You should discipline yourself to use GIMP occasionally. Stick a project to it, or at least a particular thing you want to do in a project, until you've searched and exhausted all options. You'll learn something, either that you didn't know how to use GIMP right or that GIMP thoroughly has failed to supply a useful feature. You might even accidentally stumble across things you hadn't thought to use for a particular task and come up with a few new tricks to keep in your toolkit. In any case, doing things different from time to time is good... at the moment I'm playing Chess, even though it's inferior to Go, because I want to improve my visualization and tactics in general--I'll play blindfold chess when I'm decent at Chess.
How many days can you go telling a small child she can't play her game?
I'm glad your daughter's way too young for me, because she's going to grow up to be a spoiled entitled gold-digging bitch.
Oh your video game doesn't work. Why don't you try something else?... okay you little cunt-bitch hellcat, you wanna throw your Wiimote at my head? You don't get to eat for the next four days. Then you can complain about not having your video game working.
Because I can see that 2 + 2 doesn't make over $9000?
Taking away your employees' living wages, while helping yourself to seconds won't either.
Right, taking away a few small dollars from everyone will do tons of damage. Clearly the employees faced huge hardships with the $10 they weren't getting from every paycheck so their CEO could have a $4.5 million salary.
Instead of working with employees from the beginning to save a failing concern drowning in debt and losing mindshare, those in the corner offices helped themselves to a bigger piece of the shrinking pie while asking others to do more with less.
The cuts that unions agree to in these situations amount to thousands per employee in healthcare and wages. Think dropping $400/mo in healthcare (i.e. higher deductibles on your insurance = lower premiums, 75%-90% of which is usually paid by the employer) and $500/mo in wages, that's $118 million the company saves in an effort to keep itself afloat. By contrast, they could fire about 2000 employees and make everyone else work harder if the total compensation of each employee rounds out to about $60,000 including the wage taxes, social security (6.5% employer has to pay), wages, and benefits.
And again, sometimes the ship is just going to sink, at which point the best option is really to just cut and run. Which the CEO seems to have done here. Your entire argument is "the CEO made out good and he should have gotten screwed just like everyone else, even though that wouldn't have really helped the situation any or kept anyone their jobs or made them any richer except for like 10 dollars they'd have that they don't now... I like 10 dollars."
You are clearly fixated on the numbers and completely missing the big picture. It's not about the spreadsheet, bean counter justifications.
Then pray more and it'll work out. Praying helps people in the hospital survive. It's not about the statistics, the numbers that beancounters use to show that people who are prayed for recover no faster nor more frequently than people who aren't; it's about the God-given truth that prayer heals.
Management, with no way to ensure further profitability and no way to extend the life of the company, would do well to cut and run. Know when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away, and when to run.
I wonder if this will turn out like OnLive, where the executives sucked the company's venture capital dry when it was hemorrhaging to death, then set up a new shell corporation and purchased OnLive and restored (reduced) business operations. Maybe. They could pay out to themselves and then form a new joint to restructure, acquiring Hostess operations by selling off their facilities essentially to themselves. Then again, they could just be sensibly cutting and running instead of going down with the rest of the ship.
Besides, Hostess was a walking corpse anyway.
Why does the captain have to go down with the rest of the ship when he can't save anyone?
So you respond to the question with a tirade that ignores the fact that divying up the cost of executive compensation across the labor equally results in basically a meal at McDonalds?
In small businesses with 2 employees, yeah, the guy at the top makes $100k/year and hires two monkeys for $30k/year, he could cut his salary off and give them $80k/year; the more employees you get, the less it divies up. $100k and 2 employees turns into $10M and 200 employees... except, well, at Ford the executives make a total of $60M and instead of 1200 employees they have 170,000 employees, $353 per year raise but just the CEO is $60/year (call it $6 million). Hostess 18500 employees, $4.5M executive compensation was considered "outrageous" and was cut back, but still that's $243/year per employee.
So what do you purport is the physical/real (i.e. not moral/imaginary) benefit to executives NOT making out like bandits?
"Flashy gimmicks" is called "Experimentation" in the entertainment industry. It's risk. It's like when Titan A.E. came out during the hay-day of hollywood movies, versus modern chick-flicks and re-hashes of Resident Evil etc etc. It's like when Marvel started producing superhero movies (based on comics), following in the footsteps of failures like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (movies based on video games, or at least on a franchise), which itself followed in the footsteps of major successes like Toy Story (full CGI movies).
