The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'
gallup.com
gallup.com
That being said, I find it hard to believe my company is the only one doing that, I even called Gallup about it and they did not seem to care. At all.
Imagine what the real numbers look like.
Zero days per week in the office was not presented as an option.
(A) Seven in office
(B) Six in office
(C) Five in office, seven evenings plus two days WFH
(D) Please replace me
Will be interesting to see if this choice happens.
"Look, we have a two-years contract where we pay X thousand dollars a month for 100 desks and we have on an average day 3 developers in our office. After one year of lockdowns, we know our developers work at least as well from home as from the office, but higher ups ask us why we pay so much for an empty building, so we will force you come back to the office as soon as we can, even if we don't save any money with that and most likely decrease our efficiency and employee satisfaction."
I live in Germany and that's more or less what's happening at my company as we speak. Nobody complained about our performance or said they wished the company would enforce "work from office" rules, yet, they already try to slowly increase the days where we need to work from the office.
In my opinion, once a month in the office is great for chatting and connecting with people, but when it comes to work output, it doesn't move the needle, it's actually a day lost to the business.
There was this one org that had a few floors of a building for their use, but most of the desks sat empty most of the time. This came to the attention of a different org that was hard up for space. That had 2 people per desk at many desks. They got the "space manager" to take a look, but the target org got wind of what was going on and they called everyone to be in during that time. Those floors were overflowing with people when the space manager showed up.
1. Company makes unpopular decision (cuts a benefit, partners with someone unpopular, enforces some tedious process to make management life earlier)
2. Next poll season comes round
3. Shock, results are down
4. Declare an aggregate engagement measure as an action item which incorporates both the happiness metric but others such as understanding of company strategy
5. Declare the problem with this metric are line managers not conveying company direction well enough
6. Declare you're taking action by measuring line management on this metric
7. A bunch of ensuing makework on something execs think is important (at a certain size, a singular company vision is just too generic for line employees to care), yet they sell it as taking action
I always try to keep this in mind, Valve which famously has a completely flat structure, ended up turning into an environment where things like popularity and ability to dispense resources defined the practiced org structure. Be careful what you wish for.
Do adults have judgement of pre-pubernecent 14 year olds? I mean, maybe some do, but...
What happens is that we learn to "hide" our impulses in more social acceptable behavior.
We didn't have that many bully's when i grew up but most of them are just slightly more polished version of themselves.
But when they are drinking or emotions are high they revert back. (which is bad since 2 of them are cops now)
I am not saying that person cannot change his life and ways around. I know some that have done that. But most people (in my expirience) don't
On the contrary! Good personality traits evolved because they make for good leaders.
…which makes me depressed about being on the spectrum because it means I had to accept I could never be a “leader”.
(Well, I am a technical lead, it’s in my job-description, but that’s only because I get -Wpedantic on peoples’ code - and not because I can inspire people)
It’s especially noticeable when you’re not one of the in-crowd.
(actual employees in our case)
I wholeheartedly agree. It's come to the point where if a company mentions that they participate in those surveys during the hiring process, that's a yellow flag.
The thing that's always burned me out at work is letting people on my team go through attrition or layoffs and expecting the rest of us to pick up all the slack like it didn't take 3 other people to do it.
It's frankly a pretty simple formula.
The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I'm old enough to remember that banks opened late and closed early, didn't operate on weekends or holidays, and if you didn't get your paycheck cashed by 4pm Friday you were out of luck until Monday at 10am. Grocery stores, malls, and tons of other places opened in the morning and closed at night, and most places didn't open on Sunday at all. Those that did opened later "after church".
But I understand this is difficult, even impossible, to know during the interview process.
I think assuming management is greedy and selfish until proven otherwise is a good way to approach interviewing. Negotiating compensation will give lots of clues. Ask for more money, or a different TC structure and see what happens. For comparison, ask for something that doesn't cost anything.
True teammates are cool, but is he prepared to feed my family and adopt my children in case I get killed by a bus?
What is the extent of mutual sacrafice 'true teammates' are gonna do for each other? Or is it a manipulative boss getting you to sacrafice family for the sake of the business? Or is is a naive idiot getting both of you to sacrafice for the business?
Yoy responsibility is to family and yourself first. Jobs come and go.
Of course you'd want to maximize your pay. Any coworker who drinks the Koolaid and doesn't understand that isn't a coworker I'd want to be with.
I think it was because customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that were open longer hours, and so they won business by selling something customers wanted. Similarly, I thought customers liked 24/7 support and five nines availability (especially for internet and electricity).
