Please explain how corporate expansion necessarily fucks over everyone in a company except the CEO.
Regards,
Shodan
I have no idea what you mean by “corporate expansion,” and you already won the trophy.
The example I gave you from from the real world.
This was not a theoretical company. Please explain how the expansion of that company fucked everyone down to the janitors.
Regards,
Shodan
And I answered, to the point and in detail, how smaller companies don’t necessarily apply to the corporate model and vice versa. I ran a 120-person company for 12 years, and we were acknowledged as being lavish and caring with our employees. (We tended to sweep up the best from competitors, and were the company pretty much all the workers in that field wanted to work for.) Even from that self-back-patting position, I could find examples of people in the chain who got a shorter end of the stick than they deserved, especially by the time you get to the client base.
Most companies under $10M and 100 or so employees don’t *have *a “CEO” or a board of directors - the title has been watered down until someone in a 3-person family company holds it. However much it may pain you, I draw a distinction between companies under a certain size, with a minimal C-level component, a token board if any… and that for the most part are not publicly held. Different rules, different game, different possibilities (although many of them still do their share of fucking the pyramid, because That Way Lies Success).
Given the share of business held, owned, operated and producing our world of consumer goods that are Fortune-listed, not the biggest business in a suburb of Chicago, I don’t think I’m creating any artificial pocket of conditions. Businesses of a scale to make the Fortune lists and exchanges are the ones that define our economic world, and are aped by smaller businesses that swallow standard economic assumptions about profit and wealth being the point of operations.
(You’re going to repeat your stupid question anyway, aren’t you? There’s only one debate-club trophy, and you’ve already won it.)
Prove it.
As I’ve said in other threads, that’s the problem with these discussions: if your example is an (anonymous) company run by the (anonymous) friend of an (anonymous) family member… you can pretty much make it up from whole cloth, cancha? Make up, edit, streamline, cherry-pick, misremember, adore because they gave you your first job, whatever. No matter what I argue, you can just pick and choose your counter-argument.
Which is why it’s high-school debate. Outlast and outmaneuver your opponent for the judged win. I don’t play that game.
Name the company and point to sufficient records to judge it, and we can proceed. Or point to any company you like whose records are equally open to us. But demanding that I prove my position using your “non theoretical” example is just rinky-dink high school, AM radio, bar-room nondebate.
But, being Great Debates, we can tangle with the issues instead, if you like. Harder to score points with the judges that way, I know.
Can you state what your compensation was, and what the compensation of the person who emptied the trash in your company was?
Amateur Barbarian: are you stating that any large company screws over its employees by definition? This statement is pretty broad (though it has a couple of built in caveats and escapes):
Tell me how Facebook fucks over a plurality of its employees in favor of those at the top. Luckily, they are publicly traded, have open filings, and due to their role in our society, are regularly reported on. To make it easy, here is a collection a links:
Here is a link to their SEC filings: http://investor.fb.com/sec.cfm
This page has their exec compensation: Facebook 2014 Notice & Proxy Statement
Here are their job openings: Redirecting...
You can see the positive ratings on Glassdoor: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Facebook-Reviews-E40772.htm
Interesting.
“Regular folks” have probably had no greater champion than Michael Moore who makes a point of dressing like an unemployed trucker and constantly bragging about how he grew up in “Flint, Michigan”(he actually didn’t) while getting millions to make movies attacking capitalism.
If any of the interns who worked on Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911 were paid any money, they probably only made about 125 dollars a week if that.
Is it disgusting and outrageous that he was paid vastly, vastly more than 300 times what they make or should he be given a break?
Economic theory doesn’t argue that small-scale firms operate the same way as large firms. In fact, size isn’t even the issue at all.
Ownership is the issue.
The theory you’re speaking of is one which applies to firms with a separation of ownership and control. I.e., owners and managers are separate people. Private firms, and more so small private firms, do not have this separation. Owners and managers can be the same people in private firms.
However, when the firm is a publicly traded firm…the rules necessarily change. Profit is key not because of some nefarious “screwing the little guy” reason. It’s key because shareholders of publicly traded firms are… residual claimants.
That is, they get what’s left over after all the costs are covered, after everyone’s salary is paid, after all the re-investments are done etc. What’s left over is “profit”, which is the residual.
Profit is key because without profit, why would shareholders give the firm their money in the first place?
Being residual claimants, they also have no guarantee of profit. Unlike employees which have a guarantee of payment of a wage.
The ability to generate a profit is what attracts investors to give the firm money, in order to grow and hire more of the “little guys”. If you don’t want to generate a profit but run a company for your own benefit, that’s fine. You can keep it private. No one forces you to be a public firm, but if you do, and if you want to attract investors, then profit generating ability is important, otherwise all you’d be doing is stealing their money and giving them nothing in return.
