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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

"The company's management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros."

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.

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>On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1/2 of the members representing the employees.

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.

They are not very standing out, all big german companys have that model?

Also that model swings both ways. Employees will usually remain loyal to the bitter end.

> They are not very standing out, all big german companys have that model?

Its pretty much mandatory for many big German companies

That makes about as much sense to me as putting CEOs on the board of unions.

The difference might be that workers have an interest in maintaining the business so they still have well paid jobs while CEOs do not necessarily have an interest in unions' well-being.

Many CEOs don't even have an interest in the company's well being (in the long run at at least)

It creates trust.

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.

The big German companies invite the unions in because they are a source of innovation too. And managing the connection between the people who actually build the cars and the people who design/plan them is important.

The designers are also unionized

big german companies do it because they are required to by law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corpo...

This is interesting. I sat next to a German manager of DaimlerChrysler (which really dates me, I know) on a flight. He agreed with the idea of worker unions being inside the company and having a seat at the table. He also disliked the practice of building cars "offshore" because, he said "the knowledge of building the car leaves the country".

Nonetheless, they don't let them on the board out of any self interest aside from following the law.

I actually see no problem with that. If the employees have a mechanism to keep management in check, there should be a way of management keeping employees in check. As long as there's a way to make sure everyone is on the same page, and there's harmony on and also between every level of the company, that's fine in my book.

> there should be a way of management keeping employees in check

You mean like the power to hire and fire them, tell them what to do, and how much they get paid?

CEOs and upper management aren't actually forbidden to unionize ;)

Allowed? We can choose not to work for companies that ban workers from their boards. Which is pretty much all of the big companies in the US.

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.

> Allowed? We can choose not to work for companies that ban workers from their boards. Which is pretty much all of the big companies in the US.

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.

So go start a worker-friendly company?

Ya that's what I'm wondering. The central problem seems to be wealth inequality (that capital has been separated from labor). So there's no money available for laid-off workers to start a business, maybe by design.

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 seems to be wealth inequality (that capital has been separated from labor).

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.

>That's othering. You're separating the "us" that are hard workers and successful from the "them" that are slackers.

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".

IIRC, Richard Wolfe, advocate of worker-directed social enterprises, mentioned that old school unions like SEIU are now funding startups, small businesses, etc. Maybe like a Small Business Administration and credit union for union members.

Some people do that. The majority though can't afford to do that, obviously. It's amazing that people can be so disconnected from reality to not see that as obvious.

It was meant to provoke some thought as to why there aren’t more worker friendly companies out there given that everyone seems to want them. Obviously not everyone is in a good situation to start their own.

I think you have that backwards, the more people quit the easier it is to get a job.

No, not if they are all quitting companies without these conditions to go to companies that do. You cannot create the pressure necessary to make the desired changes just by quitting.

If 1/2 of Microsoft’s workforce decided to quit tonight the company would go ballistic looking for workers.

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.

Yes, I did mention unions in my first post but that isn't what the person I was responding to was suggesting. They were suggesting individual action, not collective action.

I assumed he was talking about collective action or it’s functional equivalent here:

> As soon as enough people quit

You don’t actually need a formal union to get large numbers of people to quit.

You are of course entirely correct. Unilaterally quitting or refusing an offer isn’t going to achieve much.

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.

The most charitable reading of the OP is to believe that they want a union, since group labour negotiations are simplified when you have an official group representing you.

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.

You can’t choose not to work in the US. You will be without health insurance.

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.

I do not know of a single US company that does not allow workers (employees) on the board.

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.

Line level employees at employee owned companies are shareholders; perhaps the problem is not enough employee owned companies.

https://www.certifiedeo.com/

socialism, def.: when the working class aspire to join the ownership class.

"workers aspiring to join the owning class" sounds more like effective capitalist propaganda to me. A socialist aspiration would be to remove the distinction between owner and worker. By transforming a business to worker-ownership, the owning vs working class distinction is eliminated.

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 theory, socialism is when the working class redistributes the ownership class's assets.

In practice, socialism is a power grab where populist leaders redistribute the ownership classes' assets to themselves.

Succinct. Nice.

