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April 10, 2019

The Black Box theory of labour

by Gustavo Sosa, CEO Sosa Ingenieria, Chief of Engineering RONTIL, Uruguay
 
Gustavo Sosa
Websites like Salary.com make a living helping people know how much their colleagues are charging. In the countries where such luxurious information isn’t available (e.g. Spain, Brazil) you always ask a friend how much he makes before attending an interview. Similarly, employers use historical data or union standards to establish beforehand how much to offer.

This attitude leads to a double bargaining between employers and employees. There is a joke where a friend asks another how much is he making, and the other replies, “pretty good, considering what I actually do”. But this person still has a job, this means his employers thinks he is paying “with leftovers and a bed”.
 


As an example, at the company where I currently work, we ran into legal problems with a client. The legal fees were killing us, so I decided to get a lawyer on the payroll, instead of paying by the hour. The difference was dramatic. The monthly salary was the same as the fee for 10 hours. And that doesn’t even take into account the value I got in having a full-time legal adviser.

Let’s say you have a technician who makes USD 20,000 a year. One day he finds a problem with the electrical system that was causing loss of earnings, because of stoppages and break downs. The yearly loss of earnings was about USD 80,000.

Well, that means that one worker could very well work just one day every four years and you still get even. Now imagine he is actually clever, and not just lucky. If he gets to work every day, he will help you make a small fortune. The higher the skills of this person, the more dramatic the effect. What about a Marketing VP who is able to look at the proposal for a new product and predict it won’t work? How much would have Warner Bros paid to an executive able to stop all the mistakes they did with the movie Justice League? How much would you pay Warren Buffett or Charles Koch to come work with you for one day every five years?


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


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