Again, these fucking billionaires.So? that's not the topic of discussion here.
Bruh, Billionaires and top executives are often paid astronomically more than their employees, even though workers are the ones driving the production and value creation.
No, they can't really afford that. To pay them more they have to charge their customers more. Ford/GM went bankrupt becasue of unions.
When Shareholders lose their money, workers don't lose theirs.
No, they are extorting wages beyond any reasonable amount.
So yes, the fact that billionaires are ridiculously overpaid is absolutely relevant when discussing whether these workers are overpaid.
What also makes it relevant is that these companies, in particular, are owned by or accountable to much larger corporations, where shareholders and major investors—including potential billionaires—reap the benefits of profit growth.
Maersk - Despite fluctuating profits, still generated substantial revenue and has the financial capability to meet workers' demands for higher wages. They reported a profit before financial items (EBIT) of $470 million.
Hapag-Lloyd - Despite the decline in profits in Q1 2024, they still reported a significant profit of EUR 299 million. While there is a drop from the previous year's record profits, the company can still meet workers' demands for higher wages.
CMA CGM - In the second quarter of 2024, CMA CGM reported a net income of USD 661 million, with total revenue for the quarter standing at USD 13.1 billion.
Bruh...
I don’t see how these shipping companies wouldn’t remain profitable even after raising workers' pay. Do you? If so, I'd love to hear how.
LeBron James sells tickets and endorsements. He literally earns the money he is paid.For fuck's sake, what kind of experience deserves $200k salary here?
To be fair, it's pretty common around here for some folks to miss rebuttals.That said, unions aren't intentionally trying to limit workers' power; the intention is to reward experience and loyalty. However, I do agree that seniority-based pay scales can have unintended consequences—what I consider side effects, and what you call an engineered trap.
They are not flying passengers planes here to be paid more than US median salary.
Bruh, it’s all absurd. How does LeBron James make $48.73 million just to play with a ball, while someone in law enforcement, risking their life every day, barely makes $50k in the same time frame? Why are you so caught up with these workers when everyone—shareholders, CEOs, and billionaires—are being just as if not substantially more ridiculous?
Tell that to Ford/GM/Chrysler
Well, failure to deal with union assholes can be called mismanagement.
Nobody stops you from playing.
This is a very widely believed myth.
As a rule the inputs and the outputs are different kinds of things, so they can't be compared directly -- how do you compare calories of food with lines of code? So to compare them they have to be rated along some common scale. What scale did you have in mind? Market price?
How do you figure? Jackson Pollock wasn't using his artistic, um, "talent", to draw counterfeiting plates. He died with five million* dollars because other people had supplied him with that wealth.
JFC! If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Productivity is not about wages. High wages can present a problem, not because workers are paid too much but because they produce too little. In deciding how best to measure productivity, managers should focus not on dollars per hour but on labor dollars per product. That is, on labor content, not labor cost. Workers who are very productive can be paid thousands of dollars more than employees elsewhere and the business can still prosper, as manufacturers like Lincoln Electric have demonstrated.
Productivity measurement should focus on overall capabilities, not on one set of costs. How good is your company at taking a pile of raw materials, a bunch of machines, stacks of paperwork, and groups of employees, and turning out useful goods or services? That’s what a productivity index should address. It is, as much as possible, a relationship between physical inputs and outputs. The formula is disarmingly simple.
Correction. Bezos doesn't pay that. Amazon's customers pay that. Amazon is famous for it's labor exploitation. Low pay and high rates of on the job injuries
Please reread and respond to what I said.
I repeat, there is nothing remarkable about jobs they do which would justify $200k salaries.
I agree. All those people need raises.
Only those? No! everyone should get a raise so that $200K becomes new median.
No. It's a matter of adding negative value to noncapitulation. The workers not working is simply removing a positive value. The workers attempting to keep others from working is adding negative value.
There is negative value in your example, thus no extortion.
[Note: Somewhere in the quoting there is a nesting error, I'm not going to try to figure it out as the important parts are ok.]
I am right and you are wrong.
The problem is the higher the wage the more incentive there is for the employer to find some other means of doing it. I watched it happen with my former employer, we repeatedly moved from a worker doing X to a worker tending a machine that does X. And we did things to reduce the total labor even needed. The spray department originally would take each piece and spray it. Let it dry, turn it over, spray it again. Eventually that was replaced with a track system. Parts would be hung from the track and go through the spray station--now the spray guy only sprayed, did nothing else. Since the parts were hanging all sides could be sprayed. (They were hung from the already-cut mounting holes.) The track then went up to the ceiling and wandered around inside a cage for a while, eventually descending to have the now-dry items removed. Less labor and fewer interactions--and the fewer interactions the lower the chance of damage.
