So many people in the US - arguably still the world's most prosperous country - live on the precipice of ruin and failure because their country just doesn't give a shit about them (hence the ongoing push to make their _employer_ give more of a shit about them), and it's really heartbreaking.
To add insult to injury, every party involved that doesn't give a shit about them, yet benefits from not giving a shit about them, also pretends to give a shit about them.
The entire "essential worker" hero ad campaign at the start of COVID really put a bad taste in my mouth.
Few if any of the businesses that ran those ad campaigns actually cared about their workers or felt they were heroes (if they did, they'd treat them with basic human decency, which they don't). Instead, they treat them like garbage, lie to them, and lie to everyone else portraying that they somehow don't treat their workers like garbage.
Modern corporate propoganda (that's what it is, no matter what you want to relabel it) is pretty disgusting, especially in the fact that it's successful. We've really lost our humanity in this system and it's some of the subjective yet arguably "good" or positive attributes of humanity.
The US does the same with their military. Drape the flag over everything, trip over themselves thanking people for service, giving 10% military discounts and giving home loans with 3% down payments....but should we pay the armed forces a competitive wage? No. It’s even more cringe when all this service stuff is then extended to police and firefighters.
As if there are two classes of people in the country, those sacrificing themselves and willingly accepting less money to “serve” their country, when it’s really just their only option because all the business left their town or they messed up in high school.
I don’t ever want to be paid with “thanks” or “hero worship”. I’ll take the cash.
We were paid 50 cents above minimum wage, and it wasn’t until just recently that I realized what was going on: the park was leveraging the social status associated with being a guard in order to pay us much less than we deserved for such a demanding job. They substituted “hero worship” (like you mentioned) for the cash our labor was actually worth.
I quit a month before the season ended and don’t intend to go back.
Have you looked into what the armed forces pays? It’s not bad.
Even as a low ranking enlisted person, you get housing, healthcare and then a salary (albeit low, but it’s mostly discretionary). You can qualify for the GI Bill which pays for schooling once you get out. And if you’re in for 20, you get a pension and healthcare with the option of retiring at 40 if you went in at 20.
I believe you also get a housing allowance is you qualify to live off base and if you serve in a combat zone, a big chunk of pay is tax exempt.
I’m sure someone will be along to correct my inaccuracies.
If you add it all up, a military career is by no means a poor financial choice.
But what about total compensation, including all benefits?
You can't find a private job with a pension plan any more.
Total compensation is decent in the military, but imo it’s definitely not work the risks to life and limb if deployed. Any good soldier could probably make a lot more in the private sector for the same amount of work hours and stress.
I don’t know that this is true for all government jobs... I know that California and especially San Francisco have (or had) lavish compensation programs.
1. Don't require housing etc money
2. Are ranked up to any degree higher than random POG
?
However, it is predictable. If you aren't super career minded and are on track to be stuck at minimum wage for a long time, then the military provides a lot of structure and probably higher compensation.
If you have the option to get into a tech/finance/etc high paying career, then there's no contest. Entry level engineer at big tech companies make about the same wage as an O6 living in a high cost of living area and like 20++ years in service. Once you get promoted once, you're making more than a general.
Typical offsetting factors that rational agents weigh include pensions, education subsidies and other benefits, job stability, and perceived upward mobility.
What is really crazy to me is financial regulators on GS schedule.
And federal government pays well compared to a lot of local stuff.
There are plenty of people going to Ivy League schools who have military backgrounds.
Going to one of the military schools is highly prestigious. They aren’t easy to get into in the least.
If there aren’t any buyers, $1 is a competitive offer.
Agreed, but ultimately the responsibility to care for all citizens should fall on the government first.
Anyone who lives in a country should feel supported and cared for by their government. That's literally why it exists.
Employers should certainly care for their employees as well, but that should be an added benefit, not the primary safety net.
