Wage fixing is when multiple companies agree to set wages at a certain amount.
Sharing compensation data across companies doesn't necessarily mean wage fixing. Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.
Not saying thats what it will be used for, but it's technically not wage fixing.
> Wage fixing is when multiple companies agree to set wages at a certain amount.
I am not an expert on wage fixing laws in the US, but I came across a class action on wage fixing a few days ago (Ron Brown et al v JBS USA Food Company et al) where part of what was aledged was the illegal exchange of salary data via surveys [1].
> The Red Meat Industry Compensation Survey conducted by WMS on behalf of the Defendant Processors violated the Safe Harbor Guidelines in at least three ways. First, the Defendant Processors, not WMS, collectively managed and controlled the annual Red Meat
Industry Compensation Surveys. Second, those Surveys often contained information about the Defendant Processors’ future compensation plans and practices. Third, Defendant Processors had extensive discussions about the Survey results, including at in-person meetings, during which they disclosed their respective compensation rates, practices, and plans
What is alledged is that they did that. And if they did, they would have violated the law from my understanding.
> And what this claimed to have happened is not what is happening here.
That might be, but that's not entirely clear to me. I don't know if what Pave is doing is legal or not, but it seems to me that the line is quite fine and it would be fascinating to see this play out at court.
I'm asking this as someone with 0 legal knowledge: doesn't the context matter? If every company takes this data and is like "we want to pay at the 95th percentile" (which is what they all do), that seems like wage fixing even if they're not all agreeing to it together.
If they’re all shooting for the 95th percentile and have up-to-date data then you certainly won’t have fixing; rather you’ll get insanely rapid wage inflation!
It's possible the purpose of wage benchmarking companies is to allow bosses to say they pay the 95th percentile - which is useful to be able to say, when someone at an all-hands Q&A asks about raises and bonuses.
Then the benchmarking company simply has to define 'comparable roles' broadly enough to give the customer the result they want.
That's what my employer does. The head of our HR team got in front of the entire company and said that they aim for 50th percentile for everyone in every pay band. It instantly made me want to job hop, tempered only by the million things I have going on in my personal life that have a better expected value than a 5 or 10k pay bump.
That's... hilarious. We all know they are thinking that but to say it loudly and proudly to the employees is a self own on a level that makes me Cheshire Cat.
> If every company takes this data and is like "we want to pay at the 95th percentile"
It's thought by some that this is how CEO compensation has gone up so much: Corporate boards of directors have compensation committees, which are fed survey data about comp ranges; a comp committee will say, "We want our CEO's comp to be in the top quartile" — which, as time goes on, leads to an inexorable upward ratchet effect.
I think some basic math knowledge would help more, if every company paid at the 95th percentile then it wouldn't be the 95th percentile, it would in fact be the average. But no, these distributions are not flat like that, there is a large spread and "by definition" of the 95th percentile only a few companies pay at that rate.
If you opened up a business selling water bottles, you'd probably check what price water sells at across brands, then decide in which segment to price it.
"I want to sell my water at the upper end and market it as a gourmet brand"
>Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.
My company has done this in the past sorta indirectly, we were losing a lot of people to competitors and data like this is how they justified paying a bunch of us better so we wouldn't leave. I agree that it could be used to fix wages, but companies will always have to pay their best talent more if they want to retain them, whether that means paying them above what the data says or if it means inventing new job titles for them to progress into.
That is the entire basis for the RealPage lawsuit. The point is that if the effect on pricing is indistinguishable from price fixing, it doesn't matter if the act of colluding is abstracted into and laundered through a 3rd party with an algorithmic system responsible for setting prices.
Honestly, I think it does still matter. The basis for the RealPage lawsuit seems to be that people inside and outside the company glibly considered it price-fixing, and said it out loud to each other. The didn't really seem to make the case that it was "algorithmic price-fixing" (Disclaimer: not a lawyer). You can only argue in court about existing laws, so until algorithmic price-fixing is written in the law books (or settled case law) you're gonna have a tough time bringing that up to a judge.
It seems you don't understand the lawsuit. Most of the claims are based on the actual mechanics of how algorithmic price fixing does violate existing laws.
you are not allowed to tell anyone how much you make so you might be in trouble if your found out but the companies share this info without your consent. From my POV make it all transparent.
