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How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? The company is a gian

How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.

carlosjobim 4y ago
> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour. > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.
- malermeister 4y ago
  What you have just described is, in fact, an adversarial relationship. That's what it's called when two groups want the opposite thing.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    That's what's called a deal, a negotiation, business. Two parties come to an agreement that they both accept. You can see it as win-win or lose-lose. People who complain for long time about the company they are working for have something in common with other abuse victims: They never leave. I'm much more concerned about the deals I'm forced into without having ever accepted, such as paying tribute to the rulers.
- thewildginger 4y ago
  A problem with the argument of IT being such a free market right now is the pattern of labor markets. Look at the AI leaps and you have yourself a foreseeable "streamlining" that every other profession of the past has gone through. Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. The pattern is always the same. It's a hot and competitive market until it is captured by automation. Google announced going public with the project to automate programming yesterday! You seriously think the job that is coincidentally useful now will exist forever? Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door. And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. Those jobs were all created by automation.
Natsu 4y ago
> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite. > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits. > Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it. And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers? (those are the conditions that the article describes, not me) Should there be? Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them? Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
  - Natsu 4y ago
    > When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers? Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically. The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper. It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock. But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then. > Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them? All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good. > Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule? You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce? The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking. I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time. Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected. And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that. But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.
WalterBright 4y ago
> How do you square the circle It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand". It's the Law. > impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone else, or start their own company. > Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe working conditions were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. It's no surprise that those went away when productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10 year old could be useful at in a modern company.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  > were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. Wow. just incredible. I've never seen the take that kids working in manufacturing jobs were necessary. Begs the question, necessary for whom?
  - drjasonharrison 4y ago
    Sarcasm: until we had publicly funded schools, what else was the urban working class going to do with their children all day long? Putting them to work made sense in a "making the ends meet" sort of way.
    - MarkMarine 4y ago
      Talking about this stuff really makes people drop their masks. How many children should we use to grease the wheels of capital accumulation? How good is this system if that’s what it requires.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        I recommend you take a tour of a reconstruction of an 1800-era dwelling and have a good hard look at how people lived. I toured Mt Vernon recently (George Washington's estate). He was probably the richest man in America at the time. You and I live better than he did. You seem to think there was all this wealth sloshing around at the time. Nope.

carlosjobim 4y ago

> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour. > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.

malermeister 4y ago
What you have just described is, in fact, an adversarial relationship. That's what it's called when two groups want the opposite thing.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  That's what's called a deal, a negotiation, business. Two parties come to an agreement that they both accept. You can see it as win-win or lose-lose. People who complain for long time about the company they are working for have something in common with other abuse victims: They never leave. I'm much more concerned about the deals I'm forced into without having ever accepted, such as paying tribute to the rulers.
thewildginger 4y ago
A problem with the argument of IT being such a free market right now is the pattern of labor markets. Look at the AI leaps and you have yourself a foreseeable "streamlining" that every other profession of the past has gone through. Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. The pattern is always the same. It's a hot and competitive market until it is captured by automation. Google announced going public with the project to automate programming yesterday! You seriously think the job that is coincidentally useful now will exist forever? Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door. And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. Those jobs were all created by automation.

Natsu 4y ago

> How do you square the circle of management wanting to pay employees the minimum they can for the maximum amount of their employees labor? Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite. > The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits. > Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it. And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.

MarkMarine 4y ago
When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers? (those are the conditions that the article describes, not me) Should there be? Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them? Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
- Natsu 4y ago
  > When the capitalist class colludes to push down wages, make working conditions worse, and do mass layoffs when the company is so profitable that they have so much money they don't even know what to do with it and are therefore buying back stock, are there any laws that protect workers? Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically. The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper. It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock. But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then. > Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them? All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good. > Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule? You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce? The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking. I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time. Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected. And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that. But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.

WalterBright 4y ago

> How do you square the circle It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand". It's the Law. > impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone else, or start their own company. > Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe working conditions were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. It's no surprise that those went away when productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10 year old could be useful at in a modern company.

MarkMarine 4y ago
> were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. Wow. just incredible. I've never seen the take that kids working in manufacturing jobs were necessary. Begs the question, necessary for whom?
- drjasonharrison 4y ago
  Sarcasm: until we had publicly funded schools, what else was the urban working class going to do with their children all day long? Putting them to work made sense in a "making the ends meet" sort of way.
  - MarkMarine 4y ago
    Talking about this stuff really makes people drop their masks. How many children should we use to grease the wheels of capital accumulation? How good is this system if that’s what it requires.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      I recommend you take a tour of a reconstruction of an 1800-era dwelling and have a good hard look at how people lived. I toured Mt Vernon recently (George Washington's estate). He was probably the richest man in America at the time. You and I live better than he did. You seem to think there was all this wealth sloshing around at the time. Nope.