I'm not quite understand western rage about gas prices.
OK, gas become more expensive, shit happens. But what is the problem to ask employer to rise your salary? It's not your imagination, employer perfectly know that gas price rised. You have skills, you sell them to employer who need your skills, it is a trade and there is capitalism around. Gas prices changed, so your skills become more expensive too, since you need gas to continue to sell your skills to employer.
Another question is about salaries. In many private talks with westerners, when things come to salaries, people refuse to name the numbers. IDK, in Russia we don't have any taboos about salaries, and it is common topic for talks, when people compare their salaries, bragging about recent rise or complaining about decline. With exact numbers. "I have 150kRUB/month. Wow, I work less than you and have 170kRUB/month. My business bring me 100-200kRUB/month. I work half-day and have 70kRUB/month. You all too rich in that city, I have only 80kRUB/month in my shithole". (we used to monthly salary numbers, as tradition) I never had heard that kind of talks on western forums or in private communication. Even talking with drunk western friends in bar it is impossible to talk about each other salaries/profits. What is it? Salaries is something intimate on the west and it is indecently to discuss them?
Thanks. So, this is a kind of saving employer money through obscurity? Does it really works? If it works, that means that average salary among similar positions have to be noticeably lower than fair one. So, most employees have to be underpaid.
Also strange that it is not a open free market where sellers and buyers know each other prices and quality of commodities. That could result in huge drop in quality of commodities, employees skills in that case. If buyers and sellers don't know average prices and quality of commodities, there could not be quality competition.
So, from the other side, employees don't have to improve their skills, they just need to find an employer with highest possible proposal.
It's like you enter the shop to buy a soda and see a shelf with a tons of different cans without price. To find out prices you have to buy all different types, which is impractical, so you just take few random cans and checkout. If quality is not satisfactory, you will have to repeat that random shopping. From the manufacturer side there are no any need to make a soda with better taste - since each buyer have to choose cans randomly, there always be a buyer who will pay your price for your product, independently from the product quality.
If you add all that modern immigrants, diversity and inclusivity crap to that situation, things become even worse. In the shop you have to buy at least one blue and one rainbow cans, so manufacturer could just fill them with water or pee and they will still be sold.
For me it looks like strange casino where both player and casino loose, just because players don't want to show their bids and casino don't want to show his cards.
To add to the previous, employers frequently forbid discussion of salaries. Each employee is convinced by their boss that they are uniquely overpaid and that talking about it would result in lowering their salary to the mean. Such forbidding is legally unenforceable, but people can be bullied into all kinds of things.
I heard about such demands from employees of western (or with large western share) companies here, but nobody give a fuck to that strange, alien and completely unbased demands.
So, how much do you make?
I haven't been an employee since the 80s, but I can see why people wouldn't want to risk the deal they've made by telling anyone else about it. If you knew I was getting $10,000 per hour, would you still be okay with only getting $65 per hour?
Depends on how business going, now it runs a little better, it is $2.5k - $3k / month.
I also haven't been employee for a long time. :)
But I think it will depend on the average. If average is $5 per hour, I'll highly likely will be happy with my deal and will not care about your at all. Even if average is unknown, I'll prefer to rely on needs/spent efforts ratio. If that $65/hour cover all my needs and don't demand any significant efforts from me, I'll will not care about your salary too. Also, it depends on hours a month. Interesting, that this situation with $65/h and $10000/h is real. Say, you and I are electronics engineers with similar skills. But I'm repairing smartphones, and you repair highly sophisticated rare industrial equipment. I need an hour to repair smartphone, you need a hour to repair your thing. But I have endless customers who wish to pay me $65/h 24/7, and you could earn your $10000/h only few times a year, since there is only dozen pieces of that rare equipment in whole world. I could have questions only if average is $10000/h or if average is $65/h and we are doing exact same job with exactly same hours a year. And even in that case could be variants, when it could be OK for me. Either I'm altruist with other wealth source and this job is my hobby or lifework, either you just a relative of some top manager or supervising government official (high-ranked tax officer, f.e.). Or we are artists/actors/whatever where job itself does not matter.
In any case I'll try to find a reason for difference first. And highly unlikely I'll have intention to harm your wage, more likely will try to improve my own, by changing employer or acquiring skills.
You're right that those opportunities are limited. It was a rare and pretty unobtainable type of consulting back then, and was only around 40 hours over a couple years. Still ended up making a few million in that business. The irony is I ended up developing an intolerance for society, and exited.
Mee to, especially in last years, but my business allow to distance from society and I also delivered all business negotiations with customer managers, lawyers and finacists to my colleague/business partner, and I'm talking mostly with decently sane and competent engineers who directly work with our stuff so no need for me to exit.
In last years, top management, especially of large enterprises become completely dumb and insane. Sometimes seems that they even have their own crazy language and system of concepts, so it is impossible to maintain any dialogue with them. You could spend half of year just to make an agreement on each letter of contract, while enterprise losing multiples of our equipment price every month.
It could be that people are afraid of generating hard feelings if they are being overpaid compared to their friend or coworker.
So fear of conflict. And fear of finding out that they are being underpaid. But some are definitely over paid. I know a young guy at Netflix being paid 450,000 usd per year with barely any education and does barely any work. He does IT website mockups type thing. Once i found out about him i knew i was really underpaid.
Usuallt follows the Pareto principle right?
Thanks for your perspective.
So, for the unknown reason, there are no capitalism and free open market (labor is commodity too) in corporations?
And here comes very interesting question - if capitalism and free open market is superior over any other system of economic relations organisation, why corporations don't want to use it for labour market inside them?
Still don't get the point of such strange corporations approach with salary secrecy. Even in terms of corporation profits. In Russia, on many HR/job sites and in job sections of professional forums even prohibited to place vacancies without exact minimum and maximum wage. There exist well known average salaries for most jobs, so as employers could plan and estimate expenses and potential employees have full picture of existing opportunities. Employees with better skills nearly always get salary above average, ones with lower skills have a good motivation to gain more expirience and so on. Everything open and predictable. With salary secrecy even simple things looks obscure - how employer could estimate his expenses for new jobs? How to plan expansion of business if you have no idea what salaries new employees will agree for? With random salaries you could easily run out of funds looking for necessary competence, or vice versa, get worst possible employees if you cap the salary. Or it will get completely random result with incompetent dumbfucks with high salary and professionals working for food.
Isn't that approach destroy labour market and cause employees quality falling? Or it is an intentional attempt to force that new "post-whatever" negative selection where higher quality of life received by ones who are not better professionals, but ones who are better in lies, cheek, narcissism and all that stuff?
In latter case I see how modern west could had been degenerated to all that wokeism, ESG and other stuff.