Wikipedia's treatment is a bit more nuanced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

The obvious issue here is that workers don't want to own their company and probably shouldn't. A .001% stake in a company is less useful than a 50% stake, and it's well known that if you work at a company that pays you in shares you should immediately sell them and buy an index fund.

Let’s not argue semantics. They mean exactly what you mention: line-level labor.

It is not semantics, because the statement that line level employees are banned from being on the board of directors is false. And that is important because the reason line level employees are not found on boards is that it rarely makes economic sense for a company's owners to put a line level employee on the board. And that is important because then the solution would have to be legislation.

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?

Your entire line of comments seems to miss the entire conversation.

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.

Europe has sectoral bargaining (whole-industry unions) and codetermination (workers on boards) because they're running on newer legal systems than the US. It'd probably work here, but we have older corporate unions (per-company unions) which causes unions and management to fight each other more.

On the other hand, we do have higher productivity, but not having codetermination probably isn't the reason for that.

Many companies in the US are employee owned. I think that's great and I would love to see people on HN form more of them.

https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

The system in Germany specifically differentiates between employees and the so-called managerial class: once you reach a certain amount of leadership, you aren't eligible for the workers council anymore, even if you are an employee.

Excluding a handful of co-ops, I don't know of a single company that does. This isn't about having one board member who happens to be an employee, it's about having >=50% of the board democratically elected by the employees.

> it's about having >=50% of the board democratically elected by the employees

Is this how workers’ councils work in Germany?

Yes, for companies with over 2000 employees, although the chairman of the board (who must not be an employee representative) gets the right to cast tie-breaking votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

You can buy health insurance on the marketplaces yourself, it’s not hard, and it’s much cheaper than eg housing in most places that are MCOL and up. The challenge is saving up enough to pay for all your living expenses while you’re choosing not to work.

Isn't there supposed to be a problem with health providers explicitly rejecting insurance companies/packages that are possible to buy yourself?

You don't really have a choice if nobody where you live will take your insurance...

Not in my experience. On east and west coasts, there are at least a couple widely accepted insurance plans available. A BCBS affiliate, a vertically integrated one like Kaiser or Providence, and other insurers offering PPO plans like UHC/Aetna/Cigna/Humana/etc.

I’ve never had that issue, or even heard of that issue, but I’ve only bought insurance from relatively large insurance companies, maybe it’s an issue if you try to save money by going with a small one with no network.

I've had good and bad experiences. One thing I learned the hard way is that even as a young person with low healthcare costs, it's a very bad idea to just choose the cheapest plan without doing any research.

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.

"There's supposed to be a problem.." I think that is a story you hear for political reasons because sadly healthcare became a partisan issue.

The plans in my state that you can buy on the open market are the same plans offered to local companies and the government for employer subsidized health care.

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.

Last I checked there were two companies offering insurance to individuals in my state—yes, two, yes, I'm serious, no, not just on the marketplace, there were no other providers who will take individual customers period, yes, I checked a lot and was repeatedly told, explicitly, by people who ought to know, that those were the only two options and other insurers had pulled out entirely from offering individual plans in this state.

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.

It is definitely not "cheaper" in my experience but the marketplace is definitely easy to buy good insurance through. That said, you need income to support the massive monthly payments. Family plans in the most desirable places to live can easily be $40k/year for the insurance policy before you have to cover any out of pocket expenses.

Health insurance is the "golden handcuffs" for most people staying in a job.

GP was saying health insurance is cheaper than housing in MCOL areas. Implying if you can pay to live somewhere nice with no job, you can pay for health insurance too.

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.

Definitely an awesome idea. If you ever need an example, cLabs.co is a US corporation that has an employee board seat.

You can’t choose not to work anywhere, you’ll starve.

Class struggle happens everywhere and workers can win anywhere, even the US.

There's an entire class of corporate ownership that's employee-owned in the USA.

https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership

> You can’t choose not to work in the US. You will be without health insurance.

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.

Since most people need a job to pay for housing, food, and medicial needs companies have the upper hand

What holds workers back from starting companies with the culture they want?

money

You say that like starting your own automotive company from the ground up is as easy as pouring a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

Then try a less capital-intensive industry? If you don’t have capital, and you want to use a lot of it from other people, then maybe you don’t get to dictate how that capital is used?

s/capital/labor/

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.

