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Jarmak posted:I was preemptively responding to a line of argument I thought you might take while referencing a post PT6A made in support of you. Sorry if that wasn't clear To make my argument on that subject perfectly clear, I'm not saying that training and education are not important, just that aptitude tests are bad ways of measuring it (for one thing) and it cannot and should not be assumed that more education (beyond what's actually necessary to perform the job) will mean a better employee.
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Apr 21, 2014 18:12
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Jarmak posted:Do you guys have some sort of secret slap fight you'd like to let the rest of the class in on or something? He didn't say anything of the sort Well then I don't know what to tell you. Concern-trolling about how hiring "the best" workers opens you up to a politically correct lawsuit, brazenly ignoring actual evidence of racial bias in favor of insisting that all differences are due to educational disparity, and then putting forth zero ideas on how to correct for that unfairness so everyone actually does get equal opportunity are some pretty big red flags to me that he is not interested in reforming the system and is just an apologist for it. But if you disagree, fine, I'll drop it. He can post his remedies to the problem of systemic discrimination in the workforce if he wants. For a broader point though, since you do accept the necessity of reform, the arguments he is making are the same old tired ones that appear on the surface to be concerned with "fairness" but in reality are used every step of the way to stymie progress and entrench an unjust system. "Businesses should hire the best person for the job regardless of race. It's a shame that the university system failed some people, but you shouldn't penalize the successful people by giving the failures an advantage in hiring" ... "Universities should admit the best students regardless of race. It's a shame that poor secondary schools failed some people, but you shouldn't penalize the successful people by giving the failures an advantage in applications" ... "We should be able to fund our high school locally. It's a shame that some people are poor, but you shouldn't penalize the successful people by sending their tax money to the other side of town. If my neighborhood wants to pay a local tax to improve the local school for our children we should be able to, and other neighborhoods can do the same" ... "We shouldn't have to bus our children across town when we pay for a good neighborhood school . It's a shame that some schools are poorer, but you shouldn't penalize the successful people making them bus their children so other parents didn't earn it can send their kids up here" etc, etc. When you start with the premise that having privilege means you deserve everything it got you, then every proposal to create a more equitable society can be cast as taking something from those who have "earned it" and giving to those who didn't. Every single time it's the same "well I didn't cause this situation that is currently benefiting me, so why is it my responsibility to sacrifice anything to help those who are getting hosed over?"
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Apr 21, 2014 19:00
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PT6A posted:Training is different from education, and, yes, to the extent that education can be measured on a pre-employment standardized aptitude test, it's probably got very little to do with job qualification. What's the point of having diplomas and degrees if we don't trust them to mean anything? People go to school for years to get these qualifications, be it a high school diploma or a university degree, so maybe we should take them (possibly in combination with transcripts) as sufficient evidence of general education, and restrict pre-employment testing to more detailed things as I described earlier. Because, let's face it, diplomas do, in fact, mean gently caress all right now. It matters, kind of, if you manage to get one from the "right" school but diploma mills are so damned common that it's hard to tell. For-profit education is also becoming increasingly common, which further fucks things up. If you're willing to shell out the cash you can park in college however long it takes to get a degree.
