This is as neat a summary of why I refuse to get an MBA as any. I’ve got too much dignity to get a degree solely to earn some extra damn money and spend LESS time with my daughter.
See, you missed the all too obvious answer
The common denominator was AlienVessels
Please feel free to show your work.
You may want to consult your financial adviser, as I am no expert, but in my experience children are not a fiscally sound investment.
Do you know how much you can get for them these days?
Just making a simple observation
[QUOTE=AlienVessels]
Every single place I’ve worked in, and every business I’ve consulted for has politics and seniority issues that often trump ability, skills, and drive.
[/quote]
The 1st thing all of these place had in common was yourself. Not pointing a finger, but it’s not impossible that there was a common mis-perception issue at play. Oft times when “evey single place” seems off kilter it’s due to the viewer instead of the viewed.
Okay gonzomax, I here by grant you this magic wand. Wave it and you can make what ever changes you need to society, just by wishing:
So how do you propose we change this reality? You are talking about a person that has no skill or tallent, but you want him paid as if he does. This person is completely replaceable by a hundred people ready and willing to do the same job for lower pay.
That’s pretty much the point here. And those are the people that seem to demand union protections.
Case in point: a few years ago the outdoor works in Toronto managed to get the garbage collectors included in their union. So when negotiations came around, the outdoor workers went on strike and garbage wasnt collected for I think two weeks in the middle of summer.
Eventually the city caved and all these guys got more money. Now the guys mowing lawns earn more than they should because the city depends on garbage collection. The guy mowing lawns is not valued as highly as a garbage collector, but thanks to the union he gets treated as if he is.
You might want to check with your daughter, it’s possible she’d rather the cash.
Just putting that out there.
Exactly.
[QUOTE=Agnostic Pagan]
**I am not advocating we should - yet. But what happens when that number reaches $100K? $200K? **We need to recognize that we live in an affluent society - not a Hobbesian rat race. Money is a great tool for cost accounting and for measuring the value of assets. It is horrible for determining the worth of a person.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know what the critical number will be, but the revolution is coming, and it when it arrives, a great many people are going to be blindsided, and like Mubarak, will be sitting by the sea shore going “What the fuck just happened?!?”
We might be nice and deliver ponies.
As far as the glut of MBAs, their main purpose these days is to be sent overseas and get the corner office in Hyderabad or Shanghai rather than New York or Chicago. But then they are also competing with all the MBAs from Europe and those countries are starting to produce a good crop of home-grown stock also.
Many are also leaving the corporate sector and joining the civic sector - which is what I am doing. Social enterprise is more than a buzz-word. A non-insignificant number of twenty and thirty somethings are spending as little time as possible working for Fortune 500 corps and starting up NGOs or social businesses like Kiva or Frogtek.
The hippies had their heart in the right place, but too many had no business sense and lacked a global perspective. Many kids today are going to business school, but then use those skills to actually help people, not exploit them. In a world of Facebook and twitter, there really are no borders or classes. No us or them. Just us. The multiculturalism classes are starting to pay off. Differences do not mean that others are inferior, just different.
A few assholes will always head to Wall Street, but I really am seeing the start of a new system that just cuts them out of the loop. We are not going to burn it down. We are just going to move on, and leave them behind with the buggy-whip makers and the whale oil merchants.
The world will soon no longer need them. I so cannot wait. I am just hoping the Republicans and neoliberals don’t bankrupt it first, but even if they do, they will not be the ones that rise from the rubble.
That’s all fine and dandy, but let’s say “x” isn’t a living wage, does not include healthcare, but due to glut of unemployed “x” is about the best a certain class can get.
You want a story. When I was a kid before SCHIP, growing up in a single parent household my mother’s work claimed to include health care coverage, but they’d yank her around. Telling her she had to work so many hours a week but stacking her hours just short of the goals. Due to the pay there wasn’t much left for food. A few times we ran out of food.
At one point I had huge gash on the bottom of my foot. Kids being kids I stepped on a piece of glass playing outside. Well it bled and bled, but scabbed pretty okay by the time my mother got home from work. It was deep though, and really need stitches. As a result not having healthcare insurance, and a potential huge bill, my mother couldn’t afford, she aired on the side of financial caution. As a result it didn’t heal right, I have huge a scare on the bottom of my foot, that for some reason if it’s hit wrong my whole foot gets sore.
I remember growing up doing without. Getting picked on for being poor. Missing out on a lot of things. Eating potatoes and pasta for weeks in the summer.
SCHIP finally kicked in in time for my appendix to go. I don’t even want to think what it would have been like trying to pay the bills on that.
And company could have afforded to pay a living wage. They just didn’t. Better to spread lots of misery to their workers families to make their lives marginally better.
So when you say “x”, if “x” is a living wage then you may be a sinner, but it ain’t because of your wages.
However when I see people arguing for the right to pay “x” that isn’t a living wage. Well I see people arguing for the same childhood I had to be to infliced on others. Why shouldn’t I hate people like that? Why shouldn’t I want to punch them in their selfish mouths?
I call bullshit on this.
Grievances are not filed because management rewarded anyone. It doesn’t happen. Grievances are for when management treats someone ill, not when they treat someone well.
There’d also be no cause for a grievance with regard to being paid more for the same position. First, no one would know your pay rate unless you told them. Second, union contracts don’t specify what a job will pay; union contracts specify the LEAST or base pay for a job. Any employer is free to pay someone more for the same job if they want.
