Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
group-media.mercedes-benz.com
group-media.mercedes-benz.com
This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate "union within the company", in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1/2 of the members representing the employees.
Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the ">10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years" headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.
Absolutely love that, and stuff like that would never be allowed to form here in the US. Labor having an equal seat at the table should be seen as a good thing for the purposes of long-term sustainability, not a bad thing. Can it have drawbacks? Sure. However, the flipside is that currently in most places, such as the US, Capital has all the seats at the table, or sometimes Labor will given a symbolic place at the proverbial kid's table, with no real ability to enact change or make their voices heard. I applaud what Mercedes-Benz is doing here.
On the other hand, America's friendliness to capital has lead to funding companies that end up competing for software engineers. This is part of the reason why developer jobs in the US tend to pay twice as well as those in Europe.
I'd rather live in a place where everyone is comfortable than a place where only people like me are, even if I'd be somewhat wealthy.
Now this is a really unpopular opinion on here... I think the real issue is centralization of high capital tech work, and really the density of people in general. The cost of living in places like NYC, northern VA, and Silicon Valley are all hugely above the median. It's like a vicious cycle of groupthink instead of evenly distributing those jobs (companies) throughout cheaper, less populous areas. I'd love to see someone from a depressed area start a big name company in that area to help being jobs and prosperity to their neighbors. Perhaps that's just my deluded fantasy.
1. Inflation - Though I will not expound here because I’m not an expert.
2. Salaries in the US have been stagnant since the 70s which correlates to the start of the weakening of Big Labor by corporate and government interests.
Left-leaning source:
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
Right leaning source:
https://www.aei.org/articles/have-wages-stagnated-for-decade...
Brookings Institute coverage of both left and right sources:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/09/10/are-wages...
This is happening all the time. A hundred years ago the Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley was orchards. Detroit was getting rich on the latest tech wave.
A hundred years before that, the North of England was making fortunes in the Industrial Revolution.
In our lifetimes China has changed incredibly. Foxconn is now a big name company that employs over a million people and moved a lot of money into the places they operate.
Problem is getting money to a place like that. Investors hate travel if its not to the same 3 cities
They’ve been slowly expanding operations and bringing new tech jobs and opportunities to a pretty bleak area. Very cool and inspiring to see.
The same works in the other direction, and it kind of sucks for companies in areas where income isn't as high having to compete for talent against others with much deeper pockets. It's been interesting to say the least.
Unfortunately, I've seen the govt operating against unions... looking at the railway and airlines and think they're really on the wrong side of this, as much as I don't want to be more inconvenienced from strikes, they should be able to do so. I feel the govt does more harm than good in the US and would prefer a little less picking winners and losers in the mix. On the same note, I don't think they're playing their hands well at all to establish domestic production and security fia application of tariffs and FDA requirements.
I feel like this is the opposite of what’s happened here in the UK and the timescales are not that long but the collective amnesia is staggering. Even just as far back at the mid 00’s seems to have fallen out of the memory of a large proportion of the population.
Isn't that what the complaints about NIMBYism are all about? Yeah, I'm all for having other people solving the problems of the poor workers. I don't have to do anything until they do. While we're at it, lets have the software developers clothe and house them as well. They can clearly afford it. It's only fair. Am I a good person now?
Talk is cheap. Do something first before complaining about what others aren't doing.
If there were a stronger social safety net and everyone had to pay a bit more in tax, then that would actually impact something.
It's effectively a bunch of people who want a crowd funding campaign for a product to exist, and everyone else saying "if you want to throw your money away, here's a trash can". That's entirely missing the point and completely unhelpful. The goal is to make a collective investment and get something in return.
If we're being real, this group, myself included, is only one step removed from a NIMBY, but it is what it is. If you want to suggest I abandon the little leverage I have to put towards creating a better society for myself and the people around me, I would say: you first. Oh, not interested? Welcome to the club. Now let's work together to make this place we live better.
Highly paid tech workers are still workers, albeit ones that tend to lack class consciousness because they think they're on top (until they get fired en masse to save profits).
Management earning wildly disproportionate salaries should share first. Management is worthless without labor, yet is responsible for choking workers from their fair share.
