10 ms·

There is no denying that it takes skill and hard work to keep a business afloat in these times, or that it is stressful, or that it is easier to walk away than

by II2II 6y ago

There is no denying that it takes skill and hard work to keep a business afloat in these times, or that it is stressful, or that it is easier to walk away than deal with the situation. On the other hand, very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people. In many businesses, such as some of the businesses mentioned in this article, it isn't a question of whether those other people can afford to send their children to college. They already knew the answer to that question: they cannot. Instead, it is a question of whether they provide their family with the bare essentials. I am not suggesting that executives should sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the company or other employees. What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less. If you disagree with that, that's fine. Consider it an ideological difference. Yet it is also important to realize that there are people who would disagree with both of us, that those who have more also have an obligation to sacrifice more in a time of crisis.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Look at American business composition statistics. Most businesses are small. A few people totally matter.
waheoo 6y ago
> What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less. You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? I think the underlying problem here is that executive salaries and bonuses are at too higher multiples. Much higher than historical norms. Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Sure they would. These "time of crisis" instincts are very primitive, as are most emotional reactions of this kind. To makes sense of them just imagine an extended family operating, c. 100k years ago. The idea is this: in a time of crisis (say, very low food) how immoral it would be for the father (, etc.) to take much more than the mother (etc.). And these feels very plausible. It is in the nature of a family to expect sacrifce. It is these small-scale familial impulses that ideologues often rationalise (on both left and right). What economics as a (rough) science is meant to provide us with is a way of transcending these impulses. These microeconomic explanations should persuade us that they are being misapplied in this case, and "familial-crisis" thinking cannot plausibly apply to a buisness. However most people cannot really critically relate to their own emotional instincts, and so often explaining the microeconomics is shouting into the wind.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    I think this is your point but helping spell it out. The father in this case is probably the best shot at obtaining more food for the starving family and needs energy to do so.
    - clairity 6y ago
      you've made a lot of assumptions to reach that conclusion. for counterbalance, women burn less energy per mass on average and are less massive on average, which means they'd last longer in the search, raising the likelihood of finding food.
      - darkerside 6y ago
        I'm not educated on which sex would have truly had a better chance, and not totally concerned with it. Mostly concerned with illustrating more clearly the parent posters point. My assumption is men did more hunting and women gathering, and that in a starvation scenario, known gathering food sources would have been exhausted. Sorry for any Paleolithic women I may have offended with my post!
        clairity 6y ago
        ah, ignorance is bliss, except when you're naturally selected away by implicit biases that lead to poor decisions. no need to worry about paleolithic women, they were probably less fragile and better survivalists in comparison.
        darkerside 6y ago
        Wouldn't doubt it!
- hatchnyc 6y ago
  > You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? It is interesting how these discussions about "inequality" play out within America. I've traveled a small amount outside of the US/EU and have many close friends from poor countries and it strikes me that a real move towards equality would likely result in a step downward for nearly all Americans, even those who consider themselves poor and disadvantaged by American standards. I'm not saying this isn't something to pursue within a country on its own merit, but some of the absolutist moralistic rhetoric used in these discussions definitely betrays living in a bubble.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? "Like" in the most obtuse aspect. What about how little I pay my kids or dog? Thats not in context. The issue is the morality within the system in place in the US (US firms, per the article title).
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I don’t see how it’s obtuse. The morality of paying an executive disproportionately more is the same morality as paying a worker in the US disproportionately more than a worker in a poorer country. At the end of the day, everyone is looking out for themselves and their immediate tribes first, and everyone takes what they can get. However, society is more harmonious when the delta is not too great. The US simply also had the luxury of having a delta of two oceans and huge amounts of space.
- jzb 6y ago
  "Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place." This right here. If the CEO made, let's say, five times what I do - or some reasonable multiple during normal times, I wouldn't object to some retention bonus to maintain as much stability at the top as possible. I acknowledge that 1) C-level and VP-level gigs come with responsibilities I would not want and 2) a good exec is hard to find. So I don't mind if company execs make much more than I do. I do mind bullshit like this where they make in a year or two what I can expect to make over more than a decade, maybe even a lifetime, and then when times are hard get showered with more money while we get laid off or end up doing twice as much to cover for people laid off or hiring freezes. Yep, being an exec of a company that's bankrupt probably sucks. Guess what? Being a average employee sucks then too. Everybody should have to suck it up, not just the run of the mill people.
  - agensaequivocum 6y ago
    > I do mind bullshit like this where they make in a year or two what I can expect to make over more than a decade, maybe even a lifetime Why do you care?
mostlyghostly 6y ago
"very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people" Hate to break it to you but that is EXACTLY what is going on here. Some people have EXPONENTIALLY more impact on saving a business than everyone else in the building. Real world examples: - Two sales people who knew every high profit customer in our local market, which was the core of our turnaround plan - My product engineer, with "the specs in her head". We could have never rebooted the business without her. - The last manufacturing engineer standing, who we needed in the event we could secure a new facility for operations. - My boss, the master deal maker who knew every major retail chain on our side of the country. Our secret to rebuilding the critical mass required for survival. - One commercial manager (there were two of us), who was tasked with re-balancing the entire business on the fly to deal with massive swings in costs and competitor activity. Our pre-fire business model was completely shot and the banks cut us off, so we needed to reorganize around the new reality and find a way to generate positive cash flow to survive. Without those five people / groups, the game was over - there would be no recovery plan, no road back to sustainable operations. Everyone else is irrelevant, potential cost savings when we needed them. You are playing a very high stakes short term game for the humble prize of survival... Finance's job was basically to keep the tie fighters off our back, keep the lawyers, bankers, and insurance people away from folks doing the actual work. Customer Service was there to gently wind down relationships with non-critical accounts, in the vague hopes we could come back someday. We were able to give a few people some runway on those teams, moving anyone who wasn't able to hit the street immediately onto those lists to give them a little more time. And your key people are irreplaceable in that world. There's no way someone of equivalent expertise is walking into that mess for what you're able to pay them. At an individual level? We had to invoke our worst endgame due to other issues (deal fell apart); four of the critical five are no longer with the company. Each of them landed with a promotion and a fairly substantial raise elsewhere, often with instructions to "go take their business back". (at that point, it was open season for those accounts; our prior employer was unable to service them) The typical job search for that level of talent is hours / days rather than weeks or months (there is a very specific set of people who will hire them immediately if given the chance) . Any visions of nobility needs to balanced against your obligations to support your spouse and children. You're going to sacrifice your kids future for some random people they never met? Your spouse is cool with that? Get real. (Mine knew what was going to happen; I had "the talk" with her beforehand. We knew my job was going to be eliminated and I couldn't break ranks without screwing my people. But we've both done turnaround work before, so we had a plan to handle it. She's one in a million.) So that's the shit-show you're trying to hold together. Heck, I had a financial model sitting on my laptop to go buy one of my dying brands from the company, once it was very apparent that they weren't able to protect it. At that point, it was basically sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim it...
darkerside 6y ago
Would you agree that those who do more should also get more? You are ignoring production in your ideological framing.
scarface74 6y ago
Do you make minimum wage? Do you give any excess over minimum wage that you earn to charity? The vast majority of us posting here “make more when others are making less”. Even in your own company you probably make 10x more than the lowest paid contract worker who cleans your office after hours.
- minitoar 6y ago
  This is more like all the contract workers are getting laid off and you give yourself a bonus, then leave the company.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    That’s the deal you make as a contract worker. Yes, I’ve been a contract worker. Heck, I have even left a full time job for contract to perm role before knowing that there was a chance I would be let go if the project I was hired to lead wasn’t successful even if through no fault of my own. I negotiated a premium because of that risk. On the other hand, half the issue with being a contractor is that we as a country decided to tie health insurance, workers comp, and unemployment insurance to the company instead of making them universal and state run like every other industrialized country on earth.

