17 ms·

This, and similar moans, really misses the point. Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions: * Employers want to essenti

This, and similar moans, really misses the point. Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions: * Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. * Employees, and the society made up of employees, want stability, employment rights etc. as salary work is a backbone of societal stability. Employers will happily pay the lowest amount of salary that will convince someone to work for them - COL being a key consideration. Employees will negotiate on the basis of the value they bring, but in principle, there is no moral obligation for employers to pay a wage that's fair, based on the value of the employee work, perhaps above ~subsistence levels. How it works out, we'll see. Perhaps societies agree that strong-arming employers to pay equal salaries, regardless of location, will work - that's how unions, weekends and paid holidays came to be in the developed world (sorry Americans). But neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract, negotiated between labour takes and makers. For a different take, should it also be unfair for someone qualified, living in a lower cost-of-living location, to offer their employment to the same company for less? This seems like normal salary negotiation to me.

ForHackernews 6y ago
> neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract This seems like a purely semantic distinction to me. Unless you're religious and believe that humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" then everything you're claiming as a 'right' is just some generally-agreed social principle that your ancestors fought hard to establish.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  There's a secular right and wrong too. It's not that murder is OK, with a fee of life sentence. It is wrong and should never be done, and backed up by legal penalties.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    Not really true, as many people support murder by the state in retaliation for heinous crimes including other murders. Two wrongs do not inherently make a right, and our belief that murder is bad is very much a holdover from our religious roots.
beaunative 6y ago
employment is an actual contract, not just social.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  right, but what underpins the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants. Like democracy - it is literally a contract, written in laws. And yet it is also a social contract.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants. Until "the board" steps in and says 'no', right? That's been my experience. Proclamations and cheerleading about "we're a meritocracy, we act democratically in this company". Times get tough (like a Global pandemic coming along), employees ask firm questions like "will the executives taking a pay cut like the rest of us?" Response: "the board said no" "We're all in this together"; "The board won't approve it." "Burnout is real! Take steps to monitor it";"The board won't approve a 4 day work week" etc. I've been in some VERY heated and passionately argued meetings in the last month as a leader, hearing my cohort leaders giving voice and in some cases giving voice myself to concerns and frustrations coming from a workforce that is growing pretty pessimistic watching how much of the internal corporate cheerleading and messaging in practice is at odds with corporate rhetoric that have manifested during our extended org-wide WFH. Wonder if anyone else has observed the same.
    - rich_sasha 6y ago
      So as I see it, the society leaves most of an employment contract up to the firm-employee combo (where the firm has the upper hand). But some fundamental things are not up to the company, at least by law: can't discriminate by gender, race, age, veteran status, marital status, having children and so on. In Europe, like it or not, you must give your employees paid holiday leave, sick leave and time off to look after children. If firing people, you must give them proper notice, and cannot fire people for a long list of reasons considered illegal. If doing group redundancies, you must follow proper procedure, aiming to maximise the fairness of the approach.
ajuc 6y ago
> there is no moral obligation for employers to pay a wage that's fair, based on the value of the employee work, perhaps above ~subsistence levels. is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired? It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people but not from companies made of these people. Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.
- jhowell 6y ago
  > Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks. Look at many of the products we make together. Why would we hide behind laws that protect bad practices and think those same companies take a moral high ground on this issue. It is, and always will be, due in part to fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, about the money.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Funny how Target and Costco are still in business, since they're both public and pay living wages to their employees. The duty of a business is to keep the business healthy. This whole "profit at any cost" is a fairly new development.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Yeah, Milton Freidman has a lot to answer for.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  > It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh.
  - 6y ago
pydry 6y ago
On the one hand lying about your location to an employer seems sketchy. On the other hand COL adjusted pay seems pretty much equally sketchy. Employers trying to adjust salaries based upon COL really isn't much different to printer manufacturers software disabling printers and selling them at a cheaper price. It's an attempt at price differentiation - in the opposite direction.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  Yes, agreed, that's a sticking point. I'm objecting to the critique of COL-adjustments on moral grounds: that it is wrong, according to some metric, to pay people differently, based on where they work remotely from. I don't think it is wrong. Maybe impractical, and maybe we agree it's a nuisance, and as workers can force the employers to reject that. But fundamentally fits in with what employment is.
- jhowell 6y ago
  When employers ask employees where they live, they may already know the answer and ask only to indirectly answer others questions. I would think what is documented and certified when filing taxes will be important, perhaps retroactively. Jobs and new software tools may pop up to help companies better understand their geographically distributed workforce from an accounting perspective. Employees with legal challenges (past or present) have the potential to reduce productivity.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  If your employer required you to move to a location with a higher cost of living, would you not expect to be compensated for that? i.e. is it only downward adjustments for COL that you object to? and, if so, what's the logic in that (other than pure self-interest)?
  - nemacol 6y ago
    I think the "requirement" part is a sticking point. If I chose to move from my small house in WV to a condo in Pitt, i would not expect my employer to pay me more because of my choice. If they required me to move to Pitt or I lose my job, I would expect some compensation. Likewise, if I take a job and get X salary for that job, then move to a cheaper part of town I wouldn't expect to take a pay cut.
jacknews 6y ago
In other fields, these kinds of paradoxes often indicate that a system is broken, or is not applicable. Perhaps free markets are not really the right system to apply when managing human resources, and especially to distributing the fruits of our collective efforts.
dv_dt 6y ago
I think the only way that balance changes is within a worker cooperative. It’s odd to me that there aren’t more tech based cooperatives as the entry cost seems so much lower than many other businesses. But I also suppose the opportunity costs may also be higher.
enriquto 6y ago
> Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. This is true, but there's more to it. Employers typically make a product and they still need to sell it to somebody who is not a poor monkey. Employers also need a safe social environment so that their offices do not get burn by the angry masses, and if the factory takes fire they expect the firefighters to show up. Thus, employers have a real interest in living in a safe world full of happy, well-paid people.
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  If only they realized this.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Of course they do. That's the whole point of expelling poor people from where they live. Who doesn't seem to know that are the employees, who prefer to trample on each other instead of (gasp!) force a collective negotiation.
grumple 6y ago
Your strategies are those that optimize for jobs a monkey to do: "I need someone to flip this burger or turn this wrench". Paying for cheap labor, you get cheap results. I've seen this time and again across many different industries. When it comes to knowledge / skill based work, the high end of the spectrum is a multiple of value over the low end. Sometimes that's 1.5x, sometimes it's 10x, sometimes it's 100+x. It doesn't matter how many scientists you hired if you didn't hire the first one (or one of the first ones) to create a working and marketable COVID vaccine, for example. It doesn't matter how many engineers you hired at 50k/year if you didn't hire the guy for 2 million / year that finally got self-driving cars working. At a less extreme scale, it doesn't matter how many junior devs you hire to do the work if one senior dev could have done it faster and with less headaches, which happens all the time in tech. On a daily basis, in my experience at multiple tech jobs. And let's also remember that market salaries selects for talent before the talent is even there; today's smartest students that want a paycheck go for tech careers (and some other fields). If tech stops paying well, those people go into other fields, and you don't even get the option to hire that 10xer because they don't exist. If you stop paying well but your competitors continue to pay top dollar, your competitors will leave you in the dust.
suyash 6y ago
This is a good definition based on how Capitalism works.