Because in that industry, you need a lot of capital, which usually means you need to convince people to lend you theirs. If you’re in an industry that doesn’t, and labor is the limiting factor (tech is more in this vein), then labor tends to get its way. This has been a bit mixed up by super loose monetary policy, but that’s not historically the norm.

I get your point: I was just making it clear that the opposite isn't true for labor-intensive industries where one has to gain the labor from a lot of people and still get to dictate how the labor is used. The obvious conclusion is that it's not about the quantity of capital/labor, but the current economic system where capital is king.

I wonder whether it isn’t more fundamental. I think the underlying principle is “leverage” and “scarcity”. The more leverage an input has and or the more scarce it is, the more it is prized, everything else being equal.

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.

Yep, this. Most labor has much less leverage now that it’s more easily replaceable by equally talented people half a world away. It’s just in areas with shortages where it has strong negotiating leverage.

Property rights aren’t a law of nature, but we’ve all come together and decided that we want them. I’m sure there are ways for groups of people to try other models on their own.

> but we’ve all come together and decided that we want them

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.

This isn't true. All settled agrarian societies need property rights, and allow for the accumulation of capital. You need to be assured the grain you grow will be yours to eat. You also need to be assured that the grain you've stockpiled for the winter will not be redistributed to people who may be staving now, otherwise you'll starve in the winter. Everything else flows from here.

> all settled agrarian societies need property rights

Perhaps, but the upthread discussion doesn’t hinge on merely the existence of property rights, but the very specific capitalist model of property rights, which obviously, not all settled agrarian societies have needed, since it is several millenia newer than settled agrarian societies are.

Defenders of capitalism love to argue about the need for “property rights” and then just leap from there to “and, therefore, capitalism”.

Property rights + individual liberty = capitalism.

The right to accumulate capital, and the freedom to voluntarily transact with others without outside interference is all that's needed to accumulate enormous wealth.

There is no dismantling of capitalism without compromising either property rights (ownership of land/stuff) or individual liberty (labour regulation).

> Property rights + individual liberty = capitalism.

No, one very specific model of property rights (plus no individual liberty not subsumed within that model) = capitalism.

But, again, the capitalist model of property rights isn’t the only one, and the developed West, where capitalism first became dominant, has been drifting away from the capitalist model of property rights for about 100 years now. (While at the same time rejecting alternatives that much more stridently oppose the capitalist model that grew up in places that attempted to avoid capitalism entirely.)

Can you describe the difference between the "capitalist" model of property rights and the common law model? I wouldn't classify ancient Roman property law as fundamentally different from ours today, would you?

Would you say that the ancient world practiced capitalism? Surely they had wealthy classes of merchants, landowners, bankers, etc. who accumulated capital and did stuff with it.

It’s just communist flim-flam.

I'm not going to discuss any of the tie-ins with capitalism, because frankly I don't care to, but I'm going to point out that as a historical note this is not an accurate representation of legal history. In fact it largely ignores it.

Our current system of real property ownership is a result of adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments on land during the advent of industrialization. The 'fee' in fee simple is etyomologically derived from 'fief', a system in which land titles were granted to people in exchange for fealty and servility.

Agrarian societies had significantly different needs and organized their affairs differently and they didn't starve during the winters. Except for those that did, like the settlers in iceland, who died from potentially too many property rights as landholdings became concentrated in the hands of a few small families which left their society brittle enough to be wiped out by inuit raids.

Anyways, the naturalistic fallacy isn't good support for current property rights, which are about as artificial as any law gets.

> adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments

I would agree with the former, and not the latter. As soon as dispute resolution and contract negotiation became sufficiently formalized, and our societies became sufficiently nonviolent, a class of people emerges who are able to accumulate capital legitimately (merchants, bankers, landowners). This all happens prior to any sort of industrialization, and can rather be seen as a prerequisite for it. Nowhere is this more clear than in Edo Japan, which was hardly industrialized, yet saw the emergence of a wealthy merchant class due to the legal structures which protected their assets from arbitrary seizure and redistribution. Wealthy non-ruling classes also existed all over Europe prior to industrialization.