If labor prices go up, then maybe those perks will be scaled back because customers will not be able to afford them. I already see fast food restaurants around me no longer open before 11AM and after 7PM.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tyranny-of-ch...
That article is about choosing between 10 different comparable items. It is not about giving money to a store that happens to be open when you want to give it money, versus a store that is closed.
Night shifts can be pretty rough, but back when I still did shifts I sacrificed a couple nights around new year once and added a good chunk of money to my usual income that month over a few days due to getting holiday compensation (double pay) plus night shift compensation and that got doubled again for being an emergency substitute for another person who'd gotten sick.
You only get problems when social manipulation is used to pressure workers into providing that level of support without appropriate compensation.
If the workers had better options, they would have chosen to go elsewhere.
Around me, I now see restaurants and stores closing earlier, which must mean they are no longer able to find labor willing to work at the low wages they were expecting them to.
For support, it depends on whether you're hiring more people (good), offering optional on-call time for extra money or reduced hours (probably fine), or forcing people to be on-call on top of a normal work week (bad).
Is it? Why? What has the average person gained from being able to shop and bank 24/7? Are you sure they aren't just being given more incentive to spend money and support greedy management and investors?
If you are required to be in the office from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday and grocery stores and banks are only open from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday (or even 8 am - 6 pm if you live in an area where long commutes are normal) you're effectively excluded from banking and shopping entirely.
This seems to be a systematic means of excluding people in some places in Europe. Stores and banks in some places were only open from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm Monday - Saturday. Orthodox Judaism forbids work (including house work) on Saturday, so Jewish people working 9-5 jobs had very limited access to services.
But.. why should companies require that? No time to go out for an errand?
(And if you want to reduce how much people work then it's better to just shorten the standard work week than to add in a weekly grocery exception.)
It's definitely a problem and while there are some ways to just work around your boss it's often just easier to find another job.
As opposed to what, exactly? What are you expecting to see? Highly engaged employees mass quitting? The situation described in this piece sounds fairly normal to me. People who aren't that fussed about their jobs, or actually dislike them, are always much more likely to quit.
The real question is whether there has been an increase in the percentage of employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged. The article might answer that question but I'm afraid I'd disengaged before I got to that point.
For example, my guess would be that the lost value from a disengaged employee is closer to 100% of their salary than 18%, because of how they drag the rest of the team down by generating bugs, derailing conversations, needing constant help to un-fuck their local env, etc.
Coworkers have commented that if we lose these people we are fucked, and I just keep thinking: can’t you see that they are already gone? You better make plans, because as soon as they go I’m splitting too.
This is a real problem. I'm consistently encouraging my team to take time off as and when they need it, and to make sure they're only working their contracted hours: everyone running themselves into the ground is the last thing we need.
Also, if everyone's running on the red line the whole time you actually lose the ability to plan effectively because you have no idea what the world looks like when everyone is simply doing a "normal", healthy, sustainable workload.
Honestly thats a terrible reason to stay - unless you work at a charity.
Add to the middle of this that we have deals or licenses running out and have decided that on top of everything else we should save some money too. The opportunity costs are probably killing us. But to keep them from completely killing us, other people are still cranking out major features including architectural changes, so we have those disruptions hitting too. It’s chaos.
This worked out really well for me. I was satisfied with my work accomplishments, I had plenty of extra time to write books and spend more time with family and friends. I don't miss that 20% loss of income.
I'm curious what job you have. I'm a SWE who is in the process of moving into a manager role. As an IC, I am 100% certain that I could get the same amount of work done in a 24 hour work week. In fact, I was probably working less than that already and still meeting my deadlines and getting great reviews. As a manager for the same team, at the same company, I am now working a full 40 and there's no way I could cut 40% of my hours without a massive drop in output.
I'm not against a 4 day work week (in fact, my manager is talking about trying it out in Q4 for our department), but not everyone is an IC knowledge worker. There are plenty of roles where time does directly correlate with productivity, which is why this discussion is so complicated.
I agree, but that's kind of my point. There are plenty of people doing 40 hours worth of needed work right now. If we switch to a shorter work week, that work will need to be distributed to more people.
It's not an impossible problem to solve, but OPs comment seems to imply that there are no trade offs to be made if we switched to a 24 hour work week and I'm just trying to point out that that isn't the case.
I also do believe that this is somewhat intentional; to keep people too busy to think freely and effectively, so that a status quo is maintained.
I'm a SWE working on a small team.
