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Here's an abstract question. What percentage of one's labor in a organization is it acceptable to get or not get back?
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May 18, 2019 20:04
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BrandorKP posted:Here's an abstract question. What percentage of one's labor in a organization is it acceptable to get or not get back? Ethically 100%. Or at least whatever they don't receive should have strong ethical justification for (healthcare, schools, etc.). Realistically enough that they can cover necessities and have a reasonable level of comfort without having to work themselves ragged (even 40 hour work week is too much, but people are pulling more than that.)
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May 18, 2019 20:28
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BrandorKP posted:Here's an abstract question. What percentage of one's labor in a organization is it acceptable to get or not get back? How do you even begin to adequately quantify the labor that most people put into an organization in the first place?
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May 18, 2019 20:32
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That's another question too. The value I generate for the organization is not the value generate for society, it's only a small portion of it. MixMastaTJ posted:Ethically 100%. Or at least whatever they don't receive should have strong ethical justification for (healthcare, schools, etc.). But not all that I generate is me alone. I am able to generate more value as part of the organizatio and society than I would alone. Depending on the year only accounting for the cash generated I'd say I get 30 - 60 % (before taxes) and that gives me a very decent income.
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May 18, 2019 20:42
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rscott posted:How do you even begin to adequately quantify the labor that most people put into an organization in the first place? The "add the total revenue up and divide it by the number of employee hours worked" method will give you a much better idea than the capitalist one which is "I the big smart boss man work constantly and a thousand times harder than everyone else and therefore I should get all the money"
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May 18, 2019 20:42
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BrandorKP posted:But not all that I generate is me alone. I am able to generate more value as part of the organizatio and society than I would alone. Depending on the year only accounting for the cash generated I'd say I get 30 - 60 % (before taxes) and that gives me a very decent income. If you are able to work together in order to generate more value then the products of that cooperation should be equally distributed too, because you all worked together to produce it. As far as society goes yeah, you're all products of an education system and healthcare and poo poo and you need some form of tax to supply those social services. But that's also ultimately going back to you, or perhaps is paying off the debt you accrued to society earlier in your life.
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May 18, 2019 20:48
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rscott posted:How do you even begin to adequately quantify the labor that most people put into an organization in the first place? Me personally I can total all the invoices. I can also ball park risks and rough magnitudes of the liability I reduce. In general that's much harder.
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May 18, 2019 20:49
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BrandorKP posted:But not all that I generate is me alone. I am able to generate more value as part of the organizatio and society than I would alone. Depending on the year only accounting for the cash generated I'd say I get 30 - 60 % (before taxes) and that gives me a very decent income. Firstly, if 30% of the wealth you generate puts you above, say, GDP per capita there's a pretty good chance your work is overvalued and your company is ultimately skimming profits from some other workers. Not saying this as a call out or imply you don't deserve what your making, just that in the abstract when I say workers deserve 100% it would account for that sort of thing. And yes, clearly people working in tandem will accomplish more, I'm not anti-orginization. The fruits of that labor belong to the workers which produced it, collectively. If a two person team works together on something (assuming they put in equal labor) each person is entitled to half the spoils. Same goes for a team of 20 or 2000. There's an argument that different labor contributes disproportionately, which should be accounted for, but it's probably not the pencil pushers who decide logistics and organize the work day who are doing the most vital work. The person scrubbing toilets probably deserves a bigger share than the boss. And if this production is truly worth doing than the workers doing it should be able to agree to pool some part of their capital to keeping the production going. If everyone wants their 100% share and screw the company doesn't that show we, as a society, don't actually want that production anymore?
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May 18, 2019 21:16
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MixMastaTJ posted:Firstly, if 30% of the wealth you generate puts you above, say, GDP per capita there's a pretty good chance your work is overvalued and your company is ultimately skimming profits from some other workers. Not saying this as a call out or imply you don't deserve what your making, just that in the abstract when I say workers deserve 100% it would account for that sort of thing. eh i'd say, without knowing any of the relevant details, that it's more likely he's having his labor marginally less exploited due to the advantageous social position he occupies. granted, said position is almost certainly built on a throne of blood but 
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May 18, 2019 21:22
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BrandorKP posted:Me personally I can total all the invoices. I can also ball park risks and rough magnitudes of the liability I reduce. In general that's much harder. I can quantify the number of purchase orders I wrote and approved, and their value, and their on time delivery rate and rejection rate or a dozen other metrics, but how do I turn that into an objective value wrt to what my labor contributed to the process? Like honestly if you have the answer let me know, yearly reviews are coming up
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May 18, 2019 21:26
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Like I said what proportion of the total labour hours do you work, and how much would that proprtion be of the company's total turnover? Or failing that, what would happen if you stopped doing your job? What are other jobs at the company that would cause similar amounts of disruption in their absence paid?
