Labor has value and employers pay for it. They know that if they don’t, the shop down the street will, because it’s worth it to have competent employees who show up to work.

Your belief that an employer would risk losing a valuable employee to save a few books shows how little respect and understanding you have for anyone in business.

BASIC ECONOMICS BASIC ECONOMICS BASIC ECONOMICS

Christ this fucking person is all over this thread insisting that management is infallible

Update with more trash:

Ok friend, let’s work this out. A widget is worth $1.00. You can get it at the hardware store or on Amazon for the same price. But this widget has elastic demand.

A single employee can make 30 widgets in an hour. With materials, amortized equipment costs and overhead, the most the employee can make is $13.00 an hour. This allows there to be room for $.05 profit on the widget and $.10 in markup at retail.

But you think that everyone deserves $15.00 an hour. So you use government to force widgetco to pay their $13 an hour employee $15. The employee doesn’t produce more widgets, and overhead didn’t decrease. However, the retailer now needs a $.15 markup to raise all their wages.

There isn’t enough profit in the production of widgets to raise the wages to the level you demand. The market will not pay $1.25 for a widget. So now there are no widgets, no jobs, and widgetco is out of business.

The employer was paying what the market would bear. But you don’t understand these simple economic concepts. You think because widgetco made $1 billion in profit last year (off the sale of 20 billion widgets) that they are evil and greedy. But now, there are a shit ton of people out of work.

There is a middle ground between management and labor and the popular phrase around Reddit of “well if they can’t afford to pay more then they shouldn’t be in business” is not it. Oh, also the same people who bitch whenever the price of anything increases.

This fuckface needs to take their strawman of a toy model and shove it up their ass. If these "simple economic concepts" held any water, then we wouldn't need anything more. But no, asshats like this fella like to circlejerk over how rational consumers are and won't hesitate to utter that "the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" in the same breath.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This person does not work for a living and definitely has a trust fund

    • VernetheJules [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Glanced and saw they post on /r/smallbusiness lmao, probably a lemonade stand or something

  • wantonviolins [they/them]M
    ·
    3 years ago

    it's not in the employer's interest to pay labor its actual value, or even adequately - their goal is profit. given that profit rises as expenses decline, this automatically creates an adversarial relationship between employers and labor. even when the employer is genuinely interested in providing adequate or high compensation, market forces compel them to do the opposite

    there is nothing reductive or antagonistic about pointing this out, it's just a fact

    • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      lmao his whole response to this is focused on the word bootlicker

      Ironically, most of the geniuses who use this term would, in fact, welcome an authoritarian government to “free them” from the “shackles” of capitalism. Bootlicker, indeed.

      bahahaha he thinks this is a dunk

      • sammer510 [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Literally told him to shut the fuck up when I saw that. These people don't get bullied enough

      • nohaybanda [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        "If they're so opposed to boot licking how come there's no boot polish on their tongues, huh?"

  • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I love how condescending he becomes immediately after being questioned. :marx-ok:

    • VernetheJules [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      Hey friend, have you considered that you deserve to be poor? The market is always right! :<)

  • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I've never had a job where my employer didn't explicitly tell me, when signing on, that they could get rid of me at any moment for literally any reason.

    Like that's the job market, that is at will employment. This guy is super out of touch and probably has never had a fucking job that wasn't with a relative or something

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Your belief that an employer would risk losing a valuable employee to save a few books [sic] shows how little respect and understanding you have for anyone in business.

    I work for a major US multinational corporation (like, you probably used one of my employer's products in the last 48 hours if you're in the US--that major) as a software engineer. When I convinced the other two SEs on my team to share salaries, we discovered that the new guy (hired only a few months prior) was making substantially more than my other coworker was making, and roughly the same as I was (after being there for 7 years).

    Fast forward a couple years, and that lower-earning coworker, a talented SE by all accounts, is now working for Amazon. (Was awkward meeting with my boss after my coworker announced he was leaving, and my boss was all rueful about losing him, and I'm sitting there thinking, you were paying him like $8k less than the new guy, of course he's leaving!)

    So uh, yeah, they totally would do that to save a few "books."

    • VernetheJules [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      I wonder what goes through their head when they see any of the TalesFromX subreddits or Malicious Compliance or any of the zillions of stories of shitty labor practices

      probably just the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" on repeat

      • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It's some combo of repeating the sacred mantra "we pay market rate compensation" (i.e. the survey company we use told us what we want to hear) and various forms of cope like "we're a great place to work" or "there's more to a job than money".

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    3 years ago

    "let me explain the Science of Economics to you, simpleton. Begin by imagining whatever situation you like with whatever rules make my argument make sense..."

  • NewAccountWhoDis [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Employers are very famously long term minded robots who operate in a purely logical manner and that is why they can not make mistakes or do any business practice that could harm them

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I made so much money selling stuff produced in my factory. I then subtract a little profit for myself and the costs of producing the stuff. I then pay the rest to my employees in wages. For reasons left unexplained I have no incentive to take as much in profits as I can get away with.

    • Simple economic concepts according to :reddit-logo: oligarch simps
  • aFairlyLargeCat [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    At this rate I’m going to end up living another 30 years purely driven on the desire to get to watch some of these people face the wall.

    :sleepless:

  • OgdenTO [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I mean, he's already wrong from like the initial description of widget costs :

    With materials, amortized equipment costs and overhead, the most the employee can make is $13.00 an hour.

    This isn't how pay for workers works. Wages are not "cost or profit sharing" as he is talking about, by taking the sell price of the widgets that are being made and back calculating what share the workers should receive for their work. Wages don't fluctuate with the future sales income. If the widgets don't ever sell, the workers still get paid.

    Wages are paid from already existing money that the capitalist has from previous profit.

    This dufus doesn't even understand that, it's like chapter 2 of wage, labor, and capital.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I didn't start making significant money until I realised that every employer is out to screw me and acted accordingly.

  • Rem [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Rule of thumb: if someone starts a thought experiment involving a company that makes "widgets", you can safely walk away.

  • Shrek
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    deleted by creator

  • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Your belief that an employer would risk losing a valuable employee to save a few books shows how little respect and understanding you have for anyone in business.

    Saying this with a straight face means that person is either a malicious sociopath or just plain stupid. Either way, why should they have all the money again?