> the naturalistic fallacy

The assertion that property rights ought to exist isn't a naturalistic one. I was simply pointing out that property rights are hardly a new development in civilization. Property rights can be asserted morally, without any naturalism, by equating the outputs of one's labour with an extension of one's self. If you have produced something for yourself, with your own time and labour, it should be yours do dispense with as you see fit, in the same way that your body is. A claim over one's property must therefore be justified as though it were a claim over one's own person, and this rather reduces the scope of legitimate claims.

This is an ahistorical retelling of the development of property rights and capital. Agrarian societies existed for thousands of years[0], before the enclosure movement turned to commons into capital that could be privately owned.[1]

[0] https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vol4/pp20-26

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/enclosure

I'm aware of enclosure, but it doesn't conflict with the notion of accumulated capital. Aside from precious metals, wealth in the agrarian world was often measured in fixed quantities of organic outputs - mostly grain, but also raw textile, etc. This is capital. It can be exchanged for goods, services, and real property. A 10th century merchant was a capitalist. He accumulated wealth and used it to expand his enterprise. This had a compounding effect and made some people very wealthy. Owning a fleet of trading ships is a business.

capital

There is almost nothing that doesn’t stop them.

Centuries of capitalists hoarding capital.

People will say capital, but there are successful businesses in America started in garages literally every day. Not every one becomes Apple, but many of them go on to support lots of families.

>People will say capital

Because the answer is capital.

There are many, many examples proving that's wrong.

Both neoliberal and classical definitions of capital make it nearly tautologically required as an input for production. 'Wealth' and 'Capital' aren't the same thing.

Capital isn’t the only thing that prevents workers from starting companies.

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.

Yes, but the assertion is that so much capital is required that it's a barrier to starting a business. And that's just not true. It is definitely possible to bootstrap a small business, and there are many government programs available to help. The bigger barrier, in my opinion, is an appetite for risk. In that capacity, America is definitely following in Europe's footsteps.

The answer is that it's hard and people want to be rewarded for the hard work at the market rate.

Garages are capital.

For well developed industries, I agree that employee representation is a good thing.

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.

Do they? And what does that money buy you?

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.

>One of the guests I talked to was a junior dev. He was making 120k/y. He had to flat share. With 120k?

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.

Seattle is pretty actively hostile to housing development (it seems to be swinging a bit more friendly but it's also a "I'll believe it when I see it.").

>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?

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.

That's bad for society because living in NYC uses less real resources (especially energy) and is much less carbon intensive than living in a suburb. The only reason it's more expensive is they're bad at governing themselves.

Much of the property in NYC is just parking money into fixed assets... doesn't even have to be income property. I'm not sure the govt is capable of fixing the issue, short of separating corporations from personal liberties legally (via national legislation) and legislating usage requirements for corporate owned land/property. Both of which would be VERY hard to do legislatively.

If there's no height limits, someone owning an empty condo shouldn't stop other people from living in the same building. They're paying property tax too.

Why compare NYC and Berlin instead of NYC and London, or Houston and Berlin?

Berlin is a major European tech hub, is it not?

More like wannabe tech hub - salaries reflecting competitiveness.

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.

Local CTO chat in Berlin has over 200 members and it's just fraction of all companies that work here. I'd say it is indeed a tech hub with very dynamic startup ecosystem, with its own Zalando etc mafias.

Presumably because that's where the junior programmer and the commenter in question are from?

On 120k you can get your own apartment in NYC outside of Manhattan and the expensive parts of Brooklyn easily. Plus that is for a new grad / jr engineer. They’ll be making north of $200k in 5 years most likely.

Yeah but outside of (Manhattan and the expensive parts of Brooklyn) leaves like... not much of NYC? Most new grads do not choose to live in Queens, the Bronx, or Bed-stuy.

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.

$1,800 is a lot to save relative to your income. 50/30/20 rule says you should be saving <$1,300ish and spending around $3,200 on needs, so maybe like $2700 on housing and $500 on utilities, groceries, etc. $3k / mo for an apartment on $120k salary is completely reasonable.

I went through the same thing and had no problem getting a place of my own.

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.

