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Volt Asks Temps To 'Vote" For Microsoft Pay Cut
theodp writes "In an email sent Friday evening to its Microsoft temp workers, Volt Workforce Solutions asked the techies to 'vote' to agree to a 10% pay cut. From the email: 'We want to support you in continuing your assignment at Microsoft and respectfully ask that you respond by going to the upper left hand corner of this email under the "Vote" response option and select, "Accept'" by close of business Tuesday, March 3, 2009. By accepting you agree to the [-10%] pay adjustment in your pay rate.' Microsoft managed to keep the Feb. 20 email detailing plans to slash rates from leaking while it pitched its Elevate America initiative at the 2009 Winter Meeting of the National Governors Association, touting Microsoft skills as just the ticket to economic recovery."
that their REAL "Elevate America" plan is to hire 10% more people but pay them 10% less?
"Voting" is a rather hilarious newspeak term for acceptance of a pay cut.
Not that I see anything particularly wrong with this approach. I find it pretty absurd that a company should be "stuck" with the contract rates it offers. And considering how big salaries in USA are, it's a small miracle that they still manage to make a profit.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I'm sure much worse is going on elsewhere. It's just that this is such a bizarre way to do it. Do the temps really have a choice?
There's the door, you know how to use it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
they start sending this email to the upper management in MS and see how many Accept replies they get.
And since when is something that's compulsory also voluntary?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I'll bet Volt isn't taking a cut on their obscene margin.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The email stated "this is mandatory in order to continue your assignment at Microsoft ". So voting yes just means you want to keep your job.
I agree. There's plenty of companies negotiating concessions with unions and regularly staffed employees for pay or incentive cuts. Slashdot villify's Microsoft enough that they don't need to post the common business practices of third parties in the employ of Microsoft. Give us a break kdawson, enough with the sensationalist anti-Microsoft vendetta.
How many of them made $17 billion in profits over the last year?
It's one thing to cut salaries when you're hemorrhaging. It's another to cut salaries when everyone else is hemorrhaging, and you have a stable, monopoly-protected revenue base, just because your workers have no alternative.
> since 1 in 30 employees must start on the first day of the month, assuming people's
> contracts are as likley to start on day 1 as any other day
Considering your explanation above, I doubt any contract starts on day 1, because clearly they don't want to pay, and not starting contracts on day 1 is a way for them to not pay.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Contract workers get paid by the hour.
So that would be from $50 to $40 for me. Which I'm okay with that, because I'd still be making double what anyone else in my family makes. I'm not greedy. I just want a decent job with air conditioning & a chair to sit on.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Will the US nationalists make up their collective mind? If capitalism and competition are good, then Microsoft can only be bad for stifling competition.
Successful companies are a good thing, they can help improve the industry's efficiency through reduced prices and increased quality. But monopolistic companies like Microsoft rarely do either.
If it wasn't for the monopoly, Microsoft would have been dead between XP and Vista. Six years between incremental product releases? Instant death in any *normal* industry. Fast-paced competitors like Apple and Linux would have eaten it for breakfast. And the economy would benefit. So does the US still need more Microsofts?
Sam ty sig.
FedEx did it too, about two months ago. CEO took a 20% cut, various levels of management took 7.5-10%, and everybody else (well, everybody salaried, aka me) took 5%. The bigger hurt was the suspension of the 401k match.
Still, honestly given the economy, I'd rather see this than layoffs. Not that there aren't people I'd like to see gone, but that needs to come as part of the normal, "You're a moron/sloth, go pursue other career opportunities" methods. Layoffs always seem to get 75% of those people, and another 25% that were invaluable but pissed off the wrong person.
The more layoffs we get, the further down the bottom of this thing is going to be. So, given that a company's options are lay some people off or just make everybody take a little pain for the collective good, I'll take the collective pain right now. I think it's better for the economy as a whole.
It's one thing to cut salaries when you're hemorrhaging. It's another to cut salaries when everyone else is hemorrhaging, and you have a stable, monopoly-protected revenue base, just because your workers have no alternative.