Americans might be selfish but they’re not irrational. Much of my family immigrated to Australia and Canada. My mom just got back from a long trip there, and was complaining about how small and close together the houses are, and how doctors can’t really get rich there. If you care more about the square footage of your house or the number of cars you have (and Americans do, and continually import immigrants who have similar values) than about health care for poor people, then the specific trade-offs made in America economic policy are totally rational.
I'm saying that governmental policies have allied the poor and the ultra wealthy to the detriment of the middle class. GP was saying American dev salaries are too high, when really they are not the issue compared to how many tax breaks 10MM+ individuals have gotten.
Investors have bought up 40% of the real estate in some counties in the US. That's ridiculous.
When the government allows for predatory behavior by companies and the ultra wealthy that lowers their responsibility to society that is not a burden for the middle class to bear.
And besides if you think that's an economically feasible zero-sum calculus, I don't even know what to tell you.
But if you really think you earn too much, you can donate 40-50% of your salary and truly transform another person's life or make an astonishing impact in a charity of your choice. I hope you are being coherent with your words and are already doing this.
How do you feel about people who say to protestors, "if you don't like it here, move"?
You're peddling the same logical fallacy that conservative billionaires have convinced the lower-middle class of for a century.
OP proposes a trade: their high salary for a society that prioritizes the wellbeing of everyone over the wellbeing of the luckiest few. In response, you suggest that OP should give away half their salary to another individual, and they've solved their problem.
The fallacy here is that you assume assume OP's goal is to be purely selfless; that is not the case. OP very selfishly wants to live in a healthier, more sustainable society than they currently do. In response, you disingenuously suggest that they take all of the negatives of their the trade with none of the positives.
Hopefully you see why that's not helpful to anyone.
One thing I'd add is that, even if I were able to give away enough of my income to make a difference in my community, everyone in the community would benefit, but I would be the only one paying for it. I find this intensely unfair and distasteful.
This is similar to how I felt during the height of the bay area mask mandates when most people were masked and one or two families were not. Those folks were reaping all the benefits of widespread vaccinations and masking, yet bearing none of the burden. I despised those people probably more than was healthy.
I'm not sure 'even' is the right word here. The gap between developer and median salaries goes down the richer the country is. e.g. in many Eastern European countries the average salary for a software developer can be up to 2x or more higher than the national average.
I was on a wedding in NYC last summer. One of the guests I talked to was a junior dev. He was making 120k/y. He had to flat share. With 120k?
With 60k/y you do not have to flat share in Berlin.
And this goes the other way around too. When I worked for a multinational in Berlin a few years ago we had lots of Ukrainians that we hired at externals through a subcontracting company in that country.
Quite a few of the better developers applied directly and we happily took them on. The main reason was that they would make twice as much in Berlin.
But that was on paper. After paying taxes in Germany their net salary was less than what they had made net in Ukraine. Most of them went back.
Just saying.
For one, every city with a lot of career options for young professionals is actively hostile towards housing development, except maybe Seattle.
$120k should be enough to live in apartment anywhere in the US though. However, with how high rents are, it makes much more sense to spend that somewhere else like an early retirement in a much cheaper city.
After paying taxes in Germany their net salary was less than what they had made net in Ukraine. Most of them went back.
Income tax in Ukraine is about 20%. I used to live in Hongkong. Max tax rate was about 15%. Overall quality of life was terrible compared to advanced economies with 2x/3x tax rates. Sure, you might be "rich" on paper, but you pay a lot for privitised versions of these quality of life services. I always say: "If you pay little [in taxes], you get little [in gov't services]."
Another way to think about it: Look at countries that are not corrupt but it is very hard to get rich. Usually, those countries have excellent quality of life.
And maybe they went back for cultural reasons (food, family, education, etc.). I have observed that pattern many times.
Reality is SW engineering barely 2x median income in Germany untill you're talking like senior/lead roles. Meanwhile in the US grads start 2x.
Ok well the problem there is he's living in the most expensive place he possibly could. Live in the suburbs and you won't have to share a flat on $120k.
Assuming you pay $200/month in healthcare, ~$1800 a month to max out your 401k, your take home pay is about $5,000 after taxes. In Manhattan and the expensive parts of Brooklyn, your own place is realistically a minimum of $2,500, possibly as much as $3,000. Outside of those places, still $2,000.
Source: I literally just went through this process, as a new grad, making slightly above $120k about 3 months ago.
