We Will Do Anything to Get You to Work for Us Except Pay You Enough [McSweeneys] | Hacker News Reader

We Will Do Anything to Get You to Work for Us Except Pay You Enough [McSweeneys]

mcsweeneys.net

165 pointsrandycupertino72 comments

Just rolled through McDonald's and every lane has huge signs saying they'll pay for your college and training and sign-on bonus and....

I want money to purchase housing, land, and food. Just give me the money. There's only 4 people in that building serving 100+ people an hour - how does it not make sense to just pay them 20$ an hour?

The college stuff is a scam because most can’t collect and the hours aren’t flexible enough to allow it. It might also get preferential tax treatment

A lot of the college stuff offered by places like Walmart is a select few online degrees at places like Southern New Hampshire. Basically programs with a very low marginal cost.

The first result of a Google for this program tells you that the criteria for McDonalds is:

"""Courses must be taken at a degree or certificate granting college or university, accredited by the U.S. Department of Education."""

I don’t know about the collection part, but folks can take virtual classes these days (this was true even before the pandemic.)

Unless things have changed, how are the hours not flexible? I thought that was half the point of McDonald's.

No fast food jobs have flexible hours. You’re lucky if you have any say in your hours at all.

The hours are entirely arbitrary and unpredictable and often make it very difficult to coordinate time off with friends and family. It's like they're in their own lonely little world.

Because McDonalds can take away all the auxiliaries without consequence.

However, lawyers will come after them if they try to reduce your wage later.

A McDonald's wage isn't going to pay for representation, so you better hope there's easy evidence to be had that what's happening to you is a policy-level scheme to defraud employees so you can attempt a class action.

The irony is that mistreating low-level employees actually reduces litigation liability if they can't co-ordinate. The less you pay them, the less they can afford litigation, both from a time and money perspective.

> A McDonald's wage isn't going to pay for representation,

The Department of Labor has lawyers too! They'd be happy to look into wage theft complaints for free.

For businesses like McDonalds, the choice is pay people more now or promise to give them something in the future if they remember to do it and followthrough will all the hoops. Most people won't follow through on the promise of college or training or whatever so all it costs them is the money to print up the sign.

Only because this is true, they are willing to spend $X,000 in tuition. If the bar is low, the reward would be too.

Two reasons come to mind: Wages are sticky, especially on the down-side. If they pay more now they will have a hard time reducing that pay. New hires might refuse to work if they know what a previous employee was paid, etc. And the current lack in labor supply is considered temporary by most companies.

Pay a monthly bonus based on profits then?

To chime on mrfusion’s point, temporary bonus is the dedicated way to do it.

It can be for any reason, and you can clearly state it’s only for this month, or until the pandemic ends, or whatever. Nobody will hang them over the fire when it ends and it helps adapt to conjectures.

Seems pretty insane when they have an operating margin of 40%, but I think that's looking at the corporation and not the franchisees.

Perhaps this is the return of "I worked my way through college!" that people trot out when tuition was 1/3rd the cost it is today.

*1/3rd the cost adjusted for inflation, even.

From https://www.archwaystoopportunity.com/tuition_assistance.htm...:

"You are eligible for $5,250 in Tuition Assistance if:

* You have a performance rating of “significant performance” or better, maintained throughout the course/program.

* Notify your Supervisor of your participation

You are eligible for $2,500 in Tuition Assistance each year if:

* You are employed by McDonald’s for at least 90 cumulative days.

* You work an average of 15 hours per week or more.

* You have a performance rating of “significant performance” or better, maintained throughout the course/program."

Just adding some information to the discussion. $2.50 extra per hr for 2000 hrs (typical hours worked in a year) is $5000.

The difference is that the extra pay isn't contingent on and arbitrary performance review process and maintaining a certain level of hours.

I'd probably rather take the extra pay in that situation.

That's because most of these things have no real cost or a very low real cost to the company.

Free college at Walmart lets you pick from one of a few online educational factories.

10% off stuff in a store means they are still probably making a profit on it.

I used to work for a parking agency. Companies might only have paid 50 cents on the dollar and even less for large buyers for that parking.

Not only that, but if you're working a low wage job you likely have to take multiple jobs just to survive, so you a) don't have the money to make many purchases, even at a discount and b) don't have the time to enroll in a degree program and take classes. What people need is enough money or resources to have some savings and breathing room.