by II2II 6y ago

texasbigdata 6y ago

Look at American business composition statistics. Most businesses are small. A few people totally matter.

waheoo 6y ago

> What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less. You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? I think the underlying problem here is that executive salaries and bonuses are at too higher multiples. Much higher than historical norms. Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place.

mjburgess 6y ago
Sure they would. These "time of crisis" instincts are very primitive, as are most emotional reactions of this kind. To makes sense of them just imagine an extended family operating, c. 100k years ago. The idea is this: in a time of crisis (say, very low food) how immoral it would be for the father (, etc.) to take much more than the mother (etc.). And these feels very plausible. It is in the nature of a family to expect sacrifce. It is these small-scale familial impulses that ideologues often rationalise (on both left and right). What economics as a (rough) science is meant to provide us with is a way of transcending these impulses. These microeconomic explanations should persuade us that they are being misapplied in this case, and "familial-crisis" thinking cannot plausibly apply to a buisness. However most people cannot really critically relate to their own emotional instincts, and so often explaining the microeconomics is shouting into the wind.
- darkerside 6y ago
  I think this is your point but helping spell it out. The father in this case is probably the best shot at obtaining more food for the starving family and needs energy to do so.
  - clairity 6y ago
    you've made a lot of assumptions to reach that conclusion. for counterbalance, women burn less energy per mass on average and are less massive on average, which means they'd last longer in the search, raising the likelihood of finding food.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      I'm not educated on which sex would have truly had a better chance, and not totally concerned with it. Mostly concerned with illustrating more clearly the parent posters point. My assumption is men did more hunting and women gathering, and that in a starvation scenario, known gathering food sources would have been exhausted. Sorry for any Paleolithic women I may have offended with my post!
      - clairity 6y ago
        ah, ignorance is bliss, except when you're naturally selected away by implicit biases that lead to poor decisions. no need to worry about paleolithic women, they were probably less fragile and better survivalists in comparison.
        darkerside 6y ago
        Wouldn't doubt it!
hatchnyc 6y ago
> You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? It is interesting how these discussions about "inequality" play out within America. I've traveled a small amount outside of the US/EU and have many close friends from poor countries and it strikes me that a real move towards equality would likely result in a step downward for nearly all Americans, even those who consider themselves poor and disadvantaged by American standards. I'm not saying this isn't something to pursue within a country on its own merit, but some of the absolutist moralistic rhetoric used in these discussions definitely betrays living in a bubble.
Supermancho 6y ago
> You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? "Like" in the most obtuse aspect. What about how little I pay my kids or dog? Thats not in context. The issue is the morality within the system in place in the US (US firms, per the article title).
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I don’t see how it’s obtuse. The morality of paying an executive disproportionately more is the same morality as paying a worker in the US disproportionately more than a worker in a poorer country. At the end of the day, everyone is looking out for themselves and their immediate tribes first, and everyone takes what they can get. However, society is more harmonious when the delta is not too great. The US simply also had the luxury of having a delta of two oceans and huge amounts of space.
jzb 6y ago
"Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place." This right here. If the CEO made, let's say, five times what I do - or some reasonable multiple during normal times, I wouldn't object to some retention bonus to maintain as much stability at the top as possible. I acknowledge that 1) C-level and VP-level gigs come with responsibilities I would not want and 2) a good exec is hard to find. So I don't mind if company execs make much more than I do. I do mind bullshit like this where they make in a year or two what I can expect to make over more than a decade, maybe even a lifetime, and then when times are hard get showered with more money while we get laid off or end up doing twice as much to cover for people laid off or hiring freezes. Yep, being an exec of a company that's bankrupt probably sucks. Guess what? Being a average employee sucks then too. Everybody should have to suck it up, not just the run of the mill people.
- agensaequivocum 6y ago
  > I do mind bullshit like this where they make in a year or two what I can expect to make over more than a decade, maybe even a lifetime Why do you care?