Plus with junior devs the salary increase is pretty steep in the first few years.
I think the argument “he has to live in a share flat otherwise would need to compromise on maxing out with 401k” isn’t as convincing an argument as the OP thinks.
What about the cheaper parts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island...? Not even to mention Jersey City.
It's funny that we have a dozen different open source software licenses that are all some version of "how can we give this to you even freer" but we have no notion of what an equitable work contract looks like. Until that changes, things will never, ever, get better for workers.
I don’t know of single US company that allows their workers on their board. I’m not against it. I think it’s an awesome idea.
Technically, if a CEO is on the board, then a company’s employee is on the board. Shareholders will probably not vote to put a line level employee on the board, though.
The compliment to "workers aspiring to join the owning class" is that the biggest risk a capitalist faces is the possibility of being thrust back into the working-class, and having to actually work for a living, as opposed to living off of profits derived from the labor of others.
In practice, socialism is a power grab where populist leaders redistribute the ownership classes' assets to themselves.
Is this how workers’ councils work in Germany?
So the conversation becomes, should the government(s) in the US force businesses to place line level employees on the board (if the line level employees want to be on the board), and under what parameters?
In Germany, they do find it economically viable and important for line level employees to have direct representation on the company board. Talking about the CEO or other management classes being on the board is missing the conversation. Suggesting that because US companies don't believe in the economic value is missing the conversation. Suggesting that people are saying that this type of board composition is illegal is also missing the conversation. No one said it's illegal, but it's equally not a legal requirement either like it is in other places.
The conversation is that this composition doesn't exist, by and large, in the US, and people think it should. People seem to believe that it does have value to the business.
So yes, it does seem like you're creating semantic arguments because your points miss the conversation semantically.
On the other hand, we do have higher productivity, but not having codetermination probably isn't the reason for that.
You don't really have a choice if nobody where you live will take your insurance...
Both would only cover one of the four nearest major hospitals to me (though they did differ in which one it was) and only one of the two covered the huge local children's hospital that's also bought up nearly all the independent pediatrician's offices and pediatric urgent cares in the entire city, so if you have kids you actually only have one "option".
So much for the bounty of choice we preserved by not just going single-payer.
There might be some states where the marketplace has nothing good in it, often because that state's governor was so ideologically driven they refused free money from the feds to expand medicare style systems. American health care is HUGELY state to state, largely depending on how willing a governor is to actually help their constituents instead of virtue signalling.
Some of the low cost companies are essentially scams: most of the "providers" they list on their site will not actually accept the plan; if you do have any medical costs, they will do everything possible to avoid paying even when you are clearly covered; you'll wait for hours on hold to talk to support, then they will be rude and unhelpful; etc. etc.
It's well worth paying an extra hundred or so per month for a reputable provider so that you at least have actual functional health insurance.
Health insurance is the "golden handcuffs" for most people staying in a job.
Regardless, there's subsidies if you don't have income, and it's just based on income; there's no requirement to seek income.
I'm near seattle, and my marketplace place for 2 adults around 40 and 1 child was around $1,200; unsubsidized.
Class struggle happens everywhere and workers can win anywhere, even the US.
Neither Medicaid nor Obamacare require you to work. My father in law did this in Oregon. “Retired” years before being eligible for Medicare, and is covered by the Oregon Health Plan. In Oregon you don’t even have to be legally in the country to qualify for fill OHP benefits.
No you can't. You're not thinking this through. As soon as enough people quit in order to start pressuring companies to allow this, it becomes more difficult for the growing pool of quitters to get new jobs and it becomes a buyers market, putting you in an even weaker position than you already were in. On top of that, capital always has more of an ability to hold out far longer. You need to eat and pay rent right now while they can scale down production until you come back with terms favorable to them. This is why unions save money ahead of time so that they can strike.
I do think a strike could be effective here though. A company is in more of a bind when all / many of its workers refuse to work.
So long as the company acts as a group and labour acts as a individuals, all the bargaining power will be on the side of the company.
I think the union formed at Microsoft may be a good example to follow.
As far as I can tell, there is simply no place where a group of workers can borrow money. We have no concept of loans co-signed by a large number of people in the US.
For example, there should be a floor at which a loan is deemed risk-free because a typical person has that much money. Any of us can donate $5 to someone living on the street at any time. So 100 people should be able to borrow $500 together, no questions asked.