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Apr 21, 2014 19:57
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FADEtoBLACK posted:A guaranteed minimum income would help with this as well. You actually don't need to publish how much everyone makes if you just have a regulatory body making sure things are handled well. "Discrimination does not matter as long as no one starves in a ditch". Explain the reason to not have that information available to other employees. shrike82 posted:I'd like to hear more about what exactly it'll solve and how. I've posted multiple examples, including one that was personal, where learning about coworkers wages empowered a female minority employee instantly. It's not a panacea that will end all discrimination forever, but it's a huge first step. There are tons of jobs that have VERY definable metrics where huge discrepancies in pay are unwarranted. It's not like these kinds of lawsuits don't exist now. They do. I know labor lawyers, but most of the time the difficult part is having enough confidence in the case that when you do discovery you feel strong that there will be a significant pay difference if you don't have that information readily available. Even if managers begin making changes in order to try and compensate for this information that's the entire point. CYA to make the pay gaps smaller would be a huge boon, and avoiding the appearance of impropriety might result in less drastic forms of nepotism and boys clubs and similar issues. Making people have to think about how they display favoritism at the edge of a subpoena is not a bad thing.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:12
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No no, secret payscales are a tremendous advantage to workers in salary negotiations. That's why businesses are so keen to make discussing pay a firable offense; it's in the Enlightened Self Interest of the capitalist class to make sure their laborers are compensated according to the value of their work, so they strive to make sure no worker inadvertently squanders that advantage.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:42
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I know you are joking, but arguably it is in their best interest ultimately. Outside of the demand side of the pay equation that would potentially expand purchasing power, employees knowing how much their coworkers make could actually be more stable than they currently are. As it is now, I know many people who leave work because they don't get paid enough, only to find out later that it's because they kept low balling themselves repeatedly and had no clue what their peers made at the time. Knowing how much your peers and management make could have the added effects of 1) creating more stability in employees who are valuable but suck at negotiating raises or simply don't because they trust their employers and 2) allowing employees to realize how much their management makes so they can understand the dynamics going on purposefully and so they can better break into management themselves.
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Apr 22, 2014 06:29
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rscott posted:How is more information available in the labor market a bad thing, seriously I don't understand that. A market's efficiency relies on actors having as close to perfect information as possible right? Are we really supposed to believe that labor as a class, despite all of its' defeats in the last 35 years is manipulating this inefficiency to its' advantage? To me it seems far more likely that it's the other way around and that employers are using this lack of knowledge to their advantage, like the silicon valley collusion that was discovered recently. I don't believe it's a bad thing...but I don't believe it's a solution either. The thing about appealing to market efficiency is that the free market is well-known to be absolute garbage at dealing with discrimination, and I'm not really sure I even necessarily agree that labor should strive to be an efficient free market in the first place (ideological reasons, mostly). Frankly, I'm more than a little bit stunned that the prevailing opinion seems to be "if we just make the markets free and efficient and unregulated enough, the invisible hand will solve discrimination for us" or "if it were just a little easier to sue, the threat of legal action would cause the invisible hand to end discrimination". I believe that far more drastic action is needed to genuinely combat pay discrimination. Public pay data would help some people, but at best it'd just narrow the pay gap, not erase it. I'm not against public pay data itself, I'm against treating it like a comprehensive solution when it's really just a weak half-measure.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:31
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Main Paineframe posted:I don't believe it's a bad thing...but I don't believe it's a solution either. The thing about appealing to market efficiency is that the free market is well-known to be absolute garbage at dealing with discrimination, and I'm not really sure I even necessarily agree that labor should strive to be an efficient free market in the first place (ideological reasons, mostly). Frankly, I'm more than a little bit stunned that the prevailing opinion seems to be "if we just make the markets free and efficient and unregulated enough, the invisible hand will solve discrimination for us" or "if it were just a little easier to sue, the threat of legal action would cause the invisible hand to end discrimination". I believe that far more drastic action is needed to genuinely combat pay discrimination. Public pay data would help some people, but at best it'd just narrow the pay gap, not erase it. I'm not against public pay data itself, I'm against treating it like a comprehensive solution when it's really just a weak half-measure. I don't believe anyone said it was a comprehensive solution. It's information gathering that can then allow civil suits to be presented in far greater numbers. It's impossible to fix a problem if you don't know about it, and it's pretty hard to fix being undercut if you don't even know it's happening. This would be a dream for labor lawyers, especially considering how drastically different pay for the same job can be in a workplace that enforces those policies.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:40
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Seriously, the dumbass brother of the owner of the company I work for was in my inspection lab bitching about how they hired some guy and he told everyone how much money he was making and it was several dollars more an hour than his peers were making (about $17/hr instead of the $12-$14/hr others are making), just because this guy worked at the same company our senior VP worked at before he worked here. Hell, my company pays Cambodian and Vietnamese employees $1-2/hr less than white people doing the same job too. It's in our employee handbook that discussing wages with other employees is grounds for termination even after I pointed out multiple times that that clause is illegal under the taft hartley act of 1948. poo poo like that is absolutely endemic in small to medium sized businesses in the United States, and that's the kind of nepotism and discrimination that public pay data would help to eliminate.
