Uh, the fact that there's a cost to the firing process is the point I was trying to make. You can't just fire someone, you need to prove that it's justified.

Norway is hardly a socialist hellhole. Matter of fact, it has the highest standard of living in the world, with the USA in fourth.

Everyone treats "socialism" like it's the N word. Socialism is not inherently a bad thing, but like everything else, too much leads to problems.

I thought the American way was to reward ambitious self-motivated people

That hasn't been true since the 70s. The new American Dream is to make a kajillion dollars off the sweat of someone else's brow.

and let starve the ones too lazy to care for themselves.

Social Darwinism. That's fine until you realize that it starves children to death, children who have no control over whether their parents can care for themselves or not.

For someone with skills in shortage, job security isn't that great a thing, as moving jobs is the only way you'll ever get a pay rise.

FTFY.

Whenever I talk about a 2.5% raise being insulting and not a real raise at all, barely keeping up with COL, people look at me like I have three heads. We've been conditioned to never expect a raise of any substance, no matter the company. Bad raises and poor job security, you would think, would lead to more attrition, with all those employees taking their institutional knowledge with them. It's hard getting management to care about that, since the employee only MIGHT leave, whereas their salaries are lower NOW. My company is well aware that the compensation structure here is the #1 issue that their employees have with how they're treated. They have made it very clear that they are not willing to do anything about it.

I work in the USA for a company based in France, where workers actually have some protection from being fired on a whim. As a result, there is a process here that must be followed before someone can be let go. The worker is given a chance to improve their performance, instead of just kicked to the curb with the rest of the garbage. It works. Institutional knowledge is retained, employees enjoy better job security, fewer new employees have to be recruited/hired.

But, if you ever suggest that that be the norm here, management flips their shit and screams something about "agility" and "flexibility", while in the same breath issuing rules/policies that stifle an employee and are the opposite of flexible.

Why do they hate America? Severance? What are they, socialists?

A lot of people in education seem to be aware that "can't do cheaply" means "can't do".

FTFY. We don't give our schools enough money to buy paper. What makes you think the old people in Whitebread Acres, USA are going to stand for the schools getting more money so they can do the testing you're talking about, when there are marble bannisters in the Senior Center that need refurbishing? I mean, they're scratched.

If you buy your house at $200k, and then it depreciates to $150k, and that's all you can sell it for, then you lose $50,000 on the deal.

While it hasn't progressed to the lawsuit stage, Cosco gets all kinds of abuse from the rich folks for paying their people a living wage instead of the sandpaper-dildo treatment retail employees usually get. They won't get away with that for long, I bet.

I hate my job because that is the natural order of things. If you like your job you're not getting paid enough. If your boss knows you're happy in your job he will use it against you to either squeeze more work out of you or not give you as big a raise.

I don't start my own business because I like to eat and my family likes to have a place to live. I would find a better job except a string of total shit jobs has left me so bitter that nobody wants me around.

But if your wages don't keep up with CPI, you're going to lose your good employees to better-paying companies, while a disproportionate share of your applicants will be bad employees who quit or were fired from their former job (because the better ones take one look at your wages and shop elsewhere).

So I can never quit a job? Great. Good to know that if I leave this job I can never have another one. And people don't care about good vs. bad, they care about CHEAP.

That management philosophy may work at low-end jobs where the quality of the employee doesn't really matter. But any employer whose company does anything more than menial labor knows that the employees are the company, and will try to get good employees.

Tell that to my employer. We make enterprise-class CAD software. We have an installed base in the millions. There are a great number of talented programmers and designers here. My last raise was 2.5%. In a year when revenues were up 30%. I had a "meets expectations" review. The most I could have gotten for a top review was 3%. I'm calling bullshit. Again, nobody wants "good" employees, they want "ok" employees that they can work to death and then hire some other warm body to replace them.

You have a very distorted view of how to run a business if you think lowering costs (wages) is the only or even primary motivation of an employer.

For profit companies exist to .. well, make profit. You make profit by increasing revenues and decreasing costs. Payroll is a big cost. It is imperative, then, for payroll to be as low as you can possibly get away with. And if you're a publicly traded company, if your stockholders decide you're paying your people too much, you can get sued out of existence.

You'll find out pretty quickly that low wages = low performing employees, and will leave you stuck with low-end clients and low-end jobs.

So? As long as your costs are low, you can still make money off other peoples' hard work. That's the REAL American dream, get rich by fucking over your employees.

The trick isn't just to flat-out minimize cost. It's to minimize costs in ways that have the least impact on productivity - i.e. make the company more efficient to operate, not just cheaper to operate.

No, you make the company more efficient by lowering quality and making your people all do the work of three while paying them 50% below market. Since cheap is more important than good, you will have an advantage over your competitors that don't fuck over their employees quite as much as they really should. Eventually your market share gives you leverage, and you jack up your prices, make a bazillion dollars, sell your company for millions, and retire. Bonus: Most of your employees will probably be laid off, so you get one last poke before you go.

Market pressures would soon have the entire teaching staff of the college replaced with the cheapest options available. I don't want my kid's professors to be chosen soley on the basis of how little the college can pay them.

I'm not so fool to think that employees don't talk behind my back about such things.

And that's the difference. Most employers don't care if you talk about them behind their backs, except when they fire you for it.

We have the smallest house that is viable for our situation. It's not a matter of a bigger house further out vs. a smaller house closer in. It's a matter of this being the biggest house we can afford. We do not have an option to move closer. The house is already 1200 sq ft on a 6500 sq ft lot. There are four of us. It's technically 2br/1ba but it's more like 1.5br (it's a very small bedroom). It was the last house under $200k we could find, period. Moving closer would either cost us six figures more or buying a paper shack. Even the land would be $300-400k before there was a house on it.

I would save at most $1000 a year on my car expenses. Maybe even less depending on how much they hike my insurance premiums for living closer to the city.

Well now I know ONE place that doesn't insult their employees with a "raise" that doesn't even cover the cost of living...

It takes me 10 minutes to get to the interstate on the other side of town. Then an hour driving to the city. More with traffic. It's about 40 miles. Right now (1123 EDT) Google says it would take 58 minutes. At 0800 it would probably be closer to 90.

Anyplace that's more convenient is far more expensive. My house would probably be 1.5-2x as expensive anyplace that fits what you're describing.