Does "holding others back" include requiring businesses to treat their employees ethically?
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Should there be a salary cap?
- Thread starter runningbooii
- Start date
Does "holding others back" include requiring businesses to treat their employees ethically?
McBell
Resident Sourpuss
Would not treating employees unethically be "holding others back", specifically, the employees?
I would think so, but I wanted to find out where Reverend Rick was coming from.
If an employer pays their employees market rate wages for their contribution to the company, does that not qualify as ethical?
I'm seriously trying to evaluate your position here. Lets use an example of truck drivers for instance.
Would a truck driver working for an economy chain of stores be paid less than say a driver who had a load of gasoline or jewelry?
If you sell peanuts, crackers, and baby powder or diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, you both need a delivery driver.
Why would one driver be paid any more than the other just because his boss makes more money selling one thing or the other?
That depends entirely on the market in question.
For instance, in an economy based on slavery, the market rate (at least in terms of wages paid) for slave labour is zero. Would that situation be ethical just because it was a market equilibrium?
Edit: you've already seen my argument for why the employer/employee relationship can often be one where the employee is at a disadvantage. In those cases, no, I don't think we can automatically assume that the free market has set the price for labour at an ethical level.
As an analogy, consider the case of price gouging in natural disasters. If a person was charging people $100 a gallon for bottled water after an earthquake knocks out the municipal water service, would this be ethical? For argument's sake, assume that the market will bear the price.
I have no idea what you're trying to argue here. Maybe it would help me to understand if you just stated your point directly without the analogies.
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Everyone wants to share the wealth, but what if the company loses money?
If it can't make money ethically, then in the long run, it's probably better that it closes and frees up capital for businesses that can.
Are you channeling Romney?
How do you figure?
His business involved closing unprofitable companies or divisions. He received a
lot of flack from Dems over this, so kudos to you for being more realistic than they.
Alceste
Vagabond
You should probably try to let go of your belief that boring public policy matters regarding who should be paying what amount of our collective bill for the cost of maintaining a functional society are an envious attack. It's interfering with your perception of what is actually going on in your country right now.
The bulk of the expense of your VERY expensive society (mostly due to your ludicrously bloated military spending and your unwillingness to socialize medicine) is sitting on the shoulders of the middle class (of which you are a part, albeit at the high end), and on debt. You can't shift that burden to the poor, because you could take every penny they have and never even get more in tax receipts than you spend in servicing the debt.
The very rich, on the other hand, like Mitt Romney, pay almost no tax whatsoever, and hold three quarters of the wealth in the country. Increasing their taxes to balance the budget would not interfere with their quality of life, even a little. So, they should pay more. Right? I mean, if you want to balance the budget and pay down the debt, that is.
It's common sense. It has nothing to do with class envy, or trying to hold people back, or attacking, or whatever. It's a really boring, emotionally neutral, non-provocative, highly well-reasoned (IMO) public policy opinion.
The only reason not to substantially increase the tax burden of the top tier of wealth is that we don't actually want a balanced budget or a functioning society. If I were IN the top tier of wealth I could still very easily reason my way to that exact same conclusion without any need for "class envy", as many rich folks very often do (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc).
Alceste
Vagabond
My father had a profit-sharing scheme in his company. In good years, his employees shared the benefits. In bad years, there were layoffs, meaning they also shared the burden of the bad years. So, they were highly motivated to make every year a good year.
Alceste
Vagabond
He actually said unethical, not unprofitable, for the record.
Nothing wrong with a system like that. :no:
dust1n
Zindīq
I don't anticipate ignoring people without skills. But not all jobs will be lost immediately. It's not the world reacts overnight to legislation or anything. It's going to take more than a few years to even get machinery to replace, and certainly not every service job in the world, or even manufacturing job, can be fully automated.
No one said it was going to be easy, and no one is going to expected to favor to do more work on be paid less because workers have to be paid a certain amount.
dust1n
Zindīq
Pretty much. It's not an insane ratio or anything. I find it a normal ratio that prevents insane ratios from happening in the opposite direction.
dust1n
Zindīq
I'm sure the Founding Fathers felt similar in regards to King George.
Who will replace the machinery? Certainly, business won't, since it will be collapsing, except
for a burgeoning underground economy. Government? You have more faith in them than I.
This is not clear.
dust1n
Zindīq
My pay ratio doesn't mandate that a company must lose money. It stipulates that an executive can't earn over 300 times as much as the lowest paid worker in the supply train. It doesn't even mandate that the company has to share the wealth with anyone. It can accept the cap on salary and use the funds for investment. It can hold onto the wealth and store it.
dust1n
Zindīq
What do you mean, who will replace the machinery? I meant to say that if low-wage workers are going to be replaced by machinery, that whole process would still take a decade if not even more. It's not like society isn't going direction anyways. We should be training people to do work, not trying to retain jobs that are not longer useful.
Well, we certainly shouldn't extrapolate or implement anything with close examination of all the faucets.