You can see the impact of a poor economy and fear of piracy with movies like Doom, which was going to be a major experiment--which was relegated to an awesome 5 minute scene in the end from an FPS viewpoint, and instead churned into a Resident Evil clone (which is SAFE and not experimental). A major movie like Doom, following the video game, with a lone hero, with minimal dialogue, major action, would pave the way for movies based on the likes of Metroid. These concepts are too experimental for the movie industry to risk.
Nintendo is throwing down all kinds of experiments, ideas and innovations. Some of them fall, some of them hold. Sony played catch-up to the Wii controller by integrating motion control--poorly. Microsoft tried for the same thing but differentiated itself by expanding on the ideas presented by eyeToy, another way to base in-game movements on actual player physical movements. This isn't desperation; this is progress. This is how progress happens.
From what I read, we have a world of moronic drooling couch douchebags who haven't figured out that a TV has channels, volume, and an on/off state. The only thing you could possibly want is TV guide and adjustment of color fidelity. Other non-tuner devices--DVR, media (DVD etc) player, VOD (including Netflix)--require a content browser (select from a list, search for title, scene select) and video control features (play, pause, rewind, stop). Hence smart remotes, for dumb people who need 9 million features and interactive help and on-line connectivity via WiFi.
You are a fool. Sony got all their hardware and software development experience by developing for both the Saturn and the N64, and then pulled out and made their own. If they failed, they were tethered to Nintendo and Sega and would make a lot of money; if they succeeded, they would have their own hardware platform and a strong in-house game development branch with lots of experience right out of the gate. They engineered perfect penetration into the market with the right lube and the right sized organ.
You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. Ever notice there's a few famous CEOs with a serial record for destroying companies that seem decent, but in hindsight look weak? They're there for the controlled drop. People bring them in specifically to bring the company to its end nice and easy so the executives and shareholders can get out. Hypothetically, Hostess could have just decided there's no reason for the Captain to not bail out of a sinking ship when it's going down too god damn fast to wait around.
300,000 employees before the car industry shit itself during Bush's term. At least that's what Yahoo was reporting at the time for Ford's business profile. $366/year on bi-weekly pay is still $14/paycheck. Maybe I'm misremembering my numbers; does an order of a Taco Bell boxed meal really matter? 14 bucks isn't paying anyone's mortgage.
You are buying too much house. Those credit cards will crush you. I know, I was there..
Interest on a house for say a 150k house right now is about 8-10k per year. All mortgages are front loaded. The gov 'lets' you keep 3k of that.
I'm better at this than you are. Loans are not "front loaded," they are "savings accounts that the bank opens in you." The "principal and interest" thing is a myth, an abstraction for weak-minded third grade drop-outs (i.e. Americans). The truth is you have a balance and you compound interest daily on it. The balance is high, the interest paid is high; you pay a fixed monthly pay-out, not a part of your house plus the interest accrued, so of course at first 98% of that is interest accrued and 2% is paying down the balance below what it was last month. This is the same concept as hunking a huge amount of cash into a savings account to "live off the interest."
The solution is to pay extra on the loan. This is called a "principal payment", whereas normally a payment is put into escrow and then applied to your loan on a schedule.
Credit cards have 15+% interest rates.
Last time I refinanced my car loan, I dropped it below my credit card. 10.71% car loan, 9.99% credit card, but at this point my credit card has a 7.99% APR for cash advance. A motorcycle loan is at least 6% APR; I may as well buy a motorcycle on my credit card, there's no filing fee.
Besides, I've already raised enough capital in the past 4 weeks to pay off 80% of my credit card balance anyway. Straight out. God knows I only spend 15% of my paycheck. I'll have that house paid off in 14 months if I really want, but more like 3 years... I'm going to redo the kitchen, buy expensive appliances, and replace the carpet with bamboo flooring first. Oh, and pay off my car loan. Can do that in 4-5 months.
My numbers are probably wrong; when I did this a decade ago, Ford had 300,000 employees and total executive compensation was 4-7 million dollars per executive including salary, stocks, and bonuses. Also, kids don't need a bunch of junk to "have a Christmas," what you on about?
