> people who get paid in stock aren't warehouse employees they are highly paid software engineer types, surely they can tolerate getting by on 200k/yr salary for a few months.
Why would anyone be OK with not getting paid their fair, and agreed, share?
I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker, regardless of how much he or she makes.
> Take the argument to the extreme, is it OK for every employer in every industry to agree on wages and no-poach?
Why isn't it? Those agreements don't restrict or infringe on the freedom of others to form different agreements, or avoid forming them.
> What about colluding on prices?
Same exact situation. Price agreements don't restrict the freedom of other parties to set prices contrary to that agreement.
> Aren't these all the same infringement?
Without getting into specifics... Yes.
> The truth is sometimes society has to take away the rights of the few for the sake of the many.
I truly commend you for your honesty about what these laws are.
> The fact is rules like this almost certainly make our economy more productive as a whole.
I don't see where that's been demonstrated here. They certainly aren't productive for the firms who are punished for, or prevented from, forming such agreements. I would argue that the fact that firms do form such agreements when free to do so, means that they are productive for the economy as a whole by definition.
> better allocate how your pay gets spent (benefits, perks, parties, etc) if you disagree with how the company does it, and it also grants you many other freedoms like retaining IP rights, paystructures (hourly vs salary), etc unlike normal employees.
You can do all those things as a normal employee (perhaps a company lied to you that they couldn't?). Companies offer contractors higher pay and/or better benefits because they want to shirk their legal obligations to employees, there's nothing that would actually prevent them from offering those better terms to employees.
> The terms of the exchange is your time for money.
So the contract only covers time? Not actual work, but only time? Do I get to spend the time how I want as long as there is a paper trail that it was your time I just wasted?
> The company isn't a charity.
Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
> it makes little sense for employers to provide it.
I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer. You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
> You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability?
So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
> People bet a portion of their lives on their employer and there’s a lot of hassle recovering from unplanned changes.
Based on whatever laws protect you as an employee, I don't see why people bet such a large portion of their lives on their employer.
My spouse died recently and I was left to care for a toddler by myself. It was rough. I could not work anymore and after some period of unpaid leave, my employer proposed to end our cooperation. I think it was fair. They had paid me well for my work and I was smart enough not to blow it all on big cars and other useless things.
Highly paid specialists complaining about the big tech layoffs are either in a better position than me (usually they either have no dependents or have a spouse to help with either the mortgage or the kids), or their bad situation is entirely self-inflicted by their reckless spending.
> If a business derives $X profit from a laborer and agrees to pay a given % of $X to the laborer as compensation, it should not matter if the laborer is in a high cost or low cost of living area
That would be true if that were deal the business had with their employees. However, you made up the percentage thing by observation and are working from the assumption that because you can represent a wage as a percentage of a profit margin, that means the business agreed to share a fixed percentage of profit with the employee. This is incorrect reasoning.
Businesses generally don't contract with their employees to share a percentage of revenue or profits, with the narrow exception of commissions for people in sales. With regard to developers and almost all other employees, the contract both parties agreed to is almost always a trade of specific amounts of time for specific amounts of money and possibly some flexible additional benefits. And to the employee's benefit, the amount of pay does not flex based on whether the company is even producing a profit from the sale of the the products of their labor, only how many hours they put in. Caveat all manner of fuckery in labor relations, of course. Which is a giant caveat, I agree in advance.
However the fundamental agreement is still time for money without the employee having to worry whether the products of their labor can be sold for more than their hourly wage, that's the business's problem to deal with. The employee expects their paycheck to show up on time all the time, or the deal is off.
With that sort of agreement, it is absolutely expected and reasonable that the business keeps any profit from selling the product of the labor after the agreed upon fees for said labor have been paid. That was the deal.
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If you'd like a different deal for most people, as I would love to see more of in the world economic future, then most people need to change over from needing a job to needing some form of income to support their long term future growth as they live currently off of savings.
Instead of expecting someone else to ensure there is a buffer of money to pay you so you can pay your expenses, you will have to keep that buffer yourself and be okay with the fact that sometimes you will get paid a lot and sometimes not so much, but you will then be getting that percentage of the profit you wanted and it will be totally reasonable to expect the same percentage regardless of what the cost of living is.
You also won't have to worry about layoffs as much because the company's costs now also scale directly with it's profits, so there is no need to cut head count when things get really bad and the company's buffers run low.
But again, that also means you will be responsible for keeping a big enough buffer yourself to deal with the fact that your income fluctuates with both short an long term market swings. Otherwise all you have done is trade the annoyance at seeing the company profit massively from your fix-time-cost labor for the annoyance of being broke even though you have a job whenever the market takes a shit.
