Every laborer sells the same the same thing: their body. It's just about which parts for how much - and the toll/risk each entails. All deserve a fair wage and respect.
Humans are inherently fragile beings with almost no redundant parts. If I fry your brain with long hours and politically hostile work environment and drive you to depression; vs. I fry your brain with long hours in physically exhausting environments. The results are the same - your brain is fried. One type of hostile work environment is not necessarily better or worse than another type of hostile work environment.
I've worked as both a manual laborer on a construction site and a software engineer at big tech corp. The burnout I get as an engineer is way better than what I felt as a laborer, I don't think most people who have done both would consider them similar.
I would push back against "the results are the same". They are objectively not the same. Of course physical and mental exhaustion are both bad, but I think people would prefer to work in an office than a factory and trying to equate the two experiences is a little reductive.
not necessarily true. obviously you would, but I know many people who hate the idea of working indoors. They don't toil in a factory per se, but they work outside and enjoy it.
the same time, if you have a good support group and work hard strenuous hours (like rig workers) the physical isn't that bad because you have the bouyant comfort of comraderie. but if you are in an office stuck next to someone whose values you cannot stand and clash with yours, and whose boss demands and harasses you all the time but you are stuck working paycheck to paycheck because of medical bills or something.....that's a reason to want a factory job for some.
The only thing they have incommon is that they refuse to change their lives. They don't make use of their own capabilities to make changes.
Specially the American culture has this idiotic thing where people are so afraid to called a failure or to be someone who quits. That's probably doing more damage than anything to yourselfs.
I am not sure that is true though. When I was really into 'becoming a big startup' etc, I was taking lessons from almost exclusively US founders. If things fail, go bankrupt and repeat was a main point. But I was in the EU and here (outside of the UK, at least as far as I have seen in practice) bankruptcy is a big taboo and you are judged by it. Instead of it being something you at least tried but failed, it is seen as a deep flaw over here and it can haunt you for a long time as bankruptcy information is public. Judges and lawyers here push you to keep going and avoid bankruptcy at all cost, but that seriously makes no sense in many cases which can be outside your control. My last one was 8 years ago: I pivoted and it has been good since then. After selling a company, I have to find something new and that seems to fail 1-3 times in short succession, not all with bankruptcy of course, and then a business picks up momentum.
I digress, but I think the US has a healthier attitude towards failure. Maybe I am wrong of course: I never lived there.
> it is seen as a deep flaw over here and it can haunt you for a long time
When a company goes bankrupt it can bring down with it smaller providers and self employed workers. If you only lose venture capital, that is not so bad as it is part of the risk/reward. Why anyone would like to do business with an entrepreneur that uses bankruptcy to move on? I guess that in-advance payments could be a solution.
Bankruptcy is a last resort mechanism. It makes sense to let people move on when, without bad intention, they just failed a business. To make mistakes is human. But to abuse the privilege betting in high risk business and letting others pay for it seems immoral and not long-term sustainable for the economy.
Bankruptcy means that somebody else ends up paying for what you spent on the business attempt. It means that people and companies who provided services don't get paid. It is not no harm done who cares event.
High risk businesses have a cost. Trying multiple of them and expecting others to swallow looses they did not caused sounds to me like abusing the system meant to get you out of genuine failure.
It is a last resort: the point was it should not put a permanent stigma on your head. I am not talking about people who abuse it: I am talking about doing your best and it does not work with no way out.
> If things fail, go bankrupt and repeat was a main point.
This is not treating it as a last resort, this is "you rely on repeated bankruptcy" as a part of strategy. So they go into high risk business with expectation that someone else will pay if that fails. (Which is ok in only speculators loose money, but not ok if they end up not paying suppliers, sub-contractors etc for services.)
> Judges and lawyers here push you to keep going and avoid bankruptcy at all cost, but that seriously makes no sense in many cases which can be outside your control.
This is judges and lawyers treating bankruptcy as a last resort.
> Judges and lawyers here push you to keep going and avoid bankruptcy at all cost
Judges and lawyers probably do that very close to the extent that that is actually a requirement of the bankruptcy laws, which are intended as a last resort.
I live in France, I know we have more worker protection laws than most countries, but I expected at least some from all first world countries.
Factory work is typically among the most regulated kind of work, and often unionized too. Things tend to be very clear: there is a boss, there is punch clock, it is not like software development where it is not clear when you are working and when you are not. It is easy to see exactly what is happening.
It's legal because the workers welcomed it. At first.
This is one single factory in the entire United States, and it is news because it is so far out of the ordinary.
I grew up around a lot of steel mills in the middle of America. What happens is this: Demand increases rapidly but nobody expects it to last. So they go to the union and work out a deal for increased working hours at a higher salary. Everybody, and I really mean everybody, is happy.
Because nobody expects the conditions to last long.
The workers see the opportunity to buy a boat or a truck with cash from all the extra work they put in, and the thought of it makes them excited to do all the extra shifts. But then towards the "end" the excitement wears off and they can't wait for the extra work to end. And it does.
I would not say it is completely outside of the ordinary for factory work. It is an extreme, but forced over time is a pretty common problem in warehouses and factories in the US. Typically that comes with a 1.5X pay increase for overtime hours worked, but working 60-80 hours a week or more is physically and psychologically draining, especially when the factories and warehouses are not air conditioned and the temperature inside hits 100-120 degrees during the summer.
Employees tolerate it because it can double their annual salary buying a better life for their families. It just comes at a huge personal cost.
In this specific instance the 80 hour work weeks are simply not sustainable and I have to imagine that management will want to end the practice as soon as possible. I did not see mention of 1.5X pay in the article, but unless Kansas has very lax labor laws that would be the norm. If 80 hour work weeks are common it is costing them to not hire new workers.
1.5x of what base? Those people aren't working 80h because they like the pay. They need the money. Not necessarily all of it, but are dependent on the job. haven't had a pay raise in 10y.