That would be nice, but that is not our world. A country and by extension a government is a historical institution created by a governing class: a monarchy or created through war land boundary. The citizens of a nation, until the US attempted, did not have any say in their country's destiny. That was entirely controlled by the ruling class.
The concept of a nation authentically caring for its own citizens is completely modern.
This is the opposite of the libertarian / conservative philosophy, which is that government should have no role in people's lives and people should support themselves -- government's just a referee for disputes.
So one could argue that it's an unrealistic "philosophy" that is just used to provide cover for said people's selfish bullshit.
Also, when born into a system that forces you, on threat of violence, to participate in it, there is no peaceful alternative that permits an opt out, so saying that those people benefit (in your view) when they have no other option, is extremely disingenuous. Do people also benefit from the war on drugs being waged against them?
There are lots of legitimate critiques of libertarianism. Neither the false dichotomy nor the ad hominem you offered are among them.
Not everyone agrees that that particular form of stability and security that you seem to think is such a huge benefit is worth the cost: specifically, that every person alive in a certain region must be forced, on threat of violence, to pay and participate in that stability-providing system, even if they vehemently do not consent to such.
Perhaps you value stability and security above all else, and think it’s a good deal. Others that do not, and consider the price (morally, in the legitimization of armed robbery, to say nothing of the dollar figure) too high, are not being selfish by having those values.
Libertarianism is not the opposite of “socially interdependent”. It’s the opposite of “forced at the point of a gun”.
It's easy to have these bullshit opinions when you're a white male adult who didn't get eaten by wolves at 5 months old because there was a whole society and social structure that allowed you to safely grow up into the adult you are now.
And now that you've benefited from all that society has given to you in order for you to be where you are today, you want to opt out?
Pay back every dollar spent on you by everyone else, since you were born, and only then you can go live alone in the mountains..
It honestly baffles me that libertarians can look at the US as it is now and think, "if the government were smaller, life would be better for everyone." I don't see the connection to the two at all, even if I try to follow the libertarian reasoning.
[1]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
The pay reflects the cost of completing the task.
If you are high school educated, do not have children until you are married, and have a any level of job it is nearly impossible to be poor in the US. The above account for only 4% of all recipients of food stamps. The other 96% are people who don't want to work who are continually unemployed, have multiple children outside of wedlock yet want the same quality of life as everyone else. Decisions have consequences and I don't feel I should have to continually pay more so a minority of the population can have nice things regardless of the choices they made!
During the 2008 crisis, unemployment benefits were extended to 2 years.
Seems like a pretty good “safety net”?
Except if you haven't been able to get unemployment because, you were a contractor, say a driver for Uber.
Except for the whole "no health care" part.
Except for the fact that that $600/week is gone now and you're among the millions of people who are still unemployed.
Except if you weren't able to get unemployment because your state's unemployment office has terrible IT problems and they still haven't caught up.
No, this isn't a pretty good "safety net".
But the govt is already planning to replace the $600.
The $600 is gone but employment remains.
Some people have had IT issues, but most are getting unemployment.
The contractor issue (except healthcare) is no different than other countries.
Not to mention the myriad other reasons for success in the US, such as being the only developed nation with large resource stores left intact after WW2?
Not to discount the very important work of US scientists and engineers who objectively did make great progress, but to say that the nation’s success depends on not helping its most vulnerable is ridiculous.
Also that the largest sea empire in the world spent that war desperately buying stuff from us.
People’s opinions of the US’ social safety net bear no resemblance to what’s actually happening on the ground.
1. It never seems to solve the problems it claims to address. When evidence against it is brought to bear, its advocates move the goal post.
2. There is never an established "end state." More and more areas of life magically become "rights" and then get added to its ever increasing responsibility.
3. It is commonly used as a means to buy votes and sow social dissent by convincing a receiving group that a productive group wants to take their livelihood away.
4. The US government is arguably not representative enough to be tasked with providing it. The nation is too large, the people are too divided, and the political system is too corrupt.
