Company Raises It's Minimum Wage to $70,000 and All Hell Breaks Loose
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Abefroman
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These are all big assumptions. Does anyone here actually think that TWO people who quit didn't have something more lucrative in the wings? This whole quit out of protest narraitve is a bunch of bullshit.
2 people out of 120 employees. one quit mostly because of burnout. He also gives his employees unlimited paid time off. It doesn't sound like a bad place to work. Lowest paid was 36k at the time in April when he gave them the raise.
He said the lawsuit expense was his biggest problem.
He said the lawsuit expense was his biggest problem.
It's sad that people really think:
a) 70k is "so much"
b) Good workers would suddenly become bad if they got paid more.
Or maybe
I think it's dumb to make a political post in the business forum and then cry "hey let's not make this political!"
Or maybe
I think trying to shoehorn a narrative where one business is a socialist failure because the owner decided to pay his workers an impressively above average minimum is garbage on it's face.
Take your pick.
Did some pussy report me? Is that why you are asking?
chaos
Buzzfeed Editor
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No one reported you.
I think this story is kind of overblown by the media. So they have two people who claim, kind of, that they left due to the raise. Some nebulous "lower paid people work harder" stuff, put that shit on Fox news and it will play as is. I'm sure the reality is that it will take a number of years for his experiment to play out.
Personally, i know the first time I got a job paying a shitload of money (in my mind, at the time) i was motivated to work harder for a time, until I realized I wanted to move to another position. Then I worked hard to get what I needed in order to move to that kind of a position. Now I work hard too, but not because of the paycheck, because of who I want to be and because I want to protect my boss because he is cool as shit. If I was paid even more would that impact it? idk, but I know damn sure it would impact my level of givafuck if I were paid less.
I think this story is kind of overblown by the media. So they have two people who claim, kind of, that they left due to the raise. Some nebulous "lower paid people work harder" stuff, put that shit on Fox news and it will play as is. I'm sure the reality is that it will take a number of years for his experiment to play out.
Personally, i know the first time I got a job paying a shitload of money (in my mind, at the time) i was motivated to work harder for a time, until I realized I wanted to move to another position. Then I worked hard to get what I needed in order to move to that kind of a position. Now I work hard too, but not because of the paycheck, because of who I want to be and because I want to protect my boss because he is cool as shit. If I was paid even more would that impact it? idk, but I know damn sure it would impact my level of givafuck if I were paid less.
70k a year is more than what 70%of households make. Not individuals, households. You're an idiot if you think for most of America that isn't damn good money much less for one earner.
What "Percent" Is Your Household?
What "Percent" Is Your Household?
Unlimited PTO is a giant scam. Look at any company that does it. Employees take on average about 2-3 weeks off total per year with unlimited PTO because there is peer pressure to never take a day off and be seen as lazy.
Vinen
God is dead
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Depends.
I take more than 3 weeks a year easy. It also makes me think less when I want to take a single-day off to extend a weekend.
I also have a suspicion that unlimited PTO is attractive to start-ups because it limits HR overhead
Vinen
God is dead
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Yeah, I've also noticed the more terrible you are the less PTO you take off since you can't get your shit done anyway.
Vaclav
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I've never been with a company that did unlimited PTO, but yea - with an average of 400 employees at a given time - I could've probably reduced time off incidents by a good 30-40 incidents a year if there wasn't limitations on it.
Noodleface
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70k is a very liveable household income throughout most of the country.
If you think it's "so much" money, you have no idea the scope of what some people make.
According to the table my house is a top 10% earner and I don't even feel like we're that wealthy. We don't even have kids. It must be hard on some families that have a mortgage and kids and don't even make in the top 10.
Rangoth
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It's not that we think it's "soo much" money, in fact it's not BUT it is way more than the average household. The data has consistently proved that. This board is biased though cause we mostly educated, internet using, computer people. We are not the average demographic. I travel all over the country and world....the average is living in a shitty town, a "go no where" job, church going or ghetto living, ignorant fuckbag. Shit, even in those places I have friends that are "better than the average moron" and they run the cats or do other more skilled labor and they clear 85k+ easily(with overtime and stuff) while all their friends are barely making 35k for various reasons.
70k household is in the top 15%, if not 10% in most cases. It's just so skewed due to large city prices that we all seem to think are normal combined with the average type of person on this board.
Who is we? I've never said anything in this regard but address the idiot woman quoted in the article who seemed to think that customer service would decline because employees making 70k were now so wealthy that they wouldn't feel motivated to work. Are you throwing in your lot with her?
