Its About Ethics in Hiring Practices

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Its About Ethics in Hiring Practices

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Why don't you conduct a little experiment and put your wage range in your advertisement and see how many no shows you get?

# ¿ May 10, 2019 00:30

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 14:38

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

wateroverfire the thing you aren't getting is that if you're viewing the salary negotiation process as a game to be played then you're playing with a stacked deck just in terms of pure information asymmetry, simply because you know you're paying everyone and for the most part your employees probably don't.

FWIW I'm a buyer for a medium sized aerospace manufacturing firm with a *vast* amount of scope, I control millions of dollars spending with next to no oversight (because no else at this company is trained to do my duties and I am the resident expert on the subjects that relate to my position and lot of stuff beyond that besides, so no one knows enough to even ask the right questions if I was unethical), on top of a bunch of other stuff related to making airplane parts, but I make almost exactly as much as volkerball makes in terms of hourly wage. I make about 66% of what the other buyers (who do a lot less terms of scope and spend less than what I do [due to the relative value of their respective inputs to the supply chain, not necessarily because they're way better at their jobs than I am, although that could be true too, who knows!]) make and I've been here longer than both of them. My position should not exist in a logically managed corporation (like 300 people work here now for christsakes), and even if it did, it makes absolutely no sense to pay it as little as I make right now. I could get a 100% raise and it would be less than 2% of what I'm responsible for

I don't say this to brag because honestly it's kind of pathetic that I haven't jumped ship for a huge bump in pay like so many of my peers but to point out the absurdity of small/medium business management. It's not like my story is unique or anything, dumb poo poo like this happens all over the country and the world since most economic activity is generated by these sized companies.

A lot of it can be attributed imo to the opacity of wage and related information in the private sector. I had no idea until recently how wide and deep my job duties were compared to the industry standard until we got merged with a larger corporation that has parts of 4 departments doing what I do. My soon to be boss has way less control over the supply chain process at his company than I do here for example. Job postings are super vauge when it comes to what you're actually going to wind up doing, and of course no one posts a salary in their job posts because information asymmetry is perceived to benefit employers so much. It might be true in a zero sum, owners getting a bigger slice of the pie sense, but I think the whole process significantly reduces productivity overall. Turnover goes up because the only way to actually gauge what you're worth is to interview somewhere else. Morale goes down when it inevitably gets out that someone is getting screwed when HR leaves a printout on the copier by accident. Titles and comparisons on wage aggregator websites aren't a ton of help because of the variance and the trend to put seniority modifiers that might mean a dollar an hour more or ten depending on the place. The whole thing would benefit from a huge dose of transparency. It would make the employer/employee relationship less adversarial and give everyone involved a higher certainty that all parties are operating in good faith.

# ¿ May 18, 2019 04:22

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

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?

# ¿ May 18, 2019 20:32

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

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

# ¿ May 18, 2019 21:26

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

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.

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.

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.

I'm going to take this to PM so we don't bore the poo poo out of everyone else in this thread

# ¿ May 18, 2019 23:35

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

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.

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?

# ¿ May 18, 2019 23:39

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ May 19, 2019 00:13

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

I bet the gosplan dudes wish they had a MRP system, although trying to scale one up to plan an entire economy would probably make my brain explode

# ¿ May 22, 2019 02:49

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Moridin920 posted:

This is simple folks. A coop pays its workers based on what the workers vote on and think is fair. After labor and expenses, the rest of the money is profit. The coop then votes on how to spend that profit.

You don't need to get into "ahhhh but how can we REALLY calculate the value of that person's work." It's something that the coop figures out for itself. If the workers decide they are not getting paid enough given the profits being made, they can vote to raise their wages. There's no boss that stands to lose out on his/her share of the pie that would be trying to curtail that. The management/bosses are elected by the workers themselves.

Sorry I thought it was implicit based on the thread topic but I was talking about within the currently existing framework that operates (at least on its face) on the premise that you get paid what you deserve and the economy at least roughly functions as a meritocracy. Obviously just about any other way of determining wages would be better than the circular logic where being paid a lot means you're good at your job doing something important and vice versa.

# ¿ May 22, 2019 03:06

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

BENGHAZI 2 posted:

It doesn't

No poo poo? That's literally what I said if you would actually read everything I wrote.

# ¿ May 23, 2019 16:26

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Somfin posted:

Here's the issue.

There's no meritocracy because inheritance and infinite corporate lifespans means wealth can accumulate into dynastic hoards that protect and further enrich those who would otherwise fail. The only way modern unrestrained capitalism can function in any way is to have a 100% death tax, a mandatory limited lifespan on corporations with everything they own reverting to the commons on death, with no way to hand poo poo off to your own children in order to to get around that. Everything you gather from the commons has to be returned to the commons when you die, or else we get kings again, as we've seen with multiple modern billionaires.

A meritocracy also requires fully-informed and rational markets, which we don't have and never will. Otherwise a better liar has an advantage over a person who has a better product.

In theory the system we have is dog eat dog, but in practice, it's whoever got there first gets big enough to eat literally everybody else and deliberately prevents others from gaining any ground, and the only thing that kills one entrenched behemoth dynasty is if it overextends itself and gets caught taking from other entrenched behemoth dynasties. The only way new behemoths are born is if a new market is found and enough resources are pulled in to exploit it more than anyone else is at that point in time, and these days the old behemoths will quietly eat every new market once it proves itself to have any sort of lasting power.

Again, no poo poo that's what I said. Do you guys just read one sentence or one post and then rush off to slam that rebuttal home? My whole point (in response to BrandorKP's question) is that even if you operate within the theoretical framework of liberal economic thought, actually calculating what your labor is objectively worth is basically impossible, and thus answering the question of how much of your labor are you willing to "give away" to ownership or capital is impossible to do in a meaningful fashion.

# ¿ May 23, 2019 16:47

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Moridin920 posted:

It's not about equality of outcome. That's a total mischaracterization of leftism imo.

Like no one seriously thinks doctors and line cooks should be paid the exact same and receive the exact same benefits. That's some weirdo cold war straw man about leftism, honestly.

There are multiple people arguing that exact point in this thread actually.

# ¿ May 23, 2019 21:40

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 14:38

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Somfin posted:

It was more riffing on what you were saying than disagreeing with you.

Apologies! v :shobon:

# ¿ May 24, 2019 00:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Its About Ethics in Hiring Practices