I expect the following has at least in part occurred:
1. Your participation in "meetings" has increased significantly. Management tends to conveniently forget that interruptions have follow-on disruptions on focus. This is compounded by the Doorway Effect [0].
2. You don't trust your direct reports to handle the level of autonomy you had as an IC. You're being pushed by your management to provide status updates so you have to scurry around poking ICs.
3. You're still expected to have at least a portion of your IC output in addition to your management duties.
4. You've discovered the productivity of your team is a bell curve. Some can get work done quickly while others are much slower. This may be related to their skill/experience or their particular tasks.
5. You're pressured by management to split up work to deliver a baby in a month. This causes you to take on even more IC work to try to accede to such stupid expectations.
Given how job tenure has plummeted over the years, I have a hard time believing this is accurate. Does anyone know a place where retention efforts come anywhere close to hiring efforts?
How does that follow? It certainly seems that spending $9K/year or less compared to coughing up 3 to 10 times that to hire proves that attention to retention is nowhere near that given to hiring.
Companies are either making a near universal error that has been well publicized at this point or the number is wrong and hiring is nowhere near that expensive.
Amazon is a very data driven company. But they have no problem churning through people like crazy. They are a company with hire to fire, so if hiring an SDE cost $50,000, they are letting managers spend 50K to fiddle with attrition stats.
Amazon delays equity a lot, so it may look financially sensible to churn through people.
Beyond that though, companies make plenty of universal errors. Can you think of any other errors the -average- company makes, that may cost them money?
I can see equity being a reason for Amazon, but it is hardly just equity granting companies that are this way.
But retention also isn't an easy metric to solve for. It's not "just do X and watch that number improve". The closest thing companies do is throw money at people, but that only works if you're so far higher than the rest of the market that people are looking at a massive paycut if they go somewhere else, and that still is only one data point affecting those averages. Certainly, no company that I left could have kept me by throwing $9k more at me; I made more than that with every company change I made, let alone what actually caused me to start looking in the first place.
Retention and engagement are hard, complicated problems. The mindset that employees are interchangeable cogs with no real needs of their own—particularly psychological needs that have anything to do with the workplace—is still a very strong one in every sector of the American workplace. Even for those companies where management, as a whole, does genuinely understand that it benefits everyone to have engaged employees, if you ask 10 people "how do you keep employees engaged?" you'll get 12 different answers.
We're still just a few steps away from tenant farmers, sweatshops, and company towns. The fact that there's research that shows spending on retention is massively more effective than spending on hiring will take generations more to actually catch on amongst the American executive class...unless we can manage to pull together a serious union renaissance and demand the better conditions that will actually help everyone.
1) Just like in Sales, on average it is cheaper _and_ marginally more profitable to retain an employee than to recruit a new one. This includes cost to recruit, interview, onboard, etc.
2) The exceptions here that throw off the average are those companies with strong inbound hiring pipelines (ex: Amazon will never have a shortage of applicants) that reduce the costs of recruiting + interviewing, and retaining high performers (e.g.: the cost of losing an upper-decile performer is much more significant.)
I imagine that if there was a law that said companies could write off half or more what they spend on employee retention and development, you'd see Amazon and others put a lot more money that direction.
Maybe this is true of everyone and simply less documented. Silicon Valley has hijacked “disruption” but in many ways the old definition still applies to the same people. Tom was a disruptive influence so when he demanded a raise we let him go instead.
If it truly were more expensive to hire than to give raises, more firms would be giving raises.
I don't disagree but the real world is more complex. Recruiting is an entire department in most companies that have a vested interest in hiring from outside. They will pull all strings to keep getting money for hiring.
Corporate structures are really inefficient
There's an additional problem that firms are caught in a game theoretic trap. If you're the only firm providing stability, your investments in that in the short term might make you less competitive on pay, which means you'll train up people who might leave seeing higher pay elsewhere. So stability investments might be rational in the long term, but because of market conditions you get killed in the short term, and you end up tempted to abandon your strategy after a few bad quarters where it looks like they aren't paying off.
You're contradicting yourself here. Above you were saying that the way to keep employees is to give them proper raises, and thus enhance stability. How come greater stability equals less competitive pay?
If you spend money internally on promotes, you'll have less money to compete in the market for new hires. Therefore you might get some indicators that things aren't working, for example you might lose out on desirable candidates in the short term. Also retention might be a lagging indicator, because maybe some of your people already have their foot out the door, so it may look like people are continuing to leave in response to the old incentives before they realize things have changed.
Ideally you exist in an organization where everyone is on the same page about your strategy and anticipates those kind of negative indicators, but maybe understanding is fragmented and a bunch of stakeholders push back when they see those negative signals.
