Talia Jane Writes Na Open letter to Her CEO

[aerius]

Because your competitors will see that you're treating your employees like shit, snatch them all up and put you out of business when nobody will want to work for you.

And I can undercut their costs and put them out of business first. We're talking about a bunch of unskilled workers, there are always more where they came from, I'm not going to run out of them any time soon since the US is a fucking shithole as far as labour laws are concerned. And it's call center work for fuck's sake, I can easily outsource 99% of it to India, pay my few remaining US workers $150k each to manage everything, and still come out ahead on costs & service compared to my competitors.

[General Zod]

Because your competitors will see that you're treating your employees like shit, snatch them all up and put you out of business when nobody will want to work for you.

And I can undercut their costs and put them out of business first. We're talking about a bunch of unskilled workers, there are always more where they came from, I'm not going to run out of them any time soon since the US is a fucking shithole as far as labour laws are concerned. And it's call center work for fuck's sake, I can easily outsource 99% of it to India, pay my few remaining US workers $150k each to manage everything, and still come out ahead on costs & service compared to my competitors.

And this is why our economy's in the shitter.

[biostem]

Because your competitors will see that you're treating your employees like shit, snatch them all up and put you out of business when nobody will want to work for you.

And I can undercut their costs and put them out of business first. We're talking about a bunch of unskilled workers, there are always more where they came from, I'm not going to run out of them any time soon since the US is a fucking shithole as far as labour laws are concerned. And it's call center work for fuck's sake, I can easily outsource 99% of it to India, pay my few remaining US workers $150k each to manage everything, and still come out ahead on costs & service compared to my competitors.

And this is why our economy's in the shitter.

How would you rectify the situation? The only things that come to mind would be to a) up the minimum wage and b) mandate that employers providing a service must hire employees within a certain distance of the area in which said service is being provided.

[General Zod]

There's a number of alternative models to pick from. Some grocery chains use a profit sharing method that turns employees into vested stock owners after a few years, and I think that could be a really good solution for a lot of businesses on top of raising the minimum wage.

[General Zod]

Of course for any of that to mean a damn you have to simultaneously tackle the affordable housing problem that all the baby boomers have driven into the ground.

[Stormin]

I wonder how badly she screwed herself out of possible future better jobs now that a google search of her name will turn this up.

As another person who is living in the negatives I understand the frustration but this is probably one of the worst ways to go about trying to fix it. Complaining to the public won't get her a raise.

[biostem]

Of course for any of that to mean a damn you have to simultaneously tackle the affordable housing problem that all the baby boomers have driven into the ground.

Well, that's a case of supply and demand, no? Even if the government were to step in and build affordable housing, if the area became desirable to live in, it'd drive the demand up, and private owners would still be able to charge what people are willing to pay.

My issue is that if the supply of workers exceeds the number of available jobs, then employers could simply offer lower pay until they get people for the minimum...

[Simon_Jester]

Interestingly, unless Talia is outright lying about some of the details, retaining employees for a period of several months is advantageous to this company. She notes that the inexperienced call workers get worse results because they can't handle the customers as well, and wind up having to give out more free coupons/gift cards/money/whatever to compensate.

The idea that retaining employees is intrinsically 'useless' because any random desperate fool off the street can do the worker's job just as well as the person who has that job now... This is largely an illusion created by bad management, in my opinion. Either managers who don't understand what their own employees do (and therefore cannot grasp the role of experience in making employees proficient), or managers who are so bad at preserving a base of talent and motivating their staff that they don't even know what a competent, well organized workforce with effective experience looks like.

[biostem]

It may not necessarily be a matter of veteran employees being able to do the job better than new hires - it may simply be a matter of new employees doing the job "well enough" to meet whatever handle time and other metrics that they have set in place - the owners may simply not care about other factors, or may prefer to invest in things like a more robust automated phone system or easier to use troubleshooting suite.

[aerius]

Interestingly, unless Talia is outright lying about some of the details, retaining employees for a period of several months is advantageous to this company. She notes that the inexperienced call workers get worse results because they can't handle the customers as well, and wind up having to give out more free coupons/gift cards/money/whatever to compensate.

Any business which isn't completely stupid will have costed that out. They will know how much an inexperienced worker will cost them in refunds vs. the additional wages they need to pay out to retain a good worker. If they have to hand out an average of $20 per day in coupons/refunds vs. $25 dollars in wages, guess what's going to happen? It's the same way that automakers in the past cost out the price of dead bodies & lawsuits vs. spending an extra $10 on each car so that it doesn't explode.

[Elheru Aran]

Because that's not morally bankrupt at all, at least when it came to the cars. It's a little more understandable with a call center but it maintains a basic notion that workers are utterly disposable.

