If you can't keep everyone on in the first place it's pretty ugly to give the people at the top bonuses, they have less to lose from losing their job in the first place.
- If we do not keep the highly paid senior sales rep, we're going to have no customers and thus... everyone gets canned.
- They are objectively better off leaving for another firm, where they don't need to worry about impending doom. So we need to provide an appropriate incentive to prevent them from breaking ranks and screwing everyone else left behind.
- The humble factory worker or customer service person doesn't have that same kind of impact on the whole....
Any moral conversation ultimately becomes a discussion about why someone with objectively better and safer options should continue to work for a company that is paying them less than market. Unless everyone else is willing to work for reduced salary / benefits and promise not to quit, that's not a morally tenable position....
Personally, I'd love it if people acted for the greater good. That's not going to happen here, unless you want to restrict people from changing employers and force them to show up to work...
I guess the real answer here is I'm not cut out to be an exec and I don't understand the mindset of people who are because I'm fine getting payed $100k a year (modulo inflation) for the rest of my life and I've lived most of my career at $30k, and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary. I would sooner go broke at a company I ran than hang people out to dry who depended on me for a livelihood.
> and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary
How about this instead? Your company is overstaffed due to a massive drop in sales. You will run out of money and will have to fire everyone including yourself in one month. Your other choice is to cut 80% of the staff immediately and your business will make enough to pay everyone’s salary who remains.
The better choice for everyone is the surviving business, and that’s the one that puts more money in your pocket. Letting people go is a business decision and it’s very often the correct one. Good business decisions lead to making more money.
That's not what we're talking about, though. If you suddenly don't have the market you used to, then it makes sense to cut down your workforce to be the appropriate size for the market you do have.
But that doesn't mean it's ethical to then throw money at your executives just to keep them around. If the business is viable with the smaller market and smaller workforce, then the executives should either stick around based on the company's future prospects, or leave. If they want to leave, then perhaps executives of their caliber aren't required to run the company given its new reality. Getting them to stick around by showering them with more money just increases wage inequality.
“Showering them with more money” in these scenarios is “give them some more stock” to try to offset the 90% of their income they just lost due to the stock becoming near worthless.
And they also have less incentive to stay because these are supposedly people who could provide the same work for other companies in similar situations at the same or higher prices. I find myself in this situation right now: ill stay on at higher prices if the company wants to renew its contract, or i'll leave for another place (I have more people emailing me for work than I have before the pandemic and I'm not on any social media and don't have a personal website).
In an environment where businesses have been operating on massive leverage for years, there's a fight brewing over who is going to get cash-flows and who will not, this obviously extends to workers who have outsized impact on whether any given business will stay open or file chapter 7/11.
If I'm at a place where people will lose their jobs if I leave the company the answer is simple: I don't leave until that's either not the case or I personally can't afford it anymore.
I owe no loyalties to corporates, I have other interests that I would like to spend time on and pursue more than convincing stakeholders to make decisions that should have been made long ago to have them avoided being put in the position they are now.
If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.
>If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.
I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically. That's all. Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.
My point is frequently your world descends into a flaming pile of shit unannounced.
Go ask the career restaurant workers how the year is going. Go ask the tourism guides and travel agents. Go ask their bosses how they intend to keep the doors open with an 80% decline in revenue.
I don’t understand what your point is. You think I don’t get this? This is a thread about giving executives bonuses when the company is going bankrupt.
> I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically.
For you, not for others.
> Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.
I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this. And I can just accept an offer from another place rather than outright reject them.
>I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this.
Yeah, and it's their problem up until the point at which the situation is unrecoverable without you, and even then it's still mostly theirs, but I would have a lot of hangups about acting in a situation like that.
I actually liked the company I just left. I liked the people and thought that the people in management up to and including management were all good people. I am usually far more cynical.
Post Covid, they decided to give everyone a pay cut instead of laying off people. This was morally the right thing to do in my opinion. It is a small company and I didn’t feel we had any dead weight.
I knew that in my position, the company would struggle a little bit. But what was I suppose to do? Stay out of loyalty or accept an offer that was a 60% increase in total comp at a more stable company?
- If we do not keep the highly paid senior sales rep, we're going to have no customers and thus... everyone gets canned. - They are objectively better off leaving for another firm, where they don't need to worry about impending doom. So we need to provide an appropriate incentive to prevent them from breaking ranks and screwing everyone else left behind. - The humble factory worker or customer service person doesn't have that same kind of impact on the whole....
Any moral conversation ultimately becomes a discussion about why someone with objectively better and safer options should continue to work for a company that is paying them less than market. Unless everyone else is willing to work for reduced salary / benefits and promise not to quit, that's not a morally tenable position....
Personally, I'd love it if people acted for the greater good. That's not going to happen here, unless you want to restrict people from changing employers and force them to show up to work...