Families will get torn apart, people with health issues will be on their own, immigrants will get booted.
C-suite will get a raise from the stock price bump.
Congrats on our system.
C-suite will get a raise from the stock price bump.
Congrats on our system.
These large companies are ultimately doing what the Fed wants them to do, no point blaming the c-suite for that?
eg. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/12/does-the-f...
It's politically incorrect to say the Fed is trying to make x% people lose their jobs but that's basically what they're scheming for the past year or so...
Our system relies on the fear of the bottom. Capital is in charge, they require the threat of destitution in order to continue to get away with their continued extraction. When wages go up, more power is vested in the worker which isn't okay by the folks at the top.
The execs get paid a lot - but there's not that many of them, and there's 200k people at MSFT making an average salary (with benefits) >$200k. That's >$40B per year. The execs don't take home >$2B per year.
Satya made <$60M last year. There's not 35 execs at MSFT making the same amount of money or higher. There's 18 others, and they make a lot less money on average.
This 10k layoff, at an average salary of 190,302, is about $2b a year. So yeah not quite - but for them to suffer no consequences is still pretty gross.
This is in part, due to the fact that he has nothing to do with Microsoft anymore.
This part of your statement has no relevance given MS's position, even taking into account the current market.
MS as a company is in no danger here. In fact, they are doing quite well.
You hire people if you need them, fire them if you don't. It's really that simple.
Your employer doesn't owe you a job.
Do you have any actual numbers on the number of execs vs workers and their salaries?
Plus, every sale of the company's stock by a key executive is immediately reported to the SEC and publicly available on the SEC and company's websites. Wall street watches this like a hawk. If any key exec unloads more than a few percent of their entire holdings at any one time, it will hurt the stock price pretty substantially. Effectively, it makes it so the CEO can't sell a lot their stock at once while they are CEO.
The big numbers you see for CEO compensation for this year are largely stock options that were granted years prior which vested this year. Almost all of Satya's compensation is performance-based instead of guaranteed. The company he leads must deliver sustained profitable growth over the long-term for his comp to be worth a lot. The fact it's worth a lot this year is almost entirely due to him already delivering on his commitments to shareholders in the past. Keep in mind that the average public company CEO is in the CEO job less than five years. Satya is in the minority that is succeeding. Due to the high visibility of the CEO role, the majority who don't succeed have a high likelihood of never earning significant compensation again.
That's not our number at all. GP said "executives" which includes a lot more than the CEOs. For all I know 1% of the company could be executives
It's not how business works.
You hire people if you need people, and you pay them the least you can get away with, so you maximize profits - because long ago, you raised money with the promise to the people you raised the money from that you would do this, and you have a Fiduciary obligation to do so...
We agree then that employees should put in the least amount of work that they can get away with, right? Fair's fair.
They're particular individuals who will take a stance like what you're outlining and sit in a limbo state outside of performance firing them. They bring down team moral, high performing employees feel cheated, etc.
Please show me one public company that has said - sorry shareholders - we're returning 100%+ of profits to our employees forever.
You can't raise money from Shareholder A with the promise to never return the money.
That's a donation. Not gonna be able to raise money like you can from VCs and IPOs.
Being nice to workers, and never returning money to shareholders because you're overpaying your workers are two entirely different things.
FAANG has treated their workers quite well for a 10+ years, and shareholders have not cared, because profits and growth have been enormous.
They could've treated their workers much better and paid them 2-3x as much money, though. But they didn't. Because they would've gotten sued by shareholders.
Probably not. Google makes $1.6 million in revenue per employee, and $400k in profit per employee. Wages in tech for these money printing companies are more set by arbitrary norms than any real financial basis.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
Compared to unions and socialist ideals, FAANG has treated workers okay because of the arbitrarily high income compared to when the working class gets even more exploited in other industries. Being better than bad situations doesn’t mean a good situation.
Some big tech companies were colluding to keep wages stagnant by not hiring workers at other companies. Wages were lower until the collision was uncovered and companies like Facebook came around and started paying more. Colluding against workers is not treating them well.
Pay and some stock options aren’t the only ways to treat workers better. Capitalism doesn’t have to control every part of why we are nice to other people.
There. Corrected.
https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its...
> For example, when interest rates go down, it becomes cheaper to borrow, so households are more willing to buy goods and services, and businesses are in a better position to purchase items to expand their businesses, such as property and equipment. Businesses can also hire more workers, influencing employment. And the stronger demand for goods and services may push wages and other costs higher, influencing inflation.
[0]: https://www.epi.org/blog/inflation-minimum-wages-and-profits...
Hopefully that buys you some more time to find a new job or line up an ACA plan if you're in a state with decent ACA plans, because actually paying for COBRA out of pocket for months at a time is indeed very expensive.
(It also would be totally worth it if you had existing expensive health care needs in your family)
TL;DR: Treat COBRA as an options contract.