It would be cheaper to hire more workers, if they could get any to work for the same pay. They likely can't, so it would be more expensive to raise the pay. As it is, in the short term, it could be dangerous to let people have time to think.
Conditions call for a strike. Don't know what took them so long.
"State law says that overtime is due once an employee has worked 46 hours within a week. Federal law says that overtime is due once an employee has worked 40 hours within a week."
So it is substandard, and this:
"Breaks are not required under state or federal law."
The same law has been passed in France where a union's deal can bypass the law (totally crazy idea to be honest). And these deals happen exactly like you described, except that workers are threatened by factory closure.
For example it happened for the Smart car factory, they accepted to work more hours for the same pay, with the promise to get investments. Well now the factory is closing and they are pissed off to have granted free work to their employer (mercedes Benz)
Yes, but it is not without limits. The hard limit is (supposed) to be 48h/week down to 44h/week after 12 weeks, including overtime. And even if employees and unions want to work more, legally, they can't.
It can go up to 60h/week in exceptional situations. Notably, it happened during the pandemic for some essential workers. In the article, that's 84h/week.
For the Smart car factory scandal, the work week was 39 hours, which is more than the official 35, but well within the limit and perfectly legal. The problem is that it should have been paid overtime, but it wasn't, which technically meant it was a wage reduction.
There are still some people in France who do absurd work hours, but not factory workers. Among them are medical interns (that's illegal but still done), self-employed people, and some high level employees who don't work on the clock.
Is it out of the ordinary? We're working minimum 50 hours a week and being told that it's only out of the goodness of the supervisor's heart that we've got any time off. Even at above-average pay for the area, they can't get new bodies in the door and experienced workers are leaving. It's been the same story everywhere I've worked. I'm sticking at this company because the pay is good, but I've been on overtime since shortly after I started here and this is the slow season right now.
Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative?
Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work.
For example, there's year long tourism on Madeira. Everyone there is working hard all year long, charging for tourist services very cheaply. Yet there are many examples of places with year long tourism, but you can still find mass closures during siesta.
Everyone, through culture, decided not to overwork and there's no one "hard-working" enough to have their business open during siesta. No employee will agree to work during siesta, similarly employers do not expect their business to be open.
Not everyone has the opportunities that many of us on HN have enjoyed. The HN crowd is insanely privileged. Don’t assume they have had the same access to opportunity that you did or they have the same talents you do.
In my own life, I was one decision away from driving trucks in West Virginia. The decision at the time was not obvious and the path I took was much harder. It took 10 years to see light at the end of the tunnel. However, I have since had incredible opportunities that I could never have imagined at that time. It was a costly personal decision as I lost a lot of important human connections along the way.
Clearly you're using vague language to protect your privacy by obscuring the details but if you ever do decide to publicly post about this please let me know! The journey sounds fascinating (and harrowing!), and I'd be curious to read your blog post / memoir / watch the feature length movie made based on it.
Its a very good question. I think in general it is important to realize that a significant amount of "design" work goes in to creating economies. Local, state, and national decisions will lead to certain conditions. How were those decisions made, and under what conditions? For any given place the answer will be different. How does one place compare to another?
It is my view that it is perfectly feasible to design economies (in a voluntary way) where people can work 20 hours a week and have two months off a year every year. Or closer to our current world, there is no question in my mind that we could keep things as good or better they are now materially, while making sure no person has to work more than 40 hours a week to survive.
I do love to talk about specific strategies [1] but that quickly activates our tribal instincts and can cause violent arguments even when our underlying goals are in near complete agreement. So it can be useful to just ponder on the above. How did things get the way they became? Is it due to iron wrought natural laws, or historical decisions we could freely agree to change?
as nice as that utopia would be, the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive.
the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severely infringes personal liberties, but eventually makes whole economies less competitive as the hardest working & most ambitious workers migrate away.
the better approach is to try to ensure everyone has dignity and fair pay for the amount of work that they do. that's a function of the distribution of pay and wealth, which is something we can legislate via sticks and carrots.
Instead of there being no way its completely trivial.
Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given.
The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules.
Otherwise
- Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple.
- Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple.
- Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple
- Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay.
Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not.
Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them.
Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs.
Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.
sorry, again, you're focusing on the wrong problem, and trying to implement arbitrary and strict controls to boot (which might work for computers, but not so much with humans). we already have overtime rules (and a number of the other provisions), and they don't change the equation in any meaningful way, as this very article elucidates. it's perhaps well-meaning, but it's plainly the wrong approach.
They’re not changing things in a meaningful way because of other decisions, such as letting letting minimum wage fall to an obscenely low level such that people have to work two jobs simply to survive.
>some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive.
The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life.
People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.
yah, that's why ultimately the better focus is on a more equitable (but not equal) distribution of pay and wealth. worrying about the number of hours in a work week (or even minimum wage, in the long run) is a distraction in this regard (popular distractions on hn and elsewhere, by how well received such misguided ideas seem to be). we should be making labor markets radically transparent for workers, and legislatively shifting power to humans over amoral corporate entities. companies should be working for the people at large, not the other way around. once you accumulate about $2-10MM in assets, you've won the economy and we should make it steeply, progressively harder (but not impossible) to accumulate more. this also has the nice side effect of making the economy more dynamic and resilient, while also fostering more innovation all around.
I can't believe people are even having this conversation. As a civilization we solved this problem about a century ago. We know the solution. In the US labour law has been subverted and undermined. Thats the problem. It's not that nothing can be done about it. Lots can be done and has been done around the globe (but predominately in advanced economies, of which the US is one).
Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
This isn't obvious at all. A few very specific, niche employment areas in which the US dominates (software engineering in certain niches, medical practice, and maybe show business) have a modest influx of Western European workers, but that says nothing.
Among the reasons for emigration to the US, there's not a single living soul that says "oh, I'm not legally allowed to work enough in my area of employment to achieve my dreams". It's a laughable and ridiculous statement.