ForHackernews 6y ago

> neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract This seems like a purely semantic distinction to me. Unless you're religious and believe that humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" then everything you're claiming as a 'right' is just some generally-agreed social principle that your ancestors fought hard to establish.

rich_sasha 6y ago
There's a secular right and wrong too. It's not that murder is OK, with a fee of life sentence. It is wrong and should never be done, and backed up by legal penalties.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Not really true, as many people support murder by the state in retaliation for heinous crimes including other murders. Two wrongs do not inherently make a right, and our belief that murder is bad is very much a holdover from our religious roots.

beaunative 6y ago

employment is an actual contract, not just social.

rich_sasha 6y ago
right, but what underpins the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants. Like democracy - it is literally a contract, written in laws. And yet it is also a social contract.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants. Until "the board" steps in and says 'no', right? That's been my experience. Proclamations and cheerleading about "we're a meritocracy, we act democratically in this company". Times get tough (like a Global pandemic coming along), employees ask firm questions like "will the executives taking a pay cut like the rest of us?" Response: "the board said no" "We're all in this together"; "The board won't approve it." "Burnout is real! Take steps to monitor it";"The board won't approve a 4 day work week" etc. I've been in some VERY heated and passionately argued meetings in the last month as a leader, hearing my cohort leaders giving voice and in some cases giving voice myself to concerns and frustrations coming from a workforce that is growing pretty pessimistic watching how much of the internal corporate cheerleading and messaging in practice is at odds with corporate rhetoric that have manifested during our extended org-wide WFH. Wonder if anyone else has observed the same.
  - rich_sasha 6y ago
    So as I see it, the society leaves most of an employment contract up to the firm-employee combo (where the firm has the upper hand). But some fundamental things are not up to the company, at least by law: can't discriminate by gender, race, age, veteran status, marital status, having children and so on. In Europe, like it or not, you must give your employees paid holiday leave, sick leave and time off to look after children. If firing people, you must give them proper notice, and cannot fire people for a long list of reasons considered illegal. If doing group redundancies, you must follow proper procedure, aiming to maximise the fairness of the approach.

