vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
There IS an amount of money you can pay to make people deal with very unpleasant situations.  Offer me my old pay + 50% to go back into the workplace daily and deal with my last boss? Yeah, I'll tell you to go fuck yourself.  Offer me 3M+ a year to do it? Okay. I'll take that and do JUST ENOUGH to keep the job for a year or two, and then I'll never fucking work again. Or I'll get fired and laugh all the way to the bank anyway.
Companies, especially big ones, find in Switzerland a business-friendly environment and often benefit from a special tax regime. Don't mix the companies interests with yours.
Options granted by an employer to an employee are generally different that the standardized options that are traded on public stock option exchanges.  They may or may not have somewhat comparable terms, but generally the terms are fairly different. As a holder of an expiring employee option, you can only choose to exercise it by paying the specified price and receiving the shares, or not.  It is common that the exercise system will allow you to exercise all the shares and simultaneously sell enough of the acquired shares to cover the option cost of all the shares, thus leaving you owning some of the stock without having to spend any cash.  You will owe taxes on the gain on exercise, regardless of what you do with the stock. If you want to buy publicly-traded options, you should consider that completely separately from your employer options other than thinking about how much exposure you have to your company situation.  It is very common for employees to be imprudently overexposed to their company's stock (through direct ownership or options).
I would like to add that coworkers who do give their employer free time are half the problem, as they are enabling this behavior from management. And, why do they do this? Because they are trying to impress management. So, the employee who gives free time to a company is actually *more* selfish than the one who refuses to work more than 40 hours. They are adversely affecting other fellow employees in their own self-interest. I severely resent any employee who regularly gives free time to a company.
Is your argument that a company should be responsible for paying an employee enough to support whatever lifestyle that employee chooses?  Because that's definitely what it sounds like you're arguing for.    The minimum wage should be exactly $0.  If you don't have the skills to earn enough to support yourself, then you need better skills not laws forcing someone to pay you more money.
"I disagree. If nobody got their health insurance through their employer, then everyone would go out on the market and acquire them. This would create a more dynamic health insurance market which would, over time, drive down the cost of getting health insurance.   I don't follow your logic about how ""wages wouldn't keep up"" 10 or 20 years down the road. If anything, not having to worry about benefits in a particular job would give employees more job mobility, causing the job market to be more competitive. In other words, it would be more likely to cause wages to up.  Also, ancillary benefits of getting employers out of the health insurance/benefit dynamic would be to create more efficiencies within those businesses (reduce staff spent on coordinating plans and such), make small businesses more competitive (they are at a disadvantage now with regard to big companies with pools of employees), and get more people to acquire at least some form of insurance (health coverage goes up).  I, for one, welcome a world in which our employers have absolutely nothing to do with our benefits choices and we choose them at our own discretion, just as I do with my car insurance."
Yeah there's a lot to talk about with basic income. Like how currently there is an incentive to not work harder or move up the socio-economic ladder because as you earn more your welfare benefits go away. So people think it's not worth getting a better job because they will pay more in taxes and lose benefits but now they are working harder and not getting more for it. A basic income wouldn't go away with that sweet new job promotion. Therefore there is an incentive to work more.  I like the basic income idea. But I wonder about how to handle immigration and global relations. You will have it in some countries where others are like literally falling apart. Basically we have a long way to go until we are comfortably collecting our BI checks. At least in the US.
"I can say from personal experience that, as an employee, I would prefer a system like this for determining pay scale. I had a situation happen to me that was similar to the Yak driver analogy in the article: I had been at a software company for a little while, and they were always hiring with a chronic shortage of talent. Finally they hired some new guys, but still had open positions. One of the new guys who came on was making a full $15k more in salary than me, for doing the exact same job-- and no, he wasn't a lead, Sr., or anything like that. No matter how I tried to not let this get to me, it was hard not to let it affect my morale, and I finally ended up leaving the company.   So yeah, I'm sure guys like Ntang would say it's my fault for not negotiating a better salary, but since that's impossible (due to the bureaucracy) in most jobs, the fact is that the best way to ""negotiate a better salary"" is usually to just look elsewhere."
gr33nss -   Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. The way most companies avoid having to pay overtime is by putting you on salary. I try to stay focused on promotions and bonuses as a way to justify all the extra work hours above the typical 40-hour work week.   It sounds like you'll have to put some extra hours in but it will reflect positively if you don't rush to get home as soon as your 8 hours/day are up. Just my two cents...
