[realtalk_sp]

It seems like it's about the optics in the present BLM-heavy climate.

But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity.

I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories.

This is just another classic case of people reacting emotionally, biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.

[david38]

This is common because people in rich countries have no idea what the situation is in other countries.

I remember something similar happened in India. Kids were sewing rugs or something, someone didn’t like it because it looked bad (like a sweatshop) and there was a boycott.

The place went out of business. International investigators later found that 50% of those children had to resort to sex work while a good percentage of the rest ended up doing hard labor jobs and such. It was absolute catastrophe. The white rich people who started the boycott? They just went on with their lives. No significant and realistic effort was made to correct anything by them.

[sethammons]

I upvoted because it is accurate. I wanted to comment that I think you can drop the race part from the comment.

[bJGVygG7MQVF8c]

No, it's essential to what's being communicated.

> Baizuo (/ˈbaɪˌdzwɔː/; Chinese: 白左 báizuǒ, literally White Left) is a derogatory Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white people.

[caymanjim]

I've spent much of my career as a software consultant. I usually make about 1/3 of my client billing rate. The rake is high. Part of that is normal overhead of employer-side taxes, benefits, expensable items (hardware, business lunches, continuing education), infrastructure/support (office space, office staff/HR/non-owner management). We can generously call that another 1/3 of the client bill rate. That leaves the final 1/3 to the company for profit and business development. There's nothing remotely unusual about this arrangement.

[WalterBright]

Back when I worked for Boeing, the accounting figure was that it cost Boeing about 45% over and above my salary to pay for my benefits package and taxes paid on my behalf (things like health insurance, retirement plan contributions, the so-called "employer's contribution" of Social Security taxes, etc.).

This is why when one sees salary comparisons, they are misleading. A correct comparison would compare what is called "total compensation" which includes that 45%. For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous.

Those "free" benefits aren't free at all. They come out of the employee's pocket.

[caymanjim]

> For example, whenever you hear about public teacher salaries being low, no mention is ever made of the total compensation, which is pretty generous.

This is disingenuous. It's perfectly acceptable to compare teacher salary to any other salary. The default assumption is that you're comparing W2-with-benefits to W2-with-benefits. When people talk about low teacher salary, they're talking about it in comparison to another salary with the exact same overhead. It's not necessary to assign cash value to employer-paid taxes and benefits when making an apples-to-apples comparison.

[WalterBright]

It is not disingenuous because the public teacher benefits package is much better than typical in the private sector.

The teachers' unions have been quite clever about this, in negotiation for much of their pay in the form of benefits, so it looks like their pay is low. The newspaper, for example, often runs comparisons of salaries but never total compensation.

[caymanjim]

This is also misleading. Medical benefits are comparable to white-collar professional services jobs. Most teachers have payroll deductions to pay for a portion of their insurance. In 15 states where teachers receive pensions, they receive them in lieu of Social Security benefits. They don't pay into Social Security, and they don't receive Social Security upon retirement. They only receive their pension. If they don't work as teachers long enough to receive a full pension, they're losing out. Even if they switch to a qualifying job, those years of non-contribution to Social Security reduce their eventual benefits. Most states are phasing out pensions and replacing them with 403(b) plans, and/or making teachers contribute to the pension plans out of their salaries. Aside from insurance and retirement, teachers don't have nearly as many benefits and perks as corporate workers do.

Part of the reason teacher salaries are lower on an annualized basis is that they don't work during the summer, but considering that their salaries are already on the low side given the education requirements, that washes out.

I'm not trying to paint a sob story for teachers. They're usually comfortably middle class, and if they put in 20-30 years, they're usually retiring comfortably. But you're making it sound like they have a benefits package above and beyond other employment. It's simply not true. Plenty of other jobs (and I don't just mean tech jobs) that require a four-year degree come with far better benefits, 401(k) matching, and you don't have to gamble on committing your entire career to staying in the same career in the same state in order to retain the value.

[WalterBright]

> But you're making it sound like they have a benefits package above and beyond other employment.

