Unless businesses are assessing these things with reasonable competence they will be employing people they don't need at unnecessary cost and failing to fill positions that could be of enormous economic benefit to the business if filled.
The fact is all businesses are making these sort of estimated assessments regarding the economic benefits of positions within the business all the time. Even if they don't formalise the process of doing so. Not to do so at least reasonably competently would be economic suicide for any business.
An economic benefit assessment does not have to be done in order to have good hiring practices. For manufacturing, all you have to do is build the labor costs into your overhead and have your margin exceed that. You don't have to figure out how much economic benefit a box stacker adds to the product because you're selling it for more than it costs you to make it, including paying that guy to stack the boxes.
CS writes:
In the real world, even in your own job where you know about the details, you cannot answer the question.
The question as to whether my position provides the company with economic benefit estimated to be far in excess of the costs of employing someone in my position most definitely can be answered.
You've misunderstood, I wasn't talking about your job. Your economic benefit assessment for the network engineer, in
Message 195, never contained the phrase "the network engineer will provide an econominc benefit of X"
The question was "How much economic benefit does the individual provide?" You can't answer it in your assessment for the network engineer, the one where you know about the details, so why should I think you could do it for a job where you don't know the details?
Positions within my company (indeed whole sections and even departments) are under constant review and if the estimated economic benefits don't justify the costs redundancies are made.
Sure, but the point your missing is that you'll never find this piece of information: "Charlie, in his job, provided the company with $53,724 last year."
CS writes:
But at no point do you actually go: this engineer will provide the company with X number of dollars, so therefore we are going to pay him Y number of dollars. That's the point you're missing.
It's not the point I'm missing but nor does it have any great bearing on the point I am making.
When you say that somebody is grossly underpaid because they are not receiving a large enough portion of the economic benefit that they provide to the company, you're implying that you know how much economic benefit they provide. Otherwise, how could you say that their portion is too small?
The point I am making is this - The labour of low wage workers can indisputably be demonstrated to provides huge economic benefit to many businesses.
Then demonstrate it. How much economic benefit does a low wage worked add to a business?
Meanwhile these same businesses are quite happy to pay huge salaries, pensions and payoffs to senior managers even when these senior managers are responsble for economically disastrous mistakes or hold positions which no cost-benefit analysis could possibly justify (honourary paid positions on the board, high paid executive positions for the chairman's son, consultancy exercises with the CEO's brother-in-law etc. etc. etc. to cite some obviously extreme yet not entirely untypical examples).
You're just Begging the Question. Where are these businesses? Are they privately owned? How do you know how much economic benefit the charman's son is providing?
So we have a situation where the government is effectively subsidising businesses such that they can underpay those who demonstrably provide enormous economic benefit so that those at the top can make huge gains regadless of whether they provide any economic benefit or not.
A minimum wage worker provides little to no economic benefit to a company. If you think otherwise, demonstrate it.
Its only when you have a whole bunch of them that you start to get an appreciable amount of benefit. But, at that point, you are actually paying quite a bit for all those people.
Too, the people who make most of the money are the ones who are paying for the federal government, so its all just coming back around anyways.
That absolute ripping up of the expectation that one's economic benefit to a business will have some bearing on reward, even just to the extent of a wage one can live on, is the "discrepany" I am talking about.
The economic benefits that a worker adds to a company do not belong to the worker, they belong to the owners of the company.
™ Version 4.2
(1)