I've never paid for it, the one time I had it come up it was something like $800/mo for me as a single 20s laid off person. Not top priority.
The ACA just states that insurers can't refuse a customer who wants to purchase a plan just because they have a preexisting condition. It doesn't actually require that the plan cover treatment for said condition.
In many states - including wealthier deep blue states - the marketplace plan options are actually quite terrible.
> Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy. They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
If you have a disease or syndrome, the treatments for that condition (whether pharmaceutical, outpatient, or inpatient) may simply not be on the list of benefits provided by the insurance plans offered.
It's legally distinct from, but analogous to, a nodiscrimination clause. They can't refuse to cover your mammogram (which they cover for everyone else) just because your initial diagnosis for Vamipiric Brain Syndrome occurred before your plan went into effect. But they can choose to say they they don't cover Nosferatudone for anyone (when Nosferatudone happens to be the only effective treatment for Vamipiric Brain Syndrome).
(There are, separately, certain treatments that all insurance plans must cover by law, although that's separate from the ACA, and it's a very limited set).
Yes, I'm well aware of that, and those requirements are incredibly bare-bones. Nearly any insurance provided by employers far exceeds those requirements, whereas the same cannot be said for insurance provided on the marketplace.
This post is about people who are losing employer-provided insurance, and there's almost no universe in which the non-COBRA options available to most of those people aren't markedly worse than what they're losing, even if we ignore the increased cost of self-purchased insurance.
If one exists, and as I stated in the original post, in many states, even the best plans available on the marketplace are quite terrible. And that's a problem that's actually gotten worse in recent years, not better, as plans have left the exchange (and providers have dropped marketplace plans from their networks).
> and your pre-existing condition won't impact the price of the good insurance plan.
Your "pre-existing condition" won't impact the price of the insurance plan relative to others who are purchasing that same plan, but you quite likely will be in a situation where the "good" (eg, gold) plans are the only ones which will provide the coverage that you need, and those are the most expensive ones. This satisfies the letter of the law, but in practice it still means that often people with chronic health condition either are are forced to pay more for coverage or are literally unable to get coverage for their conditions at all (because none of the marketplace plans will cover it).
The protections provided by the ACA are much more narrow than you're portraying them as, which is understandable because it's a common misconception about how the ACA operates, but it's unfortunately a very important distinction.
One person said this, without mentioning either their state or any details of their previous plan.
> a "blue northeast state" that, according to you, has inadequate options.
I did not say that every "blue, northeast state" has "inadequate options". I said that many states have terrible options, and that, contrary to the stereotype of ACA issues being limited to poorer red states that refused to expand Medicare, this set includes wealthier blue states.
> Do you have any evidence that the plans aren't sufficient?
You stated that "public exchanges are guaranteed to cover their existing condition", an assertion of universality. This is completely false, for reasons that I have explained. The federal statues guaranteeing coverage for individual conditions are incredibly narrow and exclude both the most expensive conditions for patients, as well as almost all expenses for chronic conditions.
Furthermore, it's very easy to disprove this assertion of universality, because it's incredibly easy to find counterexamples - the ACA has been around for a decade, and there are tons of forum posts all over the past ten years from people struggling to find non-COBRA coverage that continues to match their needs after losing a job. A marketplace plan cannot deny you an insurance plan for a preexisting condition, but that doesn't mean that there exists a marketplace plan that will cover it.
The fact that you happen to know people who are satisfied with their coverage for themselves is neither here nor there, because it does not contradict the main point: the ACA is no guarantee that people losing their jobs will actually have any non-COBRA options to address their health needs (and given that Microsoft has pretty comprehensive insurance and employs people in nearly every state, it's all but certain that the marketplace options will be appreciably worse for many of those people than the status quo).
At no point have you provided any actual evidence, other than an unsourced offhand anecdote (which I addressed), to support your bold initial claim.
I've taken the time to provide much more in the way of both evidence and explication than you have presented. If you'd like more, then perhaps first you can provide some concrete evidence to support the scope of your original, claim, and also address the specific examples that I revealed which refute the premise of your claim.
Others here have provided first-hand accounts of acquiring adequate coverage on exchanges.
Does private employer insurance not have the same limitations?
Yes, but insurance sold to private employers is a completely different market, and it is almost universally better than the insurance plans available on the exchanges.
The ACA originally tried to hide that vulnerability by making insurance mandatory, then it appeared when that forcible mandate was repealed.
Edit to reply to the reply: Right, it's not insurance. Insurance is pooling risk. If you wait until the risk event has already happened, it's not insurance, it's just paying your own costs with extra steps.
I don't think that's even "insurance" at that point....
America may quite possible have the absolute dumbest system humanly possible.
Of course the countries with those laws have never created a company like MS in the first place, so..
>>people with health issues will be on their own
Maybe the US sorts this sheet out, really about time
You can close your eyes and cheer about profitability, but the bill is coming anyway.