ajuc 6y ago

> there is no moral obligation for employers to pay a wage that's fair, based on the value of the employee work, perhaps above ~subsistence levels. is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired? It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people but not from companies made of these people. Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.

jhowell 6y ago
> Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks. Look at many of the products we make together. Why would we hide behind laws that protect bad practices and think those same companies take a moral high ground on this issue. It is, and always will be, due in part to fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, about the money.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Funny how Target and Costco are still in business, since they're both public and pay living wages to their employees. The duty of a business is to keep the business healthy. This whole "profit at any cost" is a fairly new development.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Yeah, Milton Freidman has a lot to answer for.
joelbluminator 6y ago
> It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh.
- 6y ago

pydry 6y ago

On the one hand lying about your location to an employer seems sketchy. On the other hand COL adjusted pay seems pretty much equally sketchy. Employers trying to adjust salaries based upon COL really isn't much different to printer manufacturers software disabling printers and selling them at a cheaper price. It's an attempt at price differentiation - in the opposite direction.

rich_sasha 6y ago
Yes, agreed, that's a sticking point. I'm objecting to the critique of COL-adjustments on moral grounds: that it is wrong, according to some metric, to pay people differently, based on where they work remotely from. I don't think it is wrong. Maybe impractical, and maybe we agree it's a nuisance, and as workers can force the employers to reject that. But fundamentally fits in with what employment is.
jhowell 6y ago
When employers ask employees where they live, they may already know the answer and ask only to indirectly answer others questions. I would think what is documented and certified when filing taxes will be important, perhaps retroactively. Jobs and new software tools may pop up to help companies better understand their geographically distributed workforce from an accounting perspective. Employees with legal challenges (past or present) have the potential to reduce productivity.
NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
If your employer required you to move to a location with a higher cost of living, would you not expect to be compensated for that? i.e. is it only downward adjustments for COL that you object to? and, if so, what's the logic in that (other than pure self-interest)?
- nemacol 6y ago
  I think the "requirement" part is a sticking point. If I chose to move from my small house in WV to a condo in Pitt, i would not expect my employer to pay me more because of my choice. If they required me to move to Pitt or I lose my job, I would expect some compensation. Likewise, if I take a job and get X salary for that job, then move to a cheaper part of town I wouldn't expect to take a pay cut.

jacknews 6y ago

In other fields, these kinds of paradoxes often indicate that a system is broken, or is not applicable. Perhaps free markets are not really the right system to apply when managing human resources, and especially to distributing the fruits of our collective efforts.

dv_dt 6y ago

I think the only way that balance changes is within a worker cooperative. It’s odd to me that there aren’t more tech based cooperatives as the entry cost seems so much lower than many other businesses. But I also suppose the opportunity costs may also be higher.

enriquto 6y ago

> Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. This is true, but there's more to it. Employers typically make a product and they still need to sell it to somebody who is not a poor monkey. Employers also need a safe social environment so that their offices do not get burn by the angry masses, and if the factory takes fire they expect the firefighters to show up. Thus, employers have a real interest in living in a safe world full of happy, well-paid people.

i_haz_rabies 6y ago
If only they realized this.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Of course they do. That's the whole point of expelling poor people from where they live. Who doesn't seem to know that are the employees, who prefer to trample on each other instead of (gasp!) force a collective negotiation.

grumple 6y ago

Your strategies are those that optimize for jobs a monkey to do: "I need someone to flip this burger or turn this wrench". Paying for cheap labor, you get cheap results. I've seen this time and again across many different industries. When it comes to knowledge / skill based work, the high end of the spectrum is a multiple of value over the low end. Sometimes that's 1.5x, sometimes it's 10x, sometimes it's 100+x. It doesn't matter how many scientists you hired if you didn't hire the first one (or one of the first ones) to create a working and marketable COVID vaccine, for example. It doesn't matter how many engineers you hired at 50k/year if you didn't hire the guy for 2 million / year that finally got self-driving cars working. At a less extreme scale, it doesn't matter how many junior devs you hire to do the work if one senior dev could have done it faster and with less headaches, which happens all the time in tech. On a daily basis, in my experience at multiple tech jobs. And let's also remember that market salaries selects for talent before the talent is even there; today's smartest students that want a paycheck go for tech careers (and some other fields). If tech stops paying well, those people go into other fields, and you don't even get the option to hire that 10xer because they don't exist. If you stop paying well but your competitors continue to pay top dollar, your competitors will leave you in the dust.

suyash 6y ago

This is a good definition based on how Capitalism works.