Don’t Subsidize Companies That Silence Workers | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Subsidize Companies That Silence Workers

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66 pointssmacktoward43 comments

/me looking at your silicon valley companies...

This also has to do with companies hiring more contractors vs full time employee's, then there are laws, and policies and regulations around that. Lots and lots of red tape.

Firing workers for trying to speak up about safety issues or starting a union is illegal, is it not?

A lot of companies have really poor performance review processes, read non-existent, this can be used to justify almost any firing.

In other words: Joe didn't get fired for raising Safety issues, he just happened to have a terrible performance review so he had to be fired.

Should the company have good performance review process then it's a bit more complicated but not by much:

1. Employee Raises Safety Issue

2. Fail Perf review # 1

3. Fail Perf review # 2

4. Get put on PIP

5. Fail to meet PIP objectives

6. Get Fired.

So, not immediate but can be done in 6 months or less. Not to mention the old trick of making the employees life impossible, etc ..

Yes, but quite often the company's lawyers are better paid and have more time than the employee's or the government's. Have a look at NLRB's site for unfair labor practices.

Supposedly, but it gets cloudy in right to work states.

Dont work their either!

This is an inherently classist attitude. I (and presumedly you) can get a new job easily and are in a labor seller’s market. This often isn’t the case universally or employers wouldn’t be able to act like this.

I don’t agree. It’s easier to change job now than it has ever been in history. That’s undeniable. You’re not bound by the jobs in your local area the way people were 50 years ago. Between remote work and the gig economy it’s safer than ever to quit a bad job and pick up temporary work in the meantime.

> and the gig economy

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Not only this is a risky proposition, you'll also be furthering the locust economy[0].

Don't subsidize, work for or invest in locust economy.

[0] - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

It’s easy for people who have in-demand skills and live in certain areas. If you aren’t in certain fields, the “gig economy” usually means minimum wage with no job security or benefits with an automated boss constantly pressuring you.

Which to me at least seems a far more comforting place to land than no job.

If you’re young, single, and healthy, it’s better than nothing. For anyone who has non-trivial commitments, it’s not going to support being as cavalier about quitting jobs as was suggested up-thread.

Perhaps parent was talking about a huge company with many different kinds of employees, and corresponding wages. E.g. software developer versus order picker.

Yes I can presumably get a new job. Sounds like we were raised differently. I've done everything from commercial roofing, drilling water wells, to assembling busses in un-air conditioned facilities. There were many paths I could have taken, but I was never "stuck in a job". I did what I thought paid well, stayed current on health insurance, and kept a month or two of float in the bank.

Don't invest in them either.

Support small businesses & financial independence instead.

Don't subsidize for profit companies.

Subsidies are a transfer of tax payer money to a company. If a company is turning a profit while receiving subsidies, it is simply a transfer of tax payer money to business owners.

i think this is what people mean when they say "corporate socialism"?

It’s typically called “corporate welfare,” but, yes.

There are multiple kinds of subsidies, it's not as simple:

1) Walmart (or other) companies pay so low wages that employees are eligible for food stamps or other subsidies. This is utterly outrageous and should be a criminal offense - at least, states should be allowed to claw back the assistance costs plus a 200% fine from the company to discourage this behavior.

2) Environmental subsidies: Government pays subsidies to companies (or private persons) to install new environmentally-friendly technology which is (thanks to being new) too expensive from an ROI viewpoint. Germany did this with solar and basically kickstarted the market for home solar, USA did the same with the incentives for Tesla and other e-vehicles. Obviously, these subsidies are fine as they lead to further savings or environmental goals down the road.

3) Government gives tax breaks to companies for relocation/creating new business: these are the most contested probably as multinational entities (hello Amazon) often enough abuse them for their own profit only. Done right, however, this form of subsidies has a positive ROI as a new business pays local taxes as well as its workers, who additionally provide purchasing power in their communities.

>1) Walmart (or other) companies pay so low wages that employees are eligible for food stamps or other subsidies. This is utterly outrageous and should be a criminal offense - at least, states should be allowed to claw back the assistance costs plus a 200% fine from the company to discourage this behavior.

