yes, but in a truly capitalist society, that “some mechanism” is pretty fucking well-defined: it’s called “more pay”, not “wage slavery”. But plutocracy is where we are currently stuck.
It’s the same thing. The market pays what it pays.
The problem is, as you said, the money tends to get funneled up to the top. Take my company for example. A few months ago leadership was touting “unprecedented” growth and bemoaning high turnover. Suddenly we missed our sales numbers for the quarter and there are whispers of layoffs for anyone they can’t staff on a client (at a 60% markup) if the partners can’t keep our shareholders happy.
There’s a whole complex dynamic I won’t get into. But basically if you are going to treat smart, highly paid people as disposable, they aren’t going to stick around to see if you plan to dispose of them. If I have to look for a new client anyway and the company does little for me besides broker the introduction, I see no reason why I should limit myself to clients within my firm.
But big companies don’t like that. They like to believe there is an ever ready pool of candidates waiting to jump when called. I see it from the other side too when we are trying to staff a new project and the right skills aren’t available at any price the company is willing to pay.
And if that goes on long enough, the company has to pay those employees better, or give them other considerations (better treatment, whatever) or it fails to find enough employees and goes out of business.
I’ve seen my employer make “market adjustments” to the wages of whole job families. It can take a while, but it happens.
And even if their job is secure, if they see other smart people leaving, perhaps because the work load has increased after layoffs, they’ll go themselves. Turnover is contagious.
The Great Resignation finally hit my department and it hit it hard. Within a three month period we’ve lost the following: Our recruitment team was gutted when the manager, two senior recruiters, and one junior recruiter quit leaving us with two brand new recruiters. We lost our senior compensation administrator and a benefits coordinator, both of whom had been with the company for roughly 20 years, we lost one of our HR assistants, an HR business partner, and our most senior HR employee just below the VP. All of these save for one were voluntary separations.
There was no worry about layoffs. But there were better opportunities available outside the company, including working from home fulltime, and they took it. For some of them, they’re making more money doing less work. Historically speaking, my company’s turnover rate pre-COVID was about 12-15% and it’s up to 30% in some of our departments now. I recently took a promotion within the company to a new position that pays more and will be less stressful and easier than the position I left. Management really needs to do something about the turnover and that’s going to mean WFH and paying people more. (Or at least WFH.)
Real contagious. Especially in my work. If people get a sense things aren’t going well or they will get stuck doing shit they don’t want to do, plenty of other companies to work for.
And experience has taught be that I could be doing a great job by all accounts, but still get a random call from HR that my job’s been eliminated because some executives decided to change the direction of the company. So if the ship looks like it might be leaking, what stick around to see if it sinks?
Which is honestly a shitty way to run a business IMHO. Whether they get laid off or change jobs on their own, it seems to create this state where no one is in a job for more than 18 months. Maybe you get hired at a higher level at your next job, but you really have no experience “doing” it, do you? Certainly not at your new company that probably works differently from your last one. So then you have to hire more consultants (who may have little experience as well) to pretend like they know what they are doing.
When I started to work you tended to stay in jobs for a long time, get promoted if you did well, and had some security. But that doesn’t work any longer. My son-in-law has changed jobs about every two years, and has done really well at it.
As long as starting salaries go up much faster than raises for people who stay, that seems to be the smart thing to do.
I started work in corporate America a little over 30 years ago, and this has been true all of that time.
In fact in business school in PAKISTAN in the mid 1980s the book Looking Out for # One was assigned reading in the course quaintly called Personnel Management.
I’ve lived through two generations of thirty-something managers complaining about the loss of employee loyalty as if it is a new problem.
I started over 40 years ago. In AT&T there was an organization called the Telephone Pioneers, which you could join when you worked I think 20 years there. They had lots of members. IBM was similar.
The look out for your own career thing started after they stopped even pretending to have any loyalty to employees. I think it made the management feel better - well, we can get rid of you at a moment’s notice, but we don’t expect loyalty.
And even then performance appraisal policy was to steer really low performers out the door, whereas today it is to steer all but the top 10% out the door. But they never thought so many would take the advice. And now they’re complaining.