The funny thing is humans are so bad at this, they hit the lottery and win $173,000 and they make $25k/year working at Wal-Mart and so they quit their job and spend their vast fortune buying expensive cars and touring Europe and... wonder why they're broke. People win $5 million and retire, and 6 months later they're broke and looking for a job. It's no surprise they're thinking, why not take your executive bonuses and give them to your employees so they can all have raises? In small-to-medium businesses that's sometimes a good $50 a paycheck per employee; in small businesses with 3 employees everyone could get a 30%-50% raise, though sometimes the CEO is skipping paychecks himself (because he's obligated to pay his employees' wages first). As the business gets bigger, those numbers become fractional.
If you manage to make a coherent beam, you've done something difficult and amazing. Modify anything to make it a cone. A cone will eventually spread quite wide, which reduces the energy-per-surface-area, making it less dangerous. A sphere is just a number of cones, for example. (An infinite number of cones, actually)
It creates a market vacuum and a cheap labor influx. Now another company can fill in the diminished market Hostess is out of, with a smaller operation that's not so expensive and lumbering and more fitted to market forces. These employees can get non-union jobs where they'll be offered more than they were making but less than their prior wages, which were garnered for union dues (i.e. $19/hr minus $5/hr = $14/hr, you get $16/hr instead which is $2/hr more), which thus lowers the economic waste spent in wages but increases the salary delivered to the worker, which increases wealth rather than simply shifting it around (and inflated labor costs actually decrease wealth). It increases wealth because after you hire 6 people at $16/hr rather than at $19/hr, what you have is 6 people receiving total $14/hr more, and enough money to hire another worker at $16/hr, and $2/hr left over in the corporate coffers to spend on economic growth to create more jobs.
You'll notice that the initial situation is that there is less demand in this market, so market forces caused shrinkage and poverty. More unemployment. This restructuring as outlined removes the unions and shows an end where less money is spent to produce a product, while workers receive more in pay. The role of the unions here was to erode wealth (via wage inflation, which becomes general inflation); removing them may generate a larger or smaller swing than I've shown (I've seen $50/mo union dues on $5000/mo salaries and I've seen union dues where you make $20/hr and you get $14/hr with the rest going to the union), but it'll always eliminate a waste element no matter how small. There is a short-term cost here now: more unemployed labor. The market is, however, now slightly more flexible and new jobs can grow.
A single incident like this would be just a straight loss. Constant incidents like this are typical of economic shifts. This may or may not require retraining. For example, Hostess cites competition with the current trend toward 'healthy' food. People perceive organic foods as healthy, as well as whole grains. So the bakers may move to small bread shops producing more artisan breads with unbleached, unmodified dough. Such a shift would of course then weaken the major bread mass producers; however they're highly automated and would likely have production scalebacks that resulted in reduced expense and less in reduced staffing. They would get fewer major machines, less maintenance, and thus the machine manufacturers and maintenance staff and management would shift out (in smaller numbers), which then moves the economic changes out of the baker's micro-economy and into pressure on the machinist economy. The machinists will supply wind turbines and other such stuff in the growing renewables economy, and so on.
If the entire executive board of Ford Motor Co. forfeited all of their salaries and bonuses and stock options for 1 year, they could raise every single Ford employee's salary by 18 cents per year (which is to say zero, because nobody would get a 1/3 penny per paycheck salary boost). I wonder how that works for Hostess with 18,500 workers... $3.5-$4 million seems to be roughly the previous (high-dollar) CEO's total compensation but it was lowered for the new guy in March 2012... so if the CEO took zero compensation, he could pay everyone $216.21 more per year, or $8.31 per pay check, 10.3 cents more per hour.
I have a high deductible healthcare plan that costs me $12 per paycheck twice a month ($24/mo), the cheapest option, and my employer pays the other 75% so per paycheck my health insurance costs $48. The Hostess CEO's salary couldn't pay for my health insurance. If the entire executive board cut all compensation, they might be able to pay for that kind of healthcare. Do note that I'm fiscally responsible--I keep about 50%-80% of my after-taxes salary after my mandatory expenses--so the risk of $1500 deductibles is not a problem for me and there's a $3500 per year limit including deductibles on my plan... it's a good plan if you're only concerned with potential catastrophic events like broken legs, major surgery, etc. and you don't mind paying full price for all prescriptions, doctor's visits, treatments that cost under $1500, etc,
It's a weak plan if you're a family with maintenance drugs, because you'll wind up paying full costs for everything with a limit of $7000 per annum, which means instead of paying $40 for something like a 2 month's supply of Synthroid you wind up paying $120 per month. $240/year turns into $1480/year. Have a kid and a spouse and you're probably talking about $1000-$2000/year turning into $6000-$7000; though as your healthcare costs start maximizing with nickle-and-dime (i.e. cheap doctor's visits), it starts becoming a minor hit: the deductibles on a normal healthcare plan pile up indefinitely, you wind up spending $6500 on a good healthcare plan (including your insurance premium) and $6800 on a crap catastrophic plan.
