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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> When a company loses money year after year it goes bankrupt. The company disappears. The workers lose their jobs.

If the company operates in such razor thin margins that it can't provide for sick leave for employees, something is terribly wrong.

> It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers

And you'll find that most companies pay as little as they can get away with. Google and Meta need to compete to get a limited (until recently) amounts of top talent.

A railway couldn't care less about the employees.

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It's called competition - it's the reason you get to sit there and type away on an incredible machine at a very low cost and eat food at a very low cost... The vast majority of businesses are operating on thin margins. Get in the real world, not some fantasy land.

I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, which is made by Apple with their net profit margin of 24.3% for Q4 2024. BNSF, one of the companies which is the topic of this conversation, has an operating ratio of 68% for 2024 (how much of their revenue goes towards operational costs). Their net income was $5 billion. They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.

> Get in the real world, not some fantasy land

Get out of a libertrarian's wet dream and look around you, read up a little bit on various companies financials.

Apple barely make the product. Look at the margins of all their suppliers. That fat line showing about $200b of cogs is filled with low margin businesses - the vast majority of the world is not some outlier like Apple.

Gotta look more than one layer deep financial statement guy. People who actually read a lot of financial statements have looked at a looooot more than the ones of the names on TV.

The topic of this conversation is BNSF and their ilk, I just threw Apple as a fun "you're even more wrong with your anecdote than with your main statement".

What's your excuse for them abusing their employees? Why can't they afford to provide sick leave for their employees when not only do they have billions of net profit every year, many other railways around the world in the same type of business manage to do that and be profitable.

You edited your comments... could you be more disingenuous?

No answer, good to know you agree that companies like BNSF have the money to have basic human decency and empathy towards their employees.

Yes, I edited my comment to add more data points when I collected them.

>I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, which is made by Apple with their net profit margin of 24.3% for Q4 2024.

Apple's margins are so high because the margins of their suppliers are so low (used to work for one of them) with some used to have suicide nets at their factories. Apple is an exception worldwide when it comes to HW margins, not the norm.

>They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.

Shareholders care more about line going up then about the welfare of the workers.

Where do you get your data on BNSF? The data I have shows you’re off by a factor of near 5.

Their own website: https://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/

Every quarter you click on, <70% operating ratio, $1.something billion net income.

So you’re missing quite a bit of data. BNSF has pension liabilities and took a small loss there last year. Additionally BNSF has only about $500mil of cash reserves and just pushed another near $3bil in maintenance and investment that’s not on their Q4 financial data.

I don’t know how much sick leave costs them, but they’re not as wealthy as a company as you claim here.

Competition is not the reason. The reason is workers choosing to improve things, invent things and make things more efficient. Competition is a way to incentivize people to do that, but it's not the only way.

Workers don't get to do that without some capital allocated. Rowing is one thing, deciding direction is just as important - and you'll find that the people deciding which way to row are largely trying to win.

Deciding direction is also just work. Why does the reward for that kind of work have to be ownership over the work other people do? An architect makes decisions about a building, a doctor makes decisions about treatments, a developer makes decisions about software architecture without needing to own the resulting building, patient or software, and they usually try to do their best.

As long as there is some link between the quality of work you do and the rewards you get, people will in most cases try their best. Allocation of capital is no different, and in my opinion should not be treated differently. Giving capital allocators ownership/percentage of the work others do is too much, and leads to unnecessary centralization of power.

Because everyone involved agrees to it. If you want to be a dictator and decide what others can and cannot agree to, go try. I'm an employee, I agree to do certain things and the company agrees to certain things. No one is forcing either side.

Everyone "agrees" to it because there's no other choice, it's the system we have. Everyone agrees to it the same way people in communist countries agree to do what the state tells them to do. Most people have to agree, or the whole system will collapse.

Even if you could say that people truly choose to give a piece of their paycheck to someone simply for being named the owner, it's not a reason not to consider limiting that right to choose. We limit many things that we consider harmful. This system is producing ever increasing inequality of wealth and power. There are now people so wealthy that they're able to break democracies. This will only get worse and worse.

It's not remotely close to a communist country - folks have many choices as to who to work for and on what terms. Employers have all many choices as to who to hire on what terms. Both sides have to agree. Employees jump around from company to company all the time.

Someone can decide to start a company tomorrow and keep 100% of the outcome (less taxes) if they want to do that instead - it's trivially easy to be 100% owner of a business - a couple hundred bucks online and you can set the legal entity up in minutes. Now, you then have to provide sufficient value to customers so that they make the choice to part with their hard earned dollars - and that's where it all falls down for many. But it has nothing to do with power or lack of it.

You can choose who to work for, but you can't choose the nature of the relationship. It's always the same, you're a worker who has to give away a part of what you produce and you have to do what the owners tell you or you're gone. That choice closer to getting to choose which government official you work for in a communist country. That choice only prevents the worst abuses, and only if you're not in a position desperate enough that you have to accept any owner's offer. It does not give a person freedom from being exploited.

A capitalist system would collapse without workers, so not everyone can be a business owner. Someone needs to actually do the work, capital does nothing on its own. I guess you could imagine a world where everyone is a one man business and a subcontractor in someone else's business, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the relationship. The ones with capital would still be in a position power and take a part of what people with no power produce.

Many employment contracts have equity components to them. As for "giving away what you produce" - no, you are agreeing to trade it for cash, not give it away. You basically imply that anyone trading work for cash is being exploited.

A capitalist system would collapse without workers, without capital, without a decent legal system.

Many people do work as one man businesses. It does change the nature of the relationship because the economy isn't a one way river. There are all manner of feedback looks - you mine copper, I buy your copper, make some electrical component, sell it to the manufacturer of a Komatsu, they make mining trucks, sell it to you. It all goes round and round.

The evidence for (price) competition improving production efficiency and product fit is overwhelming, examples abound in everyday life, it's hardly worth mentioning.

What are some notable examples "workers choosing to improve things"?

Most innovation is done by workers working for some company, no? Product development, research, etc is usually done by workers for a salary, not because they're competing against someone. Competition is not needed for paying people to improve things.

Competition has a lot of negative effects as well. Competition by definition has losers. Competition leads to resentment and conflict. Competition forces people to do things they might not want to to survive, because the moment someone is willing to do something to get an edge, everyone is forced to.

The vast majority of companies can afford sick days for their workers. It's even good for morale, job satisfaction and performance.

Ones that choose not to treat their workers with basic dignity are badly managed.

American railroads have pretty good pay and benefits, including some of the last defined-benefit pensions left in the private sector.

They didn't want to give in on same-day sick days (not the same as prescheduled PTO, which they did have) because it kills what they call precision train scheduling, which is basically running trains with the absolute minimum number of people possible. I'm not saying this was right or wrong, just that it's the reason.

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