So, I just need to rant for a minute about what’s just happened. It’s made me feel fairly disposable as a worker. I work in I.T. support. I help people who can’t operate technology with highly complicated issues. I am highly skilled, well trained and I have a diverse set of understanding for technical issues.
Last year I took a new job. The old job was an MSP, or Managed Service Provider; if you don’t know what that is; an MSP is the IT department for companies too small to have an IT department. That’s the summary. The new company is both an MSP and an ISP as well as just about everything else you can imagine for IT… hosting webpages, and all the associated nonsense, phones/VoIP, colocation (Datacenter stuff)… everything. Basically, when someone was signed onboard with this employer, we did it all.
Starting out, everything seemed fairly normal, a bit more involved, since we do more than the last company, but nothing too crazy. The part that irked me, is that as MSP, we own a client, we do everything for them, including, but not limited to all their computer/server/network work (which I expected), but also their phones, internet service, hosting, email, etc. everything… which is a bit more than I expected, but I was managing okay.
In March/April, things changed in my personal life, where I was having to drive my SO to work (she doesn’t have her license, and we don’t live in a place where she can reliably get a taxi/bus/other transportation), the problem is that her work is 3-11, where I work 9-5, in another city. So I tried to work with my workplace but they wouldn’t let go of working from the office, so I ended up on an insane schedule of commuting to the office (over an hour drive each way), then leaving the office at 1PM, to be home for 2PM, to get her to work for 3PM, then GOING BACK TO WORK. I wasn’t able to keep up with my workload… in addition, I’m driving her home at 11, getting home at midnight, then getting up at 5-6AM to get a shower and do it all over again. I couldn’t sustain that for any reasonable length of time, and I burned out. My doctor issued a notice to my workplace that I am unable to continue working for the time being, they accepted it and I went on disability as of early may, until now.
Currently, I feel much better, compared to when I was burning out in April, and I feel a lot better about going back. The SO has also been working on getting her license and her own car, so within a few months I won’t have to even think about whether she can get to work or not, since she will have a car and her license to drive herself there. A week or two ago, I contacted my workplace to let them know I was ready to return. We had a few emails back and forth to resolve the matter of the doctors recommendation and disability diagnosis. Once all that was completed, I thought I was ready to go. Big nope.
I got word yesterday that instead of bringing me back, they’re laying me off.
So not only did they have the callous attitude to force me to drive to the office and back several times a day to try to maintain a poor life scenario (I asked to WFH, which they absolutely could do, since they did it over COVID without significant issues)… but when I burned out as a result of their ridiculous demands, and took some time off, instead of welcoming me back and holding my position, they filled in the gap while I was out on disability, and laid me off when I was able to return.
I feel so abandoned. I won’t complain about “where’s the loyalty” because there’s never been a time in my career where “loyalty” has ever been something I’ve felt that my workplace ever gave me; and all evidence I’ve seen says that companies have zero loyalty to anyone. Maybe one day in the past that was true, but it’s definitely not been true for the entirety of my working career; but here I am, a highly skilled individual, with specific skills that will absolutely help the company succeed, that they know I have, that they’re just going to throw away… and for what?
The excuse they gave me was financial downsizing, but it’s a company of about 12-18 people, so it’s not like my job was part of a larger dismissal of people, they’ve lost, laid off, or otherwise shed employees at a very slow rate. Some of my (now former) coworkers have said that several people who have voluntarily left their positions, have been replaced during my time away; but me? no. Apparently my knowledge isn’t worth enough to them.
I’m currently on the hunt for a new employer. IMO, these guys are fools to throw away everything I know. The only challenge I face right now is finding someone who will see my value. IT support jobs are usually underpaid in my local area, and too many companies are going return to office and I’m not easily able to find remote (WFH) type employment. The jobs are there, but it’s hard to find one that’s worth my time. The core issue IMO, with the low pay, is that it’s a non-union position, but if I can find a union job, I’m all in.
Wish me luck!
I am sorry for your experiences, and am hopeful you will bounce back.
Unfortunately, under our current systems, many are having similar experiences, or even worse. Many, in particular, with chronic or permanent disability, face near total disenfranchisement from the workplace, even among those who might support themselves through working at certain kinds of jobs along with appropriate accommodations and subsidies.
None of us is ever paid what we are worth, because businesses exist to extract value from the labor of workers, that is, to claim a profit from workers selling their labor, and doing so requires paying them less than the value generated by the labor they provide to a business.
Unions certainly will help improve work and life experience for the vast majority of the population, by allowing us to negotiate collectively for conditions, terms, and wages that are more favorable than simply the least favorable ones absolutely necessary for an employer to retain some worker willing to perform particular functions.
If we recognize and pursue our shared interests, then we can end the race to bottom that has been imposed on us as workers.
This is something I’ve recognised for a long time. I will never get what I am worth 100% because I’m just a worker. Value from my work will be extracted because the sales staff needs to be paid, and the accountants need to be paid, and management, and everyone I rely on as a worker to both do my job and get paid. There will always be something additional removed for profit above and beyond the cost of all of those other labor needs that make my job possible, since I’m not the only person contributing to the earnings of the company, and the only way to make what I’m worth is to get out on my own, and become a contractor. I don’t want to do that. I have a certificate from a local college for business; I have seen the processes and whatnot that make up the accounting, marketing, sales and other processes that contribute to the success of a transaction. I am not interested and actively dislike having to do any of those tasks.
For me, this is understood, and I’ve accepted that, since I don’t want to do all the jobs. I’m willing to accept a certain amount of loss for my labor so I don’t have to think about or engage in any of those other activities. The work I do is, to my estimation, worth at least $150k/yr, extrapolated from the amount my employers charge for my time, multiplied by the number of hours they expect me to achieve in billable time per day, times five days a week, times 52 weeks per year. I struggle to extract half that in wage. If I could get half of that in wages, I’d be pretty happy, but I can’t. Therein lies the problem. I don’t and never have expected my full value, but I don’t think 50% is too much. Honestly, it should be higher, but bluntly, companies are not in the right position to entertain that, either psychologically, or financially due to mismanagement.
The value I’m seