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I don't see this addressed in the article, but maybe Canadian working culture is different than the US: Wouldn't this create a perverse incentive for companies

I don't see this addressed in the article, but maybe Canadian working culture is different than the US: Wouldn't this create a perverse incentive for companies to continue the trend of eliminating their lowest-wage employees from the books, either via contractors or automation?

tilne 3y ago
We already have that. Why not at least help the higher wage employees get paid?
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
No it incentivizes increasing the wage of the lowest paid worker. Or coop is 9:1 ratio between highest to lowest So if you want to suggest we increase CEO pay to 1M then helper pay would go up to 111,000 which would be great but generally hard to justify.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Assuming a roughly continuous distribution, unless >50% of workers earn the lowest wage, increasing the wage of the lowest-paid worker will do nothing to affect the wage of the median worker, and thus nothing to change the ratio in question. On the other hand, no longer employing the lowest-paid workers will move the median point up the pay scale.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Not sure how you got there. The ratio is between highest and lowest paid, not median. So you’re measuring something I’m not interested in targeting for this particular protocol There’s no downside to anyone other than someone wanting outsized pay at the maximum pay level Further, it’s anyone paid by the cooperative for work. So “outsourcing” doesn’t offer a workaround as it’s a contractual agreement that sets a labor wage-price during the contract negotiation.
    - InitialLastName 3y ago
      > Not sure how you got there. The ratio is between highest and lowest paid, not median. So you’re measuring something I’m not interested in targeting for this particular protocol From TFA (emphasis mine): > The plan would raise the corporate income tax on a sliding scale, depending on the ratio between the pay of a company's CEO and the median pay of the company's workers.
    - gruez 3y ago
      >Further, it’s anyone paid by the cooperative for work. So “outsourcing” doesn’t offer a workaround as it’s a contractual agreement that sets a labor wage-price during the contract negotiation. That's straightforward to enforce if you're hiring a consultant for $500/hr, but what about a consumer electronics company (think Apple) that decides to outsource all of their low paid manufacturing to a contract manufacturer? Or for a tech company to outsource all of their catering and janitorial services to a third party? In both those cases, the exact contract doesn't contain anything resembling an hourly rate. You could argue that wages of the employees that the contractor hires can be used, but that can quickly get out of hand. If Tesla is getting its lithium from a third world mine, and that mine is paying its workers $0.5/hr, should that be used as the "lowest paid" figure?
      - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        > If Tesla is getting its lithium from a third world mine, and that mine is paying its workers $0.5/hr, should that be used as the "lowest paid" figure? Yeah it should That is exactly the point, to rebalance the power and wealth equation so that we don’t have these extreme disparities
        gruez 3y ago
        >That is exactly the point, to rebalance the power and wealth equation so that we don’t have these extreme disparities Okay, but what about software firms that only hire highly paid programmers? They'll be allowed to paid their CEOs orders of magnitude higher salary because... ? Why should a CEO's compensation be kneecapped because the company ventured into manufacturing?
ledauphin 3y ago
the irony with this (as with all such laws) is that all you have to do is ask a mathematician to give you a function that is maximally un-manipulatable in this way, and the law would immediately be much harder to game. but instead we insist on writing all our laws as though the only tools available to us are +-÷×, and people who recall middle school math can find ways to game them.
- lazide 3y ago
  This has nothing to do with fixing the stated problem, and everything to do with pretending to fix the problem while getting paid. If you assume that may be true, it makes a lot more sense IMO.
  - ledauphin 3y ago
    this is a very fair point which sadly just redoubles my disappointment with the vast majority of the newer laws I hear about.
    - lazide 3y ago
      The real mind fuck for me was figuring out that this has been true for the vast majority of laws since we ran out of obvious stuff that needing banning like murder. It would cause some shifts, the obvious abusive cases would likely move on to something more subtle (if they could pivot in time) or get snuffed. But it wouldn’t be long before another hole would be found, and it would be even more convoluted and hard to detect next time.
LegitShady 3y ago
You're reading about the efforts of the third place political party's leader to get attention so people remember he exists, since politically all he does is prop up the existing minority Liberal government. This is purely for the headlines/clicks so people remember he's there and so he can pretend he does something.

tilne 3y ago

We already have that. Why not at least help the higher wage employees get paid?