This statement tries to argue a lot of things at once. I’m not sure sure I get everything it’s trying to argue, but I’ll give it a shot.
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Seems to me you’re confusing profits with margin. A firm can make a very large profit, at a very small margin. Walmart or Exxon make a lot of profit. But they have tiny margins. Which means, for each individual consumer, they are being provided with a good or service that is virtually at the cost of production. It’s hardly “at the expense” of the consumer. It’s actually to their benefit, precisely because the existence of such companies provides them with a good or service at a lower price point than they would pay otherwise.
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You have to consider the main strategy the firm is using. I.e., a Walmart operates at extremely low margins because it is competing on a cost leadership strategy. This directly…helps…the consumer by providing them a cheaper product than the competition. Other companies compete on a differentiation strategy, like Apple. Apple makes very large margins on everything it sells. But that’s because it provides a good with features that are either better or don’t exist in competitor’s products. Hence, it creates something new for the consumer. Obviously, no one forces a consumer to buy an iPhone. Yet many do, because for them the features it provides is worth the premium price.
In neither of these situations is the firm making a profit at the “expense” of the consumer.
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Firms compete with each other. They compete for customers, and compete for employees. This competition is what benefits the customers and the employees. Of course, if you’re an employee with skills that are more worthy of competing for you, you benefit more. But that’s life.
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The very existence of firms is predicated on the investment someone made in creating, running and growing a firm. How do customers and employees get “screwed over” by the creation of cheaper or more attractive products, or employees by the creation of new jobs and firms competing with each other for them?
If these people “at the top” didn’t invest in creating these firms in the first place, what “benefit” would consumes and employees get?
- The comparison between those “at the top” and poor little employees is a false one. If the people “at the top” are making so much money, than this isn’t something to fret over. It’s a good signal that maybe you should be buying stock in those companies too, and become one of them.
Employees aren’t just employees. Employees are, in most cases and in most publicly traded firms…also owners. Most Americans own stocks, either in their own trading accounts or through their 401K. So this…Marxian dichotomy of “workers vs capital”…just doesn’t really exist. Most people are capitalists. Most people are owners.
Even those that do not own stock directly or have 401Ks, but have pensions etc. Where does a pension fund get its money? What do they do with the money? They invest it in stocks. What does the bank do with the money you put there? It lends it out to businesses.
- Now the point you somewhat get correctly (although it may not have been your intention), is that indeed the fundamental “conflict” in capitalism is between profits and no profits.
Firms want to make lots of profit. Consumers want firms to make zero profit. That’s why the “idealized” perfect competition market is one where there are zero profits. I.e., all gains go to the consumer.
This doesn’t mean however that the presence of profits means consumers are “loosing”. It simply means they are not getting all the gains.
Most markets don’t have zero profits because there is never that level of competition between firms, and mainly because when that level approaches, firms figure out ways to provide good or services that are sufficiently better or different from the competition to merit a price premium. That’s what…innovation…is. Firms innovate in order to be able to continue to make profit, because otherwise, they end up with zero profits.
But there is no such thing as “at the expense of” in a competitive free market. There’s only a question about who gets which part of the benefit.
If there was such a thing as “at the expense of”, why would a consumer buy it? Why would you buy a Ford car, if it left you worst off? When you have 16 other car choices you can make?
No, you just waved your hands.
Prove it.
So it is perfectly honest and above-board when you do it, but when I do it, it is making things up out of whole cloth.
You are playing that game, and not very successfully.
Regards,
Shodan
We did not have any employees below skilled office staff, unless you want to include the building’s janitorial staff, and I don’t really know how to account for them in a question like this.
The ratio of the co-owner’s compensation to the lowest full-time equivalent was 10:1 or less. There were many part-time field employees, but they were paid at the same rate as full-timers with equivalent experience. There were always more hours for part-timers, up to around 75 FTE for 100-120 employees. A lot of our most valued staff stayed part-time by choice for ten years or more. We never had enough staff and as many were both parents and pursuing degrees, there was endless rescheduling and turnover. We paid by far the highest rates among the companies in the field. In 12 years, more than a dozen went from “some college” to advanced degrees, with our encouragement and help (both financial and work-related, as in scheduling). Many more went from being dumb 19yo’s with no real plans to college tracks with the aim of getting a related degree. (One was a model who thought she was too dumb to move to a supervisory level. She got her Ph.D. two years ago.) We also maintained very high quality healthcare options long after it started being a significant bite of profits. Those costs were a big factor, but not the only one, that led to closing all down five or six years ago.
That’s about one-third of my upper-level employment experience, less if count parallel positions separately. Lest anyone thinking I’m preaching from a barstool or union hall.
No, not really. If you go back to post 194, you can follow the progression where **Shodan **and **Ruken play a continuing game of Mr. Prosecutor/High School Debate Team and try to simple-question me into a corner. The answers get a little muddled in the process but I’m not the one who said “CEOs fuck everyone below them” and that’s not a fair summary of what my position actually is.