They do. The biggest clue is the difficulty in obtaining what the value of that benefits package is.

> put in 20-30 years, they're usually retiring comfortably

I find it amazing that one can retire comfortably at 42 if you're a schoolteacher. What other job in the private sector offers that?

[mgkimsal]

Does it particularly matter? In most cases, people take whatever 'benefits' they're given - they don't have much leverage to take something else. Whether I want or need "great" health insurance, it might be something my employer provides, and would be part of my 'total comp'. It may not actually benefit me at all, and I have no choice in it. And likewise, if the insurance is crap, most people have no leverage to replace it with anything better anyway.

Most people can only make choices with the take home portion of salary, regardless of what 'total comp' is.

[s1artibartfast]

Im not sure what you are saying here.

Benefits absolutely play a role in the jobs people take. I have been offered two jobs with identical salaries, but one had a significant employer contribution to my 401k and stock options. you can guess which job I took.

Likewise, my mother was a teacher and one of the main reasons was the incredible healthcare. She could have gone somewhere else with her 2 masters, but it was worth a ton with a sickly husband. A full salary pension is worth a lot of direct salary compensation too.

[WalterBright]

> Does it particularly matter?

It sure does. It's a lot of money that pays for things like health insurance, early retirement, and retirement benefits.

> they don't have much leverage

Sure they do - the teachers' union aggressively negotiates for those benefits.

[pininja]

I upvoted you’re comments since they are accurate to my mother’s experience as a 33+ year elementary school teacher in CA. Her health care is similar to what my job provides, and then she gets a pension that highly incentives 35+ year career of continuous work in the same district. Any long term medical leave pauses pension credit, and moving to a different district within the same state can also mess with the pension terms.

Switching jobs 15 years in feels like an all or nothing situation since they haven’t been paying into social security.

I don’t know any teacher friends of hers that have retired before 30 years on the job. It’s stable, but it’s not an early retirement career.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that funding in CA for teachers is difficult to adjust and complex, but it’s all inherently public. https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

[WalterBright]

Your link has many facts about sources of funding, but does not say what the value of the teacher benefits package is.

> retired before 30 years on the job. It’s stable, but it’s not an early retirement career.

I'd consider retiring at 52 early retirement, especially if it comes with a lifetime pension.

[pininja]

The median for retirement in CA is 61.9 years of age. Age factor plays a large role in setting pension, one cannot retire early without giving up a portion of the pension. The average monthly benefit is $4,088.

Here’s an idea of pension contribution

> Teachers contribute 8% of their monthly salaries into a state pension fund, while their employers contribute an additional 8.25%. On top of these payments, the state of California contributes another 2% into the fund.

All from https://www.teaching-certification.com/salaries-benefits/cal...

[mrobins]

The article doesn’t say Andelans think only making 1/3 of their billing rate is unfair. It says they don’t make 1/3rd of their bill rate but the company perpetuates the fallacy that they do. It both makes Andela’s pay scheme seem more generous than it is while creating social misconceptions about how well off Andela’s workers are.

[femiagbabiaka]

A one person small business and a corporation on the size of Andela simply can not be compared at any level.

[WalterBright]

> In an almost Kafkaeque twist

Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives. Nike closing means they were forced to settle for the worse alternatives.

[bitcurious]

> Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives.

I don’t find it obvious at all. Children don’t get to consider alternatives, they do as they are taught. That’s the whole problem with child labor.

[wutbrodo]

That's the problem though: the "let them eat cake" attitude that thinks that child labor in the developing world is driven by agency instead of resource constraints, and that the poorest children in the world would go be architects or engineers if only they weren't forced to work in sweatshops.

India's landmark child labor law passed in the 80s is a dramatic, tragic example of policy effects on this margin (though not driven by the same privileged ignorance as the Nike incident). When the law was passed, it lowered the welfare of the affected children and their families on pretty much every relevant metric: calories consumed, years of schooling, mortality, income/wealth, etc. The most stubborn advocate of ignoring the holistic consequences of policy might say it was all worth it, but the most damning thing is that _it increased hours of child labor per household_, coming largely from reduced time in school. Cracking down on child labor employers reduced demand for child labor, which reduced wages. But the problem is that labor supply was inelastic, where the choice was between child labor and starvation. The upshot was that children ended up working more for less money, a tragic lose-lose of a policy responsible for immense human suffering.

