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History buffs: "You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer."
- Thread starter hal9000
- Start date
The crazy thing is how expensive fast food is. Meals that are cooked at home cost 1/5 the price and a ton more healthy and tastier. Wife made chicken laarp the other night and pho is on the menu for tonight. :facelick: I married well.hal9000 said:
Our union is meeting with the chancellor today to talk about the CFA strike.
I told they students the strike may be called off.
Those we're some pretty pissed off 19 year olds.
I said I would strike anyway.
To which there was great applause.
I told they students the strike may be called off.
Those we're some pretty pissed off 19 year olds.
I said I would strike anyway.
To which there was great applause.
Keep fighting the good fightAutoprax said:
Although you should try and schedule a strike when there's surf.
How's your back? I screwed up my fretting hand about a year ago somehow while surfing and can't play anything for more than 15 minutes without pain, especially bass. Might have to get a short scale Jag or Mustang again to see if I can even play guitar anymore
I think more accurately, Mexicans would show up and take the jobs. Have you seen a construction site lately?hal9000 said:
For the most part and based on what I've seen when I check the numbers, how much a non-ownership CEO makes has almost no effect on worker wages when averaged out over the entire number of employees in the company.captyoda said:This is probably the biggest problem. Ok if you made it to CEO sure man you deserve to make a lot but when it gets so ridiculous like here in a lot of these companies its a problem. Its greed pure and simple. There is definitely a growing gap between CEO pay and workers under high management. This gap keeps growing in America over time. Wages have been stagnating as CEO pay keeps going up and up and that is bullshit.hal9000 said:That is a tough one. I don't know how you'd place a dollar value on the work that you or I do. I guess you'd have to figure out some way of quantifying your effect on society overall, plus (or multiplied by?) how many people are able to do your job.GDaddy said:
This also raised the question: why the f**k do we value our CEOs as much as we do, relative to their contribution to society, our economy, and the companies for which they work?
This greed is actually what is causing demand and regulation for a minimum wage. I don't exactly agree with a 15 dollar law but I can see why it happened. I used to work at taco bell for 4.25 and no way in hell had any intentions of thinking this was it. Basically what happened was these companies have been having a party squeezing every penny towards themselves instead of being fair and taking their share and spreading the wealth. SO after a long time the govt steps in and starts uping the wages because these asshats keep lining their pockets.
If these CEOs could of only took a 12 million dollar pay instead of 15 mil with bonuses and found it in there heart to think hmm maybe i don't need a 5th house.
I mean in the 50's and 60's it would be maybe 4 for me 1 for you, now that gap keeps widening 10 for me 1 for. 30 for me 1 for you. on and on.
It sucks cause laws like the minimum wage law will affect small businesses who may have been honest and awesome. I know where I work if your green with no skill its $14 to start with full benefits and on the high end non management position it tops out around high $38-$42 an hour this is non union btw. Anyone with drive can get to the high end in about 5-7 years or make even more in a management role. Our CEO makes about 2 mil a year and the company boasts doing about 60 mil a year.
To me this is fairly balanced and people seem generally happy. its basically everybody making money everybody happy. But if you get some clowns at the top that want all the money thats where it all starts to get f'ed up. Also if you create a workplace where people want to work you will get better candidates and can be more picky. AS far as fast food I always hear In and Out pays 12 to start? same with starbucks .as far as In and Out there is clearly a higher quality in workers than mcdonalds etc.. and I'm almost certain mcdonalds makes more, and I'm also certain despite In and Outs higher wages they are making a crazy profit.
It's a great talking point but the numbers don't usually support it. Not among CEOs who are employees. Now CEOs who also have ownership in the company because they founded it are a different story.
I'm not a mathematician but 471:1 seems like an awful disparity that if corrected would make a huge difference in both pay raises and employee morale.GDaddy said:
I'd like to see your numbers.
Golly, if there was only something we could do to protect workers from this phenomenon that is driving down wages.hal9000 said:
Why do I not see you guys go after the more than 50 billionaires in the Silicon Valley region for their grossly disparaging wages to employee ratio?FecalFace said:
But you continue to buy their sh!t and support them.
What makes you think any of us are giving Silicon Valley a pass?Surfdog said:
If you look at my history, I've been rallying against their criminal use of H1B visas a lot lately, and not to mention I think I've suggested both executions and deportations for certain "venture capitalists"
Wow! talk about destruction of an lower and middle income economy. Your policies would basically give government full control of the home buying industry. Might as well live in 1940's USSR communist block countries.ifallalot said:
How is it that high interest payments are good for ANYBODY? You're paying 3x to 4x MORE in payments, and getting NO WHERE on equity for decades.
HOW IN GOD'S NAME is that an incentive to buy, let alone afford a home!? Even if homes in So Cal could somehow magically drop to $200-$300k within quick drive of the beach, it would still cost $2500 to almost $4000 a month for a mortgage, with no equity gains for decades.
It would be ecomomic suicide for the ANY region, wealthy or poor, to wish for 10-15% interest rates on home buying.
You can't even BUILD a modest house for less than $200k in So Cal anymore because of all the overt taxes, regulations and enviro-hoops to jump. That's not counting land value, which I know you think should not even be allowed. The government should own the land too, I suppose?
