It’s called wage or pay compression and you’re right that it’s a problem. And I’m not sure if it’s more about trying to save money or it’s just laziness on the part of the company. Every year, my company conducts a wage survey and if we have any positions paying below the average we give everyone holding those positions a raise. It’s one of the reasons we have a relatively low turnover rate but it’s a lot of work for Compensation. But, yeah. There are some places where you cannot get a meaningful raise without either transferring to another area of the company or jumping ship entirely and that just doesn’t make good business sense.
That every person, able in body and under the age of 60 years, not having enough to live upon, being required, shall be bound to serve him that doth require him, or else be committed to gaol until he shall find surety to serve, and that the old wages shall be given and no more;
[…]
and that the same servants refusing to serve in such a manner should be punished by imprisonment of their bodies, as is more plainly contained in the said statute.
Some might say it didn’t work so well but why listen to historians?
As I think I mentioned above wage compression was an issue when I did salary administration 30 years ago. The reason is that the market for new hires is different from the market for existing employees who have some degree of inertia.
Also, I’ve never seen the costs of turnover get measured well or affect decisions by HR of management. A lot of managers see employees as cogs, and don’t believe in any specialized knowledge except in the cases of very high ranking people.
Funny example. My daughter used to work for an overseas airline. They forced out all non-natives. Unfortunately for them one of the people forced out was responsible for a special license needed to host their website in the US. It went dark just before a sale for the heaviest travel days of their year, and they lost a ton of business and money. Whoops.
There is also now the Netflix model, where you give big raises to the to 20% or so and encourage the bottom 80% to leave. That’s to make sure that eventually everyone will be in the top 20%
But who’s to argue with billionaires.
I have two issues with this statement.
First, there is no reason why punishment cannot be rational. I think it is perfectly rational to lock up a murderer, and I also think that that is punishment.
Second, I do not think that it is a rational justification to distrust one person for something that a different person has done.
She could use some level of rational thinking, see the raises that I’ve given in the past, and expect something similar in the future.
No, it’s not, I suppose, but it would make more sense to expect future good treatment from someone who has treated you well in the past than from someone who, according to the rational given here, they have no reason to trust.
That would be true of anywhere, not sure why anyone would make the assumption that going somewhere else would be less likely to have those factors.
I’d say it is a very irrational cycle of paranoia and victimhood. To broad brush all employers as being dishonest is simply wrong. I’ve had a lot of jobs. I’ve had good employers, I’ve had bad employers, and I’ve judged each employer based on how they treated me and my co-workers, not based on how other employers treated me or their employees. It just doesn’t make any sense to do otherwise, IMHO.
Maybe it’s because they work for good employers, and they don’t follow the advice of assuming that they are dishonest and bad employers simply because there are bad employers out there.
How does that even work? I mean, employees are employed in order to get work done. If an employer cannot expect that work to get done, then they cannot run a functional business.
How else does the work get done if it is not done by the employees who did not call off?
In fact, I give my employees quite a benefit. In most of the industry, if a groomer calls off, they have to call all of their clients individually and cancel on them. My employees just have to send me a text, and I do what needs to be done from there.
Why blame the employer for an employee who just doesn’t like working, or decides that they’d rather do something else that day? If someone shows up late every day, is that the employer’s fault? If someone calls off regularly because they just don’t feel like working, is that the employer’s fault? Well I guess it is, to some extent, if the employer doesn’t fire them for poor attendance, anyway.
Where’s the line between nearly and not? Seems you want to make a point here, but are not willing to actually stand by it.
I do see that, and I really don’t see what you are trying to say. You complain when employees are nearly powerless, and it seems that you are also complaining when they are given power.
What should an employer do with an employee that would satisfy whatever metric you are trying to get at here?
You said:
Which would imply that employees are all mistreated, and therefore are justified in distrusting their employers. I really don’t see how else that you can put your statements into a coherent whole unless you are claiming that all employers mistreat their employees.
You continue:
So, what do you mean by “nearly all”? 95% or more? That’s what I would take nearly all to mean, and I would disagree. In my experience, working grunt level entry jobs, it’s more around 50/50.
