Where and how do you work? The economics and culture of employment.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Where and how do you work? The economics and culture of employment.

Solkanar512: Dec 28, 2006; by the sex ghost

So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home.

For me personally I was raised by a unionized public city employee and a homemaker/house keeper and was the first in my family to attend college. I was lucky as hell to get into an insanely good school with financial support and ended up at a massive manufacturing/aerospace firm in a very mixed blue and white collar environment. The culture is very much a mixture of government/military bureaucracy, old school "I'm a captain of industry" business types and new school consultant business types. It's a very odd culture to be sure, I can go into more details if folks are curious. I do data analysis which is very white collar work but the data is about the stuff the blue collar folks are working on, so I work with them a great deal.

Solkanar512 fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Aug 28, 2018

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 21:11

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:51

Solkanar512: Dec 28, 2006; by the sex ghost

wateroverfire posted:

The share of the business's income paid to the shareholders in compensation to them for the use of their money, which they wouldn't put into the business if they couldn�t expect a return on the investment. A business needs money to operate and to expand and that money has to come from somewhere. Providing capital is every bit as important and deserving of compensation as unloading trucks or touching computers.

And while I'm sure in some circumstances you can find investors who would rather eat the goose than wait for eggs, that is definitely not the norm.

Come on dude, you can�t make a post like that and completely ignore the insane amounts of stock buybacks and massive dividends paid out at the expense of business investment and compensation.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 17:40

Solkanar512: Dec 28, 2006; by the sex ghost

Come on dude, just tell me why my employer needed to spend nearly TWENTY BILLION on stock buybacks.

wateroverfire posted:

We could go one by one and debate the merits of individual actions! That would probably be pretty interesting.

In a small business, at least, pumping money into comp is a tricky proposition. There are going to be fat times and lean times, and cutting wage expenses (which means either letting people go or getting them to work for less, which at least in Chile would be more difficult than letting people go) is a lot harder than not paying out as much in the first place.

Ditto for investment. Once you've put time and money into a project that doesn't work out you generally can't get any of that back and you're in a worse position than when you started.

So at least in a small-medium business context, you look at the above and go "I am on the hook if this goes sideways" and might decide not to commit a lot of money to across-the-board raises or commit to expanding unless you're confidant the environment is good and the circumstances are right for that to pay off. You tend to be more risk-averse than an outside observer might be when assessing the same decisions. I think for large or publically held companies the dynamics are probably a little bit different but management is going to collectively look at whether they can meet shareholders' expectations and if so, not stick their necks out on many additional risks. It's pretty safe to announce you're paying out a little more per share vs raising your operating costs into the indefinite future because you have some extra money or engaging in the scale of business investment that would move the needle for a public company.

But we're not talking about IPOs, we're talking about assholes trading shares between each other. The company isn't getting that money, yet they somehow demand instant and ever growing returns at the expense of everything else. That includes long term growth.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 18:22

Solkanar512: Dec 28, 2006; by the sex ghost

wateroverfire posted:

I really couldn't say about your employer (I don't know who you work for). What did they say about it?

It was pretty typical bullshit about enhancing our position in the market and being more competitive against our main rival.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 19:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Where and how do you work? The economics and culture of employment.