5. It relies on confiscation by the aforementioned unrepresentative entity. And those that never use it shoulder a disproportionate burden of its funding and implementation.
The idea that a social safety net is a Universal Good Thing needs to be reevaluated.
Sure it does. There are dozens of Western European countries where people do not go bankrupt due to medical debt, post-secondary education is free or affordable, homelessness is not a serious issue, and large portions of the population are not incarcerated.
> 2. There is never an established "end state." More and more areas of life magically become "rights" and then get added to its ever increasing responsibility.
Sure there is. Scandanavian countries, for the most part, have had a fairly undertstable steady-state relationship with their social safety nets for decades, with policy arguments mostly taking place on the margins.
> 3. It is commonly used as a means to buy votes and sow social dissent by convincing a receiving group that a productive group wants to take their livelihood away.
Creating government policy that is appealing to voters is the basis of democracy.
> 4. The US government is arguably not representative enough to be tasked with providing it. The nation is too large, the people are too divided, and the political system is too corrupt.
Sure. But it's probably worth trying to change that right?
> 5. It relies on confiscation by the aforementioned unrepresentative entity. And those that never use it shoulder a disproportionate burden of its funding and implementation. The idea that a social safety net is a Universal Good Thing needs to be reevaluated.
Yes, it requires those who amass a disproportionate amount of the society's financial resources to shoulder a disproportionate financial burden of maintaining that society. They're still doing pretty well, go to Geneva sometime and hang out with rich people and see for yourself.
I do agree that we could still do a better job than what we are doing but many of your points are never going to change under any large welfare system, at a minimum points 2-5 fall into this category in my opinion.
A quick googling says that 3 million people "drive for Uber." Paying them what the high-flying executives make would mean a few dollars per person.
I completely understand the impulse to question the huge disparity in salaries, but for the most part, executives that get paid that much work at gigantic companies, where hundreds of millions of dollars is an almost irrelevant pay increase when distributed across all of the employees.
Let's radically simplify Uber's stakeholder into five classes: executives, investors, engineers, full-time drivers and occasional drivers.
Each of these five classes of stakeholders have contributed to create Uber's market valuation of $55 billion.
The first three classes are already well compensated because executives, investors and engineers have negotiating leverage.
But the full-time drivers are the one stakeholder class that created much of Uber's value yet receive very little of the value they created.
Maybe they're 10% of the total driver base, or 300,000 workers. How much of Uber's value do they deserve?
I think you make an excellent point that Uber wouldn't exist without drivers, but I feel like the inverse is also true? How much would a driver make just posting on FB or wherever that they were willing to drive people around for what they make driving for Uber? I feel like the vast majority of them would make basically nothing, otherwise there would be a lot more people doing that.
What about the car manufacturers? The reliability and availability of the cars has "generated value" in an analogous way for Uber as well. Should they be compensated or should the cars be priced at what people are willing to pay for them?
Are you sure it's not because their marginal product is higher? Are you implying that collectively those groups managed to finagle a situation where the marginal worker is paid more than their marginal value, persistently and across multiple rounds of hiring? If it's not that, I think the more correct thing to say is they're paid higher because they're worth more to the company, not because they have "better negotiating power".
The school is ethically wrong here.
This is not a true statement. Uber is not worth $55b because they have performed a lot of driving work. Uber is worth $55b because they have constructed a system in which driving work can be easily scheduled and allocated.
The value is the system and the system was not created by drivers.
The system was created to serve drivers and riders together.
"yet receive very little of the value they created."
They have received all of the value from the driving work they performed, in the form of a 1099 paycheck. There is a fairly clear market rate for driving work.
They did not contribute to the construction of the $55b system.
