Tag Archives: Salary

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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There are parents who support the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality, but what happens when their children enter the business world. What happens when the CEO of a company tries to practice ‘everybody gets a trophy’ in his business. We have a recent example.

Yesterday Business Insider posted a story about Dan Price, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based credit-card-payment processing firm Gravity Payments. Mr. Price decided to raise the minimum salary at his company to $70,000. At first his employees were thrilled, but things do not work out as well as planned.

Employees are leaving. Why? Because some employees feel that some less valuable employees got increases bigger than some more valuable employees. One employee complained that the new policy did not reward work ethic–there was no incentive to do more or work extra hours to complete tasks. People who had done that in the past were treated no differently than the less conscientious employees.

The company is struggling financially because of the decision to pay everyone $70,000 a year. There is also a court case filed by Dan Price’s brother, a minority owner, which was filed soon after the pay raise.

There is something in the American psyche that expects to be paid a fair wage for a hard days work. There is also something in the American psyche that resents it when people who do not do a good job are paid the same as people who do. That is why socialism will fail in America, just as it has failed in all the other places it has been tried.

With A Stroke Of The Pen…

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Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about President Obama’s new Executive Order to change the rules for American workers regarding overtime pay.

The article reports:

Currently, businesses that pay salaried workers less than $455 a week have to pay overtime as well. Obama complains that this threshold has been raised only once since 1975. (He conveniently leaves out the fact that the last increase came during President Bush’s “jobless recovery.”)

As a result, he says, too many companies are “skirting basic overtime laws, calling somebody a manager when they’re stocking groceries and getting paid $30,000 a year.”

Obama plans to raise the threshold to $50,400, which he says will make 5 million more workers eligible for time-and-a-half pay.

So let’s take a look at this. If you are working hard, it’s always nice to get a pay raise, particularly if you are putting in a lot of overtime. However, it seems to me that the decision to pay you overtime should be made by the company you work for (since they are going to be required to come up with the money to pay you). If you understand that companies are in business to make a profit (otherwise there is no point in being in business), then you understand that this Executive Order is not going to have the result that President Obama seems to think it will have. The head of a company is now placed in a position where he has to figure out if it is cheaper to pay someone overtime or hire someone part time. He also has to consider if he wants to replace one person who was previously not paid overtime with two part-time people paid less. At any rate, the unintended consequences of this Executive Order are going to hurt workers more than they are going to help them.

If You Misdiagnose The Problem, You Won’t Get The Right Solution

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The federal deficit is out of control. For whatever reason, the Obama Administration is convinced they can reduce the deficit by cutting military readiness and benefits to the military.

A website called trivisionno.com posted the following:

https://www.rightwinggranny.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/food-stamps-monthly-benefit.jpg

Note that the average food stamp benefit per person is $125.35 per month.

The chart below (from the same site) shows the benefits paid out:

https://www.rightwinggranny.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/food-stamps-annual-benefits.jpg

These benefits are given to people based on their income. There is no work requirement, generally no drug testing, and nothing to encourage people to get off of food stamps. Why are we not doing some serious cutting here? I am not trying to pick on food stamp recipients, but my point is that we need to look at many ways to deal with runaway government spending.

From a site called U.S. Government Spending:

govspendingwelfareMeanwhile, Stars and Stripes reported yesterday:

The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission will release its long-awaited report Thursday, which will propose fundamental changes to military benefits including ending the 20-year retirement, according to the Military Times, citing sources familiar with the report.

The plan calls for Congress to create a hybrid system of smaller defined-benefit pension along with more cash-based benefits and lump-sum payments. A significant portion of retirement benefits would come in the form of government contributions to 401(k)-style investment accounts, those familiar with the report told Military Times.

In addition to the 401(k) for troops serving less than 20 years, the commission will suggest promising a pension to troops who serve a long-term career, but one that would be more modest than what military retirees receive today, a defense official briefed on the plan told the Times.

And, unlike the current system, this pension would not start upon separation from service; instead, those payment checks would begin at a traditional retirement age, such as 60 or older, according to the official.

So let’s see. Rather than deal with the people who choose to collect welfare rather than work (I realize that does not apply to all welfare recipients, but it applies to some of them), we are going to take away the benefits of the men and women who voluntarily risk their lives to keep us free. It’s even worse than that. When a career military man leaves the military at age 40-something, he starts out as an employee in the civilian world at square one. His military experience does not necessarily translate to seniority in a civilian job. His retirement pay helps bridge the gap and allow him to support his family. He (or she) has given up many of the peak advancement years in order to serve America. Why in the world would the government even consider taking away something that makes the military a reasonable option to civilian life? If I didn’t know better, I would believe that the military commission was attempting to destroy our volunteer army.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

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Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article today comparing President Obama’s statement about equal wages for women with the actual pay scales at the White House. Please follow the link above to read the entire article, but this is the gist of it (as posted at McClatchydc.com):

But a McClatchy review of White House salaries shows that when the same calculations that produced the 77 cents is applied to the White House, the average female pay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is less than the average male pay. When counted the same way that produced the 77-cent figure, the analysis found, women overall at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. That’s an average salary of $84,082 for men and $76,516 for women.

 Asked about its own payroll, the White House said Wednesday that it should be measured by how it pays men and women in the same jobs, but not the kind of broad brush that compares overall male and female pay.

In other words, the White House doesn’t want to be measured by the same yardstick they use for everyone else. The 77-cent canard is based on averaging on the widest possible “big brush” scale. Their answer — that men and women doing the same work and responsibility get paid equally — holds true in the marketplace as well. In fact, that’s what the 91% gap shows, in both the White House and the Blau-Kahn study; the difference is in the rational choices made by women in the marketplace, not some kind of malicious conspiracy against the female gender.

Another reason the alternative media is necessary under the Obama Administration.

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