It's interesting for me to read this, because it's very much the trope(s) of what high tech jobs are - or what people imagine them to be.

Interesting, because I work for a large tech firm (Fortune 50) that's been around for a while. We don't have basically any of the stuff listed. No free meals, no fancy break rooms, kegs, parties, vacations, etc. But what we have is pretty good pay. Not sports cars in the parking lot pay, but pretty good.

The other thing is that the site I work at is in a smaller college town (< 60k population) in a nice, relatively quiet part of the US. So quality of life is pleasing.

Personally as far as my work career goes, I rather like this arrangement.

> Jobs aren’t for financially sustaining you—they’re for financially sustaining us.

That is the crux. I feel like most businesses actually don't produce enough value to justify their own existence and therefore require below cost-of-living wages to keep them afloat.

If they didn't justify their own value they would be out of business.

Well when you take into account GST, income tax their employees pay, corporate tax, payroll tax, import&export duties (and every business up and down the supply chain has the exact same tax burden), there is not a lot left over for the business or the employees.

The reason businesses exist is for creating profitable returns on capital investments. W/o profit, you simply do not have jobs in the first place.

Whoever runs the company is currently taking it all. Not the gov’t or employees.

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-i...

I tried and failed to find a relevant statistic, but I’m pretty sure total CEO compensation is not “all” of net corporate profits.

No, it’s just that globalization means that laborers in wealthy countries who expect a high standard of living are indirectly competing against laborers in poor countries who expect a relatively lower standard of living. It’s just competition and expectations.

Taxes and government is the answer. Almost every bonus listed is tax incentivize vs just paying people more. The real question we should ask is how did we get all the laws that make this the reality.

This. Payroll taxes incentivize lower wages and encourage alternative compensation. This is very similar to how government programs influenced market incentives that gave rise to employer sponsored health insurance: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...

Instead of vilifying employers who are (in most cases) just responding to market incentives, we should be advocating for lower payroll taxes.

And then people have nothing to retire on, unless the lowering of payroll taxes is combined with bringing back pensions (employer paid retirement income).

Do you mean, advocate for disallowing exemptions from payroll taxes?

If we removed those incentives, companies would just give the rest to executives.

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-i...

Could you expand on your model?

Sure, here’s an NBER paper that attempts to estimate this using state corporate tax cuts. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24598/w245...

Why? They still need to attract and compete for talent which is what all this song and dance is about.

Because the people making these decisions want to be paid more? The effect is relatively well studied. Here’s an NBER paper.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24598/w245...

"There's a labor shortage! Nobody is willing to work for the wages we are offering!"

I mean it’s true but the reverse sucks too. If my company spent 2-3k per employee to make the work environment better is appreciate that way more than the 5k bonus that’s 3k after taxes we get and it would improve my quality of life more. We get paid quite fairly but not being able to get decent cafeteria food or coffee is a huge drag

I had the opposite experience (in my well funded tech company days). We got free food at my job, and we had to pay tax on it as a benefit (for which we were reimbursed). The food, and cafeteria, were not my thing at all, and 95% of the time I either skipped lunch or grabbed something outside. I had no problem with my salary, but given the choice, I would have been happy to get more money and no food. (Just to be clear, it was very popular, I just would have liked the choice)

Yeah I guess it depends on priorities we’re in a big campus so it’s hard to go anywhere. I don’t always have time to pack a lunch so I’d like to have a healthy non prison style food option as a backup. Also I’d like to not get changed 5x if I need a snack and not have to provide my own coffee and tea

If an employer offered me a 5k paycut so they could ply me with coffee and snacks that’s not a deal I would take. So in reverse, I’d like the 5k please.

For snacks no. But for breakfast and lunch, that’s a 20$/d or 5.2k/yr value, so I’d take that for the convenience. I got tired of bringing lunch to work after about 4 years. Most places I’ve worked have had few takeout options. (Of course WFH changes calculus)

You’re probably saying that as someone with a much more comfortable income than the typical low wage worker. An extra $3000 to a McDonald’s worker means a lot more. If you’re someone who is struggling to make rent every month you’d probably take a one-time bonus of $300 cash over $3000 in ongoing workplace amenities.

Do min wage workers get much of 3k amenities?

