Now on the small business level:

You run the day to day, make sure everything gets done and quality doesn't suffer, oh ya you've been here longer than any employee I've had in 20 years and I appreciate that. Oh ya, you've brought in the best two helpers that we've had in as long as I can remember, and I appreciate it. Oh ya, you promote the business on social media and in person, and try to sell work, and I appreciate it.

But I can't pay you this week. I know you eat bologna sandwiches and we eat 90% of our meals out. I know I don't have my own bank account and all my personal funds come from the business. I know I'm taking cruises and camping trips in my new truck and you're looking for a part time job, but thank you for being the one I can trust to run things after 10 years of not having a vacation. I know you have worked your tail off to help grow it and I don't return phone calls or messages or delay until people go elsewhere because there's certain aspects I just won't let go of, but for some reason everything is really slow and we can't afford maintenance on our cobbled together equipment to keep things running, so I'll pay you and the hands when I can but you'll be home today.

Sorry, needed to get that off my chest because this is why when people say "just go start a business" not everyone needs to be running a business

Cheap labor isn’t good, good labor isn’t cheap. But you don’t need a communist union to negotiate fair pay if you know what you’re doing and worth.  Every place that didn’t make a decent offer I told no.

Capitalism isn’t failing, the country is failing capitalism.

Best advice my conservative parents gave me was “the universe owes you nothing, you make it in your own.”

This country has been a long ways from capitalism for decades now. Regulations, subsidies, and government policies have seen to that.

$2400 a month at 40hrs a week.

I made that in the 90s as a E4. In 1989 my last civ job I made almost $9 a hour.

Daughter in hight school made $11 a hour at a grocery store.

Do people still only make $15 a hour? or is that a joke?

No, that's true.  The only people who should just go start a business are the ones telling actual business owners how things are.

It's always the "prison of two ideas" around here.  Either all employees are a bunch of avocado toast eating snowflakes, or all business owners are skipping out on payroll because they funded their latest cruise.  Can't be anything in between.  

I've seen multiple jobs the last few weeks wanting years of experience in things like heavy equipment maintenance or hvac license for 16-20/hr.

One wanted a minimum of 2 year degree in manufacturing for $20

Uum...agriculture.  Our price goes below the cost of production regularly.

See. The country is failing capitalism,

There doesn't seem to be as much gap between small business and corporate business as some like to make it out to be.

Corporate grunts are making 2015 wages while their masters are buying new vacation homes with their bonuses.

Small business employees are drowning while the owners are funding their lifestyle directly from company coffers.

Either way employees get screwed

Stupidest fucking thing I've read on this forum (amongst a a firehose of stupidity) in a while!

LOL

I love the anonymous surveys that one doesn't respond to and then gets a message from their manager or HR asking why they didn't respond to the survey.

I really love the anonymous surveys that one responds to and then gets to have a meeting with their manager or HR to discuss their responses.

I also love the anonymous surveys that ask personally identifying questions, such as what department you work in and how long you have been with the company and other such bullshit that allows the company/HR to identify every respondent as if they weren't already aware of each respondents identity already.  Anonymous my ass...

Attached File

And yet... You can still afford internet!

'Round here, yes.  There are people that think $20/hr is "good" pay.

Well, they're taking money, but not working.
They're AT work (maybe).

If they don't feel well (heaven forbid) at work they can either:
Start  feeling well,or
Fell well fired, glad to be  a reference.

And we pay the subsidies.  Again the consumer pays the costs.

People act like it’s difficult to be a good leader. It’s not, and it’s simple.

Pay them what they’re worth.

Be honest with them, the good and the bad. Continuous feedback. There should be no surprises as to where they stand.

Praise in public, criticize in private. Give them credit where credit is due and do it in front of others.

Invest in them professionally and personally.  Take interest in their career even if it doesn’t involve you or your company. Nobody stays at a job forever. When they leave you want them to leave with a good impression of you and being a little bit better because you helped them grow.