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

No it incentivizes increasing the wage of the lowest paid worker. Or coop is 9:1 ratio between highest to lowest So if you want to suggest we increase CEO pay to 1M then helper pay would go up to 111,000 which would be great but generally hard to justify.

InitialLastName 3y ago
Assuming a roughly continuous distribution, unless >50% of workers earn the lowest wage, increasing the wage of the lowest-paid worker will do nothing to affect the wage of the median worker, and thus nothing to change the ratio in question. On the other hand, no longer employing the lowest-paid workers will move the median point up the pay scale.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Not sure how you got there. The ratio is between highest and lowest paid, not median. So you’re measuring something I’m not interested in targeting for this particular protocol There’s no downside to anyone other than someone wanting outsized pay at the maximum pay level Further, it’s anyone paid by the cooperative for work. So “outsourcing” doesn’t offer a workaround as it’s a contractual agreement that sets a labor wage-price during the contract negotiation.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    > Not sure how you got there. The ratio is between highest and lowest paid, not median. So you’re measuring something I’m not interested in targeting for this particular protocol From TFA (emphasis mine): > The plan would raise the corporate income tax on a sliding scale, depending on the ratio between the pay of a company's CEO and the median pay of the company's workers.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Further, it’s anyone paid by the cooperative for work. So “outsourcing” doesn’t offer a workaround as it’s a contractual agreement that sets a labor wage-price during the contract negotiation. That's straightforward to enforce if you're hiring a consultant for $500/hr, but what about a consumer electronics company (think Apple) that decides to outsource all of their low paid manufacturing to a contract manufacturer? Or for a tech company to outsource all of their catering and janitorial services to a third party? In both those cases, the exact contract doesn't contain anything resembling an hourly rate. You could argue that wages of the employees that the contractor hires can be used, but that can quickly get out of hand. If Tesla is getting its lithium from a third world mine, and that mine is paying its workers $0.5/hr, should that be used as the "lowest paid" figure?
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      > If Tesla is getting its lithium from a third world mine, and that mine is paying its workers $0.5/hr, should that be used as the "lowest paid" figure? Yeah it should That is exactly the point, to rebalance the power and wealth equation so that we don’t have these extreme disparities
      - gruez 3y ago
        >That is exactly the point, to rebalance the power and wealth equation so that we don’t have these extreme disparities Okay, but what about software firms that only hire highly paid programmers? They'll be allowed to paid their CEOs orders of magnitude higher salary because... ? Why should a CEO's compensation be kneecapped because the company ventured into manufacturing?

ledauphin 3y ago

the irony with this (as with all such laws) is that all you have to do is ask a mathematician to give you a function that is maximally un-manipulatable in this way, and the law would immediately be much harder to game. but instead we insist on writing all our laws as though the only tools available to us are +-÷×, and people who recall middle school math can find ways to game them.

lazide 3y ago
This has nothing to do with fixing the stated problem, and everything to do with pretending to fix the problem while getting paid. If you assume that may be true, it makes a lot more sense IMO.
- ledauphin 3y ago
  this is a very fair point which sadly just redoubles my disappointment with the vast majority of the newer laws I hear about.
  - lazide 3y ago
    The real mind fuck for me was figuring out that this has been true for the vast majority of laws since we ran out of obvious stuff that needing banning like murder. It would cause some shifts, the obvious abusive cases would likely move on to something more subtle (if they could pivot in time) or get snuffed. But it wouldn’t be long before another hole would be found, and it would be even more convoluted and hard to detect next time.

LegitShady 3y ago

You're reading about the efforts of the third place political party's leader to get attention so people remember he exists, since politically all he does is prop up the existing minority Liberal government. This is purely for the headlines/clicks so people remember he's there and so he can pretend he does something.