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May 18, 2019 21:29
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gently caress it, I'm already asking the lovely questions How much are you paying yourself, company owners?
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May 18, 2019 22:22
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rscott posted:Like honestly if you have the answer let me know, yearly reviews are coming up A invoice for me I would have done tip to tail. From quoting out the job, to the sceduling, to the field work, to the invoicing and reporting, and then possibly to chasing the account if delinquent. That's not going to be the case for like anybody else in any other line of work. I do the whole shebang. OwlFancier posted:Or failing that, what would happen if you stopped doing your job? Someone less competent would get my position. I've watched the repercussions of that a couple times now as I've transferred between locations. I can't be specfic. A big flaming stink posted:granted, said position is almost certainly built on a throne of blood but Ehh, that's what we try to prevent. Remember Tianjin a few years ago. Basically the not for profits mission is to try to prevent that sort of thing. Anything we make gets distributed to all the employees at the end of the year rather equitably too. Salaries / compensation for the bottom of the organization are good and the top is only compensated at like 3-4 times the lowest field employees. I could switch to team throne of blood and I would make so much more money.
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May 18, 2019 22:31
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BrandorKP posted:Someone less competent would get my position. I've watched the repercussions of that a couple times now as I've transferred between locations. I can't be specfic. OK clever dick, what would happen if your job stopped being done. I don't actually care I'm suggesting this is a method you can use to evaluate the necessity of your labour.
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May 18, 2019 22:39
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wateroverfire posted:A lot of good research quoted in your post. I enjoyed looking through it. I think you are mingling two concepts that it would be better to disentangle. Individual people are not statistics. Within every group there's variation in outcome and what I'm proposing here is that whatever the economic or social headwinds an individual faces, they should do what they can to maximize their good outcomes. That means if a person's looking for more money, they should (IMO) go out and play the game and try to get it - and even figure out how to be better at that skill. On a societal level many people won't do that, or will try and not be successful, but that doesn't make it bad individual advice. It's not the solution to everyone's labor problems or to any big picture problems. So I think it would be good to talk about individual strategies separately from these big societal statistical considerations - which are real and valid - rather than treating the statistics as reasons for people to decide advancing in life is impossible. I imagine that your no show employee was doing exactly that - practicing a strategy they've developed to keep themselves sane while dealing with lovely bosses. Individually people need to make do with their life situation, which can often mean settling for a raw deal because you lack the means to hold out for a better alternative. That pragmatism comes with a psychological cost and the vast majority of humans find it deeply unpleasant to sacrifice a large portion of their free time and autonomy so they develop little ways to harden their psychology against the unpleasant realities of life as a wage worker. Part of that is severing the expectation that your boss actually cares about you or will treat you with the baseline of dignity and understanding that you'd normally expect from another human being. Yeah it sucks but if it seems unfair to you that probably speaks more to your position in this social conflict than anything else. It's probably unpleasant to realize that the people locked into a dependent relationship with you often have deeply antagonistic feelings toward you but that's the inevitable byproduct of your deeply unequal relationship. So one of the many ways this manifests is employees not always giving their bosses or potential bosses the social niceties they might extend to a friend or loved one or colleague. Cause you're none of those things to them. If they consistently thought of you as a human being then all the things you're doing that make their lives more difficult or unpleasant would be even more upsetting. So some pragmatic dehumanization on their part toward you as a prospective employer is a very psychologically effective way for them to maintain their sanity. You find this situation unpleasant and wish your employees or potential hires could be more pleasant toward you and treat you with some basic politeness. This would help to disguise the reality of your relationship with them and disguise the naked power differential that makes their resentment toward you quite natural. You're getting the better deal here, I'd say you should grow a thicker skin.
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May 18, 2019 22:46
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BrandorKP posted:A invoice for me I would have done tip to tail. From quoting out the job, to the sceduling, to the field work, to the invoicing and reporting, and then possibly to chasing the account if delinquent. That's not going to be the case for like anybody else in any other line of work. I do the whole shebang. I mean, you being in a position to take a job that's fairly compensated to do socially valuable work is 100% built upon the exploitation of the global south. It's good that you're trying to mitigate the effects of it, but that doesn't change the reality of being a subject of capitalism.
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May 18, 2019 22:55
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OwlFancier posted:OK clever dick, what would happen if your job stopped being done. I'm not trying to be clever or snide. The positive externalities of what I do are very large and they would go away.
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May 18, 2019 23:05
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BrandorKP posted:A invoice for me I would have done tip to tail. From quoting out the job, to the sceduling, to the field work, to the invoicing and reporting, and then possibly to chasing the account if delinquent. That's not going to be the case for like anybody else in any other line of work. I do the whole shebang. I'm going to take this to PM so we don't bore the poo poo out of everyone else in this thread
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May 18, 2019 23:35
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OwlFancier posted:OK clever dick, what would happen if your job stopped being done. Like in my case, we would not be able to sell about 95% of the parts we currently make. There's no possible way they wouldn't replace the functions I perform, so that makes me essential. But does that make me important or deserving of higher compensation?
