> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this.
Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?
Additional irony is, that behavior is condemned while any sort of orchestrated labor union in the industry is met with resistance at every turn.
Your employers, even as competitors dealing with monetary counts in billions, try to unionize (aka collusion). Stop pretending businesses are looking after your best interests. Chances are, if the business supports something, unless your goals align on that thing with the business, you probably want to do the opposite. Compensation maximization and labor expense minimization are nearly orthogonal.
No, being clear, since it seems you aren't separating concepts.
You're not happy that these companies have SINGLE large shareholders. That the founders kept so much company equity. I FULLY AGREE no one should have that much wealth. But, no one here is complaining about families or others having similar wealth. They are complaining that founders kept that much ownership.
The real wage suppression is happening in other industries and companies. How about the lack of a livable wage in industrial and service industries? How about that fact that the average wage has not kept up with cost of living?
Why are you advocating for engineers like myself making many times the average income and living way above average lives? That's insane!
How about oil companies with similar profits paying engineers 80-100k? at an actual risk of loss of life?
We should focus on the actual problems. The lack of ability to tax generational and asset wealth. The reason they accumulate so much is that we can't tax their share of ownership.
I agree with what you've said, but there's not much that individuals on here can do about it. I'm just trying to convince readers here not to willingly participate in reducing their own wages for the benefit of insanely rich business owners.
I don't think people really understand the gravity of those fortunes.
Jeff Bezos could now (in theory, at market prices) buy Tacoma, Washington.
As in buy every piece of real estate, private and public, all utilities and infrastructure.
A town of 200,000 people. One man could buy it all. The assessed property value for 2017 was just over $105B, including government-owned, plus wiggle room for other properties.
That "should not" be possible. Buying (or being able to buy, rather) a "mid sized urban city", as an individual.
That actually seems pretty small compared to Bezos impact on global commerce.
I am all for constraints on wealth being created or compounded by political and market corruption. But see no reason to discourage or cap wealth created by productive means.
Creating this artificial ceiling in the low 6 figures is awful, regardless of how badly people making less than that are getting screwed. As far as I'm concerned, they're as hopeless as a bucket of crabs and we shouldn't use them as a bar or relative bar for anything.
Do I-bankers look at they're comp and say "yeah that's pretty good. I'm ok getting screwed out of any more"?
I think we should always be advocating for our group as hard as we can.
These aren't the only choices. I think our industry is actually a little better with that, where we have some software engineers advocating for more money for the contractors. [1]
Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?