If the US implemented more reasonable restrictions on labor in the US do you propose the hardest working most ambitious are going to move to China or Brazil?
if people want to work more that’s fine but the others should not be punished for it.
you see: some people push very hard because their life is their work. They don’t have time for something else because they work a lot, and they work a lot effectively consuming what should be their free time because they don’t have the mental energy to so something else.
Once you create a bit of space and disentangle yourself from your work not a lot of people want to work extra time. ideally life should be split between work and creative pursuits and the percentage of work should decrease until it eventually hits 0. People will still do stuff, but your livelihood should not be tied to your job. You should pursue your “hobbies” because they are fun and/or fulfilling.
Automation is good enough today that we should not have to work more than 15-20 hours per week. Knowledge workers already do this but “butt in seat” mentality still says 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy really. We took all the productivity gains our technological advances brought and use them to create more bs work instead of reducing the amount of work we have to do.
this is the right attitude. Things should be results oriented not hours-worked oriented. The problem with the industry is that the factory worker metaphor still persists when knowledge work is nothing like producing something in a repetitive manner.
> the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work,
To be clear, I am talking about a voluntary system. No one would be prevented from working more, it just wouldn't be necessary to survive. I love to work pretty much all the time, though only some of that is hours I am billing to my employer.
EDIT: I quickly rewrote my original comment after posting, but I do see one quoted reply got in before the change. Just wanted to add this note about the change.
>I see no contradiction or flaw. What I desire is a world where it is possible for any person to survive working 20 hours a week with a couple months off.
What GP is arguing is that is achieved by fixing the pay distribution, not by limiting hours. If you only limit hours but don't fix the pay problem you create perverse incentives where people have to work undocumented "overtime" or face the threat that they will be replaced by someone who will or where people who want to work overtime face punitive punishments if they do so.
I am also not describing a scenario where we limit hours. While I do have ideas on solutions, I am not even proscribing a particular solution. As I said, we must first agree that we are capable of changing things. Some want to imagine everything is as it is due to unchanging natural laws, when in fact individuals and collectives made a lot of decisions along the way. I suggest we question those decisions and imagine how things would be different.
One thing I can be extremely clear on is that I do NOT think the US government legally limiting work hours is any kind of solution. I am all about looking at society as a whole and reasoning on society-wide changes we can make voluntarily to achieve a better world.
Personally, I don't think that "solution" is as obscure as it is made out to be. This problem isn't new and has been studied for years. When a worker feels forced to work such arduous hours (as opposed to someone in finance or tech who puts the extra hours to get ahead), in a fair system, I assume one would ask "why didn't he just find a new job". The answer I come to is he can't - the threat of poverty is far to great in the US to even think about the uncertainty of leaving your current job, especially if you are living paycheck to paycheck. If you fix this problem then I believe most labor abuse would go away. I don't think it involves some sort of "reimagining" of novel solutions. Furthermore I think solutions involving overtime laws are just band-aids.
Unfortunately any kind of solution that tries to address the market side effects of labor will die in the US by the socialism boogeyman
Too bad you are being down voted and being misunderstood. I fully agree with you that in this day given our over all productivity, humans should be able to, in theory able to design systems to minimize work without co-coercion. But as you partially correctly observed, typical human nature ( ranging from bureaucratic govts, to seeing survival as a zero sum game ) is a hindrance to achieving this goal. Where I completely disagree is that you will completely not change people's mind en masse even if you showed them a working example, so in a manner speaking any strategizing that one does is moot.
> How did things get the way they became? Is it due to iron wrought natural laws, or historical decisions we could freely agree to change?
Reminds me of Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch, which also ponders this question. I can't do it justice with just one excerpt, but here's one passage that always stays with me:
The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.
... Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.
Sorry, but this is BS. The course of a river is a direct result of several close-to-deterministic forces and influences. Caesar's Palace, along with "neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes" are manifestations of many different forces, a large number of which are subject to individual and social choice-making. The pretense that "neurobiology is destiny", "economics is as immutable as physics" and "regulatory regimes are natural law" is just completely bogus, and the argument is one entirely in favor of the status quo, by the status quo.
Are you arguing against me, the essay, or the excerpt? I don't think your rebuttal really hits at the main body of the essay, which is about how competitive pressure can trap groups into miserable situations that no individual wants, but which are stable enough to be hard to break out of. It's not that you can really predict the form of societal institutions, but just that they perhaps aren't shaped by free choice as much as they seem, because of how much the incentive landscape restricts our choices.
I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.
Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.
The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).
But choice-making is a product of neurobiology and economics. We’re not going to solve problems like global warming by “choosing” our way out of them. We need to formulate economic solutions so that they’re the only rational alternative.
These are NOT "design" jobs. They aren't "knowledge/service" jobs either.
And fun fact: retraining absolutely does not work. Less than 10% can be retrained and usually they are the segment that could have retrained themselves without specific retraining.
I think you might have misunderstood the comment you're replying to: they're saying that economies (and related policies) are often built through some form of design process, not that factory jobs are design jobs.
Factories aren’t generally in cities. In a rural town, your job choices may be work at Walmart, one of two factories, or on a farm. The “hard” factory job may be the “best” bet among the choices.
The bigger question is usually why don’t people move from a rural location? And the answer is usually “it’s complicated “. Old parents to take care of. It’s familiar. Friends. Maybe own your simple home. Maybe your church is there. Maybe quiet life is your thing.
The best thing about moving to remote work is that it will enable people to live in these smaller communities while having the increased income of the city. I hope this will bring more money back to local economies and revitalize rural areas.
All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals.
Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.
> All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it
when you stop competing for the same strip of land, 10 miles from the pacific ocean, it turns out there's a sort of stupendous amount of land.
while, yes, there will technically be some competition, in the areas under discussion i don't think it will meaningfully effect housing prices.
(i could divide the amount of land in rural america by the number of possible work-from-home employees and we could figure out what it'll do to the average population density. but, hell, i've lived in these areas, i don't need to.)
Missoula is not really the rural part of America that the parent comment is talking about. While Missoula’s population “feels” small at 75k, it’s the second largest metropolitan area (110k-ish) in the state, which has a population of a million.
