4 ms·

Every corporation has contempt for its workforce, it's why labor unions are so necessary.

dragonwriter 6y ago
Nearly every corporation has naked contempt for its “human resources”, that's why it calls them, and the department responsible for minimizing the cost of exploiting them, “human resources”.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Indeed. It's a bit sad how us human resources often balk at accepting this fact.
Someone1234 6y ago
It varies. Not because some corporations are moral, but because happy workers are a good long-term strategy and many corporations are stuck with rolling short-term-ism. They reward the top tier on a three-ish year cycle, so executives only need to make the numbers go up for three years before exiting with a higher paying job and compensation via stock sales. The US has a massive issue in general with rolling corporate pump & dump. The whole stock market basically encourages it. That's why we see things like customer retention strategies that actually reduce re-subscriptions and hurt the long term reputations remaining popular (because the short term matters more to executives than the long term, even if the company burns down after they leave).
- willcipriano 6y ago
  "I'll be gone, you'll be gone"[0] [0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG
- minikites 6y ago
  >happy workers are a good long-term strategy I always see this cited as a reason but it so rarely happens that it might as well be a Horatio Alger fable. It's not instructive or useful in our current reality and it would be like taking lessons from the workplace successes of Santa's elves.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    Contrast Walmart and Costco, in terms of employee happiness and turnover.
    - minikites 6y ago
      >As of February 2021 Walmart has a market cap of $374.31 B >As of February 2021 Costco has a market cap of $148.54 B https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-sinks-as-pay-raise-plan-is-panned-by-wall-street-2017-04-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-si... >“We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups,” Baker wrote in a note to clients. Treating employees well is punished by the market and neither Costco or American Airlines treat them particularly well, just less terribly than their competitors. A company necessarily has to treat its employees like shit in order to succeed.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    It depends on where in the world you are, what kind of work the company does, etc. It even depends on where within a country the company has its principal activity. Of course it is not necessarily the case that what works here in Norway would work in the US even if the legal framework were changed to support it.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  It varies because different industries and corporations have different power relationships with their employees and potential employees. If you work in tech, for example, then your statement of 'happy workers are a good long-term strategy' might be generally true, and you will work harder to retain talent both because supply of people who have the required skills is below demand and both losing an employee and taking a new one on is expensive due to the value of the institutional knowledge they hold. These workers hold a lot of power over their employer (both individually and as a whole), and they know it, so they can demand good compensation and treatment and get it. However a corporation which has a large amount of jobs which require little skill or job-specific training but a lot of effort may actually find the opposite is a good long-term strategy: they have a vast supply of potential employees and hiring and firing is cheap so they can work their employees hard to the point of burn-out and then fire and rehire the next batch. These workers have basically no power over their employer individually. Unions are effectively a way for these workers to exercise some power over their employer as a collective, to get what some workers essentially have automatically due to the labour market in which they work.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Amazon has particular contempt. It's not limited to the floor workers; engineers get punted if they look like they may be more short-term trouble than they're worth. Contrast with a company like Google, that goes out of its way to hire the best they can and then retain them under the belief that an engineer invested in pays dividends down the road. Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Nearly every corporation has naked contempt for its “human resources”, that's why it calls them, and the department responsible for minimizing the cost of exploiting them, “human resources”.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Indeed. It's a bit sad how us human resources often balk at accepting this fact.

Someone1234 6y ago

It varies. Not because some corporations are moral, but because happy workers are a good long-term strategy and many corporations are stuck with rolling short-term-ism. They reward the top tier on a three-ish year cycle, so executives only need to make the numbers go up for three years before exiting with a higher paying job and compensation via stock sales. The US has a massive issue in general with rolling corporate pump & dump. The whole stock market basically encourages it. That's why we see things like customer retention strategies that actually reduce re-subscriptions and hurt the long term reputations remaining popular (because the short term matters more to executives than the long term, even if the company burns down after they leave).

willcipriano 6y ago
"I'll be gone, you'll be gone"[0] [0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/IBGYBG
minikites 6y ago
>happy workers are a good long-term strategy I always see this cited as a reason but it so rarely happens that it might as well be a Horatio Alger fable. It's not instructive or useful in our current reality and it would be like taking lessons from the workplace successes of Santa's elves.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  Contrast Walmart and Costco, in terms of employee happiness and turnover.
  - minikites 6y ago
    >As of February 2021 Walmart has a market cap of $374.31 B >As of February 2021 Costco has a market cap of $148.54 B https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-sinks-as-pay-raise-plan-is-panned-by-wall-street-2017-04-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/american-airlines-stock-si... >“We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups,” Baker wrote in a note to clients. Treating employees well is punished by the market and neither Costco or American Airlines treat them particularly well, just less terribly than their competitors. A company necessarily has to treat its employees like shit in order to succeed.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  It depends on where in the world you are, what kind of work the company does, etc. It even depends on where within a country the company has its principal activity. Of course it is not necessarily the case that what works here in Norway would work in the US even if the legal framework were changed to support it.
rcxdude 6y ago
It varies because different industries and corporations have different power relationships with their employees and potential employees. If you work in tech, for example, then your statement of 'happy workers are a good long-term strategy' might be generally true, and you will work harder to retain talent both because supply of people who have the required skills is below demand and both losing an employee and taking a new one on is expensive due to the value of the institutional knowledge they hold. These workers hold a lot of power over their employer (both individually and as a whole), and they know it, so they can demand good compensation and treatment and get it. However a corporation which has a large amount of jobs which require little skill or job-specific training but a lot of effort may actually find the opposite is a good long-term strategy: they have a vast supply of potential employees and hiring and firing is cheap so they can work their employees hard to the point of burn-out and then fire and rehire the next batch. These workers have basically no power over their employer individually. Unions are effectively a way for these workers to exercise some power over their employer as a collective, to get what some workers essentially have automatically due to the labour market in which they work.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Amazon has particular contempt. It's not limited to the floor workers; engineers get punted if they look like they may be more short-term trouble than they're worth. Contrast with a company like Google, that goes out of its way to hire the best they can and then retain them under the belief that an engineer invested in pays dividends down the road. Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611