To be fair early in my career I did request significant raises as the job duties expanded.  I provided justification and showed that I was worth it, the company agreed.  My company is also in a growth phase so it made sense to them. So you may want to consider a jump or two to maximize your base salary.  However if you are happy somewhere, and they company is happy with you, you may want to just speak to your manager and find out what your options are.  Do some homework on the market for someone in your position and show just cause.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a mediocre idea. The first of which is that he is using salary.com and glassdoor as his sources for his software's salary information.The second problem is that it makes it easier for other companies to poach people because they will know what those people are being paid before headhunting. Third, his model assumes that people have the same incentives. Many people often forgo salary bumps and other things for reasons that aren't clear on the surface. Maybe in lieu of a promotion someone got a raise? Maybe someone accepted a lower salary with an unwritten rule that they could work fewer hours in a week or have a more flexible schedule? This guys product looks like an untested idea that could create a lot of complications.
Why should one of the most profitable companies in the world, with over a million employees be forcing their workers to work less than a full 40 hour shift, and thereby deny them the basic benefits all other fulltime workers get?  Why does costco turn such a nice profit while treating their employees with respect and paying them well, all the while providing great customer service.....?  Just because you've seen unions put out poor service, does not mean their non-union equivalents are any better.  Capitalism is merely a tool that is supposed to benefit the people. As soon as capitalism starts to harm the people, it's time to put some rules in place to level the playing field. Unions are a means for workers to keep their employers in line; yes, they do sometimes go too far, but so does big business.
Actually, the majority of people that work at Costco do make over $20 an hour because they have been there long enough. The benefits and the vacation time, sick, and personal time.. Company stock and 401(k). Why wouldn't you stay?
Yeah, Microsoft's performance review system has had some... criticism in the past. You do get bonuses for excellent work, but in general it's a much more structured system. It's a tradeoff, though - on one hand engineers at Microsoft have a high guaranteed base pay. On the other hand, it's a very inflexible system and it doesn't reward merit as strongly as it could.
In your situation, it sounds like the only added benefit would be insurance continuance.  For employees who can't access short-term disability it is a critical protection against losing their job. I just want to emphasize that given that you are in a pretty decent employment situation.
From a long-term planning point of view, is the bump in salary worth not having a 401(k)?  In this case, absolutely. At $30k/year, the 4% company match comes to about $1,200 per year.  To get that you need to save $1,200 yourself, so your gross pay after retirement contributions is about $28,800.   Now you have an offer making $48,000.  If you take the new job, you can put $2,400 in retirement (to get to an equivalent retirement rate), and now your gross pay after retirement contributions is $45,600.   Now if the raise in salary were not as high, or you were getting a match that let you exceed the individual contribution max, the math might be different, but in this case you can effectively save the company match yourself and still be way ahead. Note that there are MANY other factors that may also be applicable as to whether to take this job or not (do you like the work? The company? The coworkers? The location? Is there upward mobility? Are the benefits equivalent?) but not taking a 67% raise just because you're losing a 4% 401(k) match is not a wise decision.
this is true for any kind of business deal, not just book to movie deals.   You might be the employee of a company and be given to generate income based on the revenue of said company.  you want gross or net?  Or say you're helping a small business start up and you're giving them some startup capital.  NEVER sign a deal saying that you want to receive a percentage of their net income.  you will never see your money again.
"IANAL, but I had heard (and would appreciate someone more qualified commenting on this) that one reason these things were often found unenforceable is that there is no consideration. The contract is to bind you for your work each day, but once you stop working, they allege you have a continued obligation that transcends your time at the company. Claiming that your day-to-day compensation covers this is as if to say some part of that compensation is not for your work but to pay you for not going elsewhere. It would be nice to see at minimum a requirement to separate these two concepts into separate contracts as bundling them creates a blur, and most importantly doesn't allow you to negotiate or walk away from the terms of one part without the other. At the heart of any ""market"", which the job market purports to be, is a sense that a fair price is reached when both parties can walk away from a bad deal. This is not so in the case of employment because, as Adlai Stevenson said, ""a hungry man is not a free man"", so someone who needs to eat (or feed a family) has a need to take an offer that is already biasing their acceptance of work, and this quasi-duress is compounded when a company can attach additional pressures that work agains that person's ability to fairly negotiate possible improvements of what may already have been a bad situation. I'm of the impression that duress itself has been argued to be a reason to hold a contract invalid. But more abstractly and generally, any time two parties are bargaining asymmetrically (I'm not sure the legal definition, but intuitively I'd say where one party has the ability to force a contract change and the other party is not), then those terms have to be suspect. Also, for the special case the pay is anything near minimum wage, I would suggest asking the question of whether the part of the compensation that is salary, not ""keeping you from working for the competition"", is the wage paid consistent with minimum wage, or does it have to draw from the pool of money that is not about wage but is about incentivizing you to not move.