Note that the out-of-pocket maximum (you hit this and you pay $0 for the rest of the year) doesn't include deductibles in a normal plan, but for a high-deductible plan it does include deductibles--your total expenses can exceed your insurance premium plus your out-of-pocket maximum with a regular plan, but cannot exceed those figures with a high-deductible plan. You can also use a health savings account to pay all your healthcare expenses from pre-tax dollars, without taking the risk of a flexible spending account (remaining balance at the end of each year is forfeited in an FSA, but not in an HSA).
Not a bad plan for me because I'm not bad at managing my money. Even when I dip (I do, right now I'm buying a house and I'm paying off debt, so I'm going to max out my credit cards for maximum capitalization and then buy the house and use remaining money and future salary to pay off the credit card debt), I can get personal loans to the tune of $1500 to afford my medical expenses and I am fully capable of paying down the maximum $3500 within 1 year. Poorer families and those with less fiscal prowess would be better with a solid healthcare plan that minimizes risk at additional, but leveled (I.e. not suddenly $1500 at once, but rather $100 more a month), cost. These are more expensive.
But yeah think about it. The executives can put a couple more dollars in your pocket every month by giving up 100% of their lavish salaries and bonuses. They sure as hell can't fund your pension that way. Why do people always demand the executives take salary cuts so they can make everything better? Like if these oil companies with multi-hundred-billion-dollars profit and executives making $500M in bonuses a year stopped paying their executives, they could magically solve all the world's problems? They'd have 0.001% as much mo
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You should discipline yourself to use GIMP occasionally. Stick a project to it, or at least a particular thing you want to do in a project, until you've searched and exhausted all options. You'll learn something, either that you didn't know how to use GIMP right or that GIMP thoroughly has failed to supply a useful feature. You might even accidentally stumble across things you hadn't thought to use for a particular task and come up with a few new tricks to keep in your toolkit. In any case, doing things different from time to time is good... at the moment I'm playing Chess, even though it's inferior to Go, because I want to improve my visualization and tactics in general--I'll play blindfold chess when I'm decent at Chess.
Warm piss.
How many days can you go telling a small child she can't play her game?
I'm glad your daughter's way too young for me, because she's going to grow up to be a spoiled entitled gold-digging bitch.
Oh your video game doesn't work. Why don't you try something else? ... okay you little cunt-bitch hellcat, you wanna throw your Wiimote at my head? You don't get to eat for the next four days. Then you can complain about not having your video game working.
Mass Effect is on Wii U so that's not important.
LOL. You MUST be an accountant.
Because I can see that 2 + 2 doesn't make over $9000?
Taking away your employees' living wages, while helping yourself to seconds won't either.
Right, taking away a few small dollars from everyone will do tons of damage. Clearly the employees faced huge hardships with the $10 they weren't getting from every paycheck so their CEO could have a $4.5 million salary.
Instead of working with employees from the beginning to save a failing concern drowning in debt and losing mindshare, those in the corner offices helped themselves to a bigger piece of the shrinking pie while asking others to do more with less.
The cuts that unions agree to in these situations amount to thousands per employee in healthcare and wages. Think dropping $400/mo in healthcare (i.e. higher deductibles on your insurance = lower premiums, 75%-90% of which is usually paid by the employer) and $500/mo in wages, that's $118 million the company saves in an effort to keep itself afloat. By contrast, they could fire about 2000 employees and make everyone else work harder if the total compensation of each employee rounds out to about $60,000 including the wage taxes, social security (6.5% employer has to pay), wages, and benefits.
And again, sometimes the ship is just going to sink, at which point the best option is really to just cut and run. Which the CEO seems to have done here. Your entire argument is "the CEO made out good and he should have gotten screwed just like everyone else, even though that wouldn't have really helped the situation any or kept anyone their jobs or made them any richer except for like 10 dollars they'd have that they don't now... I like 10 dollars."
You are clearly fixated on the numbers and completely missing the big picture. It's not about the spreadsheet, bean counter justifications.