"How much of Uber's value do they deserve? "
None.
it's misleading to call equity compensation "getting paid". there's a strong argument that executives are being over-payed, but say the CEO receiving a salary of ~1.6M (11.4/7) is a lot less egregious than them being paid $42M. surely the equity conferred to the execs gets them some cash availability in various ways, but it isn't exactly the same as just giving them money (eg what would happen if the CEO uber sold off all of his stock?).
maybe the cash portion of exec salaries ought to be much lower or maybe their equity compensation ought to be much lower, but i don't think either of these things by itself or in combination is going to solve the structural problems of the american economy such as healthcare being tied to employment.
> it's misleading to call equity compensation "getting paid".
A person who has a portfolio worth tens/hundreds of millions of dollars does not have to liquidate it to leverage its value. They can secure cash loans on extremely preferential terms backed by their assets, for one.
Futher, who cares if it's "exactly the same as giving them money" or not? That doesn't change the inequality inherit in such compensation packages, just how they pay taxes.
> [neither reducing cash or equity comp] is going to
> solve the structural problems of the american economy
> such as healthcare being tied to employment.
If Jeff Bezos quit Amazon in 1998 after the IPO and we were here today at the same > $3000 per share price of Amazon, Jeff Bezos would still be worth over $100 billion and would have had nothing to do with Amazon for the last 22 years. So I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that Jeff Bezos can't be worth $100 billion unless they're mistreating their workers. Those things don't have to be connected.
Now should Jeff Bezos be worth that much? Probably not. But he's worth that much because he owned a large stake in Amazon. Anyone could have purchased Amazon at IPO and would have been up over 2000x right now. If you put $500k into Amazon at IPO you'd also be a billionaire right now, does that mean that Amazon is mistreating their employees because of you?
> So I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that
> Jeff Bezos can't be worth $100 billion unless they're
> mistreating their workers. Those things don't have to
> be connected.
Bezos is not just a large shareholder of AMZN, he's also it's CEO. He is responsible for every decision, ultimately, such as warehouse worker count and compensation. If they make less, he can put what he would have paid them into other product lines, thereby increasing AMZN stock price and his personal wealth.
Jeff Bezos could choose to pay his employees a living wage and treat them with dignity, but that may impact AMZN's bottom line or its share prices, so he doesn't.
> If you put $500k into Amazon at IPO you'd also be a
> billionaire right now, does that mean that Amazon is
> mistreating their employees because of you?
Stop defending billionaires. They won't defend you.
For this to be true, Amazon's profits would have to have no effect on its share price.
The solution for me is not to redistribute wealth by force from someone, whom i have paid before for a great service. That does not compute for me. It feels like a not justifiable punishment.
So for me the question is rather, what are the alternatives. Am i happy with AWS? Of course not. Do i want people to deliver packages and get paid badly? No. Do i find automatic package delivery attractive? Yes. But then driver lose their jobs. How to deal with that.
How to create wealth on the new foundations, where more people can participate? And dont i already see signs of it?
And, skilled labour is always wanted. All the non-computer, but crafty people do well. Everyone who can build something, that others want and cant build it, bcs... they do other things for others.
Ah, but its a useless rant.
Maybe the US is doing the right thing, bringing back the production side of things back home, so this kind of margin will be closed. Maybe it will increase then even more the productivity to make up for it. Who knows.
> I always find myself in the weird position, that i
> think, i have to defend this kind of wealth.
To continue using Bezos as an example: sure, he built a logistical empire that can deliver cat litter to my home in under 48hrs, and a computing empire that's surprisingly well used despite being absolutely obtuse.
If that's all he did, and everyone who worked for Amazon was treated well, made middle-class salaries without overworking themselves, and had world-class healthcare? Sure. I got no complaints.
But that isn't what's happening. Wealth inequality isn't "I'm jealous of someone" or "I'm opposed to this just because" -- it's recognizing that it only seems to happen when the folks on the bottom of the org chart suffer.
We've spent the past 50 years tearing down our ability to do so, why would we possibly reverse course?
It's not compensation in the "the company paid for my time" sense, but it sure affects the decisions that he makes as CEO.