Respect their personal time. People work because they need money to live their lives. They are there to trade their time and effort for money at a fair rate of exchange. If you have to call them after hours you should apologize for intruding on their personal time. Conversely if they’re sending emails and shot after hours or on a weekend? “Why are you working on a Saturday morning and not having breakfast with your wife? This can wait until Monday.”  That goes a long way.

Fight for your people and shield them from corporate bullshit as much as you can.

Check in on their workload and make sure they’re not getting burned out. Burned out people are distracted, less efficient, and unsafe.

Don’t play favorites.

Tell the truth about everything and be transparent about processes. If there are things you can’t talk about, just say that up front, “We’ve got a couple of RFPs going out but they’re confidential. As soon as I can talk about it, I will.”

Recognize that good employees aren’t a threat. Good, skilled employees reflect positively upon you.  

Don’t force people into mandatory fun. If there’s an after hours thing like happy hour, go there, buy the first round, drink your drink, lay a 20 down for tip and pop smoke.  Nobody wants their boss around for drinks.

Keep professional distance.

Starting pay for my job, which requires a STEM degree, is lower than $15/hr.

Why would anyone sign up for that? I made $10 an hour in 2005 stocking shelves. That’s more than $15 today.

Entry level job for geologists that just got their degree. It's better than being a tradie in the metal stamping industry.

I get paid for a lot of hours where I don't have to work very hard, or at all. I'm basically just waiting, or I'm in a block of time that is usually spent doing paperwork that takes most people over 10 hours, but only takes me 3 because I know how to use Microsoft Word and Excel.

All management should be required to watch and discuss this once a year.

I would work for you...

Why? How so? Isn't $15 (or less) plenty as a living wage? What's wrong with that?

Thats asinine no matter the work, especially when gas stations are paying $25/hr to work the register

Ayo what, what do you do?

In 2024 dollars? Maybe if you are single and share a living space with at least one other single person.

When labor picks someone to represent them besides a communist front group, let's resume this conversation.

This should be on a sign in every manager and bosses office.  But I guarantee if you worked for a public company, the board would fire you.  Good leadership doesn't increase the bottom line.

Next door neighbor is a geologist, well out of college and out of work for the last year.  Doesn’t sound like a promising career.

There's no gas station in my area paying $25/hr.  Most are $12.30/hr since that's state minimum wage.  General labor at local factory is 17.50/hr.  Warehouse worker with some work in freezers pays $26.54/hr.  $16.70/hr at FedEx Warehouse package handler.

Average starting salary for Mechanical Engineer in Missouri is $80,859.  That's roughly $40/hr based on 2000 hours per year.  I did 17 years at the same company.  New hire bachelor engineers were making 20k less than me with a master's.  So basically every year of service was worth about $1000 to the company.  Or less than 1% raise per year.  I changed jobs.

I’m really fortunate my public employer values leadership very much. I had to leave a few to finally find a good one though.

Last year has been pretty tough. It comes and goes. When I bailed on law school there was a boom on that was about as good as it gets for an industry. Then there was a slow down around the time I left grad school, was apparently pretty brutal. I couldn't find a job and everyone I asked for any kind of lead or advice on how to get a call back or make my resume look better or even just straight up fucking lie to get an interview just looked at me like I was asking them to just shit them out a connex full of gold bricks. I did some gig economy stuff for a while, then worked at a metal stamper shop, tried to work my way into engineering but it was made clear that wasn't happening. A little bit of a boom was on, so I took the first job offer that would be a return to geology and an exit from metal stamping.

The trick seems to be surviving your first slow down. That's what it looks like, anyway. I'm supposedly getting promoted in a couple weeks while some companies in the industry are laying people off by the dozens. I guess that's something.

CEO’s are contract players.  They negotiate every thing in advance of hire so even their bonus’ are guaranteed, but they’re also usually graduate educated and their reputations are what boards look at.  Most who are decent have even negotiated compensation if they don’t work out and part ways with the company.  The fact they are sought out especially by publicly traded companies with boards are because other people have investment riding on that company and want a return.  

If they’re squeezing the employees to make that profit, leave, simple as that.  Trying to force a company that over promises to it’s investors and can’t make a good high value decision on leadership to meet it’s commitments to pay labor extra is just going to end in a shuttered business.

