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Comment by wayanon | Hacker News Reader

Pretty amazing to be on a 6 figure salary and still strike.

I'm not in a union, but I have threatened to, and have quit with a 6 figure salary because I was under paid for what I was doing.

Make me work 100 hour weeks and no one else can do my job and I'm not at least 200k? Yeah, I'm underpaid.

A 6 figure income isn't wealthy in most (US) markets you can get that. Live in New York, California, Washington or Illinois? A low 100k salary can mean living paycheck to paycheck or living with an insufferable commute.

You can't really know if you're underpaid for what you're doing if nobody else is paying more. You might be overpaid - who knows? If there's no market there's no price discovery.

If you can get better pay elsewhere and quit to get it, that's perfectly fair game, nobody minds that because it's (in a well run company) not disruptive to the customers.

All employees "quitting" (but not really) at once because they're unionised and are already getting top pay, but want even more, and disrupt vast amounts of travel and expense at huge cost to random customers who have no power or involvement is very different.

> You can't really know if you're underpaid for what you're doing if nobody else is paying more.

I was talking relative to my coworkers at the same job.

It can quickly become apparent how much your coworkers are making relative to you if you pay attention to subtle things like vacations they take, what they did on their weekends, the cars they drive, where they live, etc.

In my case, teams had been "right-sized" such that I solely owned systems that at one point had a total of 13 people assigned to them, with no help. Yes, I held myself to a constrained budget to contribute to 401k, save as much as I could elsewhere and had a modest, yet nice apartment. Yet, my older coworkers had less responsibility, worked shorter hours, drove nicer cars, owned houses and took extravagant vacations where I drove a modest used car, rented and my "vacations" were to visit my parents (although, admittedly, airfare to visit my parents is high - it'd be cheaper to fly to Europe than visit my parents in the US, and I live in the US).

Thing is, for years, at comp time, I'd been arguing for a larger raise than bonus. I was getting a token $5k/year raise, but several 10Ks in bonus. Salary is generally a given (sure, they could in theory lower it, but rarely do healthy companies do that if you're performing), plus, typically your slice of the bonus pool is also partially determined by your salary.

So, yeah, it took trying to quit, with an offer in hand, to get my salary adjusted to where it should have been given my tenure at the company and the level of responsibility I had. Once they realized I was serious and was ready to walk, over a weekend, they gave me a nearly 30% intrayear raise. It wasn't quite what I wanted, but it put me on par with my coworkers and it was several 10s of thousands over the offer I was willing to walk for.

Also, the offer I walked away from was from one of the FAANG, and I won't say which. Apparently, having walked away from the offer has effectively black balled me from progressing in interviews with them. I've had a few phone screens with them since that I think I did well in, just to get radio silence from them. Not even a response from the initial recruiter. I've stopped entertaining of even responding to inquiries from the particular company.

The fundamental unfairness of employment is that your masters skim off the top of your labor's true value and give you less than you are worth to line their pockets. The pilots are within the bounds of fairness to demand up to the full value of their labor.

I am not taking sides in this dispute, I am sure the pilots do have some valid grievances. However "the full value of their labor" cannot be realized without a) planes to fly, b) a system for taking reservations, assigning people to seats, and collecting revenue, c) a maintenance staff to keep the planes functioning and safe, d) flight scheduling, purchasing/leasing gates at hundreds of airports (many international), financing fuel purchases, and much, much more.

Obviously, flying planes is a valuable skill. But without the enormous support system that the airline itself provides, pilots would have little opportunity to realize that value.

> Obviously, flying planes is a valuable skill. But without the enormous support system that the airline itself provides, pilots would have little opportunity to realize that value.

Then you're over-identifying what the value of their labor is. If what they need to do requires the support of others, don't factor the input of others into "the full value of their labor".

I.e. if the total value of the airline is X, and the value the pilots provides is P, and the value that all the other employees provide is N, where N + P = X, then the full value of the pilots labor is still P, not X. So I take it to mean they're wanting to get 100% of P.

>> N + P = X

It's much more complicated than that. One of the beautiful things about business, or any cooperative effort, is that the sum of the group/company is worth more than the sum of value of individual effort. 2+2=5, if you will.

The problem, when it comes to human nature, is that once the total value is determined (market cap, annual profit, ROI, etc), individuals tend to over-estimate the value of their individual contribution.

It is not just airlines. Uber drivers say they provide the rides, there would be no service without their effort. Uber says nobody was paying you to drive before we launched our platform. Both are correct. Foxconn employees say we're building all these damn iPhones, no other facility or workers can produce at this volume. Apple says if we didn't design and market such a popular product you'd have nothing to build. Again, both are correct. A film director says, look, the movie I made grossed $400 million -- and the studio replies, which you could have never made without the $100 million budget we risked, up front.

I have no position in this debate, but the exact valuation of their labour is basically exactly what's at stake here, right? Neoclassical economics would say their labour is worth the market price (ie what they're currently being paid, or else they could go find someone else to pay them more). Obviously that contains some simplifying assumptions but it is at least a point of view worth considering.

The neoclassical point of view is worth considering, but just like the much more scrutinized (by modern economists) labour theory of value, it has its fair share of criticisms from its Ricardian/Marxian proponents. A Marxian economist would say that the capacity to work, i.e labour-power, is (more or less, subject to fluctuation) is the value which when reflected in the price-form is the market price, but labour-power is not equal to labour, rather the use-value of labour-power is labour itself. The Marxian economist would say there are good reasons to believe that, either through a proof of the labour theory of value (though not necessarily a proof in the way of British positivism represented by Ricardo and J.S. Mill), a criticism of alternative models (neoclassical or Sraffian), empirical work on the correspondance between values and prices (such as Shaikh and Tonak's work) or explanation of the dual character of labour (as concrete and abstract) which reflects the essence which makes its way to appearance in surface phenomena (prices).

I don't mean to be a proponent of that view (at least not in this comment) but that might be where the parent comment is coming from.

Getting “the full value of their labor” would leave no surplus to cover capital depreciation or other people in the airline’s wages, or to pay the airline’s debts or capital costs, or to allow the airline to bank cash for a rainy day.

In many cooperative enterprises, like the historical Cherokee communal farming set-up, people set aside some of the value of what they produce to (a) cover miscellaneous capital costs and (b) be provide a reserve. The pilots should be producing a little more than they receive; otherwise the airline would collapse the next time a flight got delayed and people had to be put up in a hotel.

You’ve just described the history of the US airline sector. Every 30 years financiers forger what an awful investment airlines are and invest money into subsidizing price wars and expansions. It looks like there’s rising profits, the pilots’ unions get generous raises and then competition gets vicious and the profits disappear and the airlines go bankrupt.

> The fundamental unfairness of employment is that your masters skim off the top of your labor's true value

Sure, that's why we see so many pilots selling direct to consumers, right?

Pretty amazing to be on a 7+ figure salary and negotiate remuneration increase including being given ownership of the assets with the alternative being you'll be unmotivated doing the work or quit and take key employees with you. Absolutely standard though. Utterly unremarkable by contrast.

Compensation is not an absolute thing, it's relative.

Employees could be making 6 or 7 figures but be treated terribly and still have valid reasons to strike.

It’s all about your bargaining position. In business no agreements are final, you can threaten to break them if you think you can get more money out of it and if the other side blinks first you get more money, if they don’t you back down, get sued or lose your job.

It’s not a moral question, it’s about who’s closer to the money, or harder to replace.

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