I think companies should pay employees what they are worth, after taking a fair cut. Common opinion is that should pay what they can get away with, using any and all cultural forces, information asymmetries, etc available to them.
One of the ways companies pay women less is by taking advantage of the fact that women are less likely to think they are worth as much as they are. It's easy for companies to take advantage of this things, so they do. I still think it's wrong.
I won't think less of you for disagreeing, because as you say it's quite normal. I would say it's a common wrongdoing. Many/most employers aren't aware of the harm they are causing. And common (therefore often subconscious) wrongdoing is a lesser evil than conscious wrongdoing. But it's still wrongdoing.
I’m not aware of any other term that captures a practice that is both commonplace and wrong.
This is good and I’m adding it to my lexicon. Thanks!
There is so much money to be made by companies in paying someone for this: think about how much lost productivity there is because underpriced employees aren't bothering to solve problems they have the skills to solve!
Essentially: someone who efficiently uses capital to pay themselves to find ways to give more capital to employees who can efficiently use it. Micro VC I guess you could think of it is? Like each employee is a place to invest capital, and that is inevitably disbursed as higher wages.
Doesn't mean it's a great idea. While Google is a great cash cow, I'm not sure we will continue to see great innovation.
- tensorflow, I think a huge innovation and a big win for google.
- great work in self driving cars, but that has yet to come to fruition.
- the tech behind gmail has also been really important to the web.
- chrome is great, though not a huge leap in innovation over what firefox was doing
a lot of their other products i would argue were just purchases from a company with a lot of money and weight such as:
- android
- youtube
- google maps (its my understanding that the creator wouldnt allow google to buy his company unless he could do this but i could be wrong)
so hmm, yes I would say they are innovative and we have seen some great innovations from them; though, not at break neck speeds a lot of people assume. curious to others thoughts
The problem is that while this was happening, Google was issuing large stock buybacks, essentially transferring their balance sheet away from wages for the rank and file to investors and the executive team.
Instead of leading by example or applying their principles, Google treated it with the same HR analysis any other company would do. I can see how Google's employees, especially the earlier "Don't be evil" hires, would be upset by the lack of innovation in this space.
And when every firm behaves the same way, the long slow decay of the middle class (see charts below) starts to boil over into the political space. It's a serious problem.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/W...