Why would that be the case? We already established that the company would pay industry level salaries to new hires and existing employees alike. Moreover, because you have less turnover, you need to hire less, so you have less wasted money on hiring and training.
All in all, I just fail to understand why companies don't value existing employees more. I think it's the fact that they take advantage of people's aversion to change and interviews. They rely on people NOT going to interviews.
Maybe it's like in the prisoner dilemma: you can't go lower than the market peak because no-one will come to you, even if you offer more on average than the industry average. This way, we reward the job hoppers with the peak salaries. Peak salaries means over time the average goes up too. I guess it's how free markets operate.
This has always been known. There simply was less demand for the labor that some workers were selling to get meaningful pay raises. Now that those supply and demand curves are shifting, especially in favor for those at the bottom of the pay scale, they have the option of selling their labor at a higher price.
I am curious how it turns out in the next few decades as lower birthrate effects cause younger, lower paid workforce numbers to decrease. Especially if it is not offset by labor from immigrants.
That's some crazy long time for becoming productive. Do you have any examples of the kind of projects where this would happen? As a freelancer I expect myself to be productive within a week, preferably from the second or third day onwards with smaller tasks. May be that I'm finding just easy projects.
The article doesn't address pay as a way to increase engagement—and thus decrease attrition. Indirectly, the article suggests that increasing pay wouldn't actually have that much effect, with the real benefit coming from managers "who give workers a sense of purpose, inspiration and motivation to perform".
Mathematically, you would need every 2% of average "retention" raise to yield a 1% drop in retention rate to break even, notwithstanding that 18% productivity drop.
Put another way, it's not about employees being commodities. It's about (generally) pay-for-retention programs NOT ONLY failing, but in the worst case negatively affecting those people who are engaged by forcing them to continue to interact with disengaged people who decided to stick around a little longer.
Hm. There are few jobs that can become life goals, most are boring. And with a years long pandemic and uncertain future, to work or not to work? Work for what purpose? No level of engaging is enough if people can see through the ruse. If anything i d expect more people to go solo
That's because the big tech megacorps raised the bar in order to attract the best workers available so they could grow to have the "eliteness" that you see today. The problem is, there are only so many Apples or Netflixes with this kind of strategy so everything else looks boring in comparison.
That's what makes them exciting.
Humans have been doing "boring" work their whole lives for millions of years, it has never been a problem.
The problem is that people are working for organizations that are DOING HARM to them and their people. Not only is their work not productive, it is destructive. Not only is their work meaningless, but it endeavors to undermine meaning itself.
The problem with corporate america isn't that the work is boring; it's that for most jobs it's actually evil at some point in the pipeline. (To use a metaphor - you're still morally culpable if you're carrying boxes of bullets to the soldiers doing the actual killing). Almost no matter what industry you're in, whether it's shoes, or batteries, or electronics, you know that somewhere on the other side of the world, actual slavery is providing materials and labor for what you're selling, and you really wonder why we can't all mutually agree to make that illegal.
There are very few professions (often stuff like medicine, teaching, etc) where someone can sit back and think "yeah, my day job is a net positive for humanity".
It's hard enough to cope with when something is a decent "material good" on its own - like if you're selling shoes (virtually all of which get made in sweatshops), at least you have the pride in the fact that shoes are a necessity. It sucks that slavery was involved in making them, but at least you know people are getting genuinely good clothing out of it.
But when you don't have that - when you are, say, working in market analysis or advertising, and you realize your job isn't actually making anything or filling any material need - or even just bringing people joy, yeah, it's a bit worse than being meaningless. You're flushing the best years of your life down the toilet to make a little more money for some private equity firm. Great.
I think the main issue with modern corporate america is that too few people see the direct impact of their job. especially in pure office jobs without any technical inclination.
Doing boring work isn't bad per se, but it should lead to something that improves thanks to your labour.
But they do seem to be. Native English speakers are quite valuable in their own right here. And there's a strong big-fish-small-pond effect if you're an expert in something. Research tends to be written in English, as does documentation.
Was your work routed to someone else during your time off?
I would truly like to step away and relax. But the last time I tried to step away, I couldn't stop ruminating over all the unfinished work in my queue. My hunch is that it's not possible to truly relax unless someone else can temporarily step-in for the vacationer. Otherwise, on return, we're just greeted with an even-larger pile of work.