Of course you can estimate my income just off the tax rate I’m describing

Meanwhile it's pretty normal to need to save up for multiple pay periods to buy shoes for your 4 year old. $3k/yr in the pocket makes a difference worth more than delicious coffee to many or most people, even in California.

I’m a PhD student living on a stipend that puts my family well below poverty level, and I can easily buy shoes for my 7-year old whenever he wants. Spare me the unfalsifiable histrionics about how hard it is to be poor, please.

Congrats on having a spouse who makes decent money.

Shoes for my toddler are $30-$40, and while it’s not a burden for me, it certainly would be if I was only bringing home $1200/month.

Perhaps it’s possible to be more poor than you?

As a PhD student I was considerably better off than I had been at any time before that.

I think it was Tim Cook who made an interesting point about there being far fewer manufacturing engineers in the US than in China.

Presumably it might be possible to improve the domestic supply by investing in training, offering higher wages, etc., but companies are more likely to simply hire abroad.

I remember a couple years ago on HN someone offered 100k to their employees for recruiting a new employee.

I was thinking to myself if you just put that toward salaries you wouldn’t need all the recruitment gimmicks.

The $100k bonus is one time, the salary is annual.

I edited my comment. It’s not quite as impressive but I think it’s the same idea

100k once is a way better deal than 100k a year. It's better than 25k a year if you expect to retain employees.

Knowledge and incentives. Just offering big salaries doesn’t mean you’ll attract the best employees.

Depending on where you work parking is a factor in your salary though. I was paying $200 a month, that's a pretty significant dent.

Not needing to park or have a car at all would be even better, you'd just get an extra $500/month cash. ($200 + whatever gas and other bs the car costs)

I was doing the amortized cost of owning a car the other day and it’s pretty terrible: 50 gas, 75 car insurance, 20 maintenance, 100 amortized cost, 40 excise tax.

That’s around 300 a month for a no frills Honda HRV.

The way I amortized was 20k over 15 years, maintenance is oil change and tire rotation

I did this after my last car died a few years ago, and I had to make the argument for myself whether I'd replace it or not. The numbers really don't work out (as you discovered) unless you're very directly using the thing for something that you can't solve another way. In my case, it's more like probably $90/month for gas, $190/month for insurance, probably $600/year on maintenance unless you're under warranty with a brand new car, and then there's taxes and depreciation that you immediately lose thousands to. Amortizing them paints less of a bleak picture, but again, you gotta be directly profiting with the thing.

Maybe you're already living in a walkable neighborhood, but for some reason you work nowhere remotely close and there aren't viable alternative companies or transportation options. Maybe you're constantly traveling (say 30+ times a year) to the mountains in a way that would surpass the viability of renting a car frequently. Maybe you run a company that requires the fastest last mile transportation and storage almost all the time.

Since then, I've used car share and rentals when I absolutely need them, and the numbers would have to be dramatically different for those options not to make more sense, because I do live in a city that prioritizes transit and other transportation options, and I'll do anything possible to avoid needing a car (as in owned) in the future. If my hobbies change significantly && my financials improve significantly, then that's where I'd reconsider.

I think that's why a lot of companies quickly embraced diversity initiatives. They are basically free. don't threaten the power structure and give a lot of good PR.

Come work with us at Fringe, building the future of employee work benefits! Visit https://fringe.breezy.hr/ to see open roles! True to our name, our free breakfast muffins and cold-brew coffee on tap are second to none!

So how much do your open roles pay?

We offer free laundry service through Purple Tie and a (fully vaccinated) massage therapist who comes in twice a week!

This is a joke, right? Please say you're joking and I'm just not good at reading sarcasm in text.

https://richmondbizsense.com/2021/03/04/capital-raises-net-n...

Hah, I was wondering the same thing. I would be almost sure it was except for the very elaborate site -- too much even for a very dedicated joke.

Well, I admire their chutzpah.

McSweeneys is an internet writing/parody site. Their lists section is always amusing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists

This is why I think downvotes aren't necessary for HN comments.

I can't, for the life of me, figure out why this was downvoted.

It's accurate, and the lists are funny to me, and I didn't know about them before.

When people's feelings get in the way of facts it makes the world a shittier place.

Thanks for the info bud.

It's weird! I was just posting some context re: background of what kind of site McSweeneys was... in case people weren't aware that it's a parody piece. :shrug:

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