[Kingmaker]

I think that if you can't afford to pay your employees a living wage then you don't deserve to be in business and it might be time to reconsider your business model.

Do you really think nuking every job that fails to meet this criterion is going to be a net benefit to the people working them? This seems like the dumbest possible solution to the problem.

Interestingly, unless Talia is outright lying about some of the details, retaining employees for a period of several months is advantageous to this company. She notes that the inexperienced call workers get worse results because they can't handle the customers as well, and wind up having to give out more free coupons/gift cards/money/whatever to compensate.

She doesn't need to be lying. She could simply be mistaken, or substantially overestimating the performance differences and/or the cost of performance differences. I don't see much reason to give her analysis much credence.

[His Divine Shadow]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

If I'm running a business which requires minimally skilled employees who are pretty much disposable, and I have a seemingly endless supply of people who are either willing or can be suckered into doing the job, why the hell would I pay them anything more than minimum wage? These aren't skilled workers who I need to retain, they're dime a dozen workers who I can replace at any time and who won't be missed at all by anyone. My business isn't going to be improved if I doubled their wages, there's no return on my expenditure, I'm running a business, not a charity.

Because your competitors will see that you're treating your employees like shit, snatch them all up and put you out of business when nobody will want to work for you.

From what I see, loads of people are sympathetic to this kind of treatment of employees.

[Simon_Jester]

Interestingly, unless Talia is outright lying about some of the details, retaining employees for a period of several months is advantageous to this company. She notes that the inexperienced call workers get worse results because they can't handle the customers as well, and wind up having to give out more free coupons/gift cards/money/whatever to compensate.

Any business which isn't completely stupid will have costed that out. They will know how much an inexperienced worker will cost them in refunds vs. the additional wages they need to pay out to retain a good worker. If they have to hand out an average of $20 per day in coupons/refunds vs. $25 dollars in wages, guess what's going to happen? It's the same way that automakers in the past cost out the price of dead bodies & lawsuits vs. spending an extra $10 on each car so that it doesn't explode.

Thing is, that narrows down the category of times it's actually profitable for a company to have a lousy retention rate, while increasing the number of options for bad managers to delude themselves into thinking retention rate doesn't matter.

Which ties back into what I was saying. Retention "not mattering" is as likely to be a product of bad management as it is to be a product of a super-unskilled job.

I think that if you can't afford to pay your employees a living wage then you don't deserve to be in business and it might be time to reconsider your business model.

Do you really think nuking every job that fails to meet this criterion is going to be a net benefit to the people working them? This seems like the dumbest possible solution to the problem.

Eliminating literally every such job might not be a net benefit, but we DO have a major social problem with large numbers of companies in disparate industries all converging on "don't pay people a living wage!" as their way of making a profit.

The issue is not any one person doing something, the issue is half the major employers in America doing it at once. It's a market failure.

From the point of view of abstract spherical frictionless homo economicus specimens, sure, it makes sense for some jobs to exist that pay less than a living wage. And ideal frictionless homo economicus will only take these jobs if it makes rational sense for them to be bringing in less than the income required to maintain a household.

But when such jobs make up a majority of all work on offer for people between the ages of 20 and 35... THEN you have problems that cannot be explained as a simple linear combination of "Fred has a sub-living-wage job, and so does Susie, and so does Al..." You get problems that affect the entire society, and at that point it becomes far less sympathetic to claim "if we paid our workers more, we'd go out of business!" Because with half the economy saying that one has to think "well yes, this particular business model might collapse, but that doesn't mean ALL business will collapse; the economy will evolve and route around the problem in its own way."

Interestingly, unless Talia is outright lying about some of the details, retaining employees for a period of several months is advantageous to this company. She notes that the inexperienced call workers get worse results because they can't handle the customers as well, and wind up having to give out more free coupons/gift cards/money/whatever to compensate.

She doesn't need to be lying. She could simply be mistaken, or substantially overestimating the performance differences and/or the cost of performance differences. I don't see much reason to give her analysis much credence.

She gave specific numbers; I see no reason not to believe her.

[salm]

She gave specific numbers; I see no reason not to believe her.

There is no real reason to believe her either, though. I mean, she worked in the call center, so does she even have the qualification to judge this? And even if she does, she´s in the call center, so does she have access to enough information to judge this?

But then it doesn´t really matter imo. Just because you can run a business with a specific strategy doesn´t meant that you should do it.

[biostem]

I found some interesting info about this topic:

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/281791/ ... privilege/

http://www.businessinsider.com/stefanie ... ane-2016-2

https://twitter.com/itsa_talia/status/6 ... 5998646272

[salm]

The woman behind your second link is a classical idiot who thinks that just because it was bad for her in the past people now shouldn´t complain.
It´s like the "walk to school, barefoot in the snow uphill both ways" argument you hear from old people.

