Soda for Food StampsFollow

No labor cost is based on what the company deems is worth paying based on profit margins. It has very little to what the product being provided is. If that were the case I can think of a lot of Blu Collar jobs that by your definition should be earning millions a year, not 10's of thousands. For example a Car my company builds sells for 45K we produce 200 per shift, so about 600 a day. Assuming nothing goes wrong in the line. We have 2 shutdown periods of 2 weeks each meaning we produce about 130,000 thousand vehicles per year, which is worth about 5.85 Billion per year. Our plant has a staff that makes on average (including benefits) 30$/hr over 400 people, and temp service for 14$/hr no benefits of about 300 people. So our labor cost is about 32 million for the year. Or about half a percent of total profits.

To put a comparison to other cost of the company, it costs us a little under a bil a year for the pre assembled parts (largely from China and Korea being slammed into American Vehicles.) and a little over half a bil to store our product. (both finished and raw). The company made over 2 bil in proftis, shareholders held a party...we weren't invited, and to save costs they even took our company sponsored parties away. My bonus this year was a 1000 dollar cheque (about a weeks worth of my wages).

If you honestly believe that pay is based on product value you are more ignorant to reality than I thought.

And this is why Romney didn't win his election. Top down economics do not work they never have, and they never will. Sadly they have plagued our economic systems in NA (thanks @#%^s), to the point where it is inescapable. More and more jobs go over sees because it is cheaper to operate. Which means more profits. More companies close up here because people don't have money to buy sh*t. In order to keep making sh*t for people to buy, even if they are not (hello auto market) they move to cheaper labor markets.

Labor markets here are saturated with greedy indexing. Raise the price on consumer goods, people will spend more money, people spend more money, more profits, more over sees investment (tax free yo!) more profits. Your country is an economic husk, because free market capitalism is a failure proven twice now ('29/'08)...the greatest pyramid scheme ever devised.

Socialism baby, its the only way. We the people should control our sh*t, not a group of death panel investors.



Edited, Jan 23rd 2013 11:42pm by rdmcandie

LOL you are a blithering moron. Cost of living has increased much more than the average pay. These products that "dictate" the wages people make have gone up in price...pay has not. We went over this a few weeks back when you claimed that on average Americans were making more money than they were a decade ago...when they are making the same as they were 10 years ago and cost of living has gone up some 25%.

Sadly the only way to equalize pay in the workforce is to mandate profit sharing within a company. Meaning all profits are shared among every person involved in the company equally. So little Joe Blow doesn't get a 500 dollar Christmas bonus for doing all the work, while the Monopoly Man sits back and collects his 500K bonus for sitting on his pompous pig *** signing agreements to have Joes job moved to Mexico where Juan Gomez can be paid half Joes wage, and doesn't get a Christmas bonus.

But that is too @#%^ing communist even for me. But it is a lot better than the current system of Rich Pig making all the choices depending on what his fat @#%^ing off shore wallet says.

God dammit you are stupid.

But hey lets keep rewarding the fat pigs for moving jobs to other countries, while they retain the profits, tax free in foreign tax havens, milking the money back through Investments that they pay a fraction of the national income taxes on.



Edited, Jan 24th 2013 11:24pm by rdmcandie

One way to achieve fairness (and motivation!) to workers is to give workers shares in the company as part of their pay packet . You don't socialise or communise the company by giving the entire company to the workers, but you make all of them - even the cleaners - very modest stockholders in the place. As minority stockholders each worker would get a modest but real dividend that theoretically gets bigger if the company as a whole is more productive and successful. These would be real shares. After a worker leaves they would be able to hold onto their share (meaning that the long term health of the company is in their best interests), or sell the shares.

A prominent economist once made the very same argument sometime in the 80's or 90's. The executive boards enthusiastically misinterpreted his firm suggestion to mean that the executive board employees in public companies should be assigned shares in a company, thusly that theoretically well performing boards would be rewarded by the capital gains of their shares or share options.

I think a reasonable division would be 10% total of the issued shares being held by the entire workforce of that company. I realise that this system would require frequent share issues: probably once every year or two, with a public offering included to keep the balance at 10% employees-90% public shareholders. But I think the gains to productivity would be well worth the paperwork.

So basically, something like what New Belgium did as they became 100% employee owned a couple weeks ago. Although the employees held a 41% share before that.

Is it the majority? Not even ******* close.

It's the vast, vast, vast, vast majority measured in any significant way. If you measure it comparing me to IBM, then maybe not, but that's a moronic way to measure it.

Again, that's you misunderstanding the data. I tried to explain where you went wrong, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.



Why is equalizing pay an important objective though? Should the guy who works the fryolator at McDonalds get the same pay as the guy with the PhD who's busy discovering a cure for cancer? No? Then "equalizing pay" is the wrong objective.



Except that the guy who designs the product has a greater contribution to those profits than the guy who pushes the "go" button on the machine that builds that design, and both of them have more contribution than the guy who empties the trash cans. Trying to insist that everyone should get an equal share of the result is a moronic idea. Unless your objective is to transform our industry into a bunch of people emptying trash that is. I keep pointing this out (in many many threads): You cannot discount the fact that the worker is also greedy. He wants to earn the most money while doing the least work. That's the counter to the greed of the employer. If I get the same share of profits whether I sit on my butt doing nothing or if I come up with brilliant solutions to profit altering problems, why should I spend the effort? On a more macro scale, why should a student bother to spend time/money/effort obtaining a degree if he's going to make the same money emptying trash cans as he will designing products?

What you're proposing is completely unworkable. Top to bottom.