I've also noticed unnecessary urgency/escalation when someone is not in the office to deal with things. Say it's a Friday and I am in the office, but I am in back to back meetings and then have time blocked off to meet a deadline. Someone asks me to help on something semi-urgent, but they see I am booked, and they are generally OK with waiting, even if it delays until Monday. However,if they see a Friday OOO/vacation message in e-mail/slack, urgency is automatically ratcheted up and they want it done now.
I think there must be some psychological factors involved. It's OK if someone is technically "available" but does not have time. However if someone is takes a day off and is "unavailable" and there is wait..that is less acceptable.
How about "nothing."
1. Do not lie to new hires during the hiring process. I know this is a hard one because you want to sell the company, but it is important to set expectations appropriately. Unmet expectations (created by the company) will ultimately be paid by the company in full.
2. Do not antagonize new hires during the sign on and orientation process. Choose the employees that manage or take part in the sign on/orientation process very carefully.
3. Do not move employees down the organizational hierarchy as a consequence of a re-organization. This is so common that I think most managers don't even register that it's happening. Breaking this rule is more likely to diminish the engagement and foster the exodus of long-term employees. While that may be the entire point of the reorg currently disengaged employees have less engagement to diminish so the reorg is more likely to have a negative impact on highly engaged employees.
4. Don't measure employee engagement by how often the employee comes and talks to you. If you're making decisions based on what you are hearing from the employees that are always at your door, then may God help you (especially if those employees are above you in the management chain, because in that case you are not actually making any decisions).
5. Equally enforce the professional standards of conduct set by the organization. Every company has fuck-ups. Stories of how the company deals with those fuck-ups will be passed down to future generations. In some cases those stories will literally define the company. An organization that is not equally enforcing professional standards of conduct is not meeting employee expectations.
Companies are focused on getting the perfect person for the job who can come up to speed and be productive nearly immediately because they put no money or effort into actually developing employees (see: loyalty), Because employers are stuck on the treadmill of needing a person now to fill a need just in time, they are so averse to "false positives", hiring someone who doesn't work out, they have put in a gantlet to try to prevent that.
Also, to your point 4, it's not just that, it's the whole culture of "looking busy" instead of being productive. See for example: https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/08/04/xsolla-fires-150-em...
That's not exactly a huge surge. Perhaps we're not seeing a big shift in worker attitudes, so much as we're seeing a big shift in what people are talking about right now.
Two things here:
- Well-paid could still be under the market (happens a lot in software)
- If you're well-off it's easier to not depend on your job
If it's mostly the first problem, paying more will solve your problem.
Surprisingly, they company I left has no problem replacing me in about as much time. Though, I'm not sure if my replacement was paid more than I was. I did cite pay as my sole reason for leaving, so it is possible.
The lockdown stripped my job to the essentials: No colleagues, no coffee corner, no nice fancy office, no treats (lunches, dinners, drinks), brainstorms, etc. I was left with something that was boring me to death. I felt perfectly happy in that job for 5 years before covid.
Junk like https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed... and https://www.cookinglight.com/eating-smart/clean-eating/how-u...
My dad worked in pharma sales for 30 years. Do you think he cared to sell the drugs? I mean... in that the drugs were helping people, he was happy. But his reason for going to work everyday was talking to his colleagues. To this day, he and his old colleagues still visit each other, still party together, and vacation together.
When I tell my parents that I do things like work on programming projects outside of work, they think I'm crazy. Being genuinely interested in the content of your work so much so that you'd do it outside of a job is unique to engineering professions, IME.
Now that I'm an older person and surrounded by younger people who are doing their own thing I don't socialize much at the office outside the basic daily banter. I left to be able to go remote. Then I can just socialize outside the office which I enjoy more.
I can easily go have fun with people outside of work, so I have no incentive to put up with the annoying parts of office work just to get to interact with people.
Obviously, if you didn't have to work, you wouldn't work just to see office mates.
But if you do have to work, slogging away in a common place with friends is more compelling than sitting behind a computer.
Not for me. When it comes to work, I would rather sit behind a computer at home and talk with my friends on another computer at the same time than sit behind a computer at an office and talk with my friends there in person.
- Commute is sub 10 minutes
- I get an office with a closing door
In 20 years, I've had that combo for maybe 18 months. I lost it when my team had to move to accommodate a management-heavy org that required the personal offices.
I think fair pay and better working hours have a lot more to do with employee retention than so-called engagement. I manage a team that is well compensated and has excellent work life; we work on some really boring stuff, but this team hasn't lost a single employee to more interesting work over the years.
"The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work."