I scrolled up and I couldn’t find the one that you listed, but anyway, I could list 7, from personal experience, not including myself. 8 if I do.
Workers are not going to create a situation where employers start being good through being distrustful and malingering. They will only make employers take on the same attitude of distrusting all employees due to the actions of some.
If you are a worker, and you want to change things, then open your own business, then you can. But simply hating your boss no matter who they are isn’t going to do anything worthwhile.
And, if you want to say that you can’t do that, why not? I was impoverished and in serious debt when I opened my business. I went through years of barely scraping by, nearly losing my house and everything else in the process. And, to be honest, I did so mostly because I was tired of working for other people. I wanted to open a place that operated on ethical principles. I wanted to run a place where I would want to work.
My only obstacle in this is employees that take your advice and punish me for what other people have done to them.
Some, most, really, of my employees are not like that. They appreciate the environment I provide for them, appreciate the 40% over industry average that I pay them, appreciate the non-toxic and hostile work environment that I provide and maintain for them.
But yeah, I do have some employees that just hate employers, all employers, no matter who, and will take whatever they can get, and give as little as they can in return. Those are the type of employee that you think you are talking about, but the reality is, is that those are the employees that harden employers and make them less trusting and empowering of employees in the future.
I have a fairly high rate of turnover on employees that have been here less than 6 months, as I weed out these employees who hate work and hate employers. But, once someone’s been here about a year or so, they tend to stay for a long time.
It’s funny when an employee quits on bad terms, then after a while, tries to come back when they realize how good they actually had it here. I refuse to rehire anyone that left on bad terms, as they made me mistrust them.
I’ve had a few leave on good terms, just wanting to see what else was out there. Some are still gone, some have come back.
See, this is the claim of yours that I keep struggling with. Not all employers are wealthy. I know a whole bunch of business owners, and they range from impoverished to reasonably well off. I know very few wealthy business owners, if wealthy means breaking into 6 figures. I do OTOH, know a bunch of people who work for other people that I would call wealthy, making 6 figures or more.
You are taking the example of the owner of a fortune 500 company, and using that as the template for the owner of that little diner on your corner, or the nail salon in the strip mall down the street.
And nearly all employers that I know at least started with the idea of wanting to make a good place for employees. Some have changed, as they get burned over and over by employees, and simply cannot afford to be burned anymore. For some reason, in this process of becoming a more cynical employer, they also tend to become less progressive overall. I know business owners that started as flaming liberals who are now pretty hardcore Republicans.
Like I said, it’s a cycle that ends with the fall of civilization. I’m doing my part to break the cycle, and it seems that most everyone else is doing their damndest to deepen the spiral.
Nice Gish gallop. You ascribe a lot of positions to me that I haven’t taken.
You also tend to try and laser-focus on something in order to try and falsify it, like this:
I never said “all employers are wealthy”. That’s you making a leap in order to try and make an argument; I think there’s a term for that.
In addition, you seem to think that your personal experiences sometimes outweigh all other evidence; it does not. I congratulate and commend you for your efforts but you do not employ everyone.
Yes, because it is likely that the owner of the nail salon and the owner of the strip mall have far more wealth than the employees of those businesses.
That may be, but it turns out that many if not most employers have failed at that, perhaps because their criteria for “a good place for employees” was somewhat lacking. Perspective is a helluva thing.
Here’s the problem with this in general:
So wage work exists in part because (contrary to what Marx says) if people actually got paid exactly equal to the economic value they produce, it would suck for workers. In some stretches I could be getting paid $25/hour and generating $100/hr of value. In others I could be getting paid $25/hour to do the same thing and generating $0 of value. The benefit of wage work to me the worker is that I get a somewhat steady, consistent salary.
The problem with this is that it means that neither me nor my employer are being put to the test at the same time. My loyalty is only tested when I’m making $25 and generating way more than that. And my boss’s loyalty is only being tested when I’m making $25 and generating way less (also with small business it’s not even really my boss which I’ll get to).
