It seems to me “an elite nobility” is already governing. We just pretend it’s a democracy. 
I’m not generally of a mind to make someone else’s argument for him, but you’re such a swell guy that I’ll make an exception. I think it’s disgusting the way many CEOs are paid, often in collusion with the BODs, without regard to their performance. I think investment types are paid crazy amounts of money and they get a nice little tax perk in that much of their pay is taxed as long term capital gains (or something like that).
However, I’m not in favor of preventing stupid people from throwing their money out the window, even if it goes to some revolting guy on Wall Street. I would like to see us tighten up tax laws, though, so they don’t get special treatment.
And when it comes to unions, like I said in my first post, there are good ones and bad ones. As a free market type of guy, I consider unions to be a key part of making that market work, as long as they don’t get the government to grant them special favors, and as long as they don’t intimidate workers who don’t want to be in the union.
I take it then you are pretty much against the government giving out corporate subsidies?
Hmmm…Now let’s see…Help me here - what did each one of these places have in common?
Oh and make more money too.
We have a huge unemployment problem. That would tell a realist that you can not just walk off a job. That would also tell you you can not make demands. Many highly educated and experienced workers are out of work.
Correct.
Uhm, pretty much anywhere in the developed world. Is it your contention that people are unable to do this in, say, the US? Every single person I know has left his job voluntarily at some point and taken another one.
I agree with you. However–There is no intrinsic tie between “Union” and “lack of merit pay”–I recognize that many unions ARE set up that way. Hell, something as simple as the Federal grade/step/COLA method solves that problem if implemented correctly.
The counterpoint to your question is this one: what do you have against a person making less than their market share due to management whim or prejudice? Why should he, someone with equal or better talent/skill/initiative, be relegated to making a lower amount of money because he doesn’t share a last name, gender, or ethnicity with the boss? I find that equally disgusting. (and I, in fact, lived it–when I was at my first job, and working for literally half the salary of a guy I was approximately ten times as skilled as. Don’t even say it–the hit to my resume from quitting my first post-college job with less than five years in, during the early 2000 tech crunch, was not an acceptable option at the time. I’m doing just fine now.)
There’s room for unionization, collective bargaining, and employees working together without a stultifying sort of wishy-washy socialism–protection from employers who would otherwise use non-work-related criteria in a economy with relatively heavy unemployment is one of the bigger things unions SHOULD be able to do. Don’t mistake the implementation for the actuality.
I dunno, but my field has no unions and it had the same problems–except add “nepotism” as well. =P
The practical issues nonwithstanding, of course, of trying to find a job when economic conditions are (shall we say) less than ideal.
It’s unrealistic to think that everyone should be able, at all times, to instantly switch jobs whenever they want. But people aren’t tied to their jobs in such a way that employers can get away with crappy working conditions and not have employees leave. That’s what it sounded like **Gyrate **was saying.
Yes, politics plays a role in most companies. As does seniority. As far as the latter, if all else is equal, I think it’s fine. I don’t think it should count for zero necessarily. That leaves politics, which can suck. But politics happen in unionized companies, as well. I don’t think there’s any erasing it. But from my experience, superior performance trumps both. A company wants to make money, so their is a massive push for them to attract, keep, and keep happy their best workers. I’ve worked for quite a few companies and in every one, that has been the case. And I’m including jobs when I was in high school and college, too. In fact, the one company that I didn’t feel valued performance enough, I left.
It’s a matter of degree. In the private sector you can, as I have, make an argument for your pay to be more than doubled, and it will be. I’m not interested in some token sign of my worth. I want it to be commensurate with my relative contribution.
Management whim plays a part in both types of companies. It’s human nature. But it also works against a company who is intent in outperforming their competition. I would LOVE to have a company that competed against one who rewarded people for reasons other than merit. They would not perform as well as they could and they’d be a great source of talent for me.
As far as your experience, if you really are 10 times better than someone else, would you be happy making 3, 4, or 5 percent more? Not me. And I’m glad you feel you’re being fairly compensated now.
As I’ve said, as pathetic and sad I think it is for people to want to form a union, I’m more than willing to let them degrade themselves that way. But when they push back against an employer, part of the deal should be that the employer is going to reevaluate things and look to replace those people.
Here’s an analogy: if a landlord raises your rent 20%, as happened to me one time, I’m free to A) negotiate with him B) pay the increase or C) look at other apartments. A was a dead end, so I did C, which lead me to do B. The amount he wanted, compared to the rest of the market, was fair. I see salaries as working the same way.
Well, I’d be real impressed with the relevance of your experience if real wages for the bottom 3 quintiles hadn’t gone down on average over the last couple of decades.
What in fact happens is that the players get to the top, reap most of the reward, and then pay the second quintile to do most of the dirty work for them (i.e. crack the wip and fire people). So the “stars” get the reward and avoid taking the rap for being a-holes.
And businesses know this. They will get away with as much crap as they can. Mandatory overtime, wage freezes, ‘black out dates’ for sick leave and personal days - best of luck if you get the flu during year end reporting.
If one or two complainers leave, no worries. The boss just dumps the work onto the rest of the team until enough people are unhappy that management finally breaks down and hires a replacement, even though they have had a stack of applications from qualified workers sitting on their desk for the last month. And with the cost of health insurance, those complainers won’t leave unless they can go straight to another job. COBRA policies aren’t affordable for most of the population.
It is a wonderful calculus constantly being updated by both management and labor, and the equations are stacked in managements favor.
And all the hard skills and hard work don’t mean shit unless unless you also play the political games and hopefully find a mentor willing to show you the ropes.