Or how some victims of child abuse will beat up their children because it "obviously didn´t harm them", either.

[General Zod]

Do you really think nuking every job that fails to meet this criterion is going to be a net benefit to the people working them? This seems like the dumbest possible solution to the problem.

If you have an alternative solution feel free to share.

[biostem]

The woman behind your second link is a classical idiot who thinks that just because it was bad for her in the past people now shouldn´t complain.
It´s like the "walk to school, barefoot in the snow uphill both ways" argument you hear from old people.

Or how some victims of child abuse will beat up their children because it "obviously didn´t harm them", either.

Perhaps we had a different take-away from that article - I took it as "everyone has to eat crow sometimes, and when that happens, you have to postpone your dreams to make ends meet. I see no mention of Talia deciding to take a second job, for instance. I see no mention of her saying "I can't make ends meet with this job, so I quit and got something closer that paid better".

I don't see anyone saying that if a workplace sucks that badly, then we should all quit and take our skills elsewhere. Especially given that she apparently had enough spare income to get liquor delivered to her workplace, I doubt just how dire she makes her situation out to be...

[Simon_Jester]

So she writes something that basically reduces to "I and everyone I know here make eight or nine dollars an hour, which is NOT a living wage, this is causing severe hardship. Can we (not I, we) please have some more money?" And she consequently gets fired for saying it.

Part of me feels like I'm watching that scene from Oliver Twist where the orphan who's been working for months on near-starvation rations tremblingly walks up to the gruel line after eating his bowl of gruel and still being hungry... And asking "please sir, I want some more."

And suddenly, the adults yell "WHAT!?" And they freak out, like how dare someone ask for more. How dare he be hungry. Doesn't he have any enterprise? Any self-respect? Who gave him the license to complain?

http://charlesdickenspage.com/twist_more.html

Now, in our modern attempt to imitate this parody of some of the most insane and wicked social nastiness of the Victorian Age...

Certain things are predictably said against the woman who spoke out. People trawl through her Twitter archive looking for any indication that she spent money on a luxury, ever, because WELFARE QUEEEEEN!!! Except she is not actually on welfare so far as I know, but that's not the point. Because the cry of WELFARE QUEEEEN!!! was never actually about the idea that these people were misusing government money. It's about the idea that anyone who has no money, and wants more, is greedy and stupid and grasping and irresponsible.

They go "She's not being frugal enough!" And "Why did she take a minimum wage job in San Francisco!?" Considerable intellect and inventiveness is devoted to 'proving' her a liar who has fundamentally misrepresented the nature both of her problem and of other people's problems.

To my mind it is... sobering.. just how far and how fast this reaction goes. How categorically this swarm of quick-reacting people tries to rule out what seems to me the obvious notion that... maybe she should have some more.
________________________________

Our society is richer than 1830s London, even the paupers (mostly) aren't as bad off as the paupers of that time and place. But the structure, the format, is very similar. Large group of people we have to know are suffering, one of them speaks up, and a bunch of hypocritical bastards are shocked and offended that she did so, and start searching for a way to denigrate her account... Even though we know this account is an accurate description of what many people in America experience. We can't actually pretend that eight or nine dollars an hour is a living wage in San Francisco, any more than we can pretend that three small bowls of thin gruel a day is adequate nourishment for growing children.

And yet, many of us are compelled to try.

[salm]

Perhaps we had a different take-away from that article - I took it as "everyone has to eat crow sometimes, and when that happens, you have to postpone your dreams to make ends meet.

Nah, it looks like some attention whore with a crippled ego going "hey look, i went through shit without batting an eye, so I´m better than you".
And even her premise is nonsense. She obiously did <i>not</i> work in shithole like Yelp is described to be. She started her job at a bar and after a while actually made a lot of money with that job whereas Yelp is described as on of the places where large swaths of employees do NOT make enough.

I see no mention of Talia deciding to take a second job, for instance. I see no mention of her saying "I can't make ends meet with this job, so I quit and got something closer that paid better".

This Talia person might be an idiot or she might have been forced to take this crap job at Yelp for whatever reason. I don´t care. I do care that there are so many companies that underpay their employees, because even if this Talia person did not have to take the job there are other people who might have had to take them. And simply stating that they should all just get a second job is absurd. A job is supposed to house and feed people. You´re not supposed to need two jobs.
Now, if everybody just quit, that would be awesome. Unfortunately that is not like crowds usually behave. It does happen, see my personal anecdote a couple of posts above, but unfortunately it is rare.

I don't see anyone saying that if a workplace sucks that badly, then we should all quit and take our skills elsewhere. Especially given that she apparently had enough spare income to get liquor delivered to her workplace, I doubt just how dire she makes her situation out to be...

