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Comment by jalapenos | Hacker News Reader

A bizarre attitude that sadly will never go away.

You're paid what you're known to be worth. All this stuff is about abdicating responsibility because it feels warm and fuzzy to be a victim, say it's out of your control, and those badies are responsible for your predicament.

The solution to people having low wages isn't them complaining about it, it's specialising into something with more demand or less supply, and getting better at personal marketing. But that's hard work, so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine.

Schools should do a way better job of facilitating this, but again, that's not ultimately their responsibility, but the responsibility of the parents to make sure they do.

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> You're paid what you're known to be worth.

You're paid somewhere between the minimum amount you'll accept and the maximum that the company is willing to give you (which in the case of some VC funded companies, may exceed the amount of profit you generate!)

Where you're paid on that spectrum depends on how much leverage you have vs. the company.

In other words, you're paid at the intersection of Supply and Demand curves, i.e. the Law of Supply and Demand.

How much a company is willing to give you is based on the value you create. Companies are not going to employ someone who costs more than the value they produce. If the person creates far more value than they are paid, then the person is apt to find someone else who will pay more.

Your pay is upper bounded by the value you create, but may be arbitrarily less, especially if there is monopsony, high barriers to moving/reskilling, and/or collusion among employers.

There's nothing inherently fair about the "intersection of Supply and Demand curves" because employers manipulate them both -- by lobbying for increased immigration, reducing competition through mergers&acquisitions, erecting legal barriers for competing businesses, colluding to depress wages, and reducing incentive to compete via common board membership & equity ownership.

Strangely, corporations never want to increase wages in response to labor shortage.

And they of course suppress wages by cartels, lobby for increased immigration (bonus: h1bs are captive labor), etc.

Spare me the microecon 101 fantasy.

That’s funny, the local McDonalds is paying $17 an hour when 2 years ago it was probably paying $10.

I’m with you on the immigration front. The local town’s largest employer almost exclusively employs immigrants in the plant. If they had to pay wages the rest of the town would want to do that job, it’d probably be what the hourly workers in the office next door make. They’d want more then, which would mean the salaried people would also want more. Instead the entire town’s wages are suppressed.

> Strangely, corporations never want to increase wages in response to labor shortage.

Do you want to pay more for things when there's a supply shortage?

> How much a company is willing to give you is based on the value you create

Value in collaborative settings is extremely difficult to measure. How much is that DEI officer worth? The corp lawyer who, being honest, is not doing any high stakes work? The team lead who doesn't write code? The careful, slow IC vs the fast, sloppy IC? It's all guesswork.

> It's all guesswork.

1. figuring that out is the career of a cost accountant

2. using industry norms for certain job categories is a good proxy

3. getting it too far wrong means you go bust

The catch is that the company often knows more about your value (monetary, not personal) than you do. And they're often more experienced negotiators than you. So as a perspective employee you're normally at a disadvantage, unless you're at the tail of the bell curve or in a very in demand field.

Most companies are happy to pay you way less than you're worth if you'll accept it.

As an engineer I'm used to all the facts going on the table and then reaching a consensus. That's not how hiring works, the employer won't show you their cards. They ask how much you made in your last job, but they won't tell you how much the employee that left the position you're applying to was paid.

Employees don't show all your cards, either. Employers misjudge candidates all the time. That's how they wind up with deadwood, quiet quitters, thieves, drug addicts, etc.

I've had many, many people brag to me how they lied on their resume. Many have shameless posted here how they cheated their way through college.

Employees have the ultimate power - they can just say "no".

Supply and demand also applies to expertise, so it's hard to see how it can be any other way. There's an infinite amount of information in the universe, so there will always be someone with more 'cards', more intelligence, more cunning, etc., then you in a large enough sample size.

> Most companies are happy to pay you way less than you're worth if you'll accept it.

I laugh when I see things like this. Would you turn down a job offer if it is way more than you expected?