Then pray more and it'll work out. Praying helps people in the hospital survive. It's not about the statistics, the numbers that beancounters use to show that people who are prayed for recover no faster nor more frequently than people who aren't; it's about the God-given truth that prayer heals.
Management, with no way to ensure further profitability and no way to extend the life of the company, would do well to cut and run. Know when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away, and when to run.
I wonder if this will turn out like OnLive, where the executives sucked the company's venture capital dry when it was hemorrhaging to death, then set up a new shell corporation and purchased OnLive and restored (reduced) business operations. Maybe. They could pay out to themselves and then form a new joint to restructure, acquiring Hostess operations by selling off their facilities essentially to themselves. Then again, they could just be sensibly cutting and running instead of going down with the rest of the ship.
Besides, Hostess was a walking corpse anyway.
Why does the captain have to go down with the rest of the ship when he can't save anyone?
So you respond to the question with a tirade that ignores the fact that divying up the cost of executive compensation across the labor equally results in basically a meal at McDonalds?
In small businesses with 2 employees, yeah, the guy at the top makes $100k/year and hires two monkeys for $30k/year, he could cut his salary off and give them $80k/year; the more employees you get, the less it divies up. $100k and 2 employees turns into $10M and 200 employees... except, well, at Ford the executives make a total of $60M and instead of 1200 employees they have 170,000 employees, $353 per year raise but just the CEO is $60/year (call it $6 million). Hostess 18500 employees, $4.5M executive compensation was considered "outrageous" and was cut back, but still that's $243/year per employee.
So what do you purport is the physical/real (i.e. not moral/imaginary) benefit to executives NOT making out like bandits?
Why do you have five kids?
It's because Christmas is a retail bubble. A short one.
After all, it's Nintendo--a company that simply refuses to let go of its, "Super Mario plus other cartoony games," forumula.
DarkSiders 2 is rated M for Mature.
"Flashy gimmicks" is called "Experimentation" in the entertainment industry. It's risk. It's like when Titan A.E. came out during the hay-day of hollywood movies, versus modern chick-flicks and re-hashes of Resident Evil etc etc. It's like when Marvel started producing superhero movies (based on comics), following in the footsteps of failures like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (movies based on video games, or at least on a franchise), which itself followed in the footsteps of major successes like Toy Story (full CGI movies).
You can see the impact of a poor economy and fear of piracy with movies like Doom, which was going to be a major experiment--which was relegated to an awesome 5 minute scene in the end from an FPS viewpoint, and instead churned into a Resident Evil clone (which is SAFE and not experimental). A major movie like Doom, following the video game, with a lone hero, with minimal dialogue, major action, would pave the way for movies based on the likes of Metroid. These concepts are too experimental for the movie industry to risk.
Nintendo is throwing down all kinds of experiments, ideas and innovations. Some of them fall, some of them hold. Sony played catch-up to the Wii controller by integrating motion control--poorly. Microsoft tried for the same thing but differentiated itself by expanding on the ideas presented by eyeToy, another way to base in-game movements on actual player physical movements. This isn't desperation; this is progress. This is how progress happens.
From what I read, we have a world of moronic drooling couch douchebags who haven't figured out that a TV has channels, volume, and an on/off state. The only thing you could possibly want is TV guide and adjustment of color fidelity. Other non-tuner devices--DVR, media (DVD etc) player, VOD (including Netflix)--require a content browser (select from a list, search for title, scene select) and video control features (play, pause, rewind, stop). Hence smart remotes, for dumb people who need 9 million features and interactive help and on-line connectivity via WiFi.
You are a fool. Sony got all their hardware and software development experience by developing for both the Saturn and the N64, and then pulled out and made their own. If they failed, they were tethered to Nintendo and Sega and would make a lot of money; if they succeeded, they would have their own hardware platform and a strong in-house game development branch with lots of experience right out of the gate. They engineered perfect penetration into the market with the right lube and the right sized organ.
What kind of detonator? How much Wile E. Coyote did these people watch in bomb squad training?
Handjobs.
You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. Ever notice there's a few famous CEOs with a serial record for destroying companies that seem decent, but in hindsight look weak? They're there for the controlled drop. People bring them in specifically to bring the company to its end nice and easy so the executives and shareholders can get out. Hypothetically, Hostess could have just decided there's no reason for the Captain to not bail out of a sinking ship when it's going down too god damn fast to wait around.