If Monopoly Man's actions affected the bottom line profits of the company 1000 times more than Joe Blow, then he absolutely should get a bonus that's 1000 times larger. I know that this is hard for some people to grasp, but different people's jobs actually have different real value added to the output of a business. If I write a simple shell script that reduces the fuse time of our parts from 18 seconds per part to 9 seconds per part, and thus halves the amount of production time for a given run of parts (we're talking tens of millions of dollars here btw, and this is a real story), shouldn't my contribution be considered as vastly more important than the guy who loads the trays of parts into a machine and pushes a button? I mean, without him, my work wont matter (cause someone has to push the button, right?), but ultimately one of us can be replace far more easily, and one of us can't. Anyone can push a button. A much smaller set of people can be handed a programming problem that's affecting production times and solve it in a fast and efficient manner.

Different people and different jobs *must* be paid different salaries. Otherwise the whole system falls apart. And while this may seem "unfair" when viewed in an exceptionally simplistic way, it not only isn't, but it's the best and most fair way to do things.



Yeah. Let's not repeat half baked myths and misunderstandings about how finances work though. Cause that would be crazy!

Edited, Jan 25th 2013 5:51pm by gbaji

I think you'd be surprised how many publicly traded companies do exactly this.



While I'm sure a small handful of companies did what you say, most provide shares/options as part of bonus pay at nearly all levels of employment. While purely anecdotal, everyone I've ever known in my life who worked (full time) at a publicly traded company received some form of stock as part of their bonuses. I've always found it interesting just how wrong most people who don't work in large corporations are about how those corporations treat their employees.

Interestingly enough, the big businesses least likely to provide stock options to employees are not the free market ones, but the ones most burdened by labor union workforces. The unions don't want shares as compensation apparently. Not sure why exactly, but I suspect it's because they don't want their members to actually have a vested interest in the success of the company. Makes for a conflict of interest if your entire organization requires an "us vs them" mentality among the workforce. I suspect most people's perceptions of "evil big corporations" involve exactly those businesses engaged in industries with a heavy union presence, and I don't think this is accidental. I'd assume that if we asked for examples of mean companies not compensating their employees fairly, we'd get a list of car companies, oil companies, steel/mining companies, etc. Probably not a whole lot of computer companies, or software companies, or investment/banking companies, would be on that list.

Should make one wonder where the labor market problem really is.



Yup. Again, many companies do this already. I don't know if 10% is an accurate number, but the principle is absolutely in practice in the industry. It's odd to me that so many people think it should be, but isn't. And yes, I absolutely agree that this is a great way for the workers to share in the profits of the company they work for. Also, most companies have some form of employee stock purchase plan in which they'll automatically deduct a percentage of the workers pay (chosen by the worker) and use it to buy shares in the company. Some people choose to avail themselves of this, and some don't. Also, even if your company isn't publicly traded, or has such a program in place, there is absolutely nothing at all preventing any worker from setting aside a percentage of their earnings and investing it themselves. If you do this and get used to it, you wont miss the money, and you're building your own future. But again, many people will sit there and complain about the rich investors making bank on the profits of evil business, while they get nothing, when they had every opportunity to get the exact same return on investment if they only made a choice to do so.


I guess I just don't understand why someone would rather tear down those who take risks and reap good fortune because of it instead of taking the same risk themselves. Is it jealousy? Lack of understanding of the process? I mean, if making money on investments is such an unfairly automatic thing, then why aren't they investing themselves? Why not take advantage of the same means of lifting yourself up instead of attacking others who do make that choice? Again, I honestly don't get this.

Edited, Jan 25th 2013 6:13pm by gbaji

I was talking about the concept of "equalizing pay" in general with that part of my response. You would have a great point if I'd completely ignored the issue of different pay levels within the same business. But since I did respond to that exact aspect of the issue in the next part of my response, you kinda don't.

Why not respond to the part where I addressed exactly that which you were talking about?

No you did ignore it that is why I laughed. You just compared 2 completely different organizations and lumped them into the same pay scale. Profit Sharing does not flow between two companies. McDonalds has its profits, Big Pharm Cancer Research has its.

Frycook gets a share of McDonalds Profits, Cancer dude gets his share from his big Pharm Corp. Its not equal pay. It is equal distribution of the profits of the company. You know after Joe collects his yearly pay, and After Corporate pig collects his yearly pay.

Instead of Corporate Pig stashing the remaining 2 billion into investors off shore accounts. Everyone in the company gets a share of that 2Billion, because well they all ******* worked for it together. Its why its called profit sharing.

As for addressing what I was talking about... you aren't anywhere close to what I was talking about. You seem to have this misconception that Profit Shares = Paychecks. You are again not understanding what you are discussing. If R&D guy makes more money big deal, at least at the end of the year The guy who actually puts the product together, gets the same slice of the pie for his product.

This Profit at the end of the year is the perceived valuation of his labor in the market. You keep claiming that this is how it works...but it doesn't The guy who pushes the Go button, he doesn't get his share of the valutation of a product, because he doesn't get a slice of the profits. (granted some companies do this. Like Magna International, which is why people like it and don't let unions in).

I mean **** why do you always need your hand held. A simple google could tell you what profit sharing is.

Go learn something for a change

As a former worker of McDonalds and a student of science, I object to the idea of equalizing the pay between the two. The relevance of the hours worked heavily outweighs the hours worked. Forgive me if I misunderstood your point.

Even if it were the same amount of labor hours, the pay shouldn't be equal. One requires much more education and training than the other. Not to prop up cancer research, but that also holds true for any technical job that an average person just can't grasp in an hour introduction.

Trolling aside, that may be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard you say. Throwing away the undeniable fact that someone finding a cure for cancer is absolutely doing more "work" than someone serving up french fries, a big part of the labor cost is based on the employee's education. Someone with a PhD has spent far more time and money educating themselves as to be able to perform such non-trivial tasks and the compensation is invariably based more on this fact than on the actual labor performed.