Hate to say it, but that's exactly why. The cost of labor is dropping, because there's a massive pool of it willing to work for less right now. Market forces and all - more supply, less demand, price drops.
Sure, it was awesome for us all during the .com boom because it was the other way around (demand outstripping supply, causing outrageous salaries, etc.), but the point is stop your bitching when it goes the other way. That's just the way an open market works.
If insufficient numbers of people vote for a pay-cut, they _will_ be in the position of having to do layoffs, and in all likelihood, the people who will get laid off in such a case are the people who the company best figures it can replace with a more cost efficient alternative (read as: new graduate willing to accept a lower rate of pay). They can get away with this quite legally as long as they pay adequate severance packages.
How a person votes would likely not affect whether or not they got laid off, should a mass layoff occur, and it would really bite for the individual who voted that they would take a pay cut to get laid off anyways because not enough people voted that way, but hey.... nobody ever said life was fair.
But by all rights, Microsoft _should_ be conducting this vote anonymously... so that they have no means of knowing which employees voted no and which voted yes, because if they don't and they only lay off people who voted "no", then they could be setting themselves up for a large number of constructive dismissal lawsuits... (and what's worse for them is that the employees would have an official paper trail to prove it!). Further, by conducting the vote anonymously, Microsoft would be publicly presenting the notion that they are genuinely trying to come up with methods of retaining their employees in hard economic times because they value them all, rather than simply terminating the ones who don't vote the way they want.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In this case it is far worse. This is a 10% cut in the rate to the employment agency, so they have to cut the employees wage even further, on costs, insurance, profit etc, employees themselves are likely to get around double that cut.
I see that you have some problem with economics. Reduced pay for employees results in reduced spending, which generates lay-offs. A lot of people base their debt payments upon the salary level with out much gap between them. A 20% pay cut will often result in bankruptcy, as the employees can not just whip up a quick letter telling their creditors they will now be paying them 20% less and if they don't like it, they wont pay them anything.
Now is the pay cut to enable M$ to survive or is it to allow M$ to maintain it's current profit margin or even increase them. M$ has a history of having a total disregard for the costs of it's actions upon other people and companies as long their own profits keep increasing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If insufficient numbers of people vote for a pay-cut, they _will_ be in the position of having to do layoffs,
Nowhere did I see that this was a binding vote. I'd say it's more of a straw poll for Volt to see if they can get away with this. For instance, where did they come up with 10%?
Hell, if enough people vote yes, why not increase the cut to 15%? From the other posters comments I'd guess Volt doesn't really care about their employees and will try to squeeze them as much as possible. The "vote" is merely a means to figure out how hard to squeeze.
AccountKiller
A lot of people base their debt payments upon the salary level with out much gap between them.
If that's true, then a lot of people are complete idiots. It really doesn't seem logical that employers should factor in their employees' overspending when making these kinds of decisions.
sic transit gloria mundi
I am a contractor at Microsoft right now subject to this pay rate decrease. Although I have my opinions about why it is happening, and what should be happening instead, I think more interesting is what the immediate effect of this will be. In my case, I cancelled several services I pay for in order to absorb the hit to my income and will be increasing my W-4 deductions to maximize my current income (up to my allowed amount) in favor of decreasing my tax return next year (here's to hope).
But, I cancelled Netflix who licenses Microsoft's streaming video technology. I cancelled Gamefly who previously rented me Xbox 360 games. I will be providing less revenue through withholding to the federal government. There will be less discretionary spending and less revenue provided to my local and state government, all of whom need it just as bad as we do right now. All of those organizations rely on Microsoft products for their dwindling operations. In a very real way (since I live in northwest Washington) there will be less money for police to protect Microsoft's physical assets.
Don't these circular relationships represent the defintion of a "downward spiral"? Are we sure we understand the impact of these actions?
In the meantime I will buckle under and keep working my ass off. My kid's doctor doesn't accept righteousness as a form of payment.