300,000 employees before the car industry shit itself during Bush's term. At least that's what Yahoo was reporting at the time for Ford's business profile. $366/year on bi-weekly pay is still $14/paycheck. Maybe I'm misremembering my numbers; does an order of a Taco Bell boxed meal really matter? 14 bucks isn't paying anyone's mortgage.
You are buying too much house. Those credit cards will crush you. I know, I was there..
Interest on a house for say a 150k house right now is about 8-10k per year. All mortgages are front loaded. The gov 'lets' you keep 3k of that.
I'm better at this than you are. Loans are not "front loaded," they are "savings accounts that the bank opens in you." The "principal and interest" thing is a myth, an abstraction for weak-minded third grade drop-outs (i.e. Americans). The truth is you have a balance and you compound interest daily on it. The balance is high, the interest paid is high; you pay a fixed monthly pay-out, not a part of your house plus the interest accrued, so of course at first 98% of that is interest accrued and 2% is paying down the balance below what it was last month. This is the same concept as hunking a huge amount of cash into a savings account to "live off the interest."
The solution is to pay extra on the loan. This is called a "principal payment", whereas normally a payment is put into escrow and then applied to your loan on a schedule.
Credit cards have 15+% interest rates.
Last time I refinanced my car loan, I dropped it below my credit card. 10.71% car loan, 9.99% credit card, but at this point my credit card has a 7.99% APR for cash advance. A motorcycle loan is at least 6% APR; I may as well buy a motorcycle on my credit card, there's no filing fee.
Besides, I've already raised enough capital in the past 4 weeks to pay off 80% of my credit card balance anyway. Straight out. God knows I only spend 15% of my paycheck. I'll have that house paid off in 14 months if I really want, but more like 3 years ... I'm going to redo the kitchen, buy expensive appliances, and replace the carpet with bamboo flooring first. Oh, and pay off my car loan. Can do that in 4-5 months.
My numbers are probably wrong; when I did this a decade ago, Ford had 300,000 employees and total executive compensation was 4-7 million dollars per executive including salary, stocks, and bonuses. Also, kids don't need a bunch of junk to "have a Christmas," what you on about?
The funny thing is humans are so bad at this, they hit the lottery and win $173,000 and they make $25k/year working at Wal-Mart and so they quit their job and spend their vast fortune buying expensive cars and touring Europe and ... wonder why they're broke. People win $5 million and retire, and 6 months later they're broke and looking for a job. It's no surprise they're thinking, why not take your executive bonuses and give them to your employees so they can all have raises? In small-to-medium businesses that's sometimes a good $50 a paycheck per employee; in small businesses with 3 employees everyone could get a 30%-50% raise, though sometimes the CEO is skipping paychecks himself (because he's obligated to pay his employees' wages first). As the business gets bigger, those numbers become fractional.
If you manage to make a coherent beam, you've done something difficult and amazing. Modify anything to make it a cone. A cone will eventually spread quite wide, which reduces the energy-per-surface-area, making it less dangerous. A sphere is just a number of cones, for example. (An infinite number of cones, actually)
It won't. Everything moves to the lowest energy state.
It creates a market vacuum and a cheap labor influx. Now another company can fill in the diminished market Hostess is out of, with a smaller operation that's not so expensive and lumbering and more fitted to market forces. These employees can get non-union jobs where they'll be offered more than they were making but less than their prior wages, which were garnered for union dues (i.e. $19/hr minus $5/hr = $14/hr, you get $16/hr instead which is $2/hr more), which thus lowers the economic waste spent in wages but increases the salary delivered to the worker, which increases wealth rather than simply shifting it around (and inflated labor costs actually decrease wealth). It increases wealth because after you hire 6 people at $16/hr rather than at $19/hr, what you have is 6 people receiving total $14/hr more, and enough money to hire another worker at $16/hr, and $2/hr left over in the corporate coffers to spend on economic growth to create more jobs.
You'll notice that the initial situation is that there is less demand in this market, so market forces caused shrinkage and poverty. More unemployment. This restructuring as outlined removes the unions and shows an end where less money is spent to produce a product, while workers receive more in pay. The role of the unions here was to erode wealth (via wage inflation, which becomes general inflation); removing them may generate a larger or smaller swing than I've shown (I've seen $50/mo union dues on $5000/mo salaries and I've seen union dues where you make $20/hr and you get $14/hr with the rest going to the union), but it'll always eliminate a waste element no matter how small. There is a short-term cost here now: more unemployed labor. The market is, however, now slightly more flexible and new jobs can grow.