> outside of (Manhattan and the expensive parts of Brooklyn) leaves like... not much of NYC?

What about the cheaper parts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island...? Not even to mention Jersey City.

Well, I wouldn't know he had to or he preferred to. In my case I had that salary but I always lived shared house/apartment as long I was single. It wasn't like I had to spend more because I earned more. IMO living in shared accommodation at decent income level can be a lifestyle choice rather than a forced condition.

I would suggest sticking it out for a year or two to get more experience, then get a job with a company working remote for similar/higher salary and moving to a city with a lower cost of living. The past couple years have really opened the job market for software development nationwide, and in most of this country (US) someone can live relatively comfortably at $120k/yr. Though the cost of food, and current interest rates make it harder.

    After paying taxes in Germany their net salary was less than what they had made net in Ukraine. Most of them went back.

This is insane. It overlooks quality of life: stable democracy, low perceived corruption (police, gov't, biz, etc.), economic stability, personal safety, food safety, social safety net (physical and mental healthcare, national pension, etc.), (industrial, economic, financial and environmental) regulation, quality of public education, quality of public transportation infrastructure, quality of publicly funded arts, income inequality gap, etc.

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.

Probably unpopular opinion here on HN, but I'd love to see developer salaries come down and other workers' salaries go up.

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.

Yeah it's a ridiculous opinion when those holding our leashes make billions.

It’s not “ridiculous.” The median American simply has more money under the American system. The OECD collects detailed data on this: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm. Look at the dataset “gross incl. social transfers in kind” which looks at disposable income accounting for universal healthcare, etc. America is head and shoulders ahead of EU countries like Germany.

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 think you're switchtracking me.

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.

I don’t understand why more people don’t think like this. Even from a selfish point of view - you get to live in a place with less violent crime, you get to experience living in a “happier” community, etc etc

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.

Why are the people saying this not donating half of their 200k salaries? Is the only way to re-distribute your personal wealth by being compelled by market conditions or by the state?

Because they don't want to selflessly give away $100k for nothing. Rather they selfishly want to live in a healthier society. You're proposing they trade something for nothing, and that's misguided in the best case, or disingenuous in the worst.

I think the point being made is that it's trivially easy to make armchair moral/ethical arguments about spending money in other peoples wallets. And that the arguments would be taken more seriously if the person arguing has actually demonstrated that they have skin in the game, staked their own wallet.

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.

It's a silly argument. Me donating half my salary, today, doesn't make any sense because it won't materially impact anything.

If there were a stronger social safety net and everyone had to pay a bit more in tax, then that would actually impact something.

Won’t materially impact anything?

Go and give $20k each to 5 people making minimum wage. That would have a huge impact.

I bet a dollar if he went and did that, you'd turn around and call it virtue-signaling.

You're just looking for an excuse to invalidate their beliefs, so you can excuse yours. Not a healthy debate.

That wouldn’t be virtual signaling in the least. Virtual signaling is putting no effort behind your words.

Redistributing your own income is putting your money (literally) where your mouth is.

Again, the goal is not selflessness, it's selfishness. The selfish want to form a more perfect union. No one is saying they want to give away half their salary for nothing, no one is expecting anyone else to do so either.

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.

Violent crime & affordability issues in cities is a choice set by policy makers to make some politically connected people richer, it is not an attribute of cities. Poverty stricken rural places are just as bad, or even worse in many cases.

In Europe, even in the wealthiest countries, average programmer salaries are about 10% higher than the national salary at best. This would mean probably cutting your salary in half, instead of talking about it. It would be interesting to see you face that reality. Words are cheap.

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.

> 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.

This is very well put, you said it better than I ever have myself.

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.

> even in the wealthiest countries, average programmer salaries are about 10% higher than the national salary at best

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 would like others' salaries to go up. I'd rather not have mine come down. I mean, the median is $115k or so in the US. I make under that.

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.

The parent is probably talking about $200K+ salaries.

Sure, but if you take those $200k people and make them $100k people, then I assume I'll lose my job to them all day long. Employers will pay me lower because I comparatively suck.

Even then... for many companies the past couple years have opened up competition nation-wide. I'm able to compete for higher salaries with companies used to paying that along with what was only local talent before, while living in an area with comparatively lower cost of living and would like to move with that in mind (locked in until interest rates improve).