I think the inevitable outcome of this is that a lot more things become “luxury goods/services” because there will be a pretty big mismatch between what people are willing to pay for something and how much people will want to be paid to do something. A lot more people are just going to have to clean their own toilets/drop off their own garbage at the dump/grow their own coffee, etc. rather than pay the $30/cup of coffee or whatever the market price might be when the only baristas left are the ones who want to do it, and importantly, when we are paying an “uncoerced” price for people to pick, pack, ship and roast coffee beans.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I think it is a noble goal to have a society where nobody feels like they must work a job that they hate or else they starve or go homeless. But I think society will look DRASTICALLY different to how it looks now, and in some ways, will appear to be less efficient. I think unfortunately many of the modern comforts that people enjoy in the first world are due to exploiting the labour of people who accept whatever wage allows them to survive. But people working these jobs for low wages is what makes a lot of goods and services affordable for a large number of people.
Wow. I could have written this. Except that my company’s “club” was for 25 years and was called the Diamond Club. There was a bit of turmoil in the late 90’s and lots of talk about right-sizing and layoffs. They offered an early retirement program that was quite (i.e. very) generous hoping to get rid of so-called dead wood and expecting a 10-15% acceptance rate. Turned out to be closer to 40%.
Lots of scrambling followed. Lots of workloads increased. Which fueled further resignations/retirements.
I think municipalities will continue to pick up garbage. (although I live in a town that doesn’t.) I think coffee shops will cost more as baristas will need to be paid more, but I wasn’t imagining that the US would be paying a UBI to people in other countries. So I don’t think a US UBI would affect the cost of coffee beans very much. (It is roasted and processed in the US, but I don’t think that labor will greatly increase the cost of coffee.) I DO think more people will have to clean their own toilets, though. Which I guess will hurt me. But I think it’s worth it.
I’d say it’s almost self-balancing. The more things become luxury goods because they’re impossible to sell without raising the price due to the higher labor cost involved, the more incentive there is for people to actually work, thus the demand for labor goes back down, and the price of those things comes back down. Well, can come back down, whether they do is less certain since greed and all. Of course, if someone works to get luxury goods and doesn’t get them cause the price keeps going up, well, they might drop back out of the labor market. So it genuinely does seem like it might have a lot of inherent self-correction in the mechanism.
Also, things that absolutely need to be done, will still get done. Garbage collection, etc. Pay will be whatever it needs to be to get the job done.
Now I could have written that. During the Trivestiture Bullet Bob Allen spun off what became Lucent and decided that cutting staffing was the way to do it. I think 35-40% of people took the package. I sure did. Not only did I get a hunk of money, I got 5 weeks of vacation paid since we left on Jan. 15 and all our vacation got vested January 1.
My entire management chain left. While I was out in Silicon Valley interviewing I had to define who would get laid off, but as it turned out so many volunteered that the only person we laid off in our department was on his way out anyhow, so he did pretty well.
The projects in my group had plenty of funding, and so many people left that they were moving chemists to do our EE/CS work.
The going away part was in our cafeteria where half the staff said goodbye to the other half. It was weird, but investing that money for 20 years funded my retirement.
Yeah, we had “gang” retirement parties. We were more geographically dispersed, so not all were at the same time/place.
The sad thing? The company ended up hiring back a lot of those early retirees as contractors. Sweet deal for them.
Average hours worked per year (including full-time and part-time employees) according to Employment - Hours worked - OECD Data
Germany: 25.5
Russia: 35.9
USA: 33.9
Note that fewer hours can often be explained by higher productivity and good social conditions and cost of living; it’s not like Germany is a shithole where you can’t get a job and make ends meet.
I’m pretty sure the average number of hours worked per year per worker is a tad higher than 33.9 hours. Around here at least. Actually, I’m pretty sure most people at this company pull more than that per week. The numbers don’t match the link, either.
Is this supposed to be the average annualized weekly hours worked per worker? Something else?
It’s supposed to be
Now I did do exactly what the final sentence warned not to do, I am aware (though if you compare hours worked in Germany in 2000 versus 2021 there is a decrease of nearly a couple of hours).
NB I converted hours per year to a weekly average by deciding there were 52.18 weeks in a year.
Ok, then that’s odd, because I’m seeing from that link:
Germany: 1332
Russia: 1874
US: 1767
These make more sense. I would expect something closer to 2000. Maybe you’re dividing by 52 to get average hours worked per week?
ETA: Ok, on review, I see you were dividing by about 52, so this is a rough weekly average. Another factor to consider is with the social safety net Germany has, more of their 15-25 year olds spend time studying and traveling and don’t go into full time employment as early and likewise more of their 55-65 year olds retire earlier than the US, so the average gets dragged down. The same numbers for 25-55 year olds are most likely more similar.
Actually, looking at the numbers, I was fairly off. Germans have a higher employment rate from 25 on up according to that site than the US. Higher part time employment rate, too, which may be feeding into that.