(But yeah, for the original point about compensation, Bezos perhaps was a poor choice. I'm rolling with that decision.)
how strange, I think it's misleading to not call equity compensation "getting paid" and the IRS seems to agree? When my company grants me vested shares, a whole bunch go right to the IRS instead. Because it's "income".
I would say that compensating an employee with a financial instrument of known value is in fact the exact same thing as getting paid.
If the executives received no salary they could pay the drivers an extra 0.2% or so. If the executives received no compensation whatsoever they could pay the drivers an extra 1-2%.
[1] https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
The better goal is to say that everyone deserves an income sufficient to make it possible to buy the things they need in life, even if they aren't employed. The best way to do this is with a robust welfare state, or a UBI. If you could survive just fine in perpetuity without a job, many people would choose to stay home and play videogames unless the jobs available to them made it truly worth their while.
I mean generally speaking, through which mechanism are you proposing telling people that they no longer have the right to make more money, even though people want to buy goods and services from them. Is it a hard cap? Some kind of ratio (which will surely be gamed to hell), is it case by case? Who sets the cap or ratio? Who is the minister of punishing rich people who decides that 5 billion isn't really a problem but 40 billion is just where to draw the line. Or is it because some guy bought a boat that was just a little too ostentatious (maybe he can send it back to the boat yard to have it trimmed up by 10 meters and evade the ruling). Do you see where this gets silly and is ripe for abuse?
Let's say you miraculously manage to pull this off, then you'd have to wait the entire 10 minutes until Bezos Zuck and Buffett, shift half of their stock into a trust owned by family members that amazingly keeps them all just under the cap for long enough for them to do the same to redistribute to their heirs. Like, do you thing those guys are just going to call it quits because of this? They have all the money they need. Zuck probably doesn't wake up in the morning motivated by making another billion. He's playing a different meta-game.
Also, it's very hard for me to imagine a version of the process for implementing this that does not look like some political theater McCarthy hearingesque which-hunt.
Finally, whether you are reasonable or not, I know many people who would love to set these caps at absurd points. The coworking space I work at has the local chapter of Maoists who meet up every week on Wednesdays. I doubt you'd make it to six figures before they set their line. Do you really want this to be up to a vote?.
Meanwhile amazon payed negative corporate taxes if I recall correctly a few years ago, and has cities fighting hand over fist to optionally hand tax payer money back to them in lump sums as bribes to get HQ2. We have all sorts of other regressive taxes. Our whole tax code is designed to benefit huge corporations who can hire millions of dollars worth of lawyers to find loopholes at the expense of being totally unmanageable to small business owners who cover the difference. So yes, our system has a lot of problems and a lot of them aren't as emotionally gratifying as complaining about some rich guys 3rd helicopter, but many of them, if people took the time to learn about them could actually meaningfully changed these situations going forward as opposed to punishing a handful of people who profited off of the current backwards system.
So do we task Congress with figuring out the correct compensation for every worker in the US?
Or do we just greatly increase taxes on those high earning executives and distribute to those most in need?
So, let's assume that there were 1m Uver drivers in US in 2019 and set aside all other counries' markets. If we split $42m + $11m + $71m between them instead of top managers, they will get ~$10/month.
Will you feel better with this change of Uber expenses structure?
[0] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-dr...
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
(not I am using Q1, because Q2 has been an... atypical quarter for this sort of business)
42 million for the CEO strikes me as extravagant, but that alone is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount required to give every driver a noticeable boost in income.
Intuitively, it feels like the only sustainable way to do that is to raise the cost of every ride. Why they don't do that...probably comes down to a spreadsheet that tells them it will lose them money in the long term.
One thing of note: I lived in a semi-rural college town in the USA, with very few uber drivers but a fairly active "beeper" group organized on facebook--born of a designated driver system that expanded into general use--where people would manually post that they were available to drive or needed a driver.