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.

Good place to start would be in college towns where you could easily siphon off new grads.

Problem is getting money to a place like that. Investors hate travel if its not to the same 3 cities

$54,132 per year is the median in the united states, not 115k.

A quick google search shows varying numbers between 74k and 120k for median software developer salaries in the US. 54k seems quite low, where'd you see this?

I believe $54k is for salaries in general across all industries. Mercedes is not a tech company so no reason to assume the discussion is about software salaries

If you scroll up for context, this thread of comments was referring specifically to sw dev salaries coming down, not all salaries in general.

Dev salaries going down and all the rest going up.

Median as a dev is about $115k, is what I meant. Sorry.

Locality has natural efficiencies, which is why cities and caches are so powerful. That can't really be fought head-on in the short term. But over a longer period the increasing costs of a white-hot locale will cause other places to be more appealing. And new tech can find a new natural place to land with costs as part of that.

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.

HCOL cities is a policy choice that is somewhat independent of city density, that seem to be the worst in english speaking countries, pointing to a potential flaw in the culture or shared legal systems. There are many high density cities that are more livable than the USA and significantly more affordable. Cities managed efficiently are the most economically and environmentally sustainable places to have humanity live in by far.

Good point.

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...

StickerMule is an example. Check out where they setup shop in Amsterdam, NY. It’s in a rundown mostly abandoned former factory area.

They’ve been slowly expanding operations and bringing new tech jobs and opportunities to a pretty bleak area. Very cool and inspiring to see.

I agree with the general idea but disagree strongly with the execution.

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.

They pay so much more because US is the largest english speaking country, which is why most companies that plan to go international start there first. Starting a company in Italy and expanding to other regions is a lot harder than going from US to Canada, UK, Australia and rest of the world with english only product.

Bernie Sanders has plans on making that kind of stuff law of the land. (Not that it is likely to happen).

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.

OTOH US big tech workers are making large multiples of that bonus every year from RSUs.

Supervisory boards are super common in Germany. I am not sure if there is some legal requirement that makes this the case, but you see it at many large companies.

It's a legal requirement. I think for any company with >100 employees. But don't quote me on the number. :)

Worker Councils are to be elected in German companies beyond a certain (small) size (at least five employees who can vote and three employees who can be elected). This doesn’t mean that all German companies have them. The workers have to organize the vote themselves and if they don’t do it then there‘s no Works Council. Tactics similar to union busting are also a thing in Germany to prevent Worker Councils from forming.

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.

I am part of my company’s Betriebsrat and while sometimes it is a bit overwhelming, it really is a helpful provision. We don’t have infinite powers however the company management respects the Betriebsrat and is always mindful when it’s trying to enact policies.

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.

Having a supervisory board w/ 1/2 of members representing (non-management) employees is mandatory by law for any corporation over 50 (?) employees in Germany.

The "General Works Council" is just that board, I believe. So this is quite a normal setup for a large German company.

It never mandatory to have a Betriebsrat in Germany even with 100k employees you could not have one. You can however start one already with 5 full-time employees. Companies tend to have one around 50+ employees because before that it rarely makes sense

So it's not mandatory if somehow all employees decided not to form one, but if any of them wanted to, it's mandatory to let them and presumably support them/listen to them in some way?

Basically it’s not mandatory in the sense that you will not be fined as a company if you do not have one. However, employees can make a motion to elect a Betriebsrat (works council) in a given location. Then, if 3 locations have a local Betriebsrat the Gesamtbetriebsrat can be formed which is regularly elected across the whole German staff. Grocery chains like Lidl and Aldi have prevented the formation of a Betriebsrat by employing union busting style measures (intimidating or firing staff, etc).

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.

Thanks for the explainer!

As always with Germans, the answer is "it's really complicated" lol

Tesla does have a Betriebsrat if I recall correctly.

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

Ah smart Trick by Tesla then, elections every 7 years iirc so Tesla managed to avert a strong works council for the first years

lol ok that's pretty advanced :) if you can't bust 'em, you can't join 'em, at least lace them with cronies for the first couple years.