I have had a career spanning over 30 years at this point. I've worked in businesses with 6 employees and F500 corporations. No one has ever told me that I can't tell anyone else how much I make.
> Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.
Company A could make offers and negotiate with prospective hires based on the value they can get out of the hire. Rather than secretly leverage surveillance capitalism against the prospective hire, to base their offer on what the person is currently making (and, hey, if lots of employers do that by convention, you pretty much have collusion).
Imagine you are an sized e-commerce merchant. Someone checks out on your website and sends you a bank transfer. Then what?
You go through your ledger (bank account), find the transaction with an order ID as a memo (hopefully the buyer added it and correctly), and then you look up that order in your system and submit the order form to your warehouse?
It works like: customer gets an order number and puts this on the description of the bank transfer. This is parsed by the accounting SW coupled to this bank account, and voila!
Most banks charge some amount per transaction on commercial accounts though.
The problem is that it's extremely failure prone and not instant.
Gotta wait for the buyer to make the transfer, you gotta wait for the transfer to go through, you gotta hope that the buyer put in the order number in the description.
Sure but it takes less time to pick up takeout than it does to shop for a household. Especially if you have to use public transit, can only buy what you can carry, have to bring a kid with you.
When I teach people to cook I usually point out that when you're at the point where you're in the kitchen with the ingredients out, 2/3 of the work is done. There's a lot of labor in planning and shopping.
Yeah if you need to shop for a household every day, but usually you can do it once or twice a week and be fine. People do it all around the world, people who are much much poorer than Americans, people who also do not have cars, people who generally work longer hours.
I'm trying to get you to see that it's a significant chore and you shouldn't dismiss it. It's usually done in addition to other obligations like work and childcare. A lot of americans are also poor, work long hours, or don't have reliable access to a car.
Also people "around the world" may not be cooking at home as much as you assume either. Street food is everywhere and it is not new by any means. Individual household kitchens for city dwellers have not historically been the norm, and they still aren't in a lot of places.
> it's a significant chore and you shouldn't dismiss it
But you're comparing it to getting fast food for every meal, which is also a chore. One way or another, feeding yourself and your family is always going to be a chore.
What exactly is the relevance of this question to people living in 2024?
I mean, I cook 90-95% of my meals from scratch with the odd canned ingredient and for the rest, rely on healthy-option microwave meals or a sandwich to stop me slipping into snacking for the times when depression or tiredness do not allow it, which keeps a latent eating disorder at bay.
But people who eat a lot of fast food do not always do so out of laziness. Large numbers of city dwellers barely have access to a kitchen, e.g. at least 1.5 million people in the UK and probably more like 3.5 million live in HMO (multiple occupant) accommodation that does not have a private kitchen; those people are lucky if they have access to their own hotplates.
It doesn't matter what people did before fast food. It matters what people can find now, in the life that we have now, as an alternative to fast food.
Just telling people they should cook their own meals from scratch is not good enough.
That is why the question of fast food now being a "luxury" is so interesting.
Because it likely means people who relied on fast food to meet dietary needs -- even fairly healthy fast food like fresh sandwiches (in the UK meaning) -- are now eating something worse, not something better.
It's naive to assume it will -- or even can -- lead to a renaissance in home cooking.
What changed in 2024 compared to 1924 when it comes to cooking your own food? Kitchen/living situations in cities were much worse then and people stayed alive then without Doordash... why is that not possible now? You even have access to more technology and food that make it easier to cook. Frozen veggies, lunch meat, supermarkets, freezers.
Well we don't have massive communal dining halls or poorhouses.
I think you underestimate the extreme poverty of food even for people in 1924 who had access to a communal kitchen.
Average nutrition in 1924 was not good. It was likely significantly worse than it is now. People were on average several inches shorter and life expectancy at birth in 1924 was less than 60 in the USA and the UK.
The life expectancy for, say, a 24 year old in 1924 would be lower still.
People did "stay alive", but they died young of diseases, many of them worsened by chronic malnutrition. Kids were literally severely malnourished in the USA until the national school lunch program was launched in the 40s, and the UK was only a bit ahead, providing breakfasts and sometimes lunches for kids from 1906 onwards, and then full school meals in the 40s. Adult malnutrition was rampant in the USA of the 1930s.
