evilgenius wrote:Cog wrote:A corporation is not a charity. If you must, go beg down at the local food bank. The purpose of a corporation is to create profits to benefit shareholders. Become a shareholder and reap profits. its that easy.
I might point out your pay at a corporation is based on what you bring to the table. If you want to just punch the clock and be average, then you are going to get paid accordingly.
Its only because I'm a nice guy that I presented this basic lesson in capitalism absolutely free. I like giving back.
The point isn't whether a corporation is a charity. The point is that reward comes over varying timeframes.. The longer term can be just as rewarding,
I may have shared in past posts that I was born a US citizen but my professional career took place in Europe where I worked for international corporations that offered 6 week holidays, pregnancy leave and all of us employees benefited from a public health care system. After 15 years of being weaned on European style employee benefits I was transferred to South Florida as a base for working in Latin America. I eventually become a consultant with my own business that represented exclusively European medical device manufacturers.
At the time I sold this business to move down here to Panama we had 7 employees, two of whom where micro biologists that I brought up from Mexico and Peru having secured H1 visas. All of our 7 employees residing in the US received the following benefits:
6 weeks paid holiday
6 weeks pregnancy leave
Blue cross blue shield health insurance.
We had no turnover of employees. We had excellent work environment. Our employees were loyal and worked very hard.
It would have been easy for me to apply US standard work conditions on all the staff, would have been easy to approach our employees with a philosophy to maximize profit for the share holders (my wife and I) and I am sure I could have squeezed maybe another couple of hundred thousand dollars out of the staff by doing this.
At what cost? In terms of work environment, in terms of turnover of employees. In terms of loyalty of the staff?
There are some things you cant put a price tag on, especially when your sole criteria for valuation is to the share holders.
In the US we have a corporate culture where the primary focus is upward on share holder value. Employees are expected to be loyal but everyone knows this is only skin deep and the loyalty only runs in one direction. If you are terminated you are escorted to the door the same day.
In Europe when you are terminated or resign you give or receive 3 months notice. In these 90 days your replacement is found and ideally there is an overlap.
Now compared to Chinese corporations maybe US citizens are still well compensated.. Have we come so far that this becomes the metric by which we compare?
It seems to be the case.
By the way, some of our neighboring land owners here in Panama are really pissed off at me. I pay our staff well over the standard wage and built our indigenous staff very nice staff housing with running water, flush toilets and electricity and Wifi access. Most of our neighbors house their farmhands in shacks with no plumbing and no electricity.
And I am always hearing from these neighbors how they cannot keep staff and how you can't trust an indian worker.
And here we are 10 years into this project and have hardly had any change of employees.
Fancy that!
And you may ask why these elevated stress levels in the US. Suicide rates up? Addictions up. Life expectancy declining. Standard of living falling... Could it prey tell have something to do with all that focus on share holder value?
Fuck that Shit!
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
website: http://www.mounttotumas.com