I’ve been following news of this sort closely during COVID as a personal curiosity. Most of the affected towns are either (1) within 1-2 hour drive of a major metro center (e.g. northwestern CT) (2) already a major vacation destination prior to COVID (Jackson Hole, WY and friends) (3) a top-3 metro area in the state. If you check more than one box, the situation is more dramatic.
Many of these places were already changing prior to COVID, but, as in other domains, COVID has accelerated an already latent process.
Basically, Missoula’s example does not contradict their claim.
But yes, remote workers are more likely to move to a place like Missoula than a place like Philipsburg, MT.
> All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals.
Rural America is huge. If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).
Housing is expensive in cities because 10 million people want to live in the same square mile. The US, however, has 4 million of those square miles. (Everyone in New York City could move to California and have 10 acres of their own. I did the calculation with the intent of showing that everyone in the country could have their own square mile, but that's not true -- I didn't realize how big a square mile actually is.)
Remote workers probably aren't going to raise the cost of living that much. It is certainly possible that they could all move to the same place (i.e. turn Aspen, Colorado into New York City), and that would be a problem. But if people randomly move into rural areas, there just aren't enough people buying 1 million dollar apartments in the same place to "gentrify out" farmers.
I'll also point out, that remote work doesn't necessarily imply that it's possible to move to the middle of nowhere. You still need a good Internet connection, and many people want to live closer than an hour's drive away from a grocery store or hospital. I work remotely but I'm happy to live 3 minutes away from Manhattan. There are factors other than commuting to work that account for where people live.
> If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).
Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.
Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.
The opposite is true. They pay the same taxes, use the same stores and go to the same bars and attend tbe same cultural events. A lot of rural home owners work in a nearby town as well.
Right but the remote worker will spend money locally keeping the local economy going. And do you not pay local income tax? The only possible downside is if they're hooked on convenience and order everything online from amazon or whatever instead of patronising local shops.
Not sure there are "local income taxes" at least not here in AZ.. the towns migth get some of the state taxes, property taxes, and any services paid for ( trash, water, etc.. )
If remote work really takes off, it won't be long until most employers adjust salaries down to each employee's local cost of labor. Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?
> Why pay someone a Bay Area or NYC salary when they work in rural Montana, when they could pay a rural Montana salary to get someone who works in rural Montana?
Because you can't get anyone in rural Montana who is capable of getting a job paying Bay Area or NYC salaroies to accept that offer. Adjustment will result in meeting somewhere in the middle but whether that's 25% or 95% of Bay Area salaries is an open question.
Remote salaries might end up being somewhere between rural Montana and Bay Area. There's no reason to assume there's a huge supply of software engineers in the US which would make all remote salaries to be in the low-end.
Maybe those jobs don't pay enough to save up to move.
That and the logistics of moving. Not to mention, having a job beats not having a job. And moving often means not having a job to start. Especially when your only work experience is retail, factory floor, and farmhand.
You can't really afford to take a week off of getting paid.
And if you're constantly working to make ends meet, you don't really have time or energy to work on developing marketable skills.
Exhausted employees have less time and energy to apply for better jobs, learn new skills, or organize. This reduces turnover. It also helps that some employees will develop health problems from overwork, and then they really won't be able to afford being without insurance.
Companies tend to work (as we humans do) under the principle of least effort.
More employees means more HR work, more administrative work, more legal work, more work in general, and unless the benefits of hiring more people are great, they will just abuse the employees at hand.
First you need work two 10 hour shifts a day, 7 days a week to survive. Then you can't even study, because you can't afford it.
This is why proper unemployment and free schools (evil SOCIALISM) comes in to play. People don't need to work themselves to death just to survive, there are safety nets you can fall back on. (Yes there are holes in said nets, but it's better than the gaping black hole the US has).
I thought so as well, but then I started offering jobs to people I knew hated their jobs and also worked unpaid overtime constantly, with the smallest salaries. But for some reason, when offered a 6x salary freelancing, for less hours, with guidance, and the road paved as much as possible, everyone refuses.
Turns out there are people who take shitty jobs on purpose, out of a sense of... I don't know, fear, embarrassment, impostor syndrome, or a combination of them.
All of them in this case did, with no families or major expenses to support, and not a weird scam or pyramid scheme, just standard contract development work where in two or three contractually secured months they'd make what they currently do in over a year. The reason is basically geographical, working for clients abroad is just ridiculously more profitable (think Venezuela).
The risk in this case is extremely low, I wasn't looking for referrals either (I'd offered to give it to them if there were any), just genuinely wanted my friends to earn more and work less.
Freelancing is how I broke out of the shit job loop. But freelancing is not widely available and I consider myself extremely lucky and blessed to have been able to do it.
Besides some of the obvious reasons such as the previously mentioned location limitations and low education limiting possibilities, I'll throw out another one. Once you're in a job like this it kind of limits your ability to branch out into less physically demanding and better paying work. Your resume kind of pigeon holes you with respect to future employment and the fact that you're working long, exhausting days means its very hard to find the time and energy to build your skills outside of work.
According to the article, "Most people make between $16.50 and $20 an hour".
So, at 84 hours a week (46 normal pay, 38 overtime at 1.5x), thats $1700/week on the low end, or $88k/year.
I dont think that excuses the forced overtime and I would absolutely expect severe health and/or mental health issues to result from the overwork. But, these people can quit (and according to the article many do) - I expect the only reason folks do stay is because they cant make the same money anywhere else.
People with poor formal qualifications or habilities not longer marketable have little choice except double shifts to raise a family. Just imagine being 40 years old, no college or technical education, having only retail work experience.
The article does not claim that it is unpaid. If they were working unpaid hours that would be a serious legal issue and state and federal regulators would be getting involved.
If you don't have an easy option close at hand it ends up being a choice between continuing, taking a massive hit to your income, or choosing unemployment.