The only possible motivation issue I'd see is that if they're just answering the phones at 70k/yr they probably aren't going to see a very big bump in salary if they do an exceptional job and get promoted to manager of answering the phones. Because already 70k/yr is more than that position would make elsewhere so I don't suppose they'd pay that person 90k/yr at this place.
Dandai
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Here's a non-political perspective for you: the dude fucked up by not being humble about his attempt to change the system. From what I understand, he says he felt bad because he had friends who said they were struggling, realized he employed people like his friends, and bumped everyone's wages to an arbitrary number that he deemed livable... then he told everyone about it.
Why?
Did he want everyone to see that it could work before he actually demonstrated that it worked? You can't dismiss the extraneous stuff and say, "Well this would've worked if it weren't for the lawsuit!" because there's always a problem looming just over the horizon with a business. This time it's a lawsuit, next time it's a vendor problem, etc.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I applaud the guy for being principled and trying to affect (effect?) a change in the world. I wonder if the change would've been more successful if he had been modest about it.
Why?
Did he want everyone to see that it could work before he actually demonstrated that it worked? You can't dismiss the extraneous stuff and say, "Well this would've worked if it weren't for the lawsuit!" because there's always a problem looming just over the horizon with a business. This time it's a lawsuit, next time it's a vendor problem, etc.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I applaud the guy for being principled and trying to affect (effect?) a change in the world. I wonder if the change would've been more successful if he had been modest about it.
Rangoth
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Honestly I don't know who "we" is, was just responding to post above. I think that lady is an idiot.
There are always going to be people who become "bad" workers or lazy or whatever else once they hit a station in life they are content with. No everyone has drive/ambition/work ethic/etc. Human nature and all that. I do think that when you raise the lower bar and don't adjust the middle you do create a problem though. Not only with long term effects such as how inflation will now disproportionately affect those wages differently but also in the short term where you can potentially lose workers or create internal strife due to the created imbalance. Like others stated on this board, I do NOT believe that what you make should be compared the guy/girl next to you at a company.....IN GENERAL. One should be paid based on their value add to the company, I believe in that more than seniority, certifications, resumes, etc. This can often be a bit more challenging to calculate due to the intangibles of various departments, but plenty of companies do this well, including the one I work for.
However the "in general" statements takes a giant shit when in one swoop of the pen a large portion of the companies employees and new hires instantly gain 100% raises. Maybe it is just a purely psychological thing, too much change to fast? But it also does make a statement about the value add of the current employees.
All that being said, I'm one of those fuck minimum wage people honestly. Some jobs are just not worth that much money. I don't see why someone should be forced to pay a certain wage for it. I know it's far more complex than the few pathetic points I can bring up on a message board but I feel it contributes to the higher prices of goods and services here in the US compared to the exact same products in other countries and the fact that we ship so many jobs oversees and how manufacturing is cheaper overseas even after shipping it here(which I find an insane concept, though I get it). Call centers are a great example, everyone hates getting Amit when they call customer support, but when the company can outsources it for about 20% of the cost to have that run in the US....can you blame them? I'd do it too if I were in charge. Eventually(after I die) the entire world will have access to the same things the affluent counties do and the "value for work" concept will sort of balance out. Doing it in India will be about the same cost as doing it in the US, etc., but that's probably hundreds of years after my pathetic existence.
Everybody wins in the US, can't have losers and poor anymore I guess. I'm fine with CEOs making boatloads of money, except in a few situations like when they genuinely don't make the money but get insane government funds even though they fail(banks, some military contract companies, etc). I also hate that athletes and movie stars make so insanely much, but then again, we keep going to the theaters, watching tv, paying 175$ for baseball games(new price for my season tickets at fenway /sigh). Supply and demand. If everyone agreed to boycot baseball until tickets got cheaper or whatever, it WOULD eventually work. The problem of course is that you'll never get society to unite under such a cause, whether it be sports or entertainment. It's the sad truth but your election vote means dick these days, you're only true vote is with your dollar, but because there are so many fucking people and no desire or method to unite, even that barely counts. But I do get a little internal hard-on sometimes when I see a company get called out for something douche and I think "wow, if everyone stopped using their service/product tomorrow due to this they would either change or go out of business", but obviously that's a pipe dream....people like their simple and daily life. And please don't think I'm above the rest, I fill up with BP seal killing diesel, buy walmart sweatshop t-shirts for working out, purchase chinese made fireworks to blow shit up in my backyard, and youll not catch me giving away my season tickets to the red sox....turns I like living my life more than I care about my principles and morals