You’re not making that assumption.
The assumption the worker is making is that there will be lean years. If I was making $25 and my boss upped my pay to $30 during the fat years, but I can leave and make $35, the extra savings from the $5/hr I can put in the bank (or more realistically pay off a loan with) is a better insurance policy than an employer’s goodwill.
Also, as a worker I really have no idea where the raises are coming from. I don’t look at my boss’s balance sheet. I don’t know what conditions they would need to see to keep giving out raises.
I’m going to disagree with both you and Snowboarder_Bo here.
I basically think the relative greed or altruism of small business owners doesn’t matter that much and IS overshadowed by fortune 500 companies. I know that there are actually small-business owners with a “leaders eat last mentality” out there who will do things like not pay themselves a salary if the company doesn’t make a profit (honestly I don’t think there are as many as their used to be but in any case).
Jane and Joe’s Burger Shack employs dozens(?) of people. McDonalds employs half a million people. What Jane and Joe do with their business really isn’t going to move the needle much.
And the amount of wiggle room a small business really has to pay more to their workforce is much more constrained by the bank than by their own goodwill. If I and all my coworkers are getting paid $25/hr and the business isn’t doing well enough to recuperate that money, you can only promise me my job if you’re willing to burn through your personal money or credit. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can only keep people around to the extent you can find someone to loan you the money, and agree to the high burn rate of retaining all these now overpaid workers while you try to right the ship.
Ultimately, everyone that isn’t a large enough company to dictate their own terms is beholden to the financial system.
You didn’t disagree with me at all; I made no statement regarding degree of impact by a business based on their relative size. My statement was a general observation: employers have the ability to direct & use more wealth than employees.
I only responded to the words that you wrote. If I am wrong on interpreting what you wrote, you can actually point it out, rather than just dismiss everything as though I am acting in bad faith.
You said that they use their wealth. That would imply that they had wealth. If that’s not what you meant to imply, then you did a poor job of it.
No, my argument, the whole time, was that employees should evaluate their employers based on how they treat them, not based on how other employers treat their employees.
That is what I’ve been getting pushback from you and @DeadTreasSecretaries about, that it is perfectly reasonable for an employee to judge an employer based on other employers.
See, there you go again, claiming that small business owners are wealthy. Why do you keep saying that you are not making that claim, when you repeat it over and over again?
Though you did change what I said, I never said the owner of the strip mall. That’s my landlord, and he is wealthy, and abusive.
This is actually true. When I mentioned the 7 employers that I’ve worked for that treated employees very well, what I did not mention was that 3 are out of business, 2 are under new management, and I don’t know anything about the other 2, not having kept up with them.
Right, and in my industry, the value of what someone is doing fluctuates quite a bit. If a dog doesn’t show up, then they are generating no value, standing around waiting. In many places, that would mean that they get nothing. Here, I pay them and eat the cost myself.
Well, no the assumption that they make is that they can get 55% commission off a dog, charge $65 for it, and make $35.75 plus tips for about an hour and a half of work. What they quickly learn is that I pay them not much less than that, every hour, no matter whether they provide that value or not. I also provide and maintain their equipment, as well as provide the infrastructure and everything else they need to do their job.
When they get out there, they find that they are making less than half what they were with me, they have to pay to buy and maintain their equipment, that if they mess up a dog and have to comp the client, that comes out of their pay, that if a client doesn’t show up, then they are simply out that money.
I have a person that I hired a month before she turned 19. After 3 years, and massive investment on my part in training her, she makes $35 an hour, and she’s complaining that she doesn’t think that she makes enough, and is thinking about leaving.
Not that many 21 year olds make $70k with no college degree. If she leaves, she’s gonna get a hard lesson.
I am very open about our finances, and I am very open about my expectations on what they need to do to get raises.
You know, I think that you have changed my mind. I realize now how foolish I’ve been over the last decade, busting my ass to provide a productive and positive work environment. I have been the one to eat last. I only take a draw after all other bills have been paid, and there’ve gone by months when I didn’t pay myself a single cent.
