[GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money]
Also the fact that people in group $X are getting screwed more than people in group $Y is no reason not to fight to not get screwed if you are in group $Y.
If you don't need to buy a product to make a product, or when you have to that's typically pennies on the dollar you can share a lot more of that.
The real difference here is that when the market is favorable you CAN share more. And Samsung is doing so. In the US you probably wouldn't be able to do this because the shareholders will cry and will happily give a 100M bonus to whoever will 'lead' the company better. Where better means diverting as much as possible to the shareholders
The number of people making "moon money" is very, very small compared to everyone else in the industry.
Developers don't set EE wages. It's always the management class that is the source of your woes, not your fellow workers. We're in this together.
-- A proud programming union worker in South Korea since 2018.
You have a point. But on this precise topic it’s pretty hard to make. A tiny handful of companies who are winners beyond anyone’s expectations simply do not matter.
There is exactly zero percent chance this profit sharing contract would have been negotiated by either party as it is if this had been remotely predicted in advance. Same as the retrospectively extremely lucrative RSUs granted to nvidia employees just five years ago.
Tech folks employed by the top tech companies have been fine. I do not cry even a minute for them. The fun part of the Korean memory worker compensation is that blue collar folks finally are getting just a little bit of the taste the laptop class has been part of for so long. And it is likely to be comparatively very fleeting.
(It sounds like the union got a great deal for these workers, though.)
Tech pulled a great trick here: equity.
America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k
It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.
Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.
Of course I'm late to the game. My colleagues who have been here ten years are either extremely wealthy and bored or sailing the Caribbean at this point. Every other week someone is taking a sabbatical
I remember thinking like this when i was younger (hes older than me). Then here i am working nearly half as many hours as this guy, for 5-10x the pay.
This is a widespread, pervasive train of thought in America. Yet i wonder as the houses and healthcare stay expensive, food and fuel too... at some point this mental model breaks right?
That is, a US tech worker is taking much more for their own from those billionaire employers, compared to what Samsung's workers managed to do after a lot of haggling.
Just the average doesn’t say enough.
There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.
So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.
I don’t think they will be allowed to retire.
I’m just a dumb blue collar worker, but I’m going to go with “No” here.
They were only ever owed what they agreed to work for.
Now, that’s changed and they negotiated a different agreement.
They were never owed this until both parties agreed they were.
You pay them the bonus, it shows on the pay cheque, like every salary bonus. What about this is something you'd expect in an article?
This is not standard thing. This is response in situation where company has generated massively more profit than any time previously and likely any time in future after market stabilises. Expectation that at least part is shared with employees should not be unreasonable.
I remember when I had these kind of takes. I blindly believed in "equal treatment, including billionaires". Now I get frustrated reading them, but I have empathy from understanding where they come from (for now, at least).
> cost centres
What?
In what way are manufacturing workers a cost centre?
They aren’t call centre workers.
Almost 6x the base, not bad.
EDIT: just realized I'm not sure what a "chip worker" in this article is. Someone doing digital design? Someone working in the fab? Hmm
How about TSMC or ASML?
Are you being sarcastic?
It's literally mentioned in the first sentence of the article, as well as the subheading.