Your link states that she ordered the liquor for a company event. Even if she were able to afford a bottle of whiskey, it´s not like this bottle is particularly expensive. I just looked it up on amazon and I can order a bottle like that for 20€.

[salm]

Part of me feels like I'm watching that scene from Oliver Twist where the orphan who's been working for months on near-starvation rations tremblingly walks up to the gruel line after eating his bowl of gruel and still being hungry... And asking "please sir, I want some more."

Nice. That fits the situation perfectly.

[Broomstick]

Part of me feels like I'm watching that scene from Oliver Twist where the orphan who's been working for months on near-starvation rations tremblingly walks up to the gruel line after eating his bowl of gruel and still being hungry... And asking "please sir, I want some more."

Nice. That fits the situation perfectly.

I am reminded of one my unemployment episodes from a couple years back. A fellow poster on another message board offered me some work on his property for minimum wage. I added up the cost of driving there and back, and found that even if I slept in my car and ate minimally I'd lose money by taking that job. It would cost me more to get there and back than I would earn.

So I thanked him for his offer and declined.

Cue shitstorm: I was lazy, grasping, greedy, stupid, etc. etc. because I wouldn't take a job that would cost me money. Huh, so I wasn't desperate and therefore didn't deserve help or sympathy! It got personal and ugly.

Funny, isn't it - when a wealthy person or business rejects something that would result in a net loss they're hailed as wise and making a good fiscal decision. If a poor person does the same they're a horrible loathsome scumbug or something.

My paranoid side thinks this has been done deliberately to provide an exploitable underclass for cheap labor and sucking off money/profits but I don't really think there's a cabal of evil businessmen making these decisions, not really. That's just a nightmare I have when worried about how to pay the bills.

[biostem]

There's a fundamental disconnect here - I personally do not feel that a person, working at an entry level job outside of their are of expertise/education, should be making enough to live alone in an expensive area. You need to work that job, while sharing expenses and saving up, until you get enough experience to get a better job or move up in the company. Then, once you have that experience and a little cash saved up, you venture out on your own. I see this person as trying to jump several steps, then complaining when she falls flat on her face.

Your link states that she ordered the liquor for a company event. Even if she were able to afford a bottle of whiskey, it´s not like this bottle is particularly expensive. I just looked it up on amazon and I can order a bottle like that for 20€.

If she is complaining about not being able to afford heat and only eating rice, then this only serves to show that her priorities are screwed up. I'd be very interested to see an exact breakdown of her expenses. I've had to live on nothing but dollar store items before, and I can almost guarantee that we're not getting the full story.

People can cry that it's all the evil corporation's fault, and while I'm no fan, I don't think that's who is totally at fault, here.

[biostem]

Part of me feels like I'm watching that scene from Oliver Twist where the orphan who's been working for months on near-starvation rations tremblingly walks up to the gruel line after eating his bowl of gruel and still being hungry... And asking "please sir, I want some more."

Nice. That fits the situation perfectly.

I am reminded of one my unemployment episodes from a couple years back. A fellow poster on another message board offered me some work on his property for minimum wage. I added up the cost of driving there and back, and found that even if I slept in my car and ate minimally I'd lose money by taking that job. It would cost me more to get there and back than I would earn.

So I thanked him for his offer and declined.

Cue shitstorm: I was lazy, grasping, greedy, stupid, etc. etc. because I wouldn't take a job that would cost me money. Huh, so I wasn't desperate and therefore didn't deserve help or sympathy! It got personal and ugly.

Funny, isn't it - when a wealthy person or business rejects something that would result in a net loss they're hailed as wise and making a good fiscal decision. If a poor person does the same they're a horrible loathsome scumbug or something.

My paranoid side thinks this has been done deliberately to provide an exploitable underclass for cheap labor and sucking off money/profits but I don't really think there's a cabal of evil businessmen making these decisions, not really. That's just a nightmare I have when worried about how to pay the bills.

So I'm assuming you immediately hit the pavement and scoured the local area for a job, and took the first one that would hire you, then? While it made sense for you to turn down the job in the specific instance you mentioned, we again only get part of the story. When I had to quit my job, I went out the very next day and applied anywhere I could find. I had expenses, and holding out for something I really liked wasn't an option. I went from doing computer forensics to working at a camping store to pay the bills. Sure, I kept looking for jobs in my field while I sized people for hiking boots or folded shirts, but money's money and sometimes you have to do jobs you don't like.

In regard to your last point - it's a simple matter of supply and demand. If there are 100 people looking for work, but only 50 jobs, then those workers are going to have to compete for said jobs and the employers have the advantage.

You can enact some laws to try and keep things balanced, but push too far, and the company will simply relocate to somewhere that's more advantageous to them. The other approach to make is to better educate young people on how, when, and where to try and start out on their own, while allowing them to simultaneously build up their own wealth and experience/skill set.