General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What I like to tell my RW friends regarding their "working HARDER to EARN a better wage" chestnut - [View all]bearssoapbox
(1,408 posts)20 years ago I worked for a guy that made pizza crusts. There were 3 or 4 other employees and we made decent money. Wages+piece work. One day the owner decides that we were going to go to all piece work. He raised what we were paid per piece and told us that it was like we were "investing" in the company. The harder we worked the more money that both we(the chumps..er..employees) and the company would make and at a future date when the company made more money we would get more per piece.
I'm a natural cynic. The owner was a Raygun crapublican. I knew a couple of the costumers that bought the crusts so I asked them what they were now paying for a crust. The crapublican had raised the price of their crust by 30%.
We had gotten a 40% per crust increase but since he wasn't paying us by the hour he was making 50% more per crust than before the new pay scale. Plus, we could never reach our old pay rate because of time and equipment constraints. Not enough time in a shift(couldn't work over 9 hours because of the next shift) and the equipment(the ovens) didn't bake and move fast enough.
When we asked the owner what could be done he said that when he could afford it he would get better equipment and until then we were just going to have to live with it.
We all quit that day. He struggled for a couple of years doing a lot of the work by himself. He lost about half of his costumers when they found out what he did. I went on to something else but 2 guys went to work for one of his competitors. That's also where his business went.
Last I heard he was managing a Pizza Hut.
It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.