mostlyghostly 6y ago

"very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people" Hate to break it to you but that is EXACTLY what is going on here. Some people have EXPONENTIALLY more impact on saving a business than everyone else in the building. Real world examples: - Two sales people who knew every high profit customer in our local market, which was the core of our turnaround plan - My product engineer, with "the specs in her head". We could have never rebooted the business without her. - The last manufacturing engineer standing, who we needed in the event we could secure a new facility for operations. - My boss, the master deal maker who knew every major retail chain on our side of the country. Our secret to rebuilding the critical mass required for survival. - One commercial manager (there were two of us), who was tasked with re-balancing the entire business on the fly to deal with massive swings in costs and competitor activity. Our pre-fire business model was completely shot and the banks cut us off, so we needed to reorganize around the new reality and find a way to generate positive cash flow to survive. Without those five people / groups, the game was over - there would be no recovery plan, no road back to sustainable operations. Everyone else is irrelevant, potential cost savings when we needed them. You are playing a very high stakes short term game for the humble prize of survival... Finance's job was basically to keep the tie fighters off our back, keep the lawyers, bankers, and insurance people away from folks doing the actual work. Customer Service was there to gently wind down relationships with non-critical accounts, in the vague hopes we could come back someday. We were able to give a few people some runway on those teams, moving anyone who wasn't able to hit the street immediately onto those lists to give them a little more time. And your key people are irreplaceable in that world. There's no way someone of equivalent expertise is walking into that mess for what you're able to pay them. At an individual level? We had to invoke our worst endgame due to other issues (deal fell apart); four of the critical five are no longer with the company. Each of them landed with a promotion and a fairly substantial raise elsewhere, often with instructions to "go take their business back". (at that point, it was open season for those accounts; our prior employer was unable to service them) The typical job search for that level of talent is hours / days rather than weeks or months (there is a very specific set of people who will hire them immediately if given the chance) . Any visions of nobility needs to balanced against your obligations to support your spouse and children. You're going to sacrifice your kids future for some random people they never met? Your spouse is cool with that? Get real. (Mine knew what was going to happen; I had "the talk" with her beforehand. We knew my job was going to be eliminated and I couldn't break ranks without screwing my people. But we've both done turnaround work before, so we had a plan to handle it. She's one in a million.) So that's the shit-show you're trying to hold together. Heck, I had a financial model sitting on my laptop to go buy one of my dying brands from the company, once it was very apparent that they weren't able to protect it. At that point, it was basically sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim it...

darkerside 6y ago

Would you agree that those who do more should also get more? You are ignoring production in your ideological framing.

scarface74 6y ago

Do you make minimum wage? Do you give any excess over minimum wage that you earn to charity? The vast majority of us posting here “make more when others are making less”. Even in your own company you probably make 10x more than the lowest paid contract worker who cleans your office after hours.

minitoar 6y ago
This is more like all the contract workers are getting laid off and you give yourself a bonus, then leave the company.
- scarface74 6y ago
  That’s the deal you make as a contract worker. Yes, I’ve been a contract worker. Heck, I have even left a full time job for contract to perm role before knowing that there was a chance I would be let go if the project I was hired to lead wasn’t successful even if through no fault of my own. I negotiated a premium because of that risk. On the other hand, half the issue with being a contractor is that we as a country decided to tie health insurance, workers comp, and unemployment insurance to the company instead of making them universal and state run like every other industrialized country on earth.