Most people still don't want to deal with that, even in super wealthy countries like the US. In fact most people in wealthy countries actually scale their own living expenses in step with any increases in their income such that they can be living paycheck-to-paycheck even at $200k+/yr.
So the balance of things present day is that most people take full-time or even part-time contracts as employees and hope they don't get fired at the wrong time in life.
This is possible to change though, for yourself and for others if you like. So if you think your current deal is bullshit, feel free to change the deal.
>>Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair
>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.
Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.
If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.
It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.
Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.
Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.
In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.
There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.
By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.
I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.
1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power.
2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.
> there is a huge power disparity between employee and employer.
Is it really though? In IT? It's (or was at least) remarkably easy to vote with your feet and companies lost employees over really random stuff like employers stance on abortion rights or DoD contracts.
> Yeah, my employer can hire two of me, why can't I fucking do the same?
Not sure what do you mean here.
> Companies get away with a lot of bullshit
Honestly over the years I've seen tons of BS and primadonning from people with good negotiating position - funny to see people flipping the table, when market changed a bit.
> everyone worked for more than half a year without salary
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!? Sorry, that's not fair... Why would you do that without a FIRM equity deal? Why would you get yourself into a situation that allows somebody to yank your share away having already worked?
If you happily work for somebody without anything in return, I'm afraid to say you deserve everything you get when they turn around at the eleventh hour and take the cheap way out.
There may be laws attached to this (IANAL) but really, you've earned a very valuable lesson here. Don't work unless you're contractually guaranteed something in return.
> Either side can stipulate anything they want in that contract, other than what is disallowed by contract and labor laws (and of course your rights).
Guess what this is disallowed by!
You can write "oh yeah by the way we're not going to pay you for ~75% of your working hours because we're cheap bastards" in the contract all you want, that doesn't make it legal. If they want you to work for them 168 hours a week, they need to pay for it.
> as his employees never had a fair shot in getting a reasonable share of profits
They get paid an hourly wage or salary. Thats their share of the profits. Why are employees magically entitled to profits other than what they agreed to work for?
And if I don't work for your company, and I can't find other work, I starve. It's hardly win-win if one side of the transaction faces much more dire consequences if the negotiations fail.
>Hey guys, at the expense of sounding stupid, please educate me - if a company A pays you a salary X to do your fucking job Y and if you use that money and time on activities Z, especially if it negatively affects company A's image / revenues, why shouldn't the company be allowed to fire you as they're losing significant revenues because you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y that you're paid X for?
Because as a society we have moved beyond mere wage slaves that just do their job and call it a day, and found that certain activities that are not "contractual obligations" are also necessary for the well functioning of enterprises and societies.
The ability of workers/employees to protest, unionize, etc, has been historically important for all kinds of progress that we now take for granted (or that now has been starting to erode again, or completely eroded).
From hazard pay, to overtime, to paid vacations, to workplace safety gains, to maternity leave without vengeful termination, and all kinds of similar achievements, have been possible by people who organized inside companies.
"Affecting the company's image/revenues" is not a sufficient issue. If the company does bad stuff, treats employees badly, etc, then its image and revenues should justifiably suffer until it fixes those things, and that's good.
>I'm not taking sides nor talking about what's right, what's wrong
Oh, but you do, all the way to the weasel wording (1) "to do your fucking job Y", (2) "you use that money and time on activities Z", (3) "losing significant revenues", (4) "you didn't fulfil your contractual obligation to perform Y".
Who told you that (2), (3), (4) hold exactly, and especially (4)? Organizing some protest or unionizing is totally orthogonal to "performing Y" (your job) or not.
>If you don't like it, why don't you just quit and then sue the company instead?
Because this isn't the 1900s, and employees shouldn't be treated as mere replaceable cogs without rights and without say, even though many employees would prefer it that way.
> I suppose I'm naive, but it seems obvious to me that a company should want to pay its employees as much as possible
"As much as possible" is everything. So no.
> that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver.
If companies paid for the value the employees delivered, the company would have no profit. Companies make money by taking a share of the value employees delivered.
> It just seems obviously in the company's interest.
Maybe in a disneyesque/"it's a wonderful life" fairy tale but not in real life. Obviously it isn't in the company's interest because no company does it your way.
Actually, employees salaries, like rent, fuel costs, supplies, etc are viewed as costs/expenditures for a company. Something all companies want to reduce as it eats into their profits.
Agreed? Surely their employment contract included this clause, wouldn't that be plainly illegal to do that otherwise?
> I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker, regardless of how much he or she makes.
Because not everyone chooses which side they are on first and comes up with the justification later.
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