A single incident like this would be just a straight loss. Constant incidents like this are typical of economic shifts. This may or may not require retraining. For example, Hostess cites competition with the current trend toward 'healthy' food. People perceive organic foods as healthy, as well as whole grains. So the bakers may move to small bread shops producing more artisan breads with unbleached, unmodified dough. Such a shift would of course then weaken the major bread mass producers; however they're highly automated and would likely have production scalebacks that resulted in reduced expense and less in reduced staffing. They would get fewer major machines, less maintenance, and thus the machine manufacturers and maintenance staff and management would shift out (in smaller numbers), which then moves the economic changes out of the baker's micro-economy and into pressure on the machinist economy. The machinists will supply wind turbines and other such stuff in the growing renewables economy, and so on.
If the entire executive board of Ford Motor Co. forfeited all of their salaries and bonuses and stock options for 1 year, they could raise every single Ford employee's salary by 18 cents per year (which is to say zero, because nobody would get a 1/3 penny per paycheck salary boost). I wonder how that works for Hostess with 18,500 workers... $3.5-$4 million seems to be roughly the previous (high-dollar) CEO's total compensation but it was lowered for the new guy in March 2012 ... so if the CEO took zero compensation, he could pay everyone $216.21 more per year, or $8.31 per pay check, 10.3 cents more per hour.
I have a high deductible healthcare plan that costs me $12 per paycheck twice a month ($24/mo), the cheapest option, and my employer pays the other 75% so per paycheck my health insurance costs $48. The Hostess CEO's salary couldn't pay for my health insurance. If the entire executive board cut all compensation, they might be able to pay for that kind of healthcare. Do note that I'm fiscally responsible--I keep about 50%-80% of my after-taxes salary after my mandatory expenses--so the risk of $1500 deductibles is not a problem for me and there's a $3500 per year limit including deductibles on my plan... it's a good plan if you're only concerned with potential catastrophic events like broken legs, major surgery, etc. and you don't mind paying full price for all prescriptions, doctor's visits, treatments that cost under $1500, etc,
It's a weak plan if you're a family with maintenance drugs, because you'll wind up paying full costs for everything with a limit of $7000 per annum, which means instead of paying $40 for something like a 2 month's supply of Synthroid you wind up paying $120 per month. $240/year turns into $1480/year. Have a kid and a spouse and you're probably talking about $1000-$2000/year turning into $6000-$7000; though as your healthcare costs start maximizing with nickle-and-dime (i.e. cheap doctor's visits), it starts becoming a minor hit: the deductibles on a normal healthcare plan pile up indefinitely, you wind up spending $6500 on a good healthcare plan (including your insurance premium) and $6800 on a crap catastrophic plan.
Note that the out-of-pocket maximum (you hit this and you pay $0 for the rest of the year) doesn't include deductibles in a normal plan, but for a high-deductible plan it does include deductibles--your total expenses can exceed your insurance premium plus your out-of-pocket maximum with a regular plan, but cannot exceed those figures with a high-deductible plan. You can also use a health savings account to pay all your healthcare expenses from pre-tax dollars, without taking the risk of a flexible spending account (remaining balance at the end of each year is forfeited in an FSA, but not in an HSA).
Not a bad plan for me because I'm not bad at managing my money. Even when I dip (I do, right now I'm buying a house and I'm paying off debt, so I'm going to max out my credit cards for maximum capitalization and then buy the house and use remaining money and future salary to pay off the credit card debt), I can get personal loans to the tune of $1500 to afford my medical expenses and I am fully capable of paying down the maximum $3500 within 1 year. Poorer families and those with less fiscal prowess would be better with a solid healthcare plan that minimizes risk at additional, but leveled (I.e. not suddenly $1500 at once, but rather $100 more a month), cost. These are more expensive.
But yeah think about it. The executives can put a couple more dollars in your pocket every month by giving up 100% of their lavish salaries and bonuses. They sure as hell can't fund your pension that way. Why do people always demand the executives take salary cuts so they can make everything better? Like if these oil companies with multi-hundred-billion-dollars profit and executives making $500M in bonuses a year stopped paying their executives, they could magically solve all the world's problems? They'd have 0.001% as much mo
Yes, whole wheat twinkies, tasteless garbage shit. That'll sell.