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Apr 27, 2014 21:59
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Main Paineframe posted:I don't believe it's a bad thing...but I don't believe it's a solution either. The thing about appealing to market efficiency is that the free market is well-known to be absolute garbage at dealing with discrimination, and I'm not really sure I even necessarily agree that labor should strive to be an efficient free market in the first place (ideological reasons, mostly). Frankly, I'm more than a little bit stunned that the prevailing opinion seems to be "if we just make the markets free and efficient and unregulated enough, the invisible hand will solve discrimination for us" or "if it were just a little easier to sue, the threat of legal action would cause the invisible hand to end discrimination". I believe that far more drastic action is needed to genuinely combat pay discrimination. Public pay data would help some people, but at best it'd just narrow the pay gap, not erase it. I'm not against public pay data itself, I'm against treating it like a comprehensive solution when it's really just a weak half-measure. It's not about appealing to market efficiency, it's about making people aware that it's a problem in the first place. Once people understand how they're directly being harmed, then you can more successfully advocate for regulatory solutions, the same solutions you seem to agree with. Any sort of "market efficiency" solutions that might happen because of this (lawsuits, etc) just make knowledge of the problem more widespread.
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Apr 28, 2014 17:23
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Pay disclosure is ultimately an uninteresting solution because it's not a solution in of itself and because it has no natural constituency. Put it another way, given how Americans are uncomfortable with discussing comp and the political capital required to enact a public comp database, you might as well shoot for the moon and go for multiplier income limits or something equally implausible.
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Apr 28, 2014 21:20
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quote:what if a law made it mandatory that every employee's compensation was openly available to all other employees? Make wages transparent for everyone. Every worker can see them and they'll know if they are being discriminated against. Great. Unfortunately employers can see them too. And this foster collusion. Agreements among competitors to keep wages low are nothing new. Transparent wages make extremely easy to monitor compliance. This makes collusions stronger. Now, how much that matters is up to debate, but it is a true problem. I don't know of any case where full transparency was applied to wages. But there are plenty of examples in the good markets. Here's a nice, simple paper that describes a few.
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Apr 29, 2014 13:33
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It seems like cheating on a collusion deal would be self-defeating. The whole point of the deal was to limit what you need to pay...and then you voluntarily pay more anyway? Yeah okay maybe not as much as if you are fairly competing, but is the advantage that great? You can only poach so many high-achieving compsci grads from under Google's nose before they get suspicious or feel forced to start cheating themselves to get the people they want.
