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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

So would it be safe to say that California is probably the best for employees and Texas the worst?

If you're the type of employee who views his employer as an adversary, perhaps.

You don't have to view your employer as an adversary to support labor protection, the same way you don't have to think your neighbor is a criminal to support your local police department. Stop it with the false dilemmas.

The "false dilemma" was on the part the original poster, who claimed that "good for company" == "bad for employee". That's absurd on its face.

That is absurd I agree. I don't think that's what the OP was getting at though. Rather that higher taxes and labor protection CEOs tend to reflexively dislike (regardless of whether they are good or bad for business interests in the long term). It could be "actually good for company in the long term but the boss doesn't agree because he doesn't know what he's talking about" == "good for employee".

It's not a matter of viewing them as an adversary, it's a matter of balancing your interests with the interests of the company.

A company attempts to maximize profits while reducing labor costs. An employee attempts to maxamize profit from their labor, which is a fairly static quantity.

New tools can come out that enhance productivity, but that only sets the baseline productivity that much higher. Wages rarely increase to match a jump in productivity.

It's in the interest of both the employer and the employee to make a lot of money. If the employer doesn't make money, neither does the employee.

"Wages rarely increase to match a jump in productivity."

That's why we're all still working 80 hours a week to pay for a daily bowl of gruel and an unheated shack, right?

We're not, but that's doesn't address his statement. Does it match the increase in productivity?

Does the increase in productivity actually come from the employee or the infrastructure around the employee, developed and paid for - at financial risk, by the employer? If it's the latter, shouldn't the employer and the investors who took the risk on achieving the productivity gains receive the reward?

Here's a fairly recent NYT article that discusses this, although most of it is within the context of the then "current happenings"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/business/28wages.html

For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.

So in this regard, Turing_Machine is indeed correct that wages have historically followed increases in productivity. My remarks were imprecise, the word rarely should have had an asterisk to a footnote that states that rarely means within the last decade or so.

But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.

The BBC had an excellent graph that displays the trend over time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5303590.stm

The authors of the EPI report argue that low minimum wages, weakened union power, and the loss of both blue and white-collar jobs to off shoring do much to explain the jobs picture.

Which leads us back to why Texas is popular right now. Most of the news articles are from the viewpoint of workers, discussing it in a negative connotation. I'm sure you can find other publications from the other viewpoint, that labor is getting cheaper and profits are going through the roof. Surely someone in the WSJ or The Economist has noticed.

I wouldn't say that at all. Last January I moved from Dallas, Texas to take a job with Amazon in Seattle. Texas is a great place to work. Plus houses are affordable, and new, and large.

I worked in both places. Texas isn't bad. No income tax and cost of living is a ton lower. My salary is 30% higher but my living expenses (with less SQ feet) is a ton more and I have income tax here so proportionally I make less.

No. Absolutely not. Not financially anyway. CA has a very high state income tax and very high cost of living.

From my observations I would say so. Moved to Texas for job and find even senior Tech people are treated fairly poorly by management. And contractors even more so. That is what prompted me to post this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525345

Yes.

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