Now, how high can that go? Certainly $20 each. Maybe $100? $300? It's going to be an amount similar to what payday loan shops offer to strangers.
To me, this is like customer acquisition cost (CAC). In the 90s, CAC was under $1 before advertising got saturated. Today it's between $25 and $50, which has eliminated nearly all indie websites selling handmade goods for less than that. And driven the rise of influencers, and incentivized taking over making.
I know we have Kickstarter etc. But for something like this to work, it would need to be available everywhere immediately with no nonsense, no exorbitant interest or fees and no wait time. The government could offer group loans like this with a $100 per person limit today and bootstrap the economy to where it was 25 years ago and make a huge return.
Maybe this is what drove crypto and NFTs, just in a way that was obviously going to implode because workers were expected to pony up the cash. So I'd be curious to hear if investors know of any places to take out group loans like this.
The central problem will be inequality of all kinds, such as aptitude/motiviation/effort/etc. Eventually, in many businesses, you will get into a situation where some people will think they deserve more than others, and then politics will take over, and you have a similar problem to weaknesses in democracy.
>As far as I can tell, there is simply no place where a group of workers can borrow money. We have no concept of loans co-signed by a large number of people in the US.
There is. A family reunion, a bank, a credit union, a local business group meeting, etc. There is nothing stopping this happening other than the fact that it is not economic. Underwriting, agency risk, and pursuing unpaid debt is not a negligible problem.
>For example, there should be a floor at which a loan is deemed risk-free because a typical person has that much money. Any of us can donate $5 to someone living on the street at any time. So 100 people should be able to borrow $500 together, no questions asked.
Very few lenders exist who would accept that deal. As a lender, would you?
That's othering. You're separating the "us" that are hard workers and successful from the "them" that are slackers.
But wealth inequality is an injustice specifically because it doesn't discriminate.
For example: in software development the hardest workers are penalized because the 10:1 or 100:1 leverage in their solutions often isn't recognized or rewarded. They might get paid twice as much as another dev even though decades of experience and orders of magnitude differences in problem-solving capacity separate them. That could be where your perception comes from, if you feel undervalued for your work and see others around you as entitled.
The hardest workers I've met in my life were generally the lowest paid. When I was moving furniture from 2001-2003, women automatically were paid $9/hr to pack boxes while the men were paid $10/hr to load them. Never mind that packing is a much more difficult job psychologically. I could pack about 30 boxes/day if I went as fast as I could, while a woman I worked with averaged 80. Almost 3 times my productivity for less pay and opportunity. And she had kids. And she didn't have the money to go to the dentist. And she never complained. Not like me.
Today 20 years later, costs have at least doubled while pay has stayed the same. I worry for her and the literally 100 million Americans who work harder than we do and live hand to mouth. It's a travesty of such proportion that it's become unthinkable. We literally can't overcome our own biases to think about it rationally. Our inability to empathize is the root cause of suffering.
So yes, I would make that loan all day. And nothing against you, I don't know you, I don't mean to be critical. I just feel that your argument is rooted in bias which somewhat ironically causes you to not entertain the insights I've gained acquiring my bias.
Edit: I may have misread your point. Do you mean that some people will think they deserve more than others and hoard the profits of the business? Sorry if I got that backwards or projected my context onto what you said.
Yes, and I posit "othering" is an innate part of humans (and other animals). Of course, it is worthwhile to work against excessive "othering" that causes a net loss in the functioning of society.
>Do you mean that some people will think they deserve more than others and hoard the profits of the business?
Yes, although I would not make a judgment call as to whether or not it is "hoarding".
The lag between people quitting and people finding their next job reduces the labor supply. That’s compounded by onboarding time required to conduct interviews and get people up to speed etc. It’s why companies so frequently fold in the face of strikes rather than just fire everyone, they have a great deal of individual leverage on any one employee but are completely dependent on having a workforce.
> As soon as enough people quit
You don’t actually need a formal union to get large numbers of people to quit.
Also that model swings both ways. Employees will usually remain loyal to the bitter end.
Its pretty much mandatory for many big German companies
No? Why is it capital can dictate what labor does, but the reverse isn't true? Is it some law of nature, or a cultural victory by capital.
