Today I was given a 1.3% raise and my 10% bonus was funded at 6%. Immediately after I was told that someone told me they were about to do something that could end up costing the company around $50k. I didn't stop them.
Imo there's no such thing as 'paid enough to care'. If I'm not paid TO care, specifically, I wont care. I'm not wasting my mental energy to create more profit for the shareholders if I'm not directly incentivised to do so.
The fallacy is that anyone in the C Suite is distinctly smarter, or more wise than any reasonably proficient worker. They're not. They most often simply had a better leg-up early in their careers, either through wealth, nepotism, or pure luck.
I'm not wasting my mental energy to create more profit for the shareholders if I'm not directly incentivised to do so.
Especially when those very same capitalists use their wealth and power to attack democracy and public institutions! Every dollar of profit I make for a modern day (wage) slaver does harm to my soul.
Like most adults, I HATE my job. Every day I go into work I die inside. There is nothing rewarding about my job other than the pay check.
Still I try hard. Every day. It makes the lives of my co-workers easier. It makes my boss's life easier. They are real people in my community and I care about how my actions affect them. Work ethic means a lot to me.
I get hating your job but half assing your job every day is awful for society.
I do as well. I know (or at least I used to know) that what I do helps the public rather than giving more money to some waste of oxygen on a yacht somewhere.
One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y'all, as the words "wait let me help you reset it" were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face "I said I fucking got it!" So... I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer's office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer's office saying "hey [chief engineer], we're having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?"
My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said "I don't think I've got this." An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically "union shop rules" for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment... essentially: if you're not trained on them, don't touch and we weren't training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.
Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of "I said I've fucking got it" and stop what I'm doing. I'll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers' jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It's just not worth it.
I hate it when people yell, so unneeded, especially since the robots were stopped. I am glad you now no longer help these companies, but help your fellow workers only. :)
The free market capitalist types always wanna talk about incentives. Wages incentivize working exactly as hard as necessary to not get fired and not one iota more. Stock ownership incentivizes maximizing profit for the business: higher output, fewer sloppy mistakes, extra care and effort. Shockingly, workers are spontaneously encouraged to actively help the business succeed when they actually see a return on that increased success, who knew?
Someone from a different department wanted to transfer an internal user to me for help with something. As soon as the transfer went through, the user said something had come up and she’d call back. I didn’t offer her my number to call me directly, nor did I ask for her number and offer to call her later. I said “ok,” and let her hang up.
I used to go the extra mile for the company. Now I do the minimum necessary for people to be satisfied with my work. Being generally friendly buys goodwill, too.
The company I work for likes to hold a meeting every quarter to tell employees how the company is doing and they love to talk about the stock price as if we're supposed to care. Executives get rewarded with shares, not us, we'd have to actually use our own money to buy shares and the number of shares we'd be able to buy with our own salaries would be meager by comparison. Still, they proudly boast about share buybacks, while if you look at the publicly-available data, the execs are selling tons of shares (not just for tax purposes). So they're using company funds to pump up the stock price while offloading their personal shares. Real inspiring leadership, really drives me to put in more effort so they can get a bigger payout while I and everyone else gets diddly squat.
Who doesn't want to join a co-op and receive shares of the company for free. Almost no one wants to start a co-op, financing it, taking risks and responsibilities only to give shares away for free and gain nothing in exchange.
You don't finance it, you take a loan from a bank on the company. If the company folds, it goes bankrupt, not you.
You don't take anymore risk than the other workers.
If the company is dead, you're still a human and now just another worker on the job market. You don't go to jail for going bankrupt.
You still take all the risk because the bank is going to say they won't give a loan to a new company without a track record, unless someone is willing to be a guarantor.
Now you share the profits, but all the risk is yours.
Unless you have a bunch of people lined up to start the co-op and they're all willing to pitch in or become guarantors with you, in which case it might just work - but again, the initial people are going to have more skin in the game than the rest.
You don't receive shares for free. You receive shares in return for your labour. You don't become an equal member of a partnership as soon as you join.