A Company Copes With Backlash Against the Raise That Roared

There is a Ken Burns film about Mark Twain, who went broke trying to fund a printing process ahead of its time in the manner of a bad gambler. It's heartbreaking.

Bob Wills went broke on a failed entertainment venture, but made it good at considerable personal cost.

"Life entails a parcel of risk" - Mr. Merriwether, "Little Big Man".

I've never really understood that mindset, back when I worked for other people I didn't give a shit what other people earnt as long as what I earnt was enough to cover my overheads and seemed reasonable for the work I was putting in.

  Several employees who stayed, while exhilarated by the
  raises, say they now feel a lot of pressure. “Am I doing 
  my job well enough to deserve this?” said Stephanie Brooks,
  23, who joined Gravity as an administrative assistant two
  months before the wage increase. “I didn’t earn it.”

Not sure what I would call it, Office Support Specialist or something suitably ambiguous I guess, the role is largely one of keeping the lights on, making sure the ISP is paid etc it's not a management role in the sense of dealing with staff etc.

Title inflation is a pernicious problem.

I'm mostly saying he should have thought it through more, even if he did go through with it.

I hope CEOs don't use the same thought process to keep their pay at 300x their minimum wage workers when the minimum wage is raised to $15.

For many people, it's about the relative ranking of their worth as a person.

Whether you agree or disagree, that's how I think those who are offended by this sort of change see it.

In some respects they ARE taking my money ... the company now has less money to distribute based upon merit.

Also, I would immediately become a 9-5 employee and enjoy my weekends like my now equally paid peers.

1 - My productivity is X per month. (Whatever your definition of productivity, it must be, because I can ask for a bigger salary.) 2 - This other guy productivity is X/2 per month. (By the same rationale.) 3 - The other guy gets a raise, and now is paid twice for the same work. 4 - It follows that I'm losing the opportunity of a raise, because I do more than him.

It's not logically rigorous, it may not be true at all, but it's not an irrational reaction either.

Do you not understand the logic of people who feel that way, or do you simply not believe in it yourself? If you were getting paid $35k/year to do the same job as everyone else who was getting paid $115k/year, would you feel that it was somewhat unfair?

Also, it does impact you directly. As those around you get paid more, there is more disposable income which impacts pricing. Now, a hundred employees in a large city has zero actual impact, but the psychological resistance is already there because it will have an actual impact at larger scale (also could impact if there is a company store/cafeteria or such, but I don't think that applies here).

Then there is the notion of unequal raises. If someone else gets a 200% raise because the company has enough money, you are left wondering why you didn't get one. Did you not do good enough? Even if you already had a raise, if it was for some other reason, you are left wondering why you don't get one. Once again, even with a rational reason (because you were already making above the new minimum), the emotional damage is still there. Such a raise doesn't feel fair, regardless if it is or isn't.

Finally, considering how many times people are denied wages 'because the money isn't in the budget for it' (even if that is just used as an excuse), there is a chance one who deserves a raise can be denied it because the budgeted money for raises was already spent on other raises.

It's not that simple. The employees were already working under conditions that job/person a was worth 2x and job/person b was worth 3x. That was established and everyone was content (or reasonably so).

All of a sudden, someone declared that job/person a is worth 3x too, with no corresponding change to the output or expectations of either job.

Job/Person b, having been previously told that their value was, at 3x, MORE than job/person a, is now told that their value is now equal.

That's a redefining of the previously established contract of understanding. To expect Job/person b to completely agree to that redefinition is rather naive, to say the least.

I'm more valuable to my company as their key software developer than the receptionist. I've got more knowledge of how the company works, contribute more to the bottom line and am harder to properly replace. I expect my compensation to reflect that.

If you suggest all of a sudden that I'm not any more valuable than the receptionist hired last month, you should rightly expect that I'd be a little pissed.

All else being equal, people were happier earning $70,000 knowing that their peers earned $50,000, and unhappier earning $90,000 knowing that their peers earned $110,000.

I am likely wrong on exact numbers, but studies are well-known enough to be quoted in "Fooled by Randomness", "Predictably Irrational" and some other pop-psych titles.

My guess is the latter.

The argument against minimum wage increases is that it has a ripple effect and raises other wages as well.

- Prices of products or services increase to compensate for the increase in salary.

- Higher paid employees don't get raises since the money that was previously allocated for that is being used to pay for the minimum wage increase. (This seems to be happening in this case, where more experienced workers received little to no increase in compensation).

- Other benefits are removed or reduced to cover the additional cost (health insurance, vacation, sick leave, etc)

- The company can no longer be profitable with the additional costs and reduces the size of their workforce or shuts down completely.

Which of these side effects (if any) occur, depends on the company and its current profits, management and/or investors, as well as how much they are already paying employees.

I can totally defend the desire to quit out of not wanting to have golden handcuffs, but quitting because someone "below" you is now not as far "below" you (or is now "shackled" to you, a ridiculous thought) is just spiteful and self-damaging.

The answer to both questions in this case was:

   the CEO

Interesting that people have struggled with this concept for at least 2000 years...

Like, if a human meerely intends "to grab on anything they can to get out of the [human]-pile", & they're quite rude/destructive while doing so, they're still rude/destructive regardless of how sympathetic we may judge their intentions to be.

Is your hypothesis that the higher income, even if temporary, may afford significant relief from this?

Regardless of dictionary definitions, if we agree that building restrictions are a bad policy, it is a valid and IMO interesting empirical question whether most people supporting it self-identify as liberal, conservative or something else. (I honestly don't think I could guess the answer.)

Yeah, there really is a need to toss "liberal" in there. More liberal dense cities seem to have this problem much worse than dense less-liberal cities. Qualifier: American cities.

Some of it tends to be due to liberal reflexes (participatory democracy at all levels, favoring small local groups of activists over people who stand to profit, etc.) that backfire writ large. Add in a distrust of markets, and you have a recipe for disaster. San Francisco is a great example.

By the way, conservatives would not object to developing a neighborhood if that development meant more economic opportunities and more jobs.

If you want to split hairs over a dictionary definition, conservatives would prefer to keep things how they are and continue economic growth through expanding the private sector rather than expanding government to direct businesses on how to operate.

The thing is, like most words in English, "socialism" has taken on multiple meanings. Like it or not, there's the "textbook" definition and then then colloquial usage. And in America, "socialism" has come to refer to anything that involves redistributing wealth, providing social safety net(s), or otherwise trying to actively manage social inequality. It's a broader, more expansive definition, and I understand why purists hate seeing words diluted, but what can ya do? You can't put the horse back in barn, that ship has already sailed, can't un-ring a rung bell, etc., etc.

I thought employees were generally paid by their market rate, i.e. how much it would cost to replace them, which is not necessarily related to their value to the company.

The basic premise of socialism is that the means of production are in social ownership. Paying employees based on the economic benefit they bring is not contradictory to socialism.

People call this socialism because, after so long hearing the term bandied about as a catch-all fear word, they simply apply it to anything that doesn't match their view of the one true God's own capitalism.

My salary has never been set by my value to the company - it has been set by my ability to negotiate.

That's a good way to put it. Most people it seems have extremely negative opinions of her, but I'd wager that most of these people have read only opinions of others about her rather than anything actually written by her.

Although, I can definitely agree with the sentiment that her fiction is...weird, especially reading it today with the significant cultural changes that have occurred since it was written. But her non-fiction I think is pretty well written - whether you agree with it or not, it's far from a joke as most people who've never read any of it make it out to be.

"They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."