That’s why some labor is more highly paid or has more power than other kinds of labor. Capital, likewise has inherent leverage and scarcity power.
We have not, in fact “all come together and decided that we want” the capitalist model of property rights, and indeed the long term evolution since the early 20th century has been away from that model, which was largely imposed top-down jointly by the rising capitalist class and the fading pre-capitalist aristocracy.
Because the answer is capital.
Vision, good ideas, the ability to inspire, bringing people together, luck, etc. all factor in. To single out capital is to say if anyone has money they will be able to start a successful business.
At https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-an... the section labeled: "Democratize Corporate Boards".
Worth reading to think about nuts and bolts of something like this being normal and required.
Basically, instead of having unions/employees explain in conspiratorial tones why management is evil, they see what's happening for real. It's a lot harder to say 'evil board' when you have a seat there and are (for example) facing massive losses - your job then becomes to build a collective, satisfactory solution rather than just stay in the opposition and complain. Because employees trust the board, they will also accept changes, sometimes hard ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corpo...
You mean like the power to hire and fire them, tell them what to do, and how much they get paid?
However, large (old) companies will nearly always have such a Council in Germany.
What can they do? Basically, they do have a voice concerning anything that touches the day to day working situation. Monitor whether the employees adheres to norms and rules. Employers also have to inform the Council members about anything relevant going on concerning the workers.
Especially when it comes to hiring, firing and restructuring the Council can also veto and force the employer to sue and get the court to override the veto. In general you don’t really want to have the Council on your bad side as an employer, even though the power isn’t limitless and how much power there is in practice depends on the specific Council and how it fulfills its duties.
Unions aren’t needed for any of this but they will always want to help install a Workers Council.
I recently started at a public health insurance and we had someone from the Council sit in during my interview. When I was on the other side and took part in an interview we also had someone from the Council there to look over our shoulders, also when we documented our evaluation of the candidate.
This system of checks and balances is something that’s not much appreciated. You won’t believe what companies can get away with if there’s not Betriebsrat oversight.
The "General Works Council" is just that board, I believe. So this is quite a normal setup for a large German company.
Iirc teslas giga fab does not have an elected Betriebsrat.
Since many American companies incorporate in Germany for their German branches, they can also face Betriebsrats elections.
Overall I do think a Betriebsrat is a net positive for a company. It’s not always as profit oriented as an executive but it has a long term interest in the company as opposed to executives who just think in quarter years and about keeping shareholders happy.
It was formed very early meaning before most of the Frontline employees were hired .
There was criticism at the time that it was filled with people loyal to management rather than workers
As always with Germans, the answer is "it's really complicated" lol
The old page [0] about EU-mandated law regarding Works Councils now says "The Brexit transition period has ended and new rules on participating in a European Works Council now apply. This page is currently out of date."
The new page [1] says: "Only people employed in EEA countries can ask their employer to set up an EWC.
If you are employed in the UK you cannot ask for one to be set up"
:(
(I'm not actually sure if this was an intentional change or just an accidental side-effect of the UK leaving the EEA [2], but the Tories hardly deserve the benefit of the doubt regarding intent when it comes to a pro-capital anti-workers change, and they could easily just extend the old bill to cover "EEA or UK" rather than "only EEA" if it wasn't wanted...)
[0] https://www.gov.uk/apply-european-works-council
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/participating-in-a-european-work...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...
The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
Clara E. Mattei
It is excellent so far.
It's very well written and the research into the actual memoranda from the period she is discussing is very eye-opening. It is also, unfortunately, quite depressing.
For comparison, Google just announced layoffs of 12k today. By Sept 2022, Google had 187k employees. This is up 68k from 119k in Sept 2019's or growth of 57% from pre-pandemic. The 12k layoffs today represent less than 17.6% of their growth in new employees since before the pandemic.
Contrast with Mercedes Benz which had 152k employees in 2019 and 173k employees today, a growth of only 13.8% since pre-pandemic.
No, its work council or workers' council that is integrated to the company's top management per regulations. Germany and various countries have them, and its a Eu recommendation. It seems to work quite well judging from the last 2 decades.
I do have my issues with all rhe politics and self serving that can happen with those councils, the overall idea is pretty solid so.
For one situation gone wrong, google VWs Brazil scandals involving various private jet trips for high ranking worker councils members to visit their mistresses in Brazil.