You are comparing 2024 with a romantic fiction, when the issue is what are the options in 2024.
The era of abundant cheap food, enough time to cook it, labour-saving devices and parents who were not both working is short, and it spans about 30 years from 1940 in the USA, and less in the UK due to rationing.
We don't have that life anymore. It would be better to engineer a culture of street food in the UK and USA, because that leads to more healthy food options for vastly more people (as well as catering efficiency and less food waste)
I don't really understand your point... that the problem is non-local people making money on housing?
Even if it was only local people making money on housing this would be a net negative to local residents. Housing that exists is placed on the "global" market rather than the local one. Unavailable to anyone but tourists.
They are saying foreigners consuming for private use/cleaning money and taking them off the market entirely is a separate and greater issue. Not for rental.
I have a "car subscription" in Germany, which is kinda like a rental car but for longer periods (mine is 1 year). The subscription covers the cost of registration/taxes/maintenance/insurance and I cover fuel and parking. 580€ a month for a mid-range SUV, or 20€ a day.
There's no recipe policymakers can follow to raise birthrates over extended periods of time. Sweden, South Korea and Poland have all tried generous financial supports that failed; the smaller Soviet republics tried authoritarian methods that failed.
Even nineteenth century France & Imperial Rome under Augustus don't appear to have been successful in raising birthrates, although I can't pretend to have great data for those examples.
Hard disagree. The housing / labor markets systems are fundamentally broken and tossing what is effectively scraps at people won't cause them to have a second child in their one bedroom or move 1.5 hours away from their high status job
Intuitively that makes sense, but housing and labour markets don't seem to correlate much with fertility rates.
In a European context, France has much higher fertility than any of the Nordic countries despite higher unemployment and effectively the same housing affordability stats. More internationally the figures in Israel (pre Oct 2023) and Japan also go against the grain.
Extended maternity/paternity leave (especially in Sweden), child benefits (especially Poland), tax exemptions (e.g Hungarian income tax), subsidised or free childcare and more.
Parental leave in Sweden is 80% of your salary and maxes out at 2500 a month for both partners... In Germany it maxes out at 1800. These aren't incentives since you'd be LOSING money by taking parental leave...
> child benefits
120-180 EUR a month per child doesn't even cover half the costs of a child.
The base case is to have no parental leave, not 100% of your current salary.
Historically that was the default when people had very positive fertility. In Israel & the US where fertility is higher there's even less generous setups than Sweden & Germany.
I suspect if you give people enough money they'll probably start having kids, but it's a very high number. Hungary is currently spending 5% of its GDP on fertility policies with little success [1]. Last year Poland's increase in its child benefit program alone cost 0.7-0.8% of GDP [2].
Well most people are struggling as it is, so obviously the prospect of increasing your responsibilities and also reducing your income doesn't seem worth it...
If governments were serious about falling birth rates they would invest in their people and give them reasons to have kids rather than saying "f- you" and just importing the workforce from poor countries instead.
German cars usually have (together with Japanese, I'd say) the best reputation in reliability. And ICE cars are full of electrical components, perhaps more so than the electric cars (since ICE cars are generally more complex than electric ones). So I struggle to reconcile your comment with what I hear ...
I've never heard of german cars being known for most reliable. And when they break they are the most expensive to fix. For example audis always had issues with oil leaking and in the US audi mechanics charge the most per hour and they are hard to work on.
according to consumer reports, bmw is the most reliable at 9th most reliable automaker, audi and merc are way down
Reputation for reliability doesn't mean reliable! In most top 10 list of reliable car brands (as a whole) there might be one or two German brand in there (with Mini usually being the highest of the German brands).
I'm told that the Volkswagens made in Mexico are significantly less reliable than those made in Germany. I had a Golf which exemplified this -- all of the motory bits (not a gearhead) seemed fine, but everything else was shit from the windshield wipers that only worked on sunny days to the inexplicable decision to power the automatic locks with the vacuum system.
Blame is a big issue though. No one is willing to take responsibility for their own behaviors which means ultimately nothing gets done. People will just keep buying bigger cars, taking more international vacations, consuming more single use plastics because "its someone else's problem."
Sharing compensation data across companies doesn't necessarily mean wage fixing. Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.
Not saying thats what it will be used for, but it's technically not wage fixing.