I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

I bet his girlfriend lives in America.

If eliminating a job actually saves the company money, then that job was costing them more money than it generated and should not have existed in the first place. It's not lazy in that case, it's the right thing to do.

What a lot of people don't realize is that, as a couple people have pointed out, it's expensive and time consuming (and causes conflicts which many managers would prefer to avoid) to fire someone. Companies will tend to avoid doing so if they can. The result is that when times are good, a bit of fat will collect and you'll end out retaining a number of people who aren't very effective at their jobs, or don't fit with the skill sets needed, or for some other reason could be let go at any time, but haven't because the economic need to do so isn't great enough to warrant expending the time and effort. When times get tight, those are the first people laid off as part of the cost cutting.

While it's easy to say that this is somehow unfair to the worker, another way to look at it is that the worker was already getting more than his labor was worth. Sucks to get hit in the face with a dose of reality, but your labor really is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. It's surprising how many people don't get this though.

You're conflating two things though. There's a difference between cutting jobs and cutting pay. I agree with you in the second case (more or less), but not in the first.

I think the first thing you have to understand is that labor is supposed to produce more revenue for the employer than it costs to employ. This should be one of those "duh" things, but it's surprising how often people make arguments which rely on an assumption that this isn't true. No one would much less should knowingly employ someone who costs them more to employ than they gain from employing that person.

If we divide labor into two categories, effective labor (that which produces more revenue for the employer than it costs), and ineffective labor (that which costs more than it produces), it should follow that effective labor doesn't cost the employer anything. Effective labor is a net positive. There is no cost cutting gained if you lay off those employees. Ineffective labor, on the other hand, may be cut without hurting the bottom line of the company, and will in fact increase that bottom line.

The trick is that it's not always clear which employees fall into which category. So, if your job is to figure this out and to lay off people who are costing the company more than their labor is worth, and you do this well, you absolutely *should* get a bonus, right? If you lay off effective labor, your company will lose money. If you lay off ineffective labor, your company will gain money. Everything else staying the same, a round of layoffs will only benefit a companies bottom line if on whole those laid off were in the ineffective labor group.


Paycuts is a different issue, but it's pretty rare for a company to force paycuts across the board and then use the savings to hand extra bonuses out to just the top executives. And sometimes the issue is muddled because we're not given the context of those bonuses. You have to look at how many people total received them *and* how those bonuses compared to previous year bonuses. If a company handed out $100M in bonuses last year, and this year they cut pay by 5% across the board and only gave out $50M in bonuses, but you didn't compare that number to last year, it might be easy to say "OMG! They cut everyone's pay and then handed out $50M in bonuses!!!". That would be a false impression of what really happened. Pay was cut by 5% across the board and bonuses were cut by 50%. Tells a whole different story when you include the context, doesn't it?


Honestly, it seems like a lot of these sorts of outrage are based on half information and hype. When you look more closely and get the facts, it's often much ado about nothing at all.

Many of those top level employees make the majority of their money from those bonuses. It's difficult to retain any employee if you cut their pay by a huge margin. If the ownership believes they are vital assets, or that they can't get a workable replacement for cheaper, then they will still give them some degree of bonus, even in rough times. I personally receive a large chunk of my income via bonuses, and while I'm not top end management, a 50% cut in bonus would have me looking for greener pastures. Management gets paid for good management, and sometimes that means layoffs. If ownership thought the bonuses weren't warranted, or that paying the other employees more would be better for business, they would do that, again, assuming some level of basic competence.

If a company, especially a small business is losing money, that's one thing. If you are increasing the workload above what people were hired to do just to impress stockholders then you are just being a douchebag. I'm certainly not advocating businesses running in the red just to keep people employed, since the obvious end to that scenario is all the workers losing their jobs when the company folds.

Well, fuck. Guess we all ought to start working for the same rates they get in China then.

This. When I got my job the salary I accepted is based on the fact that I would also get predictable bonuses. Cutting my bonus is the same as cutting my pay.

LOL what? I work everyday thanks. While I do get to sit on my *** a lot (being maitnence electrician in a factory has its perks) She hardly supports me. I smoke a lot of weed so what you jealous. I also drink a lot of beer, and scratch my nuts a lot too. I worked hard in school so I could sit around doing **** all at work. It paid off in aces.

You know what I did last night, I sat in my office playing Super Mario 3D land for 5 hours until we had a controls issue that I had to go fix. I did 3 minutes of work (turns out a proxy got oil on it and it was stuck on.) then I went and had an hour lunch. The last 2 hours of my night was spent talking with friends around the plant from the comfort of my Golf Cart.

Ya I have a ******* sweet job. It lets me be a lazy ****. Jealous?

Because it's a variable contingent on personal merit. There are people at my company that make a grand total of zero as their bonus. It's a way of having variable pay that doesn't seem arbitrary by giving people different base rates for their services and avoids a bit of the sticky wage problems associated with it. If my services create a couple million in additional revenue, they are contractually obligated to pay me above and beyond my base retaining rate. It's absolutely a bonus for exceptional work, but changing the valuations prescribed in the contract would be akin to a pay cut even if the base was left untouched, especially since the bonus values for me exceed the base significantly.

Let me guess, when your company finds someone who can do the maintenance you do and another field, hires them because it'll only take 5 minutes from their day to handle your job responsibilities, it'll be the companyy stealing from the poor, right?

He may very well be providing the company a lot of value by basically acting as a cheap insurance policy for the plant breakages. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a simple problem that could cause a few hours downtime to coordinate a fix which would also cost quite a lot more in terms of both management resources combined with the opportunity cost of plant downtime.

They aren't really paying him to fix the minute things, rather paying to have him onsite for cases where there is a critical failure. I've seen cases where companies cheap out on this sort of stuff and a 5 min fix becomes a 500k problem because failures compounded without adequate supervision.

Some people actually prefer to be busy at work so the time passes faster as opposed to having to find a way to kill the day. I definitely prefer the days when I'm not here adding to my post count. If I'm not busy at work, I'd rather be home doing whatever I want as opposed to killing time. The only one jealous of him who's responded to his job claims is you.


What I realize is that his company would be better served to get someone with tickets/certifications in multiple disciplines so that person can be doing something else in their downtime if there's consistently that much.

Edited, Nov 24th 2011 9:08pm by Uglysasquatch

Well then, now that we're in agreement, what would you like to argue about instead?

Think the Sox will do OK without Theo? I think we are in for another slump.