Archive for the ‘worker’ Category
How profitable is overworking and underpaying workers?
July 19, 2009I was just thinking about why there’s such a constant process of employees being overworked and underpaid.. and so I thought I should run a what-if scenario with numbers – see just HOW profitable being cruel to your workers is and how you can pull it off without being lynched. Here’s the results of that:
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Say you have a job that should require 10 people at $40,000 per year costing a total of $400,000 per year to do correctly with happy workers. You want to reduce that cost and not have to deal with so many employees. You could plan for each person to do two people’s jobs, employing only 5 people – and you can pay them less, say $30,000 per year. Doing that could result in mutiny though and what’s more, you don’t want to interact with their newfound animosity.
So to solve both problems you insert a middle manager at twice the reduced workers’ pay ($60,000). This overpaid manager is there to obscure you and ride your 5 overworked & underpaid workers so they don’t mutiny. This person will be willing to do that because you’re paying him or her bank and they have this false sense of authority. Your cost equaling what would be 7 employees, is a new total of $210,000 per year, nearly half of your original operating budget.
If you had 7 underpaid workers with no manager (same operating cost), you still might have a mutiny and you still have to interact with all of them. If you cut 5 jobs but kept their salaries the same (within $10,000 of the same operating cost) then there’s still a risk of mutiny and you have to deal with their woes of being overworked.
But with the original cuts and manager method you get your $190,000 (almost $200k) in savings without serious risk of mutiny or needing to interact with anyone besides your toady manager.
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That’s why it’s so profitable for CEOs to make your life hell, even in this one scenario they can nearly double their profits if they ride the fine line between mutiny and obedience.
to Worker Rights rally members in DC
October 7, 2007We as a nation seem so quick to forget that we’ve not always had even the bare-bones niceties that workplaces are now required to provide. Child labor, 8 hour days, minimum wage, and so on? Many of these changes are only as old as our grandparents. Murders, beatings and massacres of union leaders and striking workers? That only slowed down in the 50’s..
We haven’t had these rights for very long at all, and getting them cost the lives of so many good people.. people risking everything for a better common good.
To let this country slide into the past, into the dark days of inhuman working conditions – it’s a tragedy. A tragedy to let this happen around us, and even to FORGET the deadly sacrifice our parents, grandparents and great grandparents made to get every little step closer to a civil society. It’s the worst possible end to our struggle for basic worker rights..
The rich are rapidly eroding every right and every regulation we’ve risked and lost with our lives to attain. This is happening right now, all over the country. They seek little more than personal gain to come directly at your expense. Their tactics are insidious, their purpose is callous if not sadistic, and they use the very qualities that make you human against you.
They MUST be stopped at every turn. There are more of us than their are of them.. and they need us for them to be who they are. Without us, they’re nothing. We can win again. We can always win again. We just need to remember our past, be aware of our present, and be willing to risk what they haven’t already taken from us – for a better future. Sometimes that will be our time, sometimes that will be our safety.. but if we don’t stand up to risk everything, then everything is eventually what they will take from us all.