General Works Council is the Betriebsrat (100% employees, not mandatory, but employees cannot be stopped from forming one), the board is the Aufsichtsrat (50% employees, mandatory for large corporations). It works really well most of the time.

Interestingly, I'm currently reading a book on the history of austerity and the author shows how worker councils were a thing in the UK during and immediately after WW1; however, austerity was put in place to systematically prioritize capital and the minority capital class over working class people. Lest that sound slightly conspiratorial the author cites specific memos and comments from the Treasury at the time that make that point explicit. They simply insisted that working class would have to "sacrifice" so that the system of capital could be restored. The interests of capital was always prioritized; it was all that mattered. People were expected to be more productive, consume less, and earn less.

What's the title?

I'm going to guess this, because I am reading it also

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

Clara E. Mattei

It is excellent so far.

what book is that?

Capitol Order by Clara E. Mattei.

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.

Depressingly, Brexit has just caused the same thing...

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...

Those record profits are past looking and don't predict how future years will play out. Many tech companies over-hired and need to trim.

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.

> This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate "union within the company",

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.

A worket council is by no means a union, it is an elected council of employees representing employees interest all the way to the board. Usually so, members of the workers council are members of whatever union is representing the industry, in Mercedes case IGM (Industrial union of metal and electronic workers). Those members tend not to be union functionaries, but the head of Mercedes workers council for sure is an important figure within IGM.

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.

This is a fairly normal structure for large German companies, fwiw.

The works council is a legally regulated means of participation of the staff in a company. Establishing a works council there are a few hurdles just like in ionizing. But different from unionizing there is no membership fee and the works council is regularly elected by all associates.

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

one more upvote...

>"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.

I guess I don't understand the pushback against layoffs. You layoff based on future projections, not past performance. It would be sinister to layoff someone to prevent some kind of timed bonus but I've seen no reports of that. As far as I can tell its just about reduced investments and reduced project scopes.

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 agree that structure sounds enticing.

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.

A works council is a requirement for every company over 50 employees in The Netherlands. It's pretty common that they're involved in deciding on bonuses like this. However, they often don't have that much power in the actual decision.

Yes, and it is also paid for assembly line workers, even in (some?) plants not located in Germany. Very classy move in my opinion.

So, a 13th salary? This is fairly common.

I don't understand what you mean by this. I'm not sure what it is in Germany, but an auto plant employee in the US would max out there salary around $50 or $60k/year with overtime. Many make much less than that. This is probably a 10 to 20% bonus for many of their workers, which is extremely high for factory work.

> an auto plant employee in the US would max out there salary around $50 or $60k/year with overtime

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-...

Skilled trades workers can make that much, but those aren’t the majority of jobs.

Glassdoor says Mercedes Benz production workers make about $18/hour on average: https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Mercedes-Benz-USA-Assem...

In some countries it is tradition for the company to pay out a "13th month" of salary as bonus. (Just explaining the reference)

It that really the going rate for an auto worker in the US these days? I knew people making $100k+ per year at those jobs 30 years ago. They worked as much overtime as they could get but some of them saved a ton. Others bought boats and second homes.

Mercedes Benz is an IG Metall company. So this is on top of the 13th-14th salary that is standard throughout the whole industry. This is basically their way of going above-and-beyond the industry Tarifvertrag (that is already considered to be quite generous for German standards).

> General Works Council seems to be something like a separate "union within the company"

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.

> management were criminals. That stain persists

Indeed. Management never moved on.

Such things exist because of an EU directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

Germany had that before the EU existed.

> 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.

Aren't large bonuses common enough with FAANG that they don't even make the news?

Exactly, and this bonus is less than $8k USD. Most FAANG bonuses are 3-5x that, and yearly.

yeah.. I'm happy for the regular workers, but as a code monkey, I'd rather make $400k a year and get randomly laid off for no reason than make $100k forever

They aren't common for many (most?) employees in FAANG. This is more like all of Facebook's content moderators or Amazon's warehouse workers getting a $7,000 bonus. Certainly that would hit the news?

I remember a few years ago when Elon Musk got a huge payout for hitting a production target with Tesla. It was basically a huge bet that paid off because they mandated tons of overtime.

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.

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