Yup. I scrutinize the income statement I receive from my employer every year. What I make vs what the company actually invests in me as an employee is really astounding. Beyond my hourly wage, the company pays for my health insurance premium (all but $10/check), and pays for a medical flex-spending account. On top of this (I know this isn't taxes but it's still an expense and government sanctioned) if I do some dumbass thing to get myself hurt at work, they'd pay all medical bills since it happened on their property.   We recently had a bit of a wake-up call this summer, as the board of directors warned everyone that the current medical plan our company provides to us is not sustainable, and will have to undergo changes (we're going to either start paying for our premiums, decrease our flex accounts, or charge smokers additional fees) beginning Jan 1st. Lots of people are complaining about this. I don't think they're aware of the horde of expenses and fees that the company swallows for them in other ways.  There's property taxes, business income taxes, excise taxes, customs/duty taxes, state taxes... along with meeting the restrictions and standards of certain governmental agencies (like OSHA). I don't know how a small business owner could ever maintain control over all of this financial mess and be able to help their customers or other employees.   There's OSHA, a profit-seeking (through citations) business now, instead of a partner and ally to businesses. A typical 'violation' is $70K, and a 'repeat' violation is $140K. Imagine running a small grocery store, and having to pay this fine because you accidentally had a piece of styrofoam lying on top of a cooler not built to withstand overhead weight. Or because someone wasn't wearing safety shoes in the store. You'd simply go out of business.
I'd probably call it an intangible or indirect benefit. Not sure what the trade term is.
YMMV, but I don't accept non-answers like that from HR.  Sometimes you need to escalate. Usually when I get this sort of thing, I go to my boss and he asks them the question in writing and they give him a better answer. (HR in most companies seem to be far more willing to give information to managers than employees.) Once we both had to go to our VP to get HR to properly listen to and answer the question. Policies like this which may have negative consequences (your manager could lose a good employee over this depending on how to close to retirement you are and how much you need to continue making that larger contribution) that are challenged by senior managment have a better chance of being resolved than when non-managment employees bring up the issue. Of course I havea boss I know will stand up for me and that could make a difference in how you appraoch the problem.
The 401k was not written with the specific intent of enabling retirement savings.  Why do tax advantages favor employees of large employers... It seems that large businesses have been more effective at influencing legislators despite that there are more people are employed by small than large businesses.
He said base salary. Most executive compensation is bonuses, awards, and long term incentives that vastly outweigh the actual cash they receive. Just check out a large company's proxy statement. Walmart's CEO received less than $3 million in cash last year.
Make sure to check the language describing the 'discount'. The company may be matching your contribution by 5% instead of a discount.  You will likely be taxed on the match as compensation and your benefit would net to less than 5%.   The next risk is that you've increased your exposure if your company does poorly.  In the worst case scenario you could lose your wages to a layoff and your portfolio to a falling share price.  Investing in other companies will diversify this risk. As for benefits, you get the 5% (less taxes) for free which isn't a bad thing in my book. Just don't put everything you own into the stock.  It should be part of your overall investing strategy.
Your employers insurance premiums will definitely go up if there are a lot of claims when it is time for them to renew their policy. It is also possible that if this happens the employer will pass along some of the additional cost to employees. The insurance company will not try to have you removed, it doesn't work that way with group policies. They just jack up the price as mentioned previously.  If you take a new job your cancer will affect the future employer in the same way. As to whether you should keep it a secret, I don't think it is something you have to disclose unless it affects your ability to perform your job, even then it may be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is true that some employers could exhibit some bias because of this, especially a small company that is likely to have a small group that is more likely to see price hikes because of a single employee making expensive claims. Bottom line: I wouldn't lie about it to a future employer, but I wouldn't volunteer that information either unless it is material to your job performance.