Kids here are so stupid they’re trying to unionize a non-profit charity organization that gets 90% of it’s funding from private donations, It get’s most of it’s staffing from volunteers too. How’s that gonna work out for them?

Lol, we start our assemblers at $18 now just to beat burger flippers and assembly is relatively low skill work. If you are only getting offered $16-20 an hour your resume must suck or you’re out in the sticks somewhere nobody wants to live.

The first two things I thought of reading your post:

If a CEO leverages his work force to maximize his salary, than the business might go bankrupt, but he's doing just fine and goes off to the next job.

What percent of the charities proceeds goes to their cause?  If the bosses are making a couple hundred grand a year and their workforce is mostly volunteer, than they can frankly die in a fiery plane crash and I'd laugh my ass off and pray their burning in hell.

HR ladies want to treat employees like a personal day care center.

Until November I was a Director in a publicly traded company.

You’re absolutely right. Now I’m with a private company which doesn’t resent me for doing my job and I’m looking at bringing some of my team over.

I’ll never work for a publicly traded company again if I can help it.

When I worked for CSC back in the early 2000s, we had about a 6 month stretch where everybody at our site (couple hundred folks including developers, QA, DBAs, etc) was working 50+ hour weeks trying to support a contract that we all knew was a mess, but since management had locked us in and we were "good employees", we stuck it out.  Once that finished, they brought everybody together and put on this big speech about how they really appreciated the hundreds of hours of overtime each of us had put in over the last 6 months and they wanted to show us how much they appreciated it...

They handed out envelopes with our names printed all nicely on them, and they told us to just wait and open them after the meeting concluded.  We did, expecting a nice check for at least some percentage of the overtime we'd worked.  Instead, inside we found how much they REALLY appreciated us:  coupons for 2 tickets at a local movie theater, a small popcorn, and a small drink. No... Not joking.  About $20 in coupons for each person despite the (combined) over $4 million in OT that got billed to the customer from our workers there, of which we didn't get paid.  CSC's thank you to us... A piss-poor $4k spread among 200 people.

If I remember right, we lost about 1/3 of the employees at that site in the coming month because of that garbage.

They also had a class action suit against them a couple years later because they'd been demanding employees put in a mandatory 44 hours and only bill 40 (and we were always told in meetings, never by email).  It wasn't until a manager screwed up and put it in an email that the employees had proof of it.  The guy who got the email from the manager made paper copies and also forwarded it to thousands in the company so they could also have proof.  

Another guy on my team and I discussed signing onto the class action suit when we got the paperwork, but concluded that as back-stabbing as CSC was, they would retaliate against everybody who signed onto it, so we didn't.  Almost a year later we started hearing of folks getting 40k+ in "back pay" from the suit.  Less than a month later, all the folks who'd been taking about getting $ from it simply disappeared from the groups one Monday.. We're talking thousands of people.

CSC was run by absolute scumbags.

No, we're going further into grinding capitalism.  The fruits of European socialism did get us to the Moon though, and that was nice for a few years.

Too many corporates run their companies like an abusive cult. They want you to recite the CEO's mantras while they cut benefits and CoL raises.

No kidding? So when the other guy is claiming that the "living wage" concept is BS, you're saying he is not telling the truch?

Suburbs of Houston (and some in Houston) , and that's what a lot of these jobs are being advertised as for pay scale. I'm not applying for those jobs because they aren't what I do and the pay is ridiculous, maybe noone is because they're still listed, but I see them when I'm browsing

I should hope so.  It only took 3 generations of struggle and investment.  There are a lot of fallow fields around

here this year because there is nothing available to put in them that will generate a profit.

No subsidies for the main crops here.

Have a friend who is a geophysicist.  Works for Shell and makes about 500k/year.

Eliminate all government assistance. Hunger is a great motivator

The conclusion was employers need to hire more bureaucracy. Just what we need to be more engaged, more memos.  

So why should consumers pay for employee daycare?

Upstream yes

Mid and Downstream have cost pass down.