Works council has a say in hiring. And firing decisions. And also on other business decision in the company. At times this is good and progressive, sometimes not so much (usually huge fans of combustion engines).
Elected Works council members can be union members but also independent.
Iirc the mode worked so well that Daimler tried to export it to an American plant but it was shut down there because “this is not how we run things here”
Ah and then with VW there is the story how the works council let itself be bribed
>"Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the ">10k workers >laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years" >headlines that seem to be popping up here daily."
i often see people going or want to go to giant IT companies, as you refer, forgetting the "safety" of working for big German or even European companies. In some German companies you get a job for life, a contract without end and the "working council" works very hard to find solutions for all workers and for the company. This is one of the reasons why i would hardly work for an American Company in US.
It sucks and people deserve severance and unemployment but at the same time why is a reduction in workforce supposed to be immoral? Have severance packages been surprisingly light or something?
I'm not sure the comparison between companies in different countries, in different industries/segments is really useful though. It sounds like you're implying the structure prevented layoffs. But in reality I feel it had little to do with profitability. Kind of like blaming a president for the overal stock market going up or down.
That's definitely wrong.
GM has said its average hourly worker earns around $90,000 in wages, overtime and profit sharing. The only workers who can reach that level are skilled trades, about 15% of the workforce, the UAW said. In-progression and temp workers earn much less.
However, a GM spokesman countered that skilled trades workers earn up to $123,000 annually, including profit sharing and overtime but not benefits.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2019/09/27/gm-strike-...
Glassdoor says Mercedes Benz production workers make about $18/hour on average: https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Mercedes-Benz-USA-Assem...
It’s less adversarial. In America, industrial unions sprung from a time when unions fought capitalism and management were criminals. That stain persists.
Tech companies’ stock awards are close to the German model. Add a Board seat elected by the ESOP and you have a tight approximation.
Indeed. Management never moved on.
Aren't large bonuses common enough with FAANG that they don't even make the news?
I did the math and realized that if he took half of the bonus and distributed it evenly to every single Tesla employee, from VPs down to cafeteria staff, it would amount to around $40,000 for every person in the company. Of course Elon pocketed it all.
Later that year and for the following year Tesla would be embroiled in labor scandals.
I've seen a lot of people in my own network who work at U.S. tech companies share this as an example of what companies should be doing. A lot of contrasting takes about how U.S. companies are laying people off while MB is handing out higher than expected bonuses.
Meanwhile, I know for a fact that a lot of the people sharing this are getting paid significantly more than these employees and also have bonus plans that pay out several multiples higher than the highest MB payout (7300EUR) even in a bad year.
Maybe this is an example of managing expectations. Mercedes-Benz paying four-figure bonuses to employees is noteworthy largely because they're paying more than expected. Meanwhile, I see people who earn significantly more being unhappy because their compensation was less than some number they expected.
Interesting lesson in how expectations are relative, not absolute.
Yup. I have a hard time taking any of the whining on HN seriously. People being paid $300K+ but all they can do is complain that they attend too many meetings. People that job hop once a year but the idea of layoffs is high treason.
> People being paid $300K+
It's probably very far from the average HNer
It is, however, a fact that a relatively high amount of HNers earn way over 100k due to the prevalence of people form SV on here. Tech salaries in the rest of the world are nowhere near those in SV.
Because the people doing layoffs are getting $250M/y in stock value alone.
Edit: See comments below. Correct Mercedes-Benz market cap is $76.5B, in which case Microsoft is 23 times the size of Mercedes-Benz.
https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/equity/mercedes-benz-group says the market capitalization is 70.29B Euros.
Mercedes-Benz had roughly the same net income as Facebook last quarter, and in the same ballpark as all of the major US tech companies, and still has significantly lower average pay.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/germany/calif...
> California is 58.4% more expensive than Germany. *
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/stuttgart-c59...
> San Francisco is 98.1% more expensive than Stuttgart [MB HQ].
* My favorite part of this comparison is that a new Volkswagen is allegedly 3.1% less expensive in California than in Germany lol
Yeah I was surprised by the number. I have a relative that makes anywhere from 1.5x to 3x her annual salary on her annual bonus working for a US finance company.