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Apr 29, 2014 13:49
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The only reason my pay sucks is because my co-workers are terrible with money and if they didn't have so much debt and a stronger safety net (personal or social) they'd be more likely to ask for raises. Every place I've ever worked the employees openly talk about wages (some don't but many do) and the only thing that's stopping them is the fear of being fired or replaced. I noticed when I first started my job that the most well paid person was the guy with the strongest safety net. He has a trust fund, considerable savings, a wife with a well paid job/healthcare benefits and made sure everyone there knew he didn't have to be there if he didn't want to be. I don't have a trust fund but after four years I put myself into a similar position by buying a small home, saving as much money as possible and keeping my expenses as low as possible. Compared to my co-workers I have received much better compensation despite doing the same (sometimes less) work. I used some of the same tricks as my previous co-worker and whenever "personal finance" comes up as a topic of conversation between me and my boss I mention that I'm debt free and I save most of my income. I always find some way to mention how I'm saving more money than I used to or that I've learned some new skill. Sometimes I flat out lie and say I did really great in the stock market or something, anything that makes them think that I can leave whenever I want. Still, my co-workers are in bad situations, most of it is their fault (gambling, bad money management, etc) and it negatively impacts me because when one employee gets a raise it increases the likelihood that others will as well. A few reforms would make it much easier for them to ask for raises, namely a stronger social safety net. If there was a public healthcare option many employees wouldn't fear losing their jobs as much and would be more likely to ask for raises. I wouldn't be opposed to some form of debt forgiveness either because jesus christ Americans are in debt. I prefer a government job/skills program (building homes, plumbing, computer work, hvac, whatever) over raising the minimum wage because it would give people an opportunity to learn skills and earn a livable wage. If people decide they don't want to work that hard they can choose to work somewhere else for less. Win win. Most companies would have to compete with the government wages/benefits except for the extremely low skill jobs. The problem now is that a low skill job is the only option available to people with low skills. The America I was always told about was the one where a guy could go to work and learn something that would benefit him later or outside of that job but that's not the reality. Sephiroth_IRA fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 14:14
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Didn't we used to have public work houses? What happened to that? Are you loving kidding me? shrike82 posted:Pay disclosure is ultimately an uninteresting solution because it's not a solution in of itself and because it has no natural constituency. mugrim posted:I don't believe anyone said it was a comprehensive solution. It's information gathering that can then allow civil suits to be presented in far greater numbers. It's impossible to fix a problem if you don't know about it, and it's pretty hard to fix being undercut if you don't even know it's happening. This would be a dream for labor lawyers, especially considering how drastically different pay for the same job can be in a workplace that enforces those policies. Come on shrike, this post was just a few below yours, why didn't you read it and take it into consideration?
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Apr 29, 2014 14:32
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Didn't we used to have public work houses? What happened to that? Are you loving kidding me? part 2.
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Apr 29, 2014 15:12
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Oh... poo poo. I didn't mean work-house. I meant public works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt7TN_CKp9U Sephiroth_IRA fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 15:23
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Oh... I didn't mean work-house. I meant public works. You mean like the WPA and AmeriCorps? Yeah, those would be a huge help if they were well funded and weren't treated like welfare programs by assholes.
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Apr 29, 2014 15:31
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Solkanar512 posted:You mean like the WPA and AmeriCorps? Yeah, those would be a huge help if they were well funded and weren't treated like welfare programs by assholes. Exactly.
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Apr 29, 2014 15:33
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I'm still amused by calling what we have a labor "market". In markets I can clearly see the prices of things. I can, for example, tell you the price of corn in different locals because we have agricultural markets that post the prices clearly. Or in medicine I can tell you the price of an appendectomy at any facility that offers it. But an I tell you the cost of a php developer in jersey? No. The cost of an editor in Saskatoon? Niet. The cost of a hunting guide in Fairbanks? Eh ... Kinda. But only with a lot of footwork and no simple place where they are all listed do I can compare. If pay data were collected and published sortable be region and industry we'd start to have something resembling a market. Oh and we already have the data. The works been done. The IRS has a treasure trove of pay data. Just need to anonymize it and release the aggregate and you have a real glass door. Or don't annonymize it and you have disclosure.
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May 1, 2014 05:32
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The bls does do this, or at least they did up until 2010. The occupations aren't as specific as they should be though.
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May 1, 2014 05:39
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Every place I've ever worked the employees openly talk about wages (some don't but many do) and the only thing that's stopping them is the fear of being fired or replaced. Consider yourself lucky, many people can and do get fired on the spot for discussing their wages. Or raises. Or performance evaluations.
