that pays more, along with their experience and know how, probably producing a better product. On one side you’ll have the best people and on the other side you’ll have ones that may be good but also very upset about the disparity. I would still question if saving on personnel brings the most benefit in most cases. It’s short term benefit, enough for an executive to get the bonus. It may also be long term if everyone is doing it so an employee has no option.
beat 7y ago
Economics is amoral. It doesn't know good from evil. The biggest mistake on the right is thinking that capitalism is Good. The biggest mistake on the left is thinking that capitalism is Evil. It just is. It's like thermodynamics. If you get burned by a hot stove, it doesn't mean physics is evil. And it doesn't mean getting burned is just your imagination, either. Without intelligence guiding them, such systems can easily destroy themselves with feedback loops. Power differentials etc, in an amoral environment, lead to low-level employees getting screwed and owners/upper management getting rich. This feedback loop can eventually destroy a company, or a society. So what I find hard to understand isn't that employees go along with this system that screws them (they need to eat, y'know?), but rather that they think it's good, that it's what's best for everyone, that maximized profits will be equitably distributed. We have an angry, populist working class that has completely accepted the systematic inequalities of neoliberal-flavored capitalism, and the socialist welfare-state hacks that come with it mostly to keep the whole thing from self-destructing this year at least. They're mad they're getting screwed, but think their bosses are completely right to screw them. It's really hard to grok that.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  > Economics is amoral Such a thing does not exist. It is the study of exchange between individuals, any model that brings down morality to 0 will not be useful, practical or a applicable. There is a reason why the most iconic political economists were all philosophers!
  - beat 7y ago
    When you buy something from Amazon, is it an exchange between individuals? When you get a paycheck from a corporate employer, is it an exchange between individuals? No, that makes no sense. It's an exchange between an individual and an abstract legal/financial entity that engages in economic activity, but is in no rational way a human being. And what about B2B exchange? Clearly, it's economics, but when Wal-Mart buys a wholesale lot of shampoo from Proctor & Gamble, it is absurd to think of that as "between individuals".
    - 7y ago
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. The problem is fundamentally this: A typical Wal-Mart store has around 300 employees. If you take the manager's entire $100,000 and distribute it to the employees, they each get less than $500/year, a raise of less than $0.25/hour. Meanwhile you're never going to get a good manager for the price of a stock clerk, because it's skilled vs. unskilled labor. But you still need a manager. And nice as it would be to pay all 300 employees $100K/year, that would immediately bankrupt the store. Moreover, it would be more than the amount it would cost to automate most of those jobs. This is not a problem with glib or moralistic solutions. And the solutions that do exist are probably more along the lines of making housing cost less so lower income people can afford it, rather than chastising the employers who actually employ unskilled workers.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  > And nice as it would be to pay all 300 employees $100K/year, that would immediately bankrupt the store I don't think everyone necessarily expects $100k/employee. But many (most?) of them work for 30-35 hours per week - not out of choice, but because their schedule is controlled by the management. And they've generally been paid at or under $10/h. In the last few years there's been moves to increase that, but even moving from full time (which not everyone gets) at $10/hr to, say, $14/hr... That's $28k? Loaded cost with taxes and stuff might be ... $35k? $40k? Maybe? That's still a far cry from "we can't afford to pay everyone $100k". Sure, you can't, but that doesn't explicitly justify paying most people $9/h part time when they want full time (and the store has a need for full time staff, they just don't want to have to provide X benefits that come with full time).
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > In the last few years there's been moves to increase that, but even moving from full time (which not everyone gets) at $10/hr to, say, $14/hr... That's $28k? Loaded cost with taxes and stuff might be ... $35k? $40k? Maybe? That's still a far cry from "we can't afford to pay everyone $100k". Sure, but that's the point. Should the manager not get $100K just because there is no way the employees could? What if that's what it takes to get a good manager? And even at the numbers you're suggesting, multiplied by hundreds of employees, turns into millions of dollars a year. That's more than the store's entire profit. And it's also still above the threshold where it becomes profitable to automate many of those jobs. > Sure, you can't, but that doesn't explicitly justify paying most people $9/h part time when they want full time (and the store has a need for full time staff, they just don't want to have to provide X benefits that come with full time). But whose fault is that? Employers generally shouldn't provide any "benefits" -- they originally came about as a tax dodge at a time when non-monetary benefits weren't considered taxable income to the employee, and that's still the primary reason they exist. Company cars disappeared when they became taxable income, employer-provided health insurance didn't because it's still a tax deduction. But in every case the employees would be better off with the equivalent in cash and the only reason they don't have it is dumb laws. It's even worse for low income employees because the rules keep trying to "help them" by giving employers huge incentives to cut their hours.
will_brown 7y ago
>How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know. All those Walmart store managers make 6 figures as you say, some as much as $250k, but the one thing they can always fall back on is they all started out as a low paid Walmart employee as well. It doesn’t change the inequality dynamics but it’s better than something like this story of the healthcare execs making $300k+ bonuses compared to their minimum wage coworkers, where the execs never started out making min wage with the company...or consider the horror story’s of those certain tech companies who don’t even treat low wage employees as regular workers and encourage regular high wage workers not to socialize with the low wage workers.
- ensignavenger 7y ago
  I didn't know that Walmart store managers were that well paid. And to be certain, they pay a lot more than 7.25/hr to their lowest paid employees!
mywittyname 7y ago
How much would you expect a person to make who manages and is responsible for the entire operations of a store with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars?
- zaroth 7y ago
  And who perhaps spent 5-10 years learning and developing those skills by rising up the ranks in that company.
csdreamer7 7y ago
I would focus on dividends and executive salaries over store manager's pay. Executives want store managers to be loyal to control theft. Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96 per quarter * 4 = $22,478,260,000 per year spent on dividends alone. If you take all that money and give it to the 2.1 million employees listed that comes to $10,703 a year in additional wages alone. I haven't even looked at executive salaries or the costs from lawsuits Walmart gets from it's shady tactics. Or that many employees are part time and the per hour wage increase would be much higher than it indicates.