The infrastructure wasn't very good, and there's no real reputation system aside from word of mouth, but it stands as a proof of concept. In theory, now that the idea's in the air, just about anyone could just slap a front-end on a routing system and cut Uber's take out entirely, as long as they're willing to deal with the responsibility (or absence) of things like payment processing and liability for things that transpire on their system.
The other end of the spectrum is of course capital gains for shareholders, but any of the wealth taxes proposed recently would help make that more stable.
We are at French Revolution levels of inequality, with a pandemic, a president that despises the majority of US citizens but runs clubs where power-seeking wealthy people pay for admission, and we are not even building enough housing for an entire generation that's growing up. If we don't start addressing this inequality in substantial ways, we will see much greater unrest.
of the whole country or that specific region ?
It is a number that can be calculated for any distribution.
As another commenter said, if employees want the profits of shareholders they should also risk a total loss of their investment. Now, I do think more companies should pay with (generous) equity and the government should do far more to support this model. Such as supporting earlier liquidity, less accredited investor rules, mandatory public listings above a certain valuation etc.
Morality here is about treating workers with a minimum level of dignity based on human rights, it's about paying us more fairly given that we are the ones producing value (the maxim that "an idea is nothing without execution" should be taken up by the investor/entrepreneur class also, without workers your idea is fucking nothing). It's also about making corporations abide by the rule of law that every other citizen has to, we need a more moral and just system, this free for all of Darwinian economics is a shit system given our current technological capabilities as humanity.
Why "workers", why not "citizens" or "people"?
The tragedy in the US is that the government has successfully abdicated its responsibility to care for its people and has convinced everyone that they must be defined by their job, or by their productivity, and that any societal benefits or safety net they obtain in life is a reward for that work, as opposed to simply having it because their country cares for them.
If you want to bring "human rights" into the conversation, let's stop connecting it with compensation and productivity.
Edit: on re-read, it sounds like I'm arguing with you or rebuking what you're saying. I'm not. I agree with what you're saying, just adding on that it should be a broader conversation. =)
If they were voluntarily idle then there would be a harsh factual basis of not being enough to feed them when there was work to be done. That was the logic of the past anyway. It may not be a right or good answer but it is /a/ reason.
Obviously things change with time and we are on an appatent trajectory to an "awkward middle" of both needing people to do some advanced work and outrunning useful tasks performable by everyone. Incentivizing upskilling to those who can perform non-automatable jobs while avoiding a defacto fixed underclass makes it extra awkward.
I can't imagine a justification that would put the term "workers" ahead of "people" in the context of affording human rights to fellow citizens.
every other system tried so far has been much shittier
It is damn easy to declare someone is underpaid or overpaid. Especially when you don't have to write the check. Far too many assume they can do the job of the over paid because they truly understand all the aspects of the job.
Sports stars, movie stars, state leadership positions, and more, all follow the same trend. So what is your point exactly? Seriously go look up what some county managers make and get back to me, here is a hint, it is not uncommon for many to make over a hundred thousand and quite a few approach a quarter million or more and you can damn well bet there are people working in your local government earning minimum wage. Why aren't people here bitching about overpaying government employees? Upper admin in any government is big bucks but that school cafeteria worker certainly isn't seeing a fair share are they?
As in, all work is not equal nor does it deserve equal pay. Never has, never will. Would you accept the same pay especially if it had to be lowered to insure the receptionist earns similar to you? What about the cafeteria worker? Yes I am going there. Why not. If we are going to declare a CEO makes to much then we cannot stop there after all we would be hypocritical. If anything the owners, be it shareholders or individuals, decide what is paid our and theoretically could take every dollar after what was decided as fair compensation was achieved
The author of this article was paid $42 million last year. Uber's top 7 executives received: "$11.4 million in salary and cash bonus, plus $71 million worth of equity awards." [0] Maybe instead of paying their CEO and executives that much, Uber should pay their workers more?
[0] https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backla...