> Maybe this is an example of managing expectations. Mercedes-Benz paying four-figure bonuses to employees is noteworthy largely because they're paying more than expected. Meanwhile, I see people who earn significantly more being unhappy because their compensation was less than some number they expected.
The tradeoffs are essentially this. In the US you can make orders of magnitude more money on salary, bonus and stock compensation. However, you get essentially zero employee protections. Meaning you can be fired without cause and without severance at anytime. You have no legal right to things like maternity or paternity leave, and you have no legal right to affordable health insurance coverage.
Also, companies often provide benefits above the legal minimum, making the minimum less relevant for those employees, unless something changes.
Whenever I'm seeing posts like this, I wonder if "up to x Euros" isn't the other way around and smaller incomes are on the lower end of the bonus range.
Link (content written by our PR department, in German): https://www.presseportal.de/pm/164280/5271230
Isn't part of inflation that this doesn't work at scale? As in, if everyone gets higher wages, bigger bonuses, and more money is being poured into 401ks, inflation gets even worse? Or do wages become a rounding error when you add in stuff like real-estate and loans?
Kind of, but wages are only part of the cost of goods.
Assuming wages represent 30% of the cost of goods (i.e. 30% labour, 20% property/fixed costs, 50% materials) and wages go up 10%, then they only impact the cost of goods by 3% (thus 3% inflation might be expected at a simplistic macro level).
Then there is a sort of loop where the 3% inflation could encourage another 3% wage inflation, but that only affects the cost of goods by 0.9% and so on. When you follow this theory, that 10% wage inflation only turns into an additional c4.5% increase in inflation (or 15% if you include the initial 10%).
This is overly simplistic and there are other levers at play, which is why lots of economics calculations often have continous simulations which can show the impact of these feedback loops (Inflation causes wage increases causes inflation causes wage increases).
This is the thinking companies would like you to have. Meanwhile, profits have been massive for many companies in spite of inflation. The in site of part is somewhat sarcastic, because a lot of it is driven purely by corporate greed next to macro economic factors.
Companies that move part of their profits into wages don't have to increase prices if... They accept a decrease in profits.
To me, this seems like one of the only ways to avert a real crisis right now. We're moving money toward the rich at a crazy rate, causing regular people to be able to afford less and less. Rich people tent to not spend their money in the real world. A rich person doesn't buy 10 iPhones or 10 F150s, they buy one yacht. The middle class is who cause economic growth and stripping them from purchasing power will slow everything down.
In the end, the rich will also feel this, when their assets implode. But they'll only feel it in the value of these assets. They won't feel it in their daily lives. Only the normals actually feel pain from all this.
This is not a good explanation because you have to explain why it went up at time X rather than earlier, and of course why it goes down sometimes. Do they just stop being greedy?
And it's empirically not true: https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-review/how-m...
> We're moving money toward the rich at a crazy rate, causing regular people to be able to afford less and less.
Also not true, wealth inequality has been flat in the US since 2013 and has declined since 2020.
People just love saying negative stuff!
In the US - debt is >30% of the economy (government deficit, new corporate debt, new mortgages, and personal auto & student loans). But non-debt still makes up the majority - so I don't think everything becomes a rounding error compared to debt.
The interest rate has to be the single most important variable - but wages aren't a rounding error.
They have flagship EVs - EQE, EQB, EQS that are well reviewed.
They are the first car company to get approved for L3 self-driving in the US: https://insideevs.com/news/630075/mercedes-first-to-offer-le...
and they are building out their own network of charging stations: https://insideevs.com/news/629594/mercedes-ev-charging-netwo...
I'm afraid they use this EVQ-T-B-D-R to impress, then get people to contact their dealers who dissuade them to go EV just yet, and finally sell the biggest ICE or hybrid possible. That's what happened with my dad who went to Lexus (for a heavy plugin hybrid, sigh).
It's not like Hyundai a few years ago where you couldn't find their EVs anywhere outside of southern CA. Just looked even Hyundai/Kia are available near me as well.
I worked at Amazon for 5 years before here, and have been here for another 5. The job is less stressful, the work is more meaningful (to me anyway, in that cars are more interesting than web ads were), the culture is more fun, and things are less cutthroat. I probably don't quite make FAANG money, but I don't put up with FAANG BS either.