It's cheaper for the taxpayer to supplement a low wage than to provide for someone with no wage.

> It's cheaper for the taxpayer to supplement a low wage than to provide for someone with no wage.

The private owners of Walmart extract profit, but refuse to provide their workers with a wage they can survive (!!!) on. The point of social welfare programs is to help those in need, not to help profitable businesses make even more profits.

What GP is saying is Walmart aren't likely to start paying a worker fairly, they're more likely to just fire them and get someone even more desperate. Food stamps are awful but for now it's better than people going hungry. In the meantime there needs to be solutions, they're a temporary fix at best.

Welfare budget that we invest in spiting private owners is then no longer available for making net improvements for people in need.

Any government service saves businesses from having to pay workers enough to buy that service in the market. That’s usually a good thing for all involved. We don’t complain that public schools are a subsidy to employers who would otherwise pay enough for private school tuition.

> This is utterly outrageous and should be a criminal offense - at least, states should be allowed to claw back the assistance costs plus a 200% fine from the company to discourage this behavior.

Alternatively, instead of raising the minimum wage in a dumb and opaque way, the state could just raise the minimum wage instead? Why is it better for a local mom and pop grocery store to pay their employees garbage than for Walmart to do it?

I'm all for minimum wage, the problem is that cost-of-living is vastly different across states - make a universal US or state wide minimum wage and it will be too low in some areas and too high in others, and a regional minimum wage, while better, will be politicized as hell, plus it creates an incentive for local businesses to bribe or otherwise manipulate politicians to lower the minimum wage.

I'm not sure if there is a one-size-fits-all solution.

> 1) Walmart (or other) companies pay so low wages that employees are eligible for food stamps or other subsidies.

How would you compare that to simply not offering the job at all?

For a lot of low paying jobs, that’s the deal. Asking a company to pay more for labor than said labor increases profits is unreasonable. These jobs just largely wouldn’t be offered.

The same people would still end up on subsidies and don’t get any work experience. I’d argue it’s a worse result.

There's no real evidence that's true. There are lots of countries where minimum wage policies are providing (or exceeding) a living wage for their employees[0]. At least enough for their employees to feed themselves without government assistance.

None of these countries have a demonstrable lack of employment growth[0] at the low end, and in macro and micro economic terms have comparable growth with the US.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D... [1]: https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate.htm

The European economy is different in many ways, closer to home we’ve seen slashed hours [0] resulting in workers getting less overall take home pay, as well as increased prices.

Not only did it result in the poor making less but the cost of living went up.

[0]: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/13/20690266/seattle...

That article doesn't seem to say what you claim it says?

> They found that the policy “reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 6-7 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by 3 percent ... consequently, total payroll for such jobs decreased.” That means the total amount that employers paid to workers was less with the new minimum wage in place than projected payroll if the policy hadn’t gone into effect.

Also

> Surveying employers, Romich and other researchers found the most common response to the wage increase was to raise prices

To wave a hand and dismiss the entirety of Europe's wage policy as 'different in many ways' is disingenuous. What Europe represents is a systemic approach to wage inflation at the low end; but this is also true for other countries with strong minimum wage guarantees (like Japan).

Every-time they've been put in place in this systematic way it's led to greater economic mobility, greater employment rates and a lowering of the burden on social welfare systems; whilst having little demonstrable impact on long-term economic growth, and in fact, there's recent evidence to suggest they have net positive impacts on growth[0][1][2][3]

What Seattle represents is a small isolated experiment within larger state, regional and federal contexts that effected its outcome. That's not to dismiss it's value, far from it, but to take as it some kind of definitive evidence is to weigh a grain of sand against a beach of contradictory evidence.

[0]: https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/distributional-mi... [1]: http://www.lse.ac.uk/business-and-consultancy/consulting/ass... [2]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [3]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25434

Minimum wages in most European countries are quite low. In France, minimum wage is about $11/hour. That’s the same as Wal-Mart.

It's actually $15.98.