No union I know of would grieve an employer when said union would stand to gain fiscally without grieving through an increase in paycheck dues collected, especially when there is no issue to grieve.
You’ve constructed quite a piece of fiction, but that’s all it is: fiction.
No, the vast majority of them were in business well before I visited them. Of course it varied from company to company. And I didn’t go to random companies. (BTW, you might consider suggesting that someone’s sampling is biased before you jump on them for perceptual bias issues. It’s the polite thing to do.)
This wasn’t a “perception” issue. My job was to go in, figure out widgets each cog produced and with new equipment, how to optimize and streamline with existing or less resources. Or if I was going in as a tech, to get “under the hood” and fix whatever wasn’t working.
There was always some sort of resistance to reconfiguration based on other than pure skill and output. People are people and animal politics follows whenever you get a group of them together.
So what do you propose we do? Give everyone $15 an hour and a pony?
If there is a glut of {anything} the value of it goes down, be it oil, Royal Doulton dolls, or unskilled labour.
It goes back to the same basic problem: what happens if suddenly there is a glut of houses on the market, do I some how deserve more for my shitty 1.5 story from 1920? If I go through the trouble of making an MP3 player, I’m forced to compete with all the other ones out there, do I some how deserve to earn a living wage because mine sucks?
It’s not up to the employer to make people valuable. If all you can do is flip burgers you are going to get paid based on how many other people are willing to do that job. If that’s not a living wage tough shit, learn to make a better burger. You don’t deserve anything more.
That’s not meant to be cold, it’s simply the reality on the other side of the drive thru window. If the burger is shit people won’t pay as much for it. Which brings us back to the point: should the government impose a minimum price for a hamburger, regardless of how low it’s quality?
The salary of the guy flipping the burger is based on what the burger can sell for. If he’s really good at it, and the burger sells for more, he can demand more money. If he can make more per hour than the next guy he can earn more money.
I’m going to hire the cheapest guy that can get the job done, just as you are going to go to the gas station with the lowest price gas.
You don’t have to take the job is it pays less than what YOU consider a living wage. The problem with that term is that everyone considers it something different. If someone else is willing to live off less, sucks to be you (the general you).
That’s why we have a society. We pool resources to help buffer the impact of cyclic ebb and flow in markets, in weather, etc etc.
Why should labor have to deal with the consequences of the poorly regulated financial sector selling fraudulent securities based on shoddily executed real estate loans?
In the past two years? You must move in exalted circles.
Because those same people were happy to benefit from those shoddily executed real estate loans.
People were more than happy to sell that shitty 1.5 story house for twice what it was worth. And they were more than happy to accept loans for more than the appraised value of the house. They loved getting lines of credit on equity that didn’t really exist. Lots of people retired while the stock market was way above what it should have been. And lots of people were hired for jobs that weren’t actually needed.
Sure, we have a society for when things are really bad, like say a hurricane. But not for when it’s going to rain. For that we have personal accountability.
This point really needs to be repeated.
If I’m selling a product, I will charge as much as the market is willing to pay and not a penny less. You’ll notice that on ebay, the winning bid is the highest; not second highest, or third, or the person that wants it’s the most, or bid first. We seem to be okay with that.
But wait, what if it doesn’t sell for as much as I think it should? What if people aren’t willing to pay me a living wage for my product? Then what?
The other point that is always over looked is that it’s not just wages. I spend most of my day trying to shave pennies of my material costs. And I actually mean pennies, I haggle and negotiate based on pennies per pound. Last week is was getting chicken down to $1.06. The week before that it was paper containers. If I pay more for packaging, I have even less to pay for wages.
If you aren’t willing to work as hard I have to hire another guy to get the orders filled, that makes you a liability. If I don’t get the orders filled (correctly) I don’t get paid, but unions don’t seem to care about that. It’s all about making sure you get to stand outside for 10min every two hours, which seems to require 5min to get your jacket, and 5min to put it away. Tell me how I’m supposed to pass that cost on to my clients. Do you think I could get away with a “union labour surcharge?” Do you think people would be willing to pay 10% more knowing you got to spend 25min every two hours standing outside?
There are 5 people trying to fit into one available job right now. In some areas it is much worse than that. But then I’m sure from a large social distance, a hurricane is a rainshower.
Doesn’t surprise me. People gripe about insurance payments until they need it.
It’s personal accountability when it’s “their” problem. It’s “where’s mine” when it happens to you.
Fine, those 5 people are now my problem, you don’t need to worry any more. I don’t know where you think I’ll get the money to pay them all, but apparently that’s my problem too. I guess as an evil capitalist I don’t deserve a living wage, only the unskilled deserve that.
Perhaps I could create a new market niche and convince people to pay 5 times as much for my product. If only I could come up with a catchy moniker like “recession supportive” or “I pay people more than they’re worth so you should pay more than my product is worth.”
Odd that 5 people out of work is my…I mean…society’s problem, but if I sell 5 times fewer products it’s still just my problem. Where’s the union to force people to buy more of my product?
If your best argument is to punch someone in the mouth, then that’s your problem.
Look, I haven’t said word one about what social programs we should or should not have to help the poor. That’s a completely separate issue that we, as a society, need to decide.
But I’m not going to pay you more than the job is worth to me if there someone else out there who is willing to do it and do it well. Now, does that often mean that for business purposes it behoove me to pay my employees a decent wage so that they don’t have to live in cars and eat cat food? Yes. But if the market doesn’t justify a higher wage, I go out of business and there is no fucking job in the first place. We both starve.