My first summer job as a teenager in high school paid 50 cents an hour. The federal minimum wage at that time was 75 cents an hour. My job involved helping to convert an old house into efficiency apartments, and I learned many skills – carpentry, plumbing, electrical, painting, laying tile, cement, and lots of cleaning. Some of my high school buddies worked for the highway department at 75 cents an hour painting highway guardrails. My pay was fine with me, because I was learning a lot of skills that have proved very useful as an adult, and besides, I didn’t want to work painting in the blazing sun. Was …

Read more

Most of us get continuing appeals to “give back” to charity or to the community with the implication that it’s our moral obligation to do so, and if we don’t, somehow we are unsupportive of humanity in general, and our neighbors in particular and should feel guilty about abstaining. The concept “give back” means that I am returning something that does not belong to me – that what I have received I did not earn and that I am merely returning it to its rightful owner. I earned what I have On a personal note, my partner and I used to have our own business. We prided ourselves on providing …

Read more

To even imagine that we should abolish public education is very controversial and almost unthinkable, as compulsory public education in America has been around in one form or another since the 1600s and has acquired an almost religious and untouchable aura. But we need to consider the following vignettes as a context for a discussion of public schools. What is happening here? What is going wrong with public education? What is Public Education? By “public” education we mean “government” education for those adjectives are one and the same. And to carry these terms to their logical conclusion, we could use the word “political” because requiring school attendance, deciding what is …

Read more

From a Facebook reply to me about a living wage … “You really hate waitresses, fast food workers, janitors, and minimum wage workers if you don’t want them to be able to pay their rent and eat. The people serving you also need sufficient food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and whatever else you have. They should have vacations, paid days off, sufficient and affordable healthcare. … Jobs are supposed to cover living expenses and give the worker the ability to save and live. An employer is supposed to care about their employees.” In summary, an employer is supposed to pay a living wage, whatever that is. I replied, “Some jobs are …

Read more

Many factors go into how to best determine employee pay for doing a particular job. Some of these are system factors that result in identifying a range of pay of how much a job is worth to that company, and some are individual factors that result in the actual pay of a person within that range. The material in this blog is extracted from Davis, John H., Statistics for Compensation: A Practical Guide to Compensation Analysis. These factors all influence an organization’s ability to attract, retain, motivate, and align the kinds and numbers of employees needed to achieve the organization’s goals. These are shown here. System factors affecting employee pay …

Read more

How to fight racism was a topic we were discussing. But then all at once, she insisted, “If you don’t actively fight racism, you are a racist.” “WHAT!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean by racism? And who is to decide what ‘actively fight’ means? Are you trying to instill a guilt trip on me?” I think her idea came from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to be an Antiracist, which book is full of circular definitions, which are logical fallacies. How would you respond to her statement? What is racism? It is important when discussing racism to be explicit about what you mean by the term. Words are important. …

Read more