Nonetheless, when Facebook had to face a small content-related crisis in Germany in 2016, that didn't stop Zuckerberg from saying the the company hires teams of hundreds in Germany to stop the spreading of hate content. They don't.
Source: Inside Facebook - Im Netz des Bösen, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2016. (sorry, paywall). http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/inside-facebook-im-netz-d...
The NYT has a great article on that, not related to Facebook but it shows the general trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...
Maybe it doesn't belong on the same table as a company like Wells Fargo since it's a different basis of comparison
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/companies-follow-ben-jerrys-l...
A hard ratio seems fair minded, but seemed to have failed here because I think there was a misunderstanding around compensation. Compensation is a product of many variables including value created for the company and supply/demand for skillset/talent. As a business climbs the value chain or seeks to hire and compensate those that create greater amounts of value, and it maintains a compensation ratio, it must seek to increase the value produced by the lowest earners (or lose business to competition).
You could probably define company, for the purposes of such a law, that excluded those kinds of structural shenanigans. Basically, define it in terms of its qualities rather than in terms of legal instruments.
I'd also guess that the IRS has already authored those definitions, or it at least a good distance of the way there.
The data would be a bit more useful if they reported the job title of the median worker.
Easy gaming like that is easy to anticipate and account for. You just have to define "workers for the company" in a way that includes contractors and controlled entities, etc.
That metric is very sensitive to outliers. If you have even one individual with enormous income, that ratio will be enormous. Now you might say "that's precisely the point", but I would argue that having how we design a society hinge on what one individual earns, is not statistically sound.
A more appropriate metric along the same line of thought would be something like top 10-percent excluding outliers divided by median income, where "excluding outliers" could be calculated in an admitedly somewhat arbitrary, but common way like e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interquartile_range#Outliers.
Or just use something that already exists instead of re-inventing the wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_index
2. People can move. Labor is more geographically sticky than capital, but it is not infinitely so. I doubt you'd ever succeed in getting Singapore to stop being the capitalist's paradise through foreign policy.
It has far-reaching consequences where whole population has high standards of living which transpills into high overall happiness, low criminality, and there is no predatory mentality to screw other people over just for one's own benefit (that I can see massively in eastern europe where I come from, and many other developing countries all around the world).
Really, Suisse could be model in many things for rest of the world, if only their mentality would be more 'transferable'.
There was a referendum to implement that cap (and at only 12x!) but it was rejected by voters.
There's a reason why there is only one Scandinavia and it's so tiny population wise. It's strictly cultural, ingrained over hundreds or thousands of years, and can't be replicated across a massive population base. That it's cultural is also the reason why Scandinavians have historically done even better in the US than they do in Scandinavia (a system with superior economic potential, combined with a culture that produces superior outcomes).
The closest a large nation has gotten to what Scandinavia accomplished, is probably Japan. However Japan has never sustained a standard of living at the median anywhere near what Denmark or Sweden reached (the Japanese are also over-worked to accomplish their lower economic output, which is a bit of a cheat if you're contrasting it with the economic output of Scandinavia).
When it comes to Switzerland, you can't replicate what they've done because there isn't enough banking to go around. That isn't a dig on Switzerland, it's the same reason most countries could never replicate Norway (oil).
Switzerland has a dozen banks that together are worth around $200-$250 billion, with just a population of eight million people. That'd be like if the top dozen banks in the US were worth $8 trillion. The total Swiss banking system has something like $7 to $10 trillion in assets under management; which would be like the US banking system having ~$350 trillion under management, a laughable sum.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted for saying this, but lazy people will take advantage of the system and it will fall apart
At least for the base salary I guess.
It seems odd to compare the non-annualised salary of a part-time worker to those of full-time/annualised. Is this a strategy by Gap to deflect attention (I know $5375 is extremely low, but I have no ration/scale/factor to compare it by, so I don't know exactly how low. This employee in Alabama could be working a day a month), or is this format of reporting actually required by Dodd-Frank?
In reality, software engineering salaries outside of established tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers", and therefore anybody can get hired no matter what level of skill they have.
I too run a software startup. The most common and serious error I see in my fellow startup founders is expecting to build better technology with worse pay and conditions. You might be able to wrangle something decent out of some poorly qualified yet smart people, but its a bit of a long shot.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with what is meant by this. Can you elaborate?
I think you would have a hard case saying Guilds and Unions are natural variations of prices.
I'm pretty sure it is and I'm quite looking forward to seeing it burst.
So far, there has been no industry that just continued making high margins over decades without any cut backs. I doubt tech will be the first one.
Compare this against companies like SpaceX where the median compensation is quite awful for the industry made even worse by the area (compensation is well below $90k in most cases). This poor compensation is made even more peculiar at a glance by the incredibly high standard of employee they have. But they have these incredibly well qualified people lining up outside the door wanting to work for them.
Of course refuting my argument is companies like Netflix. I don't entirely understand why they pay so much. But at least just taking examples like Facebook and SpaceX, compensation is mostly just based on supply and demand - rather than massive ongoing bubble of inflating salaries.
As for Netflix - you get to paid premium for taking a non-reliable job - they brag about their high turnover rate in their "culture" deck.
Edit: in UK in general you won't be seeing £150k+ salaries as a programmer no matter who you work for, the only way to get there is contracting. Top paying salaried positions for really senior staff in London at financial companies top out at around £120-130k.