French minimum wage of 1,521.22 Euro PCM (divided by France's 35 hour week * 4) = 14.48 Euro per hour / $15.98

This also doesn't take into account things like top-up tax credits for low earners, access to social housing, free childcare and a zero up-front cost on healthcare. So take home wage is substantially higher than the hourly rate would indicate.

This article says 10 euro: https://www.expatica.com/fr/employment/employment-law/french....

There are actually 4.43 weeks in a month. The shorter French work week also hurts here. Over a third of minimum wage workers in the US work full time, which makes their monthly salary about $1,950 per month, or 1,765 Euro per month. (15% higher than French minimum wage.) There is serious debate in France about getting rid of the 35 hour work week: https://www.france24.com/en/20170413-french-presidential-can....

Also, the US has a substantial tax credit for low earners (EITC). But that’s a bit far afield from the point OP was making, which is that working people shouldn’t have to draw on public welfare benefits. European minimum wages are low enough where companies are still “subsidized” by benefits paid to low income workers.

> Minimum wages in most European countries are quite low. In France, minimum wage is about $11/hour. That’s the same as Wal-Mart.

While Americans have to pay for their healthcare and other social safety nets from that 11$/h, Europeans get their benefits on top.

No. At least in France, those healthcare benefits are paid for by payroll taxes on the $11/hour. (Contrary to popular belief, European countries don’t pay for healthcare by “taxing the rich and corporations.” France has some of the lowest corporate taxes in the world.)

> How would you compare that to simply not offering the job at all?

Someone's gotta stock the shelves, there are no robots for that.

This. I find it quite shocking that in USA there are still offered useless jobs like Baggers. In Europe this job doesn't exist and no one misses it.

To some other areas - someone else picking up the tab for externalities that are not properly priced.

For example:

- public funded infrastructure which company relies on for business but doesn't pay for through tax - eg roads.

- environmental dumping - C02, pollution, waste where the full economic cost is paid down the line by future generations - in effect a subsidy on today's activities.

The other main area is to maintain 'strategic capabilities' - food production, defence, energy.

There was an interesting example in the UK - combining both energy and defence:

rumour has it that the UK government approved a new nuclear powerplant not so much on it's merits, but on the worry that if there wasn't a domestic nuclear industry in the UK, then the military would face a nuclear skills gap.

I used to agree with you on #1 whole heartedly. It's a point I brought up many many times. But this is an issue that is not as simple as it seems. Because the catch is that employees are different. In particular a single adult working at minimum wage for 40 hours a week is not going to qualify for much in the way of public assistance. However, somebody who has 6 children at home would receive money from the government that would be some multiple of their salary.

From WalMart's perspective any two employees are, more or less, the same. But that's what also leads to headlines like governments subsidizing WalMarts by $x billion. The issue is that WalMart could bring down this subsidy to basically $0 by only hiring employees who aren't having children while working minimum wage jobs (now $11/hour). Of course this is probably not the path you want to go down.

Basically the issue is a lot more complex than the numbers, in isolation, would suggest. And it comes alongside fundamental questions about society, funding, motivations, and more. In particular it's effectively a proxy for 'should employers be required to pay employees who have children more money for the same work'? I've no idea the answer to that question. It's extremely complex and comes with numerous issues. In any case I suspect few people intuitively get from 'WalMart gets $x billion in indirect subsidies' to that question on their own. Certainly took me a number of years!

On the same note - don’t subsidize companies full of activists. Center is a good place to be, radicalism doesn’t help anyone.

...Which can be a fine philosophy, if you define the "center" relative to some absolute.

If your idea of "the center" is "precisely between the two current mainstream left-wing and right-wing parties", then right now you'll end up with something along the lines of "well, some genocide is OK, so long as it's of people I don't like."

There's no special virtue in saying "both sides have good points" all day long, no matter who the sides are that you're dealing with. The political center, by any objective measure, is way, way to the left of what the "center" is in the US right now.

Or, to put this all more succinctly: I don't think anyone whose primary position is "Nazis are bad and we should treat them the way we did in WWII" should be classified as an "activist."

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