And yes we're hiring https://jobs.lever.co/MBRDNA
Myself on the other side worked 2 years as a software engineer and that's as much as I could taake:
* politics
* too many artificial restrictions
* worst management I've ever experienced
* Work doesn't get valued at all, cancelling so many projects and ideas amounting to nothing
* lower reputation than "real" engineers, they still don't understand the value of software, like so many German companies, and treat us as necessary evil, which is also resulting in not competive salary
If you shut up and just come to work every day, you certainly "made it", but for me that's impossible.
I'd rather we all cycle everywhere like the Dutch and need less cars.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Admittedly, there might be other, additional causes to this. It should still be considered if higher turn over is a business risk for the company.
In an ideal world, people would be a bit better about managing uncertainty and most people would be able to live comfortably within their means on their base salaries and would have the restraint to invest large percentages of their bonuses.
I don't want a quarterly, biannual, or annual dividend if that means that that excess capital will be re-invested into better employees (or keeping current top employees) who produce better products which can better position the company in the long run.
For a long time I naively thought that was the whole point of investment: long term sustainability and allocation of capital that allowed companies to best compete.
For comparison, Ford might be up by about 25% (+$2-3) last 5 years, but it has only yielded a dividend of around $3.
[0] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/investors/share/dividend/
Mercedes Benz Group AG https://g.co/kgs/Qm7LK4
This does not work for businesses selling commodified products/services. Walmart can pay top dollar, but it is going to be disastrous because everyone will switch to buying from target/Kroger/Costco/Aldi/Amazon for cheaper.
• Outside investment can undermine the Co-Op's autonomy (many don't allow it) • Raising capital is hard; usually you're bootstrapping (worker-owners must divert some of their income) • Sometimes worker-owners get caught up in the democratic process of collective decision-making and get frustrated
On the other hand:
• A real Co-Op is real community. They exist to support the humans through work. You're all in this together. You can be "kicked out" by vote, but when you do, you give up your share and all that share money accumulating is yours. • You are "The Man" in the worst and best way you can imagine If something is wrong with the company, you can change it. • No more perverse mgmt incentives.
The biggest Co-Op is the Mondragon. They are very successful, too.
https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/best-for-the-world-2022-w...
There are tech co-ops, which are worker-owned: https://tech-coops.xyz/
They tend not to be a great structure for fostering a massive growth, massive risk, massive profits type company.
(And I guess family owned businesses where all the workers are members of the same family?)
In the modern world, you will see this in co-ops today.
Workers there are paid more than average, however compared to US salaries that's not much.
So it's always perspective.
Currently rocking a 2010 S400, immaculate interior and exterior. I'm all in for about 12k after repairs, would be closer to 16-18k if I paid someone to do the repairs. This vehicle won't depreciate more than $500 a year at this point. It's MSRP in 2010 was 113k.
I drove a 2022 Volvo S60 t8 recharge for a little bit earlier this year, the 13 year old s-class drives better and has nicer features...
Of course this is all moot if you're trying to buy very new models, in that case, you gotta love blowing money. Hah
Depreciation issues are great; it means that (in normal times) I can buy a 4-6 year old MB for a fraction of the new price and enjoy it for a decade or more, because of its good long-term reliability.
With reliability lists, it's slightly different, in that you see the name Toyota multiple times towards the top of the lists. Mercedes is nowhere to be found in that area, but at the same time, it's not like the bottom places are all taken by them either. It's a mix, again.
They're getting to be far too complex to be reliable, and too much attention is paid to short term profits (IMO), so we get what we have now.
Do you realize that Tesla has gone from 1k to 100k employees in the meantime?
I'd prefer to work at a company that will hire en masse in the coming years, than at one that's rich on paper but prefer to pay dividends and one-time bonus while having no reasonable roadmap for the future of mobility.
I hear the Qataris and Saudis are paying well, too.
Lack of profit might mean a smaller or no bonus at the end of 2023, though.
sounds fishy.
Nothing is really stopping similar organization from happening in the formation of Corporation in the US and elsewhere. But it has to be part of the foundation of said company, especially if it's publicly traded, as it's very hard to do after the fact. I'm not convinced it should be restructured via force from the Government, and not even as a bailout, as I'm not a fan of those govt actions either.
Corporate greed during global pandemic. Capitalism at its finest. Now we all have to pay the price just like on 2009. Privatize profits. Socialize losses.