The pay is exactly high enough to maintain minimal staffing. That's normal, but in working conditions like this sometime it ends up a tiny bit higher than the local rate for similar jobs if there's competition for employees. Not everyone can maintain the working conditions. They leave, get kicked out, or they're useful (or connected) enough to keep around working humane hours.
The rest have bills, or legal requirements to maintain employment, or burned a bridge at the other factory in town, or they're inexperienced enough to not know better. They establish a reputation as an employee who can be pushed into working inhumane hours. Managers are often rewarded for keeping up with production with a small team.
A few years go by before you know it, and working hours like this is expensive. You don't have time to maintain your stuff and house, you pay someone else to. Kids need to be watched. Spouses leave. Drugs or alcohol offer to fill the holes in Maslow's Hierarchy you've sacrificed. Savings don't pile up like one might assume.
Interviewing is treacherous. If you're lucky you work a night shift so you can do an interview instead of sleeping. They'll ask you how much you make per hour and offer you a lower "starting rate" hourly wage with fewer hours, which would cut your income drastically, and suggest there might be a review/small raise in 6 months. They'll call your employer before offering you a job at that rate, putting you at risk of retaliation whether you take the offer or not.
> After 37 years, I still get forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week... I make $20.50 [an hour] after 37 years here.
Assuming they obey overtime laws, he's' making $112,996 a year ((40 * 20.5) + (44 * 1.5 * 20.5) * 52).
I think that has something to do with it. There likely aren't any alternatives where someone with that skill set can make nearly double the median income for Topeka, Kansas. But there are probably alternatives where they can make maybe a half that at more reasonable hours.
It looks like Kansas overtime law kicks in at 46 hours in a week[0], so closer to $110k. Maybe a touch less since they probably shut down periodically for machine maintenance.
Thing is, this sort of schedule turns into a weird form of neo-slavery. You don't have enough time to yourself to job hunt, even if something is even available, and you can't schedule an interview around your work. Saving money can be nigh impossible even when making that much because you no don't really have the time to try doing anything the cheap way (making your own food, fixing things yourself, etc.). It turns into this vicious, endless cycle of nothing but work and sleep. If you try take a day off, you run the risk of getting fired.
Federal overtime starts at 40 hours per week. Your link specifically says:
Whichever law (state or federal) is more favorable to the worker will apply. In most instances, federal law will cover issues involving overtime pay and minimum wage.
> Kansas state labor laws on overtime pay do not require overtime pay until an employee has worked 46 hours within a week. While this may apply in limited circumstances where an employer is not covered by the FLSA, generally the FLSA will apply and requires employers to pay time and a-half for all hours worked over 40 per workweek, unless an employee is properly classified as exempt.
Yeah, the 46 hour rule probably doesn't apply in this case, though who knows what sorts of shenanigans Lays is trying.
I worked in a factory for years when I was younger, not too different than what he is describing.
There are some jobs, like the one I have now writing code where you think about them even when you aren't doing them, they invade your dreams. I feel like I am writing code all the time, even when I'm not logged in to the work laptop actually doing it.
There are other jobs where you don't think about them when you aren't doing them, you go home after work and then you stop thinking about work.
The factory job I had was not like either of those, I did not think about work even while I was doing it. My mind was free while my body was getting paid to do work. I could be thinking about anything else other than the physical work I was doing.
I'm getting old, won't be able to write code much longer. The factory job that I used to do doesn't exist now, it's been automated. Save your money, kids.
The man in the article is working there due to golden handcuffs:
> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits.
New hires keep quitting once they experience the work and schedule, which is why those who are trapped are forced to do overtime.
> Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative?
A lot of people who work paycheck-to-paycheck in "flyover state" parts of the USA do not have sufficient savings to relocate to a place where they could work a normal 40-hour week schedule and support themselves on a reasonable income. That, combined with family ties and obligations force them to remain in their local community.
No choices. This is in the Midwest in the middle of no-where.
No you can't realistically move - every other location is far more expensive and would require significant relocation expense, and you'd have to leave your community, likely where you were born and raise(d) your family.
And yet during the Great Depression poor people moved by the thousands to find work in other states. Sure it was hard but they did what they had to in order to survive.
Mobility doesn’t work like that anymore. Moving states in 1929 meant, for the most part, a completely fresh start - your landlord wasn’t going to chase you for the rest of the rent on your lease, you didn’t have a car payment or health insurance to worry about (using social security nets like medical or housing assistance is even harder when you haven’t yet established residency in a new state), and if you had any debts or even reputation issues they were very unlikely to “follow” you. Now we have credit reporting, background checks, and a system that, by design, makes it all but impossible to “start over” when you have no other options.
Depending on your skill set or circumstances, you need a job quick; more hours means more money. What sucks is then you become reliant on that money, and changing careers is near impossible without risking your family's security.
Personally Ive done the 12+ hr/7 day in the film industry, a notoriously abusive industry (tv shows shoot 14-18hr days) but the money is great. We call it blood money, and do it until we need a vacation. We also get health benefits
Going on strike is deciding not to do it, and the article suggests they can't hire anyone:
> Frito-Lay has been told they need to fix this but unfortunately, when they bring in new people, they force the same schedule on them and they quit. Frito-Lay has waited so long to replace workers, and now Frito Lay has a horrible reputation in town so a lot of people won't work here.
It seems like the existing workers mostly put up with it for a while, and then it eventually fell apart like you'd expect.
In addition to the many insightful replies here add: Once you have a working class addicted to some combination of fast food, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, pot, opioids, and other drugs which cost money, they have a reduced capability to dig themselves out of a hole.
Man it is super weird that you put caffeine on that list.
I assume, because you did it, that you're one of those mutants who doesn't use it nor like it much. Good for you and all, but caffeine made the modern world, the majority of the population uses it every day, and industrial society wouldn't function without it.
It's also super-cheap even on a modest salary, and most workplaces give it away for free because of how necessary it is to production.
I am aware of Pollan's recently well-publicized assertion that caffeine made the modern world. I am unconvinced.
I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. (https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/)
Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for caffeine. Thereafter, they are just paying and consuming to avoid headaches and reach the baseline.