You want so much government intrusion into our lives, economically and socially, that we might as well be a communist police state. Ifall, I know your rail/hate against the wealthy, but you're rooting for the wrong team, which is just as corrupt, if not much more so.
The interest rate hike is only something to stop the crisis we have now. I don't think its a great idea, especially since it gives banks more money but whatever we have going on right now isn't working. I admit this is only due to some things I've been reading and I'm not convinced.
However, that's the only thing you really refute me on. Everything else you just say durrrrrrrrr communism. The current market is NOT working, its time for drastic change
I agree that our government is corrupt, but ultimately trust should be in the government because they exist for the people, while moneyed interests exist for profit.
However, that's the only thing you really refute me on. Everything else you just say durrrrrrrrr communism. The current market is NOT working, its time for drastic change
I agree that our government is corrupt, but ultimately trust should be in the government because they exist for the people, while moneyed interests exist for profit.
No doubt, 471:1 looks like a really high ratio because it is a really high ratio. But 471/1000 employees is a bigger number than 471/3000 employees.
Admittedly, I have only done spot checks at random off the Forbes list so those are the numbers I'm referring to. The thing is, most of the guys at the very top are either part of the ownership of the company (which is an additional and separate allocation of profit) or are cashing in one-time stock options or other forms of compensation that were earned over a period of several years, not just one year.
This is what Forbes says about in the preface to their top-10 list:
The top CEO was the guy at the head of McKesson Pharma with $131M - he stands alone at that figure and is clearly the exception to the rule rather than a typical example of it. .
The No. 2 guy was Ralph Lauren of Ralph Lauren at less than half that - $66.7M. But he's not a great example to use because he's part of the ownership of the company and it literally would never have come into existence but for him. There are a couple more heads below him that were part of the company's founding or ownership, so let's start with the #5 guy on the Forbes list, who doesn't appear to be part of the ownership.
David Cote of Honeywell (which I doubt employs very many working poor workers).
Honeywell employs 129,000 people and had revenues of almost $39B in 2015. By my count, Mr Cote's grossly excessive compensation amounts to $432 per year per employee, or a bit less than $.21 per hour (Gross). In other words, if that guy actually worked for free - which isn't a reasonable expectation - then it would not show up at all in his employees' weekly pay.
Now that's an extreme example of what I'm saying but there are others.
The next guy on the Forbes list is George Paez of Express Scripts, at $55.1M. He got the pay bump in part because he just closed a big merger merger with Medco this year. Anyways, his company employs 25,900 people, so his pay amounts to $1,988/year per employee, or an average of just under $1 per hour. Again, that's another company that I doubt employs a large percentage of the working poor.
So yeah, I fully agree that the message these CEO salaries send sux ass and that the comparisons make a great talking point, but apart from what the ownership of these various companies take in profit, the hired CEOs pay doesn't seem to be the big reason why labor rates in the U.S. are what they are.
Don't forget that many of the American CEOs oversee companies that do business, generate revenues and have employees worldwide, so dividing their income by only the number of U.S. workers gets real misleading real quickly. Moreover, big business these days frequently mark up the goods and services they sell that were actually produced on contract with other companies that have their own CEOs.
Good luck getting a government that truly "exist for the people". Do you not think the government needs to make a profit? How do you think they pay (which they are failing at that) for all the social programs we keep asking to increase on more generously each decade?ifallalot said:
Profit is not "greed", unless it's grossly overt. Business needs the opportunity to grow, so they can hire more people. Stagnant growth, means no job AND no wage growth. It's the way capitalism works. The problem with capitalism, is that it needs morals to work properly. Most have a moral compass to some degree, but some don't and they should be punished for it. Can't throw out the baby with the stinky bathwater, though.
I'd rather trust honest, ethical run business, than money grubbing and wasteful spending government, ANY DAY.
Government does not create anything. Government basically has 3 ways to generate "income":
- taxes, user fees, fines and penalties
- bonds and other forms of borrowing and lending
- selling nationalized assets
Giving the state a monopoly over any form of commerce or service does not actually eliminate the costs of management; it only obscures those costs. Moreover, the costs for some services are commonly increased in order to pay for the costs of other services, in part to obscure the true costs of those other services.
That reallocation is neither inherently good nor evil, except to the extent that people take the budget info that's reported to them at face value under the assumption those are the *only* costs of those services.
- taxes, user fees, fines and penalties
- bonds and other forms of borrowing and lending
- selling nationalized assets
Giving the state a monopoly over any form of commerce or service does not actually eliminate the costs of management; it only obscures those costs. Moreover, the costs for some services are commonly increased in order to pay for the costs of other services, in part to obscure the true costs of those other services.
That reallocation is neither inherently good nor evil, except to the extent that people take the budget info that's reported to them at face value under the assumption those are the *only* costs of those services.
By the way, and timely to this discussion, this article just popped up at MSN.com. If true, I guess we can file these events under "too soon to tell" :
http://www.investors.com/news/economy/massachusetts-is-losing-jobs-with-10-minimum-wage/
http://www.investors.com/news/economy/massachusetts-is-losing-jobs-with-10-minimum-wage/