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May 1, 2014 05:43
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So is it fair to call the firing of Jill Abramson an issue where transparency in pay would have significantly helped things, or is it too soon to tell? Vox has a rundown of articles if you are new to the situation. Here's more from Poynter. Solkanar512 fucked around with this message at 17:04 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 17:01
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Solkanar512 posted:So is it fair to call the firing of Jill Abramson an issue where transparency in pay would have significantly helped things, or is it too soon to tell? Seems sort of unlikely. The whole situation seems like a mess.
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May 16, 2014 19:34
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wateroverfire posted:Seems sort of unlikely. The whole situation seems like a mess. Why do you say unlikely? Most of what I've been reading about the topic points to the assertion that over the past decade Abramson was paid less than her male coworkers in similar positions while still performing well, while also pointing out that she had very recently discussed this issue with the board. I'm sure there are details that are wrong or incomplete (since we'll never know for sure), but it seems to me that the NY Times was taking advantage of institutional opaqueness to pay her less money than her male peers, and got kicked out for daring to confront her employer about it. Is there something I'm missing here?
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May 16, 2014 20:01
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Solkanar512 posted:Why do you say unlikely? Most of what I've been reading about the topic points to the assertion that over the past decade Abramson was paid less than her male coworkers in similar positions while still performing well, while also pointing out that she had very recently discussed this issue with the board. I'm sure there are details that are wrong or incomplete (since we'll never know for sure), but it seems to me that the NY Times was taking advantage of institutional opaqueness to pay her less money than her male peers, and got kicked out for daring to confront her employer about it. From the Vox stream you linked, she was also disliked by the publishers and they were unhappy with her handling of the paper's digital strategy. [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/business/media/jill-abramson-being-replaced-as-top-editor-at-times.html?hp&_r=1]Consider this article talking around the situation.[/u] quote:Ms. Abramson, 60, had been in the job only since September 2011. But people in the company briefed on the situation described serious tension in her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger, who was concerned about complaints from employees that she was polarizing and mercurial. She had also had clashes with Mr. Baquet. Could the pay issue have been a thing? Sure, maybe. Some sources assert her pay wasn't substantially different from that of her predecessors but mostly, you know, they WOULD say that. It sounds like there were several other points of dissatisfaction, though, and that she wasn't effective at leading the news staff. Ultimately we don't know the details and it sounds like everyone who might know is restrained from talking by the terms of the settlement.
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May 16, 2014 20:26
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Solkanar512 posted:So is it fair to call the firing of Jill Abramson an issue where transparency in pay would have significantly helped things, or is it too soon to tell? Pay transparency had nothing to do with it. She already knew about the pay disparity (with enough detail that she wasn't fooled even when they gave her a token raise that didn't actually close the gap), apparently confronted senior management about it on several different occasions, and even got a lawyer involved. The problem was that, even with the exact size of the pay disparity known to her and an obvious lawsuit brewing on the horizon, the NYT still decided they'd rather shitcan her than actually close the pay gap.
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May 16, 2014 20:42
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Main Paineframe posted:Pay transparency had nothing to do with it. She already knew about the pay disparity (with enough detail that she wasn't fooled even when they gave her a token raise that didn't actually close the gap), apparently confronted senior management about it on several different occasions, and even got a lawyer involved. The problem was that, even with the exact size of the pay disparity known to her and an obvious lawsuit brewing on the horizon, the NYT still decided they'd rather shitcan her than actually close the pay gap. I was under the impression that the lawyer issue/challenge to the board was quite recent, did I overlook something or get my timeline confused? My current understanding of the issue is that she found out, she lawyered up/talked to the board then she was out the door.
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May 16, 2014 20:53
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The only reason it might not help her is that (from those sources, at least), her and her predecessors total compensation was very opaque. Between bonuses and stock options/dividends, and up-front sums versus vested ones, it's comparing apples to oranges. Maybe it cost the NYT less money to retain her, maybe it didn't. It definitely looks like they got caught repeatedly with their hands in the cookie jar, though.
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May 16, 2014 21:13
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