My experience consuming caffeine for 35 years was that the enjoyment required increasing consumptions. This is common for most. Maybe it is different for you.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I can share my experience.
I used to drink at least 2 cups of coffee a day, and at least 3-4 of black tea.
over a year I slowly backed down to just a single coffee coffee in the morning.. then eventually switched to decafe coffee for that one. I had headaches for about a week, and I think I was irritable.
Recently I stopped even the decafe coffee, and now drink 1 or 2 decafe tea a day when it's cold.
I feel great, save money and don't miss the ups and downs of real coffee - I used to get the sweats, shakes, funny shallow breathing, etc. etc.
I also had no idea I was living life through a "fog", that I didn't even know about until a few months after I stopped. Life is much better now.
All studies confirm that caffeine consumed regularly does not improve alertness or anything else above baseline. After a tolerance is built, daily caffeine only returns the user to baseline performance, that they have fallen under due to withdrawal. If you use caffeine for more than about 2 or 3 days in a row, it stops doing anything useful. If everyone quit caffeine immediately, there would be a couple weeks of awful productivity, and then everything would go back to normal.
Because they pay marginally above minimum wage for unskilled work and offer consistent hours.
When I worked in the mall in college, our prep guy was an immigrant from Ireland who worked about 15-16 hours a day. He prepped vegetables and fruit at our place, did painting, did maintenance work and closed the day doing janitorial stuff.
You do it to support your family and because you’re too busy to find a better option.
Most of these workers have no technical skills. Their jobs are very physical and laborious in many cases. My dad was a maintenance tech at Frito for a very long time and he never experienced anything like this. They still would not promote him to management because he had no degree, despite him being the most senior and experienced maintenance tech there. They often flew him to other plants to set them up, do PLC magic, etc. Anyway, the packers, cooks, and all the unskilled labor are treated like replaceable cogs. There is zero upward promotion in these roles. It takes almost no time to train someone up for most of these roles. They will use them up and hire the next person who will burn out in 6 months. (I think these kind of working conditions are terrible, but it’s pretty clear why Frito can do this).
I think it is also interesting why people agree to work for the fraction of value they create for the company. Somehow this kind of suffering and exploitation is socially acceptable. Companies make billions and workers struggle to put food on the table.
I think governments should focus on companies avoiding tax rather than taxing them though workers (as workers suffer and yield is fraction of what companies should be paying) and we should look at tying minimum wage to company revenue (with a nationwide minimum, so that worker always gets paid a wage they can live off).
I'm generally a libertarian but I think current corporate law is insane. This seems like a reasonable starting point, maybe along with a policy requiring giving each employee a stake in the company.
Does the employee have to buy into that stake? Do they surrender it, or sell it, or keep it when they leave? Do they get more over time? Why should minimum wage field hands that will work for a month own part of my farm?
We have had negative cash flow for the last decade, should our employees have made under minimum wage due to capital calls that were made by the business?
How does a bank do proper due diligence on a loan for a business with 47,000 owners, but isn’t publicly traded? What about the administrative overhead around decision making needing a timely signature from every owner?
It’s really simple to say employees should have equity, but get into the details and the idea falls apart.
Factories like this are typically “unskilled labor” and there are few options in any given job market for unskilled laborers that pay this good. For Topeka Kansas w/ all of this forced over time the individual featured has moved himself into upper middle class income range.
I have met a number of parents who give up their personal lives and well being workingto provide their children the best lives possible, so that their children never have to work night shift or over time in a factory to provide a decent life for their families. It is a sacrifice.
In America a lot of these positions are not full time. Employers like McDonald’s and frito will try to do their best to give “hours” (part time) so that they don’t need to give benefits.
So, imagine you’re making minimum wage and you have no benefits from your job and you have to remain in a certain income band in order to qualify for government aid. It’s very hard to take a vacation let alone to just take a Sabbatical and backpack around the world to “find themselves” because they can barely afford to survive. It’a a very hard life.
There's no "siesta" (a spanish word and custom) anywhere in Portugal, including Madeira. Businesses may close for an hour or so for lunch, but "siesta" is not a thing. Not sure why you picked that as an example out of any other work expectation in any country.
I was comparing hard working Madeira to other places with year long tourism.
There, for some reason, culturally, they decided to work really hard all year.
I was talking to a hard working cab driver and told him about seasonal tourism in Croatia (tourist season lasts about 5 months) and he couldn't believe me that for the rest of the year a bunch of people do not work at all.
don't know if you read or watched Catch-22. There's phrase - what's good for the enterprise, is good for the country, hence good for the citizen. But if you're educated enough, you soon realize it's a lie. Hence why the `ills` of socialism are played all over the news n media.
Then of course, the propaganda that you're poor because you don't work hard. Which again forces people to work hard. Then you put in incentives such as tying employment to healthcare - hence no choice to be unemployed. n now you've the perfect recipe oh sorry I meant endless supply of labor / soldiers you can abuse at your whim.!!
People running factories have been exploiting and overworking the people working in their factories since there have been factories. There's nothing new here.
I think there is always going to be a bit of a disconnect and lack of empathy about excessive work hours when an hourly worker gripes about forced overtime (where in the US they are legally required to be paid at least 1.5x their hourly rate for the overtime) is complaining to salaried management (that are generally working a similar number of hours…but unpaid beyond the 40).
Kind of makes you wonder which side is being exploited.
I’ve been both and can tell you with assurance that in my experience in a 35+ year career that management is not easier, you don’t make as much per hour worked, and as an exempt employee…you generally have much less legal job protections as compared to hourly employees.
I bet I haven’t worked less than a 55 hour week in the last 20 years except for weeks where I was on vacation. Those lovely weeks of vacation—-probably 20 on average.
The real problem is cost of living without a job. It is just too fking expensive to live with little or no income.
As a result, people in less than abundant job markets are forced into taking up jobs to merely survive.