leesec 7y ago

The lesson isn't terrible, employee's should be paid more, but yeah to act like this is a grand discovery seems a bit absurd.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

He took action and doubled the pay to 15/hr, then it further increased to 16.50/hr. I didn't think he was stumbling on a new lesson, your reading was a bit more cynical than mine. Simply put, he hadn't realized the plight of those on 7.25/hr until he heard what his employees were going through. How else can we improve things if we don't allow people to change their views? Mocking a CEO for changing his view is the opposite of what we need.

nanoservices 7y ago
I agree with you about allowing CEOs room for growth and increased understanding. This case though really points out the glaring problem we have today, it shouldn't take a more than a basic high school diploma to understand that $7.25 is an unlivable wage. I'm sure the CEO has had to go out for dinner with his family and is able to do quick mental math to realize that most of his employees would have to work for days to be afford a meal like that.
minikites 7y ago
>Simply put, he hadn't realized the plight of those on 7.25/hr until he heard what his employees were going through. The fact that he needed to hear what his employees "were going through" to justify paying them more than literal poverty wages is a problem. That shouldn't require a learning experience, it should be a day 1 realization.
dahart 7y ago
I’m so torn! I agree completely with you and I want to give the charitable interpretation and I want this to set a good example for other CEOs. That’s how I was feeling reading the article, but all of a sudden after I finished I started thinking this is nuts. 500 people is not that many to be that far out of touch with employees. It’s one thing at Walmart or McDonalds, but at a healthcare company with only 500 to have 20 execs making millions and employees at minimum wage in the first place, and for the execs to not know what their pay ratio is -- meaning not knowing how many employees could be hired for the amount of money they’re each paid -- seems like more than an oversight, and is definitely one more example of the hundreds of stories we’ve heard about how crazy modern business has become. So, anyway, I agree with you and I agree with the parent comment too, it is insane.

autokad 7y ago

> "Why would anyone ... care to do more than the most basic job requirements?" They are called promotions or achievements for your next role. That's a terrible attitude to have above, and as someone who started out working minimum wage, people who had that attitude generally didn't do as well.

blacktonystark 7y ago

"I figured out if I treat my slaves better than the plantation down the road, I would get more results!" -CEOs Slavery is the problem, not the treatment. Making 200x more than the people who actually know how to do the job that makes your company run is ridiculous and the core issue.

yoz-y 7y ago

Somewhere there was a quote; Paying minimum wage is like saying: "I would like to pay you less, but it is illegal to do so."

Sharlin 7y ago

I'm afraid many people are just terrible at empathy, and imagining how it is to live a life very different from their own. As they say, the greatest privilege of them all is the ignorance of how privileged you are.

markbnj 7y ago

I worked at a pharma sales company for a bit that was losing money. This was shortly after a startup I cofounded back in the 90's was sold, and was my first (and only) "senior exec" position after that transaction (afterward I went back to engineering). I remember attending a nearly four hour meeting where the senior executive team and CEO spent the entire time strategizing ways to increase the executive bonuses. I noted that perhaps we should address that after we solved the "losing money" problem, and you would have thought I had suggested kidnapping the CEO's mother. The lesson I took from that is that senior management can be _amazingly_ out of touch, and one hundred percent convinced of their own merit and entitlement, regardless of what's going on with the business.

auiya 7y ago

"minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them" Minimum wage says to employees that if slavery weren't illegal and it wouldn't be a PR nightmare to do so besides, they would totally pay you nothing and expect servitude.