Cat has always had plants in IL. HQ is in Peoria (grew up there, several members of my family work for them), and plants all over the place. Canada probably had other things going against it at the time they pulled out. Depending on the timing, it's quite likely that the exchange rate had shifted such that, even without a raise, the workers were effectively costing the company considerably more.  Articles like that seem to leave out all sorts of details. For instance, I only saw one point where salary was increased and it wasn't anywhere near a 60% increase - more like 15% which isn't entirely unheard of. There's also what looks like a one time cash payment - bonus for a good year. 3-4x salary isn't unheard of in executive bonus land. It's also highly variable and not guaranteed year to year. The rest would be in stocks and options. The trick there is that the amounts of those were probably determined when he signed his contract. The reason it makes for a big raise is because the stock price has gone up (though it's down nearly 20% over the last month - May kinda sucked for the stock market).  You also need to look at whether the profits are higher because of higher volume (and possibly more workers), better margins, better deployment of capital, etc. And when there's talk about asking worker to pay more for their health care, is it more as a raw dollar amount, or more as a percentage of the health care costs. As to whacking defined benefit pensions -- personally, I'd rather have a 401k. The problem with defined benefit pensions is that you're tied to that company for life. Put in your 40 years and then retire with 80% pay or whatever it is. Leave after 4 or 5 and you've pretty much got nothing - with a 401k, leave after 4 or 5 and you have what you've put away + what the company matched.
As for point c if you believe that it is a requirement for companies to pay above welfare levels then campaign for that to become law.  Companies are required to act in shareholder interests which is what they do.  Your point a is about sales/profitability, unless you believe that employees working happier/better will have no effect on either. Also note that sales/profitability is generally measured as [productivity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity).  If employees were more productive then Walmart would actually need fewer of them to maintain the same sales/profits. Do you seriously believe Walmart management is so stupid that they haven't worked out how to improve productivity?  It is also worth reading about what it is like to work at Walmart: [one](http://boingboing.net/2009/02/01/life-at-walmart.html) [two](http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/01/27/what-its-like-to-work-at-walmart/) [three](http://ask.metafilter.com/62133/Whats-it-like-to-work-at-WalMart)  I agree with you about trickle down economics, but I don't see why Walmart is somehow required to make it work, or any other companies for that matter.  Solve it at the political level.
1) What's the point of paying a dividend if the stock price   automatically decreases? Don't the shareholders just break even? When the company earns cash beyond what is needed for expenses, the value of the firm increases. As a shareholder, you own a piece of that increased value as soon as the company earns it. When the dividend is paid, the value of the firm decreases, but you break even on the dividend transaction. The benefit to you in holding the company's shares is the continually increasing value, whether paid out to you, or retained. Be careful not to confuse the value of the firm with the stock price. The stock price is ever-changing, in the short-term driven mostly by investor emotion. Over the long term, by far the largest effect on stock price is earnings. Take an extreme, and simplistic example. The company never grows or shrinks, earnings are always the same, there is no inflation :) , and they pay everything out in dividends. By the reasoning above, the firm value never changes, so over the long-term the stock price will never change, but you still get your quarterly dividends.
Retirement is a Fiction anyways. It is the carrot by which the class structured social construct prods people to take money out of Circulation and attempt to hold it for a later date, or leverage monies now for later. Retirement was a reward at times offered by some companies, but was not always the case. If you made the Company you worked for enough monies, they would offer a Retirement Package, or a productivity incentive for lower classed employees. Any Retirement packages that have been saved by the American Citizens are soon to be plundered by the US Government (once they figure out how to get away with it.) All for the sake of making the many equal with the few. Yet another way to penalize the productive working class, and kowtow to the unproductive yet voting non working class.
"I was on a form of a retainer for a little over a year.  My situation kind of sucked but there's ways in which it would be favourable. I was pretty green at the time and just agreed to what they wanted. I worked for them as an employee for over a year, but they didn't pay overtime so I asked to work part time for them instead. They bait and switched me to work contractor. I renegotiated pay to be higher to fit that. I was paid minimum 22.5 hours a week, on a monthly schedule, plus any extra hours I worked.  In reality a retainer would pay in advance and you wouldn't have to actually be present for the minimum hours like I was. Still was better than being an employee.  I worked as an ""application developer"". But this isn't an unheard of thing in the tech sector; former employees that built your systems to be contracted at a later date to provide their expertise at a higher rate because they are the most familiar with the system and/or have a track record of being very good at satisfying the business' specifications or needs."
I'll just re-post my comment as an answer as i disagree with Michael Pryor. According to this article (and few others) you may save money by incorporating. These factors don’t change the general   payroll tax advantage of an S   corporation, however: A S corporation   can often save business owners   substantial amounts of payroll tax if   the business profit greatly exceeds   what the business needs to pay owners   for their work.