Since SMEs have been declining since 2000 onward, Price's Law would say that as larger corporations take more of GDP, engagement rates will plummet compared to 2000 when the majority of GDP came from SMEs.
I vaguely remember the cross-over happening in the mid-2000s. Everybody shrugged. But it was a major change.
I guess that proving that would require lots more polling and statistical rigor and would produce no viral headlines, but it seems like a more economical explanation.
to revitalize, some serious change is needed, that opens a wide number of people a sense of agency & possibility & opportunity. with the titanization of industry, there's less & less compelling ways to employ oneself, & re-enabling upstarts & small scale competitors (who are not simply bought out & plucked up as soon as they show promise).
it is the difference between vitality & perpetual decay (an upward, out-of-reaching, effervscing decay), as i see it.
Much more likely is a Butlerian Jihad to destroy automation and return us to a more pastoral way of life, even with advanced technology.
Only socially awkward engineers, business majors (most of whom are incredibly anti-social contrary to common perception), and finance types actually believe in this vision. Normal people are horrified, or will be once they actually experience what this entails.
Humans are not meant to lack meaningful work.
And I agree that we do need meaningful work on a human level; it’s why I don’t say “nobody should work”. But meaningful work might only mean two hours a day. If that’s all you want to do, you’re prolly not gonna be able to afford a new iPhone any time soon but you shouldn’t go hungry, homeless or untreated.
Citation needed.
Contrary to popular belief our civilization is not the only one that has come close to being able to provide basically all its needs. Many other civilizations have and eventually the class whose needs are provided for disintegrates due to their own decay. We will make claims that the 'barbarians' sacked rome, and while this is technically true, they are not the reason for the decline of the Roman Empire. The truth is, by the time the barbarians attacked, rome was a shell of its former self. In times past, the Roman army would have put an end to the barbarians. But the societal decay from the elites of the empire meant the systems that preserved them there slowly fell into disrepair.
Broadly speaking we are witnessing the same thing now except at a grander scale because now even for the lower classes it's not obvious they need to work.
Lack of proper capitalization.
Back then a common scenario was buy a house, fix it up a bit, save, use first house's equity and the savings as down payments on a second house. Next thing you know (if nothing goes wrong) you own a bunch of houses and have a semi-passive income stream to live on.
There are very few places in the USA where that is even remotely possible any more.
And real estate has been the most common path to wealth for a century or more.
Median income in FL is 58k. That's 3-4 years of income. Not much different.
the only places where housing prices have gone nuts are the coastal cities, which 'everyone'[1] wants to live in for cultural reasons.
[1] everyone is in quotes because it's abundantly clear that there are two classes of people in the us, those that matter to the elite and those that don't, and only those that matter want to live in the coast cities.
How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands?
There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years.
There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.
Or it could decrease corporate profits, as more goes to their workers and less to their managers and shareholders.
Hasn't it been at an historical extreme the other way? If so, the adjustment should be expected and shouldn't be inflationary.
Edit: my reasoning is that increased wages leads to increased spending, which increases prices unless goods/services can be supplied cheaper, which is unlikely since productivity growth is low.
I gotta say, the notion that it's somehow a negative that workers get a larger share is a bit convenient for the shareholders, managers, and companies.
I'm not making a value judgement, I'm just saying that increasing wages across the entire economy will cause increased prices unless something offsets it (e.g. increased productivity that keeps pace with wage increases... which doesn't seem likely).
Money is conserved: the profits go somewhere, even if to retained earnings that the corporation spends; some amount could be given to the workers to spend. Again, how is that more inflationary?
Also, spending is inflationary only in certain conditions, such as when demand is constrained. Not all spending is inflationary.
I agree with this. You should run the numbers and look at how much companies could improve workers wages by. I did this a few years ago with Walmart, I was surprised by how small the amount was. I think these companies are more constrained than you think, and the huge difference in earnings (which I'm not defending) between the executives and the average worker is more due to their scale and the fact that they can skim a bit off every worker than due to pure exploitation. E.g. Walmart has ~2m employees. $100 from each is $200m more for the executives, but it's not really going to make much a difference to an employee to get an extra $100 per year.
That doesn't fix bad bosses or bad culture in an organization. But at least it means you are not in that environment 24/7.
> Replacing workers requires one-half to two times the employee's annual salary. So, it costs $9,000 a year to keep each disengaged worker and between $25,000 and $100,000 to replace them.
Does the right-libertarian dream merge with the Marxist dream, and everyone "gets wise" to what this calculus means for wage and equity negotiation, if we just keep holding the line, that we know what we're worth, what our time is worth to place Facebook pixels on websites, and we won't work for less.