Well that's nice, except that organized labor has in fact improved the lives of workers time and time again. Companies generally come crawling back in a hurry, willing to make concessions they previously claimed were impossible, when the "unskilled labor" goes on strike. This wouldn't make any sense if people were already paid what they are worth.

Bargaining power exists. You cannot explain the world we live in without it.

>so they'd rather pour a bottle of whine.

They're actually opening a can of whoop-ass.

Fictitious. They might temporarily give their in-group a little boost from time to time, but workers lose in the long run.

Rather than being simple-minded thugs looking to whoop-ass, they should be focused on guiding their members to increased individual bargaining power by upskilling them.

Any evidence to support this claim?

Historically, unions helped workers by improving working conditions in the early industrial revolution (limbs lost from unsafe equipment, deaths due to lack of fire escapes & inadequate ventilation, women paid 1/2 wages for identical work). It's hard to imagine workers "lost in the long run" by ending these.

Wiki [1] lists several studies with evidence that unions decrease worker suicide rates and occupational fatalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...

Unions have won concessions many times that workers did not win on their own. This is a simple historical fact. You cannot account for this, so your understanding is wrong.

>Rather than being simple-minded thugs looking to whoop-ass, they should be focused on guiding their members to increased individual bargaining power by upskilling them.

Why? The bosses are also simple-minded thugs looking to use their bargaining power to pay as little as possible. That's capitalism for you. We shouldn't have one set of rules for the rich and one set for the poor.

You can say that from the vantage point of being a highly paid tech worker. The world is your oyster and so on.

People who are less fortunate are well, less fortunate. They have less of everything to fight for their future.

Don't get me wrong, I am all about self education and self empowerment and being able to improve their lot in life, but system problems require system solutions.

>People who are less fortunate are well, less fortunate.

I agree. That's why I don't want the government to forbid them from taking a job that they want by setting a minimum wage. Cutting out the bottom of the labor market doesn't help poor people.

An insane view.

That's how your taxes go to subsidizing massive corporations.

Instead of Walmart paying people a living wage, they will now pay less, and let their employees backfill with government programs.

The "system problems" are fictitious and a way to distance the locus of responsibility away from the individuals actually responsible. I wasn't born a tech worker.

And the attitude that they have to "fight" for it is wrong and antisocial. They have to build it.

To be able to say that you're able to bootstrap all your way to tech worker is often determined by where you're born, or if you immigrated to a certain country.

It's never always your initiative that makes things happens.

And the attitude that they have to "fight" for it is wrong and antisocial. They have to build it.

So I misspoken.

Doing valuable and important things and getting paid well isn't necessarily the same thing. The market isn't the end all be all determining the value of your work.

Gold is priced more money than water, and gold is a useless trinket compared to water.

I don't see how you see it as bizarre. There is always some spread between what a person is paid and the marginal value they generate -- if there were not, then there is no way companies could return profits to shareholders. How much of that spread people capture necessarily depends on their ability to negotiate for it and unions can improve their negotiating position.

> unions can improve their negotiating position.

Unions do not change the value their members produce, which puts a ceiling on the wages they can negotiate. Companies won't hire people who cost more than they produce.

That is neither here nor there. There must be a gap between what people produce and what they are paid (or else there would be no profits) -- the size of that gap is what is up for negotiation.

the size of that gap is what is up for negotiation.

Not really. The gap is the ROI of what the compensation could otherwise be invested in. The negotiation is about convincing the employer that your work would have a higher ROI.

There is no easy way to determine "the ROI of what the compensation could otherwise be invested in", so this is not an exercise any one goes through when actually trying to sort out what wages to pay. Negotiating for a higher salary certainly involves convincing people you're "worth it" but I doubt any one actually tries to sort out what the comparable investments are and benchmark their employees against them.

In the long run, businesses that aren't able to realize comparable ROI with compensation to what they could otherwise invest in must go out of business, since capital will gradually migrate to its more productive uses; but this is assuming a kind of steady state model. It's certainly not going to be clear to managers or anyone else what the entire space of comparable investments actually is.