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May 18, 2019 23:39
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rscott posted:Like in my case, we would not be able to sell about 95% of the parts we currently make. There's no possible way they wouldn't replace the functions I perform, so that makes me essential. But does that make me important or deserving of higher compensation? I mean personally I subscribe to the idea that almost all human labour should be paid the same because it's all hours of someone's life. But if you're advocating the idea that people, on the whole, are paid fairly, then if your job is irreplaceable then compare it to the other irreplaceable jobs at your company and then compare wages.
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May 18, 2019 23:42
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OwlFancier posted:I mean personally I subscribe to the idea that almost all human labour should be paid the same because it's all hours of someone's life. I think I'm arguing that what the concept of a fair wage is is completely arbitrary and can not be determined with any sort of precision in our current economic framework. We can broadly say that non managerial labor is not paid enough simply due to the huge divergence in productivity vs wages since 1970 or so but it's pretty hard to determine what a fair wage for a given, actually existing job is unless there are hundreds or thousands of people doing the same thing. There are just too many confounding factors. I personally think use value is more important than market value but that is not the framework that we operate within and I have no ability to change that. If we did operate on the sort of economic framework that did emphasize use value and how societally necessary the thing you do or help to make is, my job likely wouldn't exist.
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May 19, 2019 00:13
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If we operated on a system that emphasised the concept of use value as a means of apportioning the means of living then a lot of people would probably be working a lot less and living a lot better, and the belief in that is an important motivator for doing anything but accepting whatever you're given.
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May 19, 2019 00:15
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Under the current system I make completely useless websites for large amounts of money while nurses and teachers have to choose between heating and food. How about instead of doing complicated calculus to determine each individual employee's contribution, we just give everyone enough to have a comfortable life, guarantee everyone a good place to live in, education and health, and let people work for luxuries and extras?
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May 19, 2019 01:27
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You do not need to create an entirely new system, free of exploitation, to understand that the existing one is exploitative.
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May 19, 2019 06:04
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rscott posted:it's pretty hard to determine what a fair wage for a given, actually existing job is I mean, it's pretty easy to calculate what the universal minimum fair wage should be (it should be a living wage where a "living wage" isn't minimal subsistence but comfort and safety), once we're at that it's really just splitting hairs.
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May 19, 2019 06:27
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Yeah, fair wage for a given position should have a lot more to do with the cost of living than a lot of people want to admit. Most of the factors that we use to determine the bulk of a position's compensation (ie, responsibilities, qualifications, etc.) should be minor considerations at best. You start with the amount that an hour of any given person's labor should be worth and adjust up or down slightly based on the position itself. We'll never get there, but that's how it should be and there aren't any particularly good human-centered arguments for why labor should be treated as a market.
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May 19, 2019 06:37
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If you think a janitor should be paid less, you don't think the job isn't important, you just think its a job for poor people who should stay that way
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May 19, 2019 08:32
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I don't know why people sneer at janitors in the first place. I've worked in enough places to know that if all the janitors disappeared/went on strike, society would fuckin' collapse within two days. People are animals, people in corporate setttings even more so.
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May 19, 2019 09:25
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So a lot of the conversation has been about wage disparity between jobs, but what about wage progression through experience? How much more should lets say a carpenter with 20 years of experience be making compared to one with 4 years?
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May 19, 2019 13:04
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I'm fine with people with more experience making more as long as the floor is a truly livable wage.
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May 19, 2019 13:30
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SpaceCadetBob posted:So a lot of the conversation has been about wage disparity between jobs, but what about wage progression through experience? Livable hourly wage plus piece rate bonus, at least that works for any labor that results in a product.
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May 19, 2019 13:58
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Weatherman posted:I don't know why people sneer at janitors in the first place. I've worked in enough places to know that if all the janitors disappeared/went on strike, society would fuckin' collapse within two days. People are animals, people in corporate setttings even more so. Union janitors can make some serious bank. A CBA for a local condo association shows that head janitors are making $27 a hour this year, assistants $25, and their various helpers anywhere from $18-22 a hour.
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May 19, 2019 15:26
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Weatherman posted:I don't know why people sneer at janitors in the first place. I've worked in enough places to know that if all the janitors disappeared/went on strike, society would fuckin' collapse within two days. People are animals, people in corporate setttings even more so. Mostly because it's the kind of work that used to be done by servants - or, where relevant, by slaves. The structure of society and the nature of employment have changed considerably since then, but the fundamental idea of linking social class to work (or vice versa) has remained, and the basic cultural idea of treating workers based on the expected social class of those doing those jobs has survived into the modern era.