My position on that part of things - and if you’re going to argue it, you may want to start with post 1 and read my other contributions to this thread to get some context - is that wealth cannot accumulate at the peak of a pyramid without it costing some or all of those in the lower layers. I don’t believe all “costing” is measured in purely financial terms. More significantly for my esteemed opponents, I don’t buy the blanket assertion of “mutually beneficial transactions” that would make a 1,000-person company all happy worker bees (or at any real-world level, for that matter). So if you want to argue the point in vague webertarian dogma, I’ll pass; if you want to confine the analysis to standard economic dialectic, I reserve the right to change the viewpoint.
The higher the pyramid, the more extreme the wealth accumulating at the top, the exponentially greater the [del]“fucking”[/del] “costing.” Conversely, I think there’s a minimum company size this whole discussion applies to, and when you get down to a 50-person company where the “CEO” knows every employee personally, it’s a very different picture.
It doesn’t have to be as extreme as the Walton family, who seem to sit around chuckling over how many impoverished lives feed their obscene wealth. But it’s degrees of the same thing.
Thing is we know it does not have to be this way. The Walton’s are a prime example of executives being paid ridiculous sums at the expense of the people who work for them.
Yet the nation’s 2nd largest retailer (behind Walmart) is Costco. Its CEO makes a decent sum of money, loves his job and his employees love him.
Missed the edit window…
I should note the second quote is not the CEO but a Costco employee.
Of course it doesn’t. But we’ve created a system where it’s strongly to each layer’s advantage to… let’s say ‘squeeze’ the layers below them. We accept that “sales” and “profits” and “success” come at the price of certain levels of economic and employment oppression.
Are there exceptions? Sure. But the tragedy is more that we look at Costco and go, “Wowww…” than at Walmart and make sad faces.
(Not that I agree Costco is any model of employer benevolence… just better than most big-box stores, which is a pretty low bar.)
To add one more thing that may or may not be apparent from my posts in all these recent threads: I’m one of those who thinks there *are *much better ways. If I don’t jump up and down and piss all over a practice being discussed, it doesn’t mean I approve of it. (I believe these topics are all too complicated to try and roll into every post and paragraph, and have to be discussed in chunks.)
So I will put it plainly here, and you may quote me across the board: I believe our socioeconomic system is broken in many ways, including ways that majorities accept as being “okay” or, more often, “Well, what can ya do about it.” I don’t take a lot of accepted verities as fact or unchangeable. And I think a lot of defense of our current practices and assumptions stems from self-satisfied willful ignorance, when it’s not outright bullshit.
So I’m pretty much the last person on Da Dope you need to tell “it could be better.” Damn right it could. And when I’m not… participating over on this monitor, I’m working on things I think could make it a lot better, over on the other two. 
I’d submit that Costco is darn close to being a model of an ideal relationship between employees and employers.
If you read up on Costco their employee turnover rate is exceptionally low, employees at the company are fairly compensated, get some great benefits (401k, generous vacation policy, health benefits, etc) and as a result are loyal, long-term employees.
Clearly it can work and there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between the employee and employer. But it starts at the top. If the pressure is for the middle managers and above to constantly find ways to squeeze ever more profit out of the company they resort to squeezing the people below them (layoffs, reduce benefits, etc.).
I agree there are systemic problems but I think that at least some of it can be improved.
Take Costco as an example again.
Most companies feel that their one job is to increase shareholder value and do so at any cost. It is an amoral system.
If there was some sense of morality in the system it can work as we see in Costco. If you buy a Costco share the shareholder can’t bitch that employees are being paid too much. That’s the deal and you should know it when you buy the stock. Likewise the executives should be happy with earning a few million instead of tens of millions, padding their bank accounts by screwing over the employees below them.
The quest to squeeze every last cent out of the system for the benefit of a very few at the top is a race to the bottom. It is possible for everyone to share in the wealth of a prosperous business and not see employees as a necessary evil that sponges off the wealthy but as a group that enable the business to run and are integral to it, important to it and should share in the wealth they help generate.
It can be done because it is being done…today. Right now.
In standard economic terms and our social system seen through its lens, I can’t fault your argument in the least.
Rather than make an extended post, let me make it a question. If you take away the factor “the best they can do” from your picture, how does that change things? That is, if some majority of those working at Costco are in the best job they are likely to get, and they’re making $12/hr with better working conditions than the cornholing they’d take over at Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target or Home Depot for $9/hour… how much of that company-love, CEO-worship is from an entirely relative perspective?
Maybe working at Costco is a shitty, demeaning, exhausting job on an absolute level… but it’s better than those folks in red vests can do anywhere else.
Does that change the picture?