That the private sector is this great meritocracy which the public sector should emulate is a complete myth. All the personal anecdotes in this and countless other threads don’t counteract the fact that there are only so many positions available at the top. Much like the post-docs, we have a glut of overqualified people chasing very few openings in the corner offices. Industry will never grow fast enough to absorb them all. Fortunately, most people don’t want to work in the corner office. They just want to earn a decent living doing their current job.
I am wondering just how rich the assholes have to get before people do start rioting. A straight up redistribution of our nations income would give every working adult over $50,000/yr. Or to put it in capitalist terms, if the US was a corporation, and everyone had an equal number of shares, their annual dividend would be over $50,000. (I divided the $7.3 trillion in total wages by the 130 million workers in this country. Did not even include profits or rent income.) And that is not even dividing the wealth this country has, which is also skewed in that private wealth is incredibly overvalued and public wealth incredibly undervalued. (How much wealth does a public library represent? A research university?)
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.
Reward talent and skills (and nepotism and cronyism) with fancy titles and offices, extra assistants, or other non-monetary perks. Put the best and brightest in charge of the critical projects or have them watch over the key clients. But using money is the worst metric we could use. A hundred years ago maybe. But we have had a wee bit of technological, economic and social development since then. I think we could create a better system than what our Bronze Age ancestors came up with.
I am sure all of you are super bright and super talented and employers are beating down your door. But a lot of work does not require those amazing talents. Lots of jobs do not require a genius.They are repetitive and often require hard physical work. There are plenty of people with those abilities. So I suppose when you work a job like that ,you deserve no protections, and you should have no rights. The owner should have the right to change your pay at will. He should be allowed to fire you if he has a hangover or is in a bad mood. I guess some people just don’t realize how unimportant they really are.
AgnPag
You glance upon a subject that I’ve wondered about. How many MBA’s can we absorb?
People approach higher education for a variety of motives, but sometimes its flat out money, a kid picks an area of academic endeavor that is most likely lucrative. Now, I don’t make a value judgment about people who make money the gravitational center of their being. I think they suck, but that’s just my feeling about them, it isn’t a value judgment.
But they exist, and bounteous are their numbers. The are Legion. So all these kids, hag-ridden by greed, ambitious as Lucifer and as greedy as Moloch…they all follow the same course of study. (Or worse, the utter damnation of tax law!)
Where would one look for signs of saturation, I wonder? Nice young men in three piece suits standing by the highway ramp with signs saying “Will Analyze a Portfolio for Food.”
That’s a nice story, but it’s just a story. And besides, you know what? I start a company and create a certain number of jobs that are worth “x” to me. You don’t want one of those jobs, then go out and find another one or create your own damn job.
And the flip side is, I start a company and create a certain number of jobs that are worth “x” to me. I miscalculate and no one takes them, and I’m fucked. Tough shit for me.
And I want a pony. Who is going to give me one?
Are you seriously telling us that if we decided to just divvy up all the income that we’d have the same income we have now? Please tell me you’re kidding.
And this is exactly why (now that I have gotten over the hump of early-job resume building and the tech recession that hit right when I was first entering the market) I took a hard line when I negotiated my last job. Although it’s a measure of how bad some tech companies are that I took what I thought was a fairly hard line (suffice it to say I get time-and-a-half for over 40 hours clocked in a week while being treated as salaried in every other respect, among other things), my current employer didn’t even blink at it. I probably left money on the table. =P
Part of the reason unions are useful in that situation (as well as all other tools that give an employee relatively more power, from COBRA to unemployment insurance) is that there are economic times and situations where that job is something you CAN’T leave–whether your savings were wiped by a catastrophe, or you just had a kid and can’t afford to lose even one check, etc. It takes companies like that a long time to sink sometimes, and in a world where HR departments will reject you if you appear fickle by jumping ship too often, that’s a major factor.
Frankly–it depends. I don’t know what field you’re in, but not every field is like that–for example, there’s a lot more distance between Michael Jordan and a benchwarmer than there is between “Head Cashier at Wal-Mart” and “Junior Cashier at Wal-Mart”. The latter certainly benefit a lot more from their potential union membership–especially since joining a union does legitimately give them tools they don’t have by themselves through lack of education or opportunity, namely the ability to know how to negotiate and the pull to have it mean something.
While my field is one where a top performer can easily be worth 10x as much as a bottom-rung guy, I don’t see a properly structured union as an impediment to that, for that matter. The “template” for unions is in piecework-type jobs and physical labor jobs where there just isn’t that much room for two sincere workers to be that divergent in skills, but equally there’s no reason a tech union has to even attempt to consider (to use my field) a junior Windows admin and a senior CCIE in the same box for salary negotiation purposes. Hell, a tech union could have no union rules whatsoever aside from “employees must be fairly compensated for any hours over 2080 that they work in a year” and you’d see some pretty major benefits.
As for the “degrading” point you keep bringing up, well…if you ask me, “degrading” is when an honest day’s hard work can’t feed your family this year, when it could last year. If joining a union prevents that, you’re gonna do it. As long as it’s possible to get a full-time job in this country that doesn’t feed and shelter the person doing the work and his family, there is going to be a push from the bottom up, and that is going to include unions. What’s also “degrading” is knowing that the jackoff in the top office is making literally 100x-1000x your salary, despite the fact the company is going under entirely due to top-level mismanagement (been there). What’s also “degrading” is being asked to take a pay cut after three years of no raises AND buy your work supplies out of your personal paycheck, while your employers plead poverty despite having a surplus and a $5mil cash fund (the position from which my brother’s teacher’s union is negotiating–the state arbitrator is recommending a strike, it’s so bad, and it ain’t a liberal state he’s from.).
I took it as more illustrative of a point than as a proposal for a plan of action. Chillness.