I felt this in my soul. I just left my old job (which I liked) to go fully remote for a weird little shop in Florida. They're actually embracing remote culture and keeping employees engaged. Makes the soulless toil a bit more bearable.
All that’s really being asked of us is to give up all our productive years in service to people with no ethics, to make them richer. People who are more than happy to use you up and toss your corpse on the pile when you die. Is that really too much?
How dare you think you deserve something for your toils. Your masters have worked you incredibly hard — harder than you thought possible! Why should you get the credit when their wrist is sore from cracking the whip? You didn’t even think yourself capable, and look what you can do with proper motivation!
Now return to work, or you might find yourself without healthcare in a pandemic.
Now, is my work fulfilling? No.
Compensation was the hardest thing to leave, but when looking at the life I wanted to live I realized I had what I needed to to full-fill that life now. Mentally it is very hard, though. I had a great engineering job at Apple and after over 4 years I had a sizable chunk of RSU's to walk away from. What helped me with the RSU's was realizing that eventually I would leave–whether now or in 20 years–so walking away from RSU's is non-avoidable so I tried to frame it as a sunk cost.
It's true time is more valuable than money. However at this point I am very sick of being at home.
Re: the RSUs that is a good point. I've been at Google for coming up on 10 years, and one thing that keeps me here is the RSU "handcuffs", for sure.
The wealth inequality in the world is just staggering. You may be well off to the point money is not an problem for you, and still be piss-poor compared to your company's CEO and shareholders.
If you are inclined to compare your compensation to compensation of workers in other industries, take a minute and compare the compensation of your c-suite with those in other industries as well. You will notice that you are underpaid and massive amount of gains are flowing to your execs.
A shift in society's values indeed.
If you don't want to work for someone else, then start a business. If you don't want to work at all, then figure out how you're going to live. No one is forcing you to do anything.
Yes?
> Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
> No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
> Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
> Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
> Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
> etc.
> https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
>Yes?
Surely you understand the logistical problem this brings: if you get given free shit, there must also be a party who is giving free shit. Let's say you live on an island with just one other person. You are both entitled to free shit, but somebody has to put in the work to get the shit. Should the other person work to get his own shit and your shit, or should you work to get your shit and also his shit?
Where is the shit going to come from, in a way that doesn't require slavery for others?
For example, how can an all-you-can-eat restaurant stay in business if they let everybody eat as much as they (rationally-economically) want to eat, and labor has to be paid? If food is abundant, then the cost of each individual patron's meal is negligible and it becomes a question of whether enough people come through the door to pay for labor.
Your problem is that you don't see that all that "abundance" of food was grown by people, transported by people, prepared by people, and served by people, and none of them are your slaves. If they had the chance to get their own free shit without having to do all that labour, they totally would. But then who would remain to do the work?
The all you can eat restaurant stays in business by charging enough for meals that they can be reasonably sure that you'll won't eat more than the food is worth. However, that doesn't reduce the value of the food to zero.
Let's try another thought experiment. In my experience, all you "shit should be free" types assume all value flows from the state. That's wrong; it flows from individuals that are taxed by the state. Why don't you, as an individual, open an all you can eat restaurant where people can eat for free? Why not be the change you want to see?
Your position is only tenable if you are part of an upper class that has others in a lower class working for them, and involuntarily donating the fruits of their labor. In another word, you wish to reintroduce slavery.
Your problem is that you presume food is abundant because it just is. Reality is that food is being produced, by people who want to be paid for it. Take away that payment, and they will stop producing.
Food is abundant because of the Haber process [1] and other industrial-era improvements to food production. Only about 2% of our total labor output is required in order to produce all of our food [2]. The government subsidizes 10% of all food production and purchases [3][4]. If we already can afford to pay 2% of our population to make all of the food, and we already give away 10% of it for free, then it seems like we could reasonably discuss giving away more food for free without disenfranchising farmers.
Edit: I just realized that you might be clueless about this entire corner of sociology, so I should tell you about government cheese [5]. WP says, "Government cheese was created to maintain the price of dairy when dairy industry subsidies artificially increased the supply of milk and created a surplus of milk that was then converted into cheese, butter, or powdered milk." In other words, the government put too much money into making food, and gave away the surplus, and this has been happening continuously for decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
[2] https://csanr.wsu.edu/we-are-the-98-percent/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
[4] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Your link specifically says that 2% of the labor force are farmers. It does NOT say that all people involved in the entire chain of activities that ends with food sitting on your plate represent just 2% of the labor force. Other people involved are the people who make the fertilizer, the people who package the food (for example, by canning it), the people who put it on store shelves, and the people who transport it all at each stage. Your fourth link has a helpful chart: actual farming represents a mere 7.6% of the cost of the food.