This isn't an argument for sweatshops per se; it's entirely possible that one can do the legwork and realize that the actual effect of a seemingly good policy is horribly negative. It's an argument that judging policies on how they affect your privileged sensibilities instead of what they do to the people they affect is despicable. Transmuting suffering in sweatshops to much worse suffering from starvation simply because the latter is easier to deny responsibility for is disgusting, but unfortunately the average person doesn't have the moral reasoning ability to understand this.

[femiagbabiaka]

> I'm reminded of a story about child laborers and Nike. In an almost Kafkaeque twist, locales where this was happening ended up experiencing significant economic setbacks when Nike decided to close up certain offending factories.

The situation is almost three times as complicated as you’re theorizing here, because those companies were not passive entities. They were political organizations as well who helped remake economies. When Walmart moves into town and all of the other stores close as a result, does that mean that Walmart was better for the town?

[franctic]

I think this is a pretty unfair reading of the situation. The grievance came directly from the people working for the company. You can certainly dig in to the situation and have an opinion about whether those grievances are valid, but I don’t see how that can be seen as a case of people “biasing towards their own set of experiences and points of view.” Who else’s point of view should they be considering?

Also we definitely live in a global, interconnected world but it feels like a hell of a stretch to invoke BLM here. African workers sharing their feelings about their place of work are just “riding the wave” because they happen to black?

[realtalk_sp]

> Yet its strategy misfires and communication blunders have left its African developers in a lurch, underscoring how difficult blending capitalism and social good can be. Stung by the experience, some developers informally refer to the company as “The Plantation.”

[wutbrodo]

Most people don't have what you'd call "moral reasoning ability". The appearance of moral purity is more important than those being crushed by their "help": you can see this in the history of the average person's reactions to payday loans, boxing gloves, overseas labor, drug prohibition, and a million other things.

[vinceguidry]

> But you're absolutely right that the market sets rates. And did no one wonder why the hell Andela would exist and be so valuable if there wasn't significant arbitrage to be had? They're a business not a charity.

The article appears address the incongruency:

> As Andela moved into 2019, many within the company felt the mood shift. It moved from something resembling an NGO to a profit-driven enterprise — which it indeed always was.

Andela appears to have been a profit-driven enterprise masquerading as a non-profit one. Until they could no longer sell the lie. Appearing as a benefits-first company drove a lot of "investment" dollars their way.

Just looks like another example of fools and their money. With a heavy price tag paid by the innocents.

[seph-reed]

> They're a business not a charity

I think maybe the world is starting to feel like companies that take more than they give back are ultimately parasitic and abusive. For a long time it has been considered completely okay to maximize profit over all else, but if corporations were people they wouldn't be very community oriented peoples. Much more on the manipulative and greasy gross spectrum, and maybe that's just going out of style?

Also, they kind of were acting like a charity, so that could be part of it too.

[seibelj]

What’s wonderful about a free, liberal society is that we can all make our own choices. For example, you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit. That is just my preference.

[0_gravitas]

> you can work at a business that operates more like a charity, while I can choose to work at a business that is laser-focused on maximizing profit

unlikely unless you have a good degree of financial security or are relatively 'in demand'

[Nasrudith]

The very way that value is looked at by most people is incorrect and it shows. Not just through rates of bankruptcy and overspending even when circumstances are clearly far outliers in their favor.

There are a lot of old myths believed on a deep level like the idea of a universal fair price, fair profit margin, and zero sum benefit from trades where if anyone is making a profit it must be doing so at somebody's expense. All of them are wrong.

If operating under those fallacious zero sum models companies always look parasitic if they survive, regardless of what they contributed and what would or wouldn't have occurred in their absense.