Nope. The longer someone avoids paying off their debits, the bigger the debt becomes (thanks to the wonder of compound interest). Then, when their interest rate goes up (as it must, since rather than reduce debt, they've increased it and become a higher risk), you get a second whammy.
If nobody had debt, all earnings could be spent on direct consumption, without some (a lot, in many cases) being bled off by interest payments.
We've just come to the end of a very unnatural cycle - one where people not just continually rolled over debt, but also threw in additional debt with every roll-over, to the point where they were using new debt as their chief way of making debt payments (that's what average spending of 103% of income really means - people are using their credit cards to make payments on their cars and mortgages).
Deflation? After a decade of overinflated housing, we NEED a decade of housing deflation, just to get back to historic norms.
Bail-outs? Why bother - this just rewards the greedy, penalizes the prudent, and shows that nobody in government knows the meaning of "keep your powder dry". All the bailout money is not just a waste - it also carries the hidden cost of missed opportunities to both rationalize the car and banking industries, and to invest elsewhere. Every dollar spent out bailing crooks is a buck taken away from schools and infrastructure and retraining - money that could BUILD the economy.
For those who eschewed debt, delaying gratification, deflating prices back down to historic norms brings the reward of buying at proper value, not bubble prices. Call the bailouts what they are, a global "tax on stupdiity and greed."
I agree, but the cap gains tax should only be on real profits over $500 per year taken as income and not reinvested. Now you pay on purely nominal gains caused by inflation, fill out onerous paperwork over tiny amounts of savings account interest, usually can't deduct all investment losses from profits, and usually take a tax penalty for rebalancing your portfolio. Investment companies don't have most of these burdens, but individuals do. Getting around the ridiculous rules is a big part of why the market is dominated by mutual funds, hedge funds, IRA money-jailers and other parasites.
Inflation-adjusting nominal capital gains using the government's numbers isn't good enough. The have been fiddled with so much over the years that they are 3 to 6 percentage points lower than they would be when calculated using the methods of 15 to 30 years ago. This fiddling has also inflated GDP growth and screwed Social Security recipients by a similar percentage compounded over many years.
Also, capital gains shouldn't be taxed if the underlying capital is intellectual property. Ireland got that right; it really paid off for them. (I know this is Slashdot, but individual authors and inventors would be more viable if their product weren't taxed out of existence.)
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
This sort of thing is going on everywhere. That's why it's a recession. I think it's a little unfair to say that right now it's all Microsoft's fault that they have to cut wages because consumers can't afford their products (not that I'd shill out $150 for Office even in a good economy). It's not like companies can just say, "Wait a minute... if we don't lay people off and/or cut wages... this recession will end!" If that were possible we wouldn't have recessions at all.
The prices of ALOT of things jumped up after 9/11 on fear and during the gasoline crisis. They also take advantage of every weather crisis or flood to publish how it will cause a shortage and a price hike.
Ever notice -- when these things clear up, they don't go back down.
Everything needs to go through some deflation. The price of many things is just ridiculous.
Things going from 25-50 cents in the 70's to 6-10 bucks... That's a hell of alot of inflation -- alot more than the
supposed 2-4% reported by government figures each year. Over 3 decades, 4% would be a 324% price inflation.
Instead, I commonly see things more in line with 20x (2000%). It's not just housing.
$2.99 for a corrupted version of a song (a ringtone). vs. $4-6 for an album in the early 80's. The incremental cost
to produce that ringtone: 0. An album might have ~10 songs... so as ring tones, that'd be $30. That's 7.5-5x and those aren't for the real song. The incremental profit margins are nearly incalculable. Piracy has hurt music companies sooooo much.....
But contrary to what 'should' happen -- the government is just manufacturing more money backed by nothing. It's like stock dilution -- but on a massive scale -- dollar dilution. Soon street bums will be begging $20's for a cup of joe.
Theoretically, we are so screwed...but for what really will happen? Good luck guessing!