It's definitely not all investments. One realizes revenue from ramen shop compensation before the employees are even paid, whereas one realizes revenue from bonds only at fixed intervals of months or years, and from real estate after a period of years or decades. Yet short term bonds may actually be a fine alternative to auto manufacturing compensation, since it can take a few weeks or even a couple of months for a car to make it to the dealership from the factory.

> There is no easy way to determine "the ROI of what the compensation could otherwise be invested in",

That's exactly what cost accountants do. A large part of running a company successfully is determining the ROI of various uses of capital. The people running companies are not idiots.

There's even a word for it - "opportunity cost".

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp

It seems like you're saying that the way salary negotiation works is: the manager benchmarks the candidate's salary request against an alternative investment, like bonds, &c -- not an alternative candidate in the market place -- and then considers whether to spend that money on the candidate or on the investment.

Unions could be far more helpful. They should be focused on guiding their members towards individually increased bargaining power (by guiding them into more skilled specialties etc, and teaching them how to self-market), rather than the picket marching antagonistic crap.

Instead of more bootstraps, why can't we make sure everyone has a livable wage?

Employers are not going to employ people who cost more than they produce.

We hear this all the time, but it seems largely irrelevant. There's no good reason to believe that the lowest-paid workers would lose their jobs if they had to be paid more. There are no randomized controlled trials about raising the minimum wage, but quite a few natural experiments suggest a minimal effect on unemployment with reasonable increases. Low-paid workers have won raises with collective bargaining while your theory suggests they would be laid off en masse.

There is no consensus amongst economists that raising the minimum wage as high as $15/hour would substantially increase unemployment. You are, of course, welcome to disagree with them, but you can't claim this is just Econ 101.

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-economists-think-ab...

Would you pay someone more than they produce if it's your business?

> There is no consensus amongst economists

I don't know any who have run a successful business.

So let them go out of business and not employ anyone anymore. Why is that so hard to accept?

it might be hard to accept for the people that used to work there. right now, the labor market is pretty tight at the low end, so these hypothetical workers would likely not have much trouble getting a different minimum wage job. but it's not always like that. I remember it being surprisingly difficult to get my first minimum wage job as a teenage.

This does not appear to be true for the tech companies I am familiar with.

Or other employers, for that matter.

This does not appear to be the case for many executives.

Many employees turn out to be deadwood, too. There's always a risk with hiring someone.

Oh, how I wish I could up-vote your reply!

Why should we, meaning everyone but them, instead of them? They are responsible, not we.

Somebody once said “Specializing is for insects” - I agree with that.

Also saying that fair wages is a problem of parenting makes you seem quite disconnected with the reality of what the masses face. I think what you say is correct but only to a certain degree. Circumstances matter a lot and most of the time one may not have control over that. People come out of that kind of hardship should not fall victim to unfettered capitalism where low cost is attained any cost. Minimum mage protects against that. Keeping the minimum wage low artificially keeps cost of everything artificially low - including your wages that you get for possessing specialized knowledge (white collar jobs). This results in the middle class having a low quality of life non materialistically speaking. This is what’s going on in America. Over the quality of life from a material goods perspective is better than third world countries but softer/finer things of life - family,relations etc people have very little time for and is objectively worse than most other developed countries as people spend their time doing multiple jobs or side hustles in the hopes to escape the rat race for good. Very few succeed.

Minimum wage protects against new workers getting on the employment ladder, and encourages outcomes like McDonalds replacing them with machines, as well as funneling them into the minimum wage circumventing "gig economy".

All of the fettering of capitalism is destructive acts done by fools, or narcissists to feel morally superior, that make economic and social problems worse, rather than being of any help.

The solution to the problems we are discussing here is to increase competition in schooling, so that kids get better equipped for their futures, so they don't fall through the cracks, and that requires schooling to move away from the socialistic publicly funded schooling and towards outcomes-focused private schooling.

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