Never let it be said that I can’t be swayed by arguments on this board. New year, new business model. I’ll work less, make more, and my employees will work more, make less. I never did this for myself, I did it for them, and you and @Snowboarder_Bo have convinced me that that is pointless and foolish on my part. I shouldn’t expect employees to actually judge my business based on how I treat them, but rather, based on how fortune 500 companies treat their employees. Since that’s the case, it’s pretty stupid of me to sacrifice my time, my body, and my finances in order to be different from them.
Thank you for that, I probably would have kept up this futile effort for years, constantly fighting an uphill battle that has no end in sight. You’ve given me a different perspective on things, one that I will share with some of my business owning peers that have the same deluded vision that treating their employees fairly and equitably would have some sort of actual benefit.
ETA: I should probably delete the rest of my post, as it’s actually no longer relevant, given my newfound perspective, but I’ll leave it, since I spent time and effort on it.
IMO you are taking (and making) this far too personal. I regret participating in that endeavor and will henceforth refrain.
I’m echoing Snowboarder_Bo that you are taking this too personally.
We’re not talking about any specific situations you have with your business and individual people you work with.
We’re talking about the relationship between workers and companies in general, whether employees in general are less trusting of their bosses than they should be and to whether there’s anything wrong with leaving a boss who has treated you well to try to improve your situation.
This is missing the point.
You have a pot of money that you could give to yourself or effectively you could distribute to your employees in the form of higher pay for the amount of work they do. That pot of money is tiny compared to the pot of money the bank has to play with, and if you ever aren’t able to cover all your costs they get to dictate to you whether or not you’re allowed to continue running your business the way you do. If they only lend you enough money to retain some of your workers at current pay, your workers are still getting screwed.
Once again, say I’m a worker, and I’m in an environment where I’m getting a steady raise from a small business but the value of my labor is relatively high right now and I could leave and get more. If the situation becomes reversed and the value of my labor is lowered, I have no idea if my boss even has the ability to keep a promise that they can take care of me. It’s a safer bet to just take the money and put it in the bank for a rainy day.
I’ve worked in a blue collar light manufacturing job back in the 1980’s.
Let’s just say …. If you ever had to bend over to work on something, it was pretty much a given that some man would walk up behind you and mimic having sex with you. Every. Single. Time. Once a guy tried to nibble my ass through my jeans when I was up on a ladder and he didn’t realize a had a small wrench in my back pocket and he chipped a tooth.
Some of the guys had hard core porn displayed in their workspaces. Not the soft core stuff, like the Rigid Tool calendars. They had those too, but I was desensitized to the point those didn’t bother me. I’m talking large photos of naked women with their legs spread, naked women performing sexual acts.
There was a lot of sexual banter as well, I was desensitized past that. Promotion opportunities weren’t very good for women, simply because no one thought of us as promotion material. Women that screwed the guy that owned the company made a higher wage that women that didn’t ……to be fair that one happened because the boss actually fell for a worker he slept with and handed her a huge raise when she started to lose interest, then the other women he slept with found out and sort of blackmailed him.
The white collar job I had after that job wasn’t much better, it wasn’t any better actually. Just different. The constant jokes about male clients and taking one for team, the constant sexual advances from superiors and clients.
I was actually pretty desensitized from decades of this bullshit, something I’ve been reflecting on lately. It was really bad.
Sorry for the hijack, but don’t try to convince me that workplace harassment isn’t that bad.
I’m not sure it is a hijack.
The kind of place you’re describing runs on desensitization and desperation - the latter, because a person might need to work at such a place because it’s the only game in town (or other places might have similar cultures), and they don’t have enough resources to turn down a job at such a place and keep looking for something better.
In a sense, forcing people to work somewhere also forces them to work at places where those kinds of cultures are dominant.
And it isn’t limited to blue collar jobs. I know of one academic department dominated by old white men which is pretty bad - nowhere near as bad as what you went through to be sure.
The women they hire in tenure track jobs quite - and they wonder why.