Your links do not establish that 10% of the food production was subsidized. Even if they did, a subsidy is not free money; it is paid from taxes that everybody pays. Thus, assuming the 10% number holds up, the only conclusion that you can draw is that 10% of the cost of food production is socialized.
It does not logically follow that if we pay a certain percentage of the labor force for food production, we can therefore afford to give the food away for free. That assumes there is undue profit in the chain that could be removed. Such profit might exist, but you have done nothing to establish that as a fact.
Sociology is not the science of government cheese. Even so, the overproduction only represents yet another failure of central planning; the free market would not have made such a mistake. It is public money, taken from tax payers, and spent on producing unwanted goods. Nothing about it is free.
However, that 'sociology' does explain a lot about why you are so horribly misinformed about how the world works.
Would be a good start.
How about not exploiting people?
> Should you be given free shit simply because you exist?
Seems to work for the very wealthy, celebrities, and so on. Why, precisely, isn't this acceptable for everyone?
I'm not against people working. I'm against the wealthy callously exploiting people for grins while they, I dunno, race into space?
Who says they're being callously exploited? Because some company's founder now has hundreds of billions, that entitles random warehouse workers to share profits?
As for how you're paying for the wealthy, there are many ways. You're paying for the US government to negotiate with other countries to change their local laws either directly or via treaties to create a similar regulatory environment globally. You're also paying for externalities, like what happens with a fly ash lake or manure lagoon overflows, or the consequences of air pollution.
Sure.
1) Look at financial crisis of 2008 and the banks bail out. I have always been taught there is no such thing as a free lunch in economics. Well, apparently you can overleverage yourself, profit insanely on it and when it finally goes tits up, you cry a bit and yell "too big to fail". I have always been taught that risk is the basic principle of capitalism. If your idea or product is bad, no one gives you money for it, you run out of money and go bankrupt. Obviously not if you are a bank or military contractor (looking at you, Boeing).
2) One of the biggest company in my country, owned by our current prime minister Andrej Babiš... oh sorry, it is owned by 2 trust funds which are indirectly owned by Babiš. Anyway, that company is currently asking for 123 million CZK in subsidies. This is a company with a turnover of 161 billion and 3,8 billion CZK profit. Why are they asking for subsidies? Can't they use ~3,24% of their last year's profit?
3) Continuation of previous point, except in US terms. You can strong arm government into giving you subsidies, otherwise you are gonna leave the city / state / country and it's gonna lose jobs. See here for examples: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents
One of the biggest recipients is Tesla. On this note I find it absurd that tax money collected from normal people is paying for a billionaire's wet dream. Notice how I said normal people. Because the rich have ways to steal... damn, sorry - evade... dang, I did it again. Avoid taxes is what I meant. https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-corporate-t...
4) Look at coronavirus V-shaped recovery. It was apparent airlines are gonna be in a bit of a trouble, becaues of the... oh yeah, the global pandemic which put lockdowns in place. Anyway, airlines bought back stock and then asked for bailouts. Which they of course got. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2020/03/18/amer...
I have stopped caring for explaining how you are paying for the very wealthy. If these examples above didn't sway you, nothing will.
? If there is exploitation at large, it's the people reading this that are doing the exploitation by leveraging against workers paid 'barely survival wages' in developing countries will crying about 'not being engaged at work' while earning 10x the global income average doing work that is actually intellectual, whilst the global average worker toils at something generally menial and more classically work.
The modern world is an utter utopia relative to the life of almost any person living at any point in history, if you're reading this, you're living at a higher standard of living that most Kings and Emperors. Probably higher than even the richest people in the world just two generations ago.
Our civilization and high standard of living requires 'work', which fall upon us to do, and whether it is 'engaging' or not is mostly besides the point.
Most companies are made up of regular people doing regular work even at the upper layers, most companies are small or mid-sized and execs. are definitely not rolling in cash, there's actually a very thin slice of people earning truly outsized incomes.
It's ok to vent and be frustrated ... but it's also little bit disturbing to read some of the commentary here.
It's been that way for thousands of years -- what's new now?
Thousands of years ago, the upper class could kill you if you disobeyed. The stakes aren't as high nowadays. Yay for separating courts from employers.
An insane amount of capital looking for ROI probably also helps put people in a spot where they can afford to take a chance.