If someone is trying to imagine an alternative world, they should visit non-tier 1 cities of SE Asia or India or China. People routinely survive with less than full time income. Sure, it's a life with less material pleasure but it is a surprisingly adequate survival life.
There is no job that won’t work you for as much as they can. They pay you low enough to where you’re dependent on them paycheck to paycheck. The turnover is high and if you don’t like the conditions they get rid of you. There are a ton of people in line for your job who will put up with worse working conditions so you either lick boots or you aren’t making ends meet this week. The culture at every job is that if you aren’t sweating from 6AM to 6PM you’re “lazy.” Don’t want to work overtime? You either won’t make ends meet or you will be fired. If you don’t make ends meet in America you will be homeless unless you are married with children or can live with your parents.
The only way to remedy this is to go to college or trade school and hope your degree makes you valuable enough that you can bargain for a realistic work/life balance.
That has got to be the single most ineffective union I’ve ever seen. If that’s what a union shop looks like I can understand why people might not want to pay union dues.
We've been told for years that THIS is what a union is supposed to fight back against and prevent or fix. If they can't accomplish their sole purpose in existing, what is the point? What are the employees paying for?
I'd like to understand why you're being downvoted. Your comment isn't suggesting the factory owners/managers aren't at fault, but isn't the purpose of the union to protect the workers from exactly this?
Frito-Lay should be ashamed of themselves, and the union is an absolute disgrace as well. Both the union and Frito-Lay are stealing these peoples lives.
> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits.
Had they not been locked in by the pension, I'd imagine most of them would've quit, and Frito-Lay would've been force to improve conditions.
I wonder if unions prefer pensions pretty much for the same reason--it allows businesses to abuse workers, forcing them to turn to unions to bargain for better conditions while also keeping them locked in to the business and thus the union.
Correct. I have a 401(k) that I put my own money into and choose the funds I invest in. If I leave my job, I can take that money with me.
Companies should auto enroll and fund employees 401(k)s, which most don't do now. But they should not require 40 years of employment to be eligible to receive ANY retirement funds.
We've been talking about non-competes on HN lately. What could be more anti-competitive than having a 40 year cliff on a major chunk of your compensation? Tech companies have a 1 year cliff on equity, and even that is outrageous.
"Locked in" needs some clarification. For the overwhelming majority of defined benefit pensions, employees vest in (become qualified to receive) their benefits within the first 5 years of their service. They only need to wait until they've met the payout provisions of the plan...something like 55 years old and 10+ years of service for early retirement, for example.
What's more likely is that employees are sticking around because their years of service factors into their ultimate benefit payout once they retire. More years of service (up to a limit, typically) gets a higher benefit. And this probably only matters for the employees who've been around longest because the plan is probably frozen to new entrants.
The employee being quoted is weighing the value he'll get from adding 2 more years to his benefit formula vs going somewhere else for higher pay.
A pension should never be conditional on “not quitting”. Can it legally be? If you work 10 years you earned 10 years of pension. It should be yours regardless of what happened (e.g if you get fired).
If pensions can be conditional on not quitting, not getting fired or similar, then unions already failed (but this should be law and not require unions).
Though it's possible that there is enough information (age, tenure, gender) in the article to identify him. A bit hard to say.
He'd also have a pretty clear cut case with the NLRB if he was fired or otherwise punished for talking to the press about labor conditions (which isn't to say that this doesn't happen sometimes anyways).
EDIT: Er, nevermind. I misread it as being told to Mark McCarter thinking he was the Vice journalist. But he's actually the factory employee and Lauren Gurley is the journalist. I'm an idiot. TY ALittleLight for pointing out my mistake.
Why is your first instinct to assume unions are wholesome, benevolent actors? Unions have a long history of corruption, racism, and being associated with organized crime.
Off topic tidbit from the article - note only corn based snacks are made in Topeka. One presumes there are factories in Washington and Idaho for the potato chips.
Vegetables bought from contract farms (most of them) are bought by weight. This means the farmers have an incentive to over water right before harvest weigh in heavy. Even for stupid stuff like ketchup where more energy is then spent to dehydrate the water right back out.
Is there an alternative? By volume would lead to the same as well, for certain crops that may lead to waiting until crops are over ripe - less tasty - so they are bigger.
It seems like the only better alternative might be a fixed price based on count/average yield. It’s not perfect, but it seems possible that you could pay a farmer more (net of water costs) and the supplier could save money (net energy and transport costs). It wouldn’t work with all foods, but the volume of tomatoes alone could be meaningful.
The U.S. keeps sugar prices artificially high, and sugar is the first ingredient in Oreos. [1] That is why the candy companies fled Chicago for Canada. Probably also drove Oreo mfg out as well.
Wouldn't overtime cost Frito-Lay a lot extra? I don't get how a business can get to the point of heavily using it to the point that employees complain without thinking that it must hire more people.
And in plenty of union workplaces overtime is easy to give away, so they must be so enormously understaffed.
My guess is they've exhausted the local supply of labor for the price they're willing to pay, but I've been in situation where I don't think they crunched the numbers (or they didn't care). In my situation, which I feel bad comparing since it wasn't anywhere near as egregious, a team of us had mandatory overtime--enough to cover another salary at base pay. They didn't want to hire someone else because they said paying us 1.5x was less than hiring someone new with benefits. What I don't think they appreciated was covering vacations, resignation, or illness put even more stress on us and local laws required double-pay after a certain number of worked hours (which was put on us to try and avoid but still cover the shifts). When someone did resign, interviewing and onboarding made the next few months suck. Even with stronger labor laws than Kansas, the economic pressure wasn't enough to have them address the situation. A few people didn't mind the overtime and had the flexibility and willingness to work.
I suspect that many organizations have a "model" that's profitable and they're afraid to mess with it or dig into problems making it work better. I had another job where it was kind of a joke that most people quit their first week. They had a group that had been working there for years, they just had a lot of turnover for new hires. It seemed like a weird process to interview and hire so many people that left immediately, but they were running (presumably) a profitable business and they didn't seem interested in changing things.
