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American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough
- delecti 3y agoNon-paywall: https://archive.ph/sGdQ4 https://archive.ph/sGdQ4
- berbec 3y agoThanks for this, but infinite captcha for me.
- metabagel 3y agoWhy does this argument never apply to executive compensation? https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-automaker-ceo-pay-focus-of-union-negotiations-2023-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-automaker-ceo-pay...
- kibwen 3y agoExecutives don't need to be productive, they just need to promulgate the bizarre idea that people higher up in the hierarchy inherently deserve more pay for some reason.
- diogenes4 3y ago[flagged]
- bdowling 3y agoExecutive compensation is a drop in the bucket compared to the total salaries for all the rank-and-file employees. According to your article the average hourly labor cost at GM is $60. Assuming 2,000 hours per year, that is $120,000 per employee. For 92,000 U.S. employees [0], the total is about $11,000,000,000. Another way to look at it: If you distributed the CEO's compensation ($30,000,000) among GM's U.S. employees (92,000 [0]), you'd give each of them about $326. [0] https://www.gm.com/company/usa-operations https://www.gm.com/company/usa-operations
- pfannkuchen 3y agoThis is so often completely ignored and IMO it’s the real reason why executive pay is so high. Companies are willing to bid up executive pay but not worker pay because worker pay comes with a huge multiplier and executive pay doesn’t.
- lordnacho 3y agoAn executive can also completely tank your business in a way that a line worker cannot. So it's still a bit of a paradox why you would pay anyone so much over the odds. How confident can you really be that this one guy you found is going to increase profits by 10%? And if you do find this guy, why isn't there another guy with similar experience offering the same tradeoff?
- Ferret7446 3y agoThat's exactly why they are paid so much. It's more important that they don't fuck things up than "demonstrate productivity".
- lordnacho 3y agoThat's what I'm saying doesn't make any sense. How do you know they won't? Plenty of people have messed up a business, who's to say your guy with pedigree won't?
- Ekaros 3y agoWhy isn't their compensation two directional then? Why not give them both options and have them sell puts that company can exercise. So if company loses 10% of valuation they will pay company some money...
- happytiger 3y agoYou know why.
- 000ooo000 3y ago>Pay is ultimately tied to productivity This must be why CEO pay, relative to worker pay, has increased so much over the last few decades! /s
- berbec 3y agoWell, CEOs are increasing their performance at all important job metrics, at a much faster pace than any unimportant "worker" has done, in all of history. Just look at stock price, dividends and/or executive compensation. They are obviously much more important than the people who actually make the product, provide the service or interact with the customer. For any actually important metric, CEOs add more value to the people who determine what value the CEO adds more than any other part of the business. All hail our true lords, NASDAQ and DJIA. /s
- Animats 3y agoBoeing moved production from Seattle, where they had people with experience building airplanes, to North Charleston, South Carolina, and cut pay. Of course they now have people who don't know what they are doing. There's a more general problem. Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory? Where do you go to learn that? That's a difficult skill, and it helps to have done it a few times as a junior before you're in charge. What happens if you don't know how is that you have to let the people who sell you the machinery set up your factory. This works for simple stuff, like a bakery, which you can buy turnkey. More complex stuff, not so much. Worse, much of the knowledge doesn't transfer. If you know how to design a production line for metal furniture, that may not translate well to batteries. One of the things that auto manufacturers have painfully discovered is that a battery plant is partly a chemical plant, which is not something automakers know much about. Machine design is quite hard, not that many people are good at it, and it pays less than coding webcrap. The US used to have people who were good at this, and most of them were laid off in the 1980s.
- cameldrv 3y agoI've seen people who had never built a factory try to build one, and it did not go well.
- greenyoda 3y ago> Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory? There's a field called "industrial engineering": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering "Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information and equipment. Industrial engineering is central to manufacturing operations." In the university I attended, the engineering school had a degree program for it. Also, I'd presume that depending on what the factory produces, you'd have electrical, chemical, mechanical, aerospace, etc. engineers involved in designing and building the factory.
- inamberclad 3y ago
- diogenes4 3y ago[flagged]
- whateveracct 3y agoPar the course for WSJ
- dang 3y agoOk, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. You may not owe editors who write shit better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- diogenes4 3y agoWhy is this critique not directed at the person who posted this? Why hold comments to a higher standard than the posts?
- dang 3y agoYou broke the site guidelines badly. That explains the moderation reply. Whether someone else also broke the site guidelines isn't really relevant, but in any case the OP of this submission did not break them. I get that you feel the article is bad, but it's hardly against HN's rules to post an article that someone else thinks is bad. If you see what you feel is a bad HN submission, you're welcome to flag it, but not to post low-information/high-indignation putdowns (let alone violence-invoking swipes) which are clearly against HN's rules.
- pseudo0 3y ago> For example, American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank. Just handwaving this aside is ridiculous. Productivity is a function of capital investment in technology. If all the free capital is going into share buybacks, $5 billion in the last year, no wonder productivity is flat. https://www.levernews.com/automakers-hand-billions-to-shareholders-while-stiffing-workers/ https://www.levernews.com/automakers-hand-billions-to-shareh...
- landoftheice 3y ago[dead]
- jjoonathan 3y agoOur macro policy pumps assets and dumps exports. Our manufacturing workers must be more productive in the colloquial sense to be as productive in the economic sense. The headline weaponizes this nuance to read like "our workers are lazy." This is intentional, and it is ugly.
- Animats 3y agoWhenever you encounter an executive who complains they can't get qualified people, ask how many people they have in training classes right now. Large companies used to have large training programs, to go along with a stable workforce, and a good pension plan. A few still do. Yes, after they finish training you have to pay them more.
- aantix 3y agoAgree. Everyone wants the fullstack dev, no one wants to train the junior engineer.
- anotheruser13 3y agoNowadays, it seems that companies don't train or pay for training.
- fzeroracer 3y agoMaybe if companies put time and effort into training and retaining employees they wouldn't be fighting brain and productivity drain. I've seen this happen enough in software companies to know it's already a problem. They want 10x engineers but aren't willing to pay even 2x rates and sure as fuck aren't willing to give them good raises to keep them around. Trying to browbeat labor into being more productive isn't going to work. Unless they really want the return of how unions used to behave a century ago.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwawaysleep 3y agoThe cult of American ignorance doesn’t help as well as the idea of manufacturing as “real” work. Americans sympathize with people who complain that a Mexican took their job rather than telling them that if someone with 4 years of education can do what they do with 12 for 1/8th the pay, they are utterly pathetic.
- dangus 3y agoA Murdoch rag has an anti-worker pro-ownership class article. News at 11. If automotive CEOs don’t want their assembly line employees to demand 40% raises, maybe they shouldn’t take 40% raises themselves. Since they have more than enough money to live on in multiple homes and boats they should have no problem making themselves an example of austerity for their employees.
- sharts 3y agoTypical WSJ hit piece. When capitalist lack critical thinking skills and cry that the rate of their wealth isn’t increasing fast enough, one can be sure WSJ writers will provide soothing words. Even if they are false.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]