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May 19, 2019 18:39
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Another big piece is you want your most important workers to be in a constant state of poverty so that they maximize the time they spend working and so they'll be heavily dependant on the job. Despite what the just world morons say, social mobility is antithetical to capitalism- a few outliers can move around but the majority need to be stuck.
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May 20, 2019 00:58
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MixMastaTJ posted:Another big piece is you want your most important workers to be in a constant state of poverty so that they maximize the time they spend working and so they'll be heavily dependant on the job. Despite what the just world morons say, social mobility is antithetical to capitalism- a few outliers can move around but the majority need to be stuck. But they need to believe that they could move if they just have a perfect run and nothing bad happens that wipes out all of their progress. As opposed to everyone having lives like what the rich have.
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May 20, 2019 01:40
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Main Paineframe posted:Mostly because it's the kind of work that used to be done by servants - or, where relevant, by slaves. The structure of society and the nature of employment have changed considerably since then, but the fundamental idea of linking social class to work (or vice versa) has remained, and the basic cultural idea of treating workers based on the expected social class of those doing those jobs has survived into the modern era. The fact that we're still happy to pay people based on job title is the strongest evidence that Americans don't really want a classless society, they just want a society where they can lie to themselves about which class they belong to and which classes they potentially have access to. People don't want to accept that widespread social mobility is largely a lie and not something that can be "fixed" because it is a fundamentally impossible goal. The really funny part is that you don't need actual, real socialism to have a more egalitarian income structure. You can achieve it through aggressive regulation designed to establish income floors and hard salary caps, but we won't do that either. The wealth gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is obscene, but the salary range that exists at the lower end is quite frankly not a good thing either. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 02:49 on May 20, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 02:45
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OwlFancier posted:I mean personally I subscribe to the idea that almost all human labour should be paid the same because it's all hours of someone's life. Presumably a skilled and highly educated worker is deploying years of accumulated experience compared to an untrained person who started the job yesterday. rscott posted:I think I'm arguing that what the concept of a fair wage is is completely arbitrary and can not be determined with any sort of precision in our current economic framework. We can broadly say that non managerial labor is not paid enough simply due to the huge divergence in productivity vs wages since 1970 or so but it's pretty hard to determine what a fair wage for a given, actually existing job is unless there are hundreds or thousands of people doing the same thing. There are just too many confounding factors. You can identify the rough standard of living that the average person in a given society tends to view as an acceptable baseline for an autonomous and dignified adult life, based on the price of representative basket of commodities plus some basic sociological and psychological investigation. You can then determine approximately how much that lifestyle would cost in a given region, based on the price of things like housing, education, food and transportation. The results give us a rough 'living wage' that can at least be a starting point for such a conversation. Obviously there are deeper questions to be asked about human happiness, the acceptable level of inequality in society, what it means to 'deserve' something in a social sense, etc. The answers to these questions could even be said to change over time depending on the level of technology and culture. Maybe the level of inequality that was necessary for agricultural civilization is not necessary for machine civilization (this was the basic premise of most emancipatory political projects in the 19th and 20th century). But those larger abstract questions can be asked after we've already ensured everyone has a baseline standard of living that corresponds to the kinds of calculations I just described. After we've already ensured that everyone has a right to a baseline of economic security and social autonomy, then we can start entertaining more abstract debates about exactly what level of inequality is theoretically acceptable. Right now if you're demanding we stop and intricately debate those scenarios then you're getting in the way of solving the much more urgent and time sensitive problems that we are currently facing.
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May 20, 2019 20:08
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Helsing posted:Presumably a skilled and highly educated worker is deploying years of accumulated experience compared to an untrained person who started the job yesterday. If a more efficient worker does more work they should be compensated appropriately. If two people are doing the same work, it shouldn't matter if one does it quickly due to their skill and training, while the other takes longer. Equal work, equal pay. If someone is new, most of their work is learning to get better at the job at hand, so their expected workload should be reduced accordingly. The rest of your post I agree with.
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May 20, 2019 21:15
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hell yeahquote:Every night, several times a night, Uber and Lyft drivers at Reagan National Airport simultaneously turn off their ride share apps for a minute or two to trick the app into thinking there are no drivers available---creating a price surge. When the fare goes high enough, the drivers turn their apps back on and lock into the higher fare.
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May 20, 2019 21:18
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Helsing posted:Presumably a skilled and highly educated worker is deploying years of accumulated experience compared to an untrained person who started the job yesterday. The skilled worker is more productive, and you can construct an argument that this "entitles" them to more, but I would suggest that a person-oriented concept of work still shouldn't really care about that. Unless you take the position that human life is not equally valuable then all hours of human life should be valued equally.
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May 20, 2019 21:21
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