Same with 401ks and vesting periods and employer sponsored healthcare. It gives leverage to the employer to keep people working a job they otherwise wouldn't. Jobs should pay cash and in some cases equity. Expand tax advantaged accounts for retirement (IRAs), do something with healthcare (maybe single payer, idk).
"In its latest contract offer, Frito-Lay has said it would raise wages by four percent over the next two years"
Consumer price index has risen 4.5% since June of last year. With Biden planning similar amounts of printing, it's likely this trend will continue. What Frito-Lay is actually saying here is that they will cut employee's purchasing power by 5.2% over the next two years if that amount of inflation holds.
I would say yes and no. If you (the employee) are heavily invested in the success of the company because you have a lot of stock options, or its success would look great on your work history, or you lied about having certain skills and now you have to work double to get the job done while learning, then you might decide to put in crazy hours. But that is a don't ask / don't tell situation. If there is any record that management knew you were working 7 days straight, then they would be in the soup. But ultimately this gives the power to the employee. At a previous company where I was that overworking employee, management tried to force a new oncall rota onto the whole team which clearly took the piss, I was able to pull on the ripcord and say "fuck, no". Unfortunately this put more pressure on the US team. And if management try to fire you in Europe they better have a better reason than "wouldn't work longer hours" or "knows their rights", so you're protected when you do raise the concern.
My brother-in-law works at the Target distribution center in Topeka, and is very confused why these workers don't just quit and work at either the Target or WalMart centers that are practically next-door and begging for workers.
Definitely sounds like a rough gig here, but everyone is begging for entry-level labor, most at higher wages than this. The workers need to just protest with their feet and quit.
I used to work as an equity analyst, so have come at this problem from totally the other end.
The number one problem, that I have seen no-one talk about, are certain incentives from the market (not short-termism, if someone says that they don't understand what is happening).
I buy PEP at 15x earnings...I don't need a lot of growth to make that price work. Even if they grow a 10-20% over five years, I will probably make a market return. Which is fair.
If I buy PEP at 25x earnings plus (roughly where it is today)...that is different. I need earnings to double and then some within five years. Huge imperative for growth. If I don't see the growth, I will lose 50%+ on the position.
So when the share price is that high, the incentives are out the window. The board is never going to hire the guy who says: well, share price could do with a reset, how about we take a year boys...no, at 25x earnings, they will take the guy who comes into the room ten minutes after his piece, rips his shirt off in the interview, and drinks blood for breakfast. The boys on the comp committee want growth, they will set the 20x salary bonus package accordingly, and the exec team is going to fight like rats in a bag to get the juice.
This got very bad in FMCG too because 3G Capital exposed the amount of middle management waste at Heinz and, of course, consumers are consuming less of these unhealthy snacks. No top-line growth, so costs is the only way you can pay out.
On the OP, it is deplorable. Investors do not want this. Most fund managers do not have money in their own funds, the PR is horrendous. Companies shouldn't treat their workers this way. But...the Fed has pumped up the market, every exec team is feeling joocy on that stimmy, multiples are through the roof...everyone knows it is going to blow but the music is still playing.
I have no idea what the solution is, only that lots of people get the incentives totally wrong. Investors aren't short-term. Every investor wants the stock they can hold for five, ten, twenty years. But I have seen good companies run themselves into the ground because the comp committee wanted a "stretch" target that was literally impossible (particularly in retail, any company that can grow unprofitably but cheaply will be hung by the comp committee). Companies are even doing % of market cap growth by date X packages now, it is truly obscene (thank Elon). CEOs create these cultish atmospheres because of the incentives of pay (this is true of PEP: afaik, Nooyi was a terrible CEO, made terrible acquisitions to goose the share price, never got challenged, and walks away with $25-50m...if you lose the guys on the floor, you don't have a company tomorrow...if you don't hire Nooyi, you have saved billions in shareholder value...but it is the latter that is indispensable?).
It was unclear for me too. Though the gist of what I understood around the jargon:
Overvalued companies are driven by the stock market to have unsustainable growth, always more than before or at the very least always going up over time, even with complete market dominance.
Therefore once a company caps out a market only cutting quality or civic duty corners are left and it becomes a knife-fight to the death for all involved; with more literal impacts to the workers and customers (quality of output). Even if a company COULD just allow the profit to stabilize at a long term sustainable level that would benefit everyone most overall; they won't and will instead be driven for short term results.
But the point is explicitly not that the issue is short-termism. I am not going to go over everything again, but the issue is not solved (as everyone today thinks) by bailing people in.
Look at Tesla's exec package: Elon's package is what...$100bn? He will lose money if the stock goes to zero, but that is still a very one-sided risk for him. So doing long-term packages makes no difference because the reward is all one-sided, no risk, and the fundamentals usually aren't changed. It actually makes it worse because you dangle $100m in front of someone on a base package of $500k salary...they will believe anything to get that money. So timescale isn't relevant (again, the market isn't short-term...every investor wants a "one decision stock"...you buy, hold for the rest of your life).
As an example, this is why you see so much M&A...it makes no sense but you buy revenues from another company, you get growth. Execs don't care about the price, you just need growth, you just need to hit your targets. Whether they are short or long, the issue is with the incentives and target (although are wrong for a few different reasons I have already mentioned, and I haven't yet seen a company that has managed to structure pay perfectly...most just wildly overpay for very mediocre execs who add nothing).
Dudes, when I say "Speak English" I mean the OP should put it in simple terms that people who are not familiar with stock and performance related earnings for management and investors can understand.
It is gobbledydook to most of us unless HN readers have a better grasp of these issues than most.
This is the “have you tried yoga” of labor discourse — shallow, unhelpful, and really dismissive, especially when factory workers are not given the choice to work additional hours, working conditions are challenging at best, and management seems (putting it charitably) negligent.
Conflating optional decisions with force is dangerous.
If they have better alternatives, they should do those. If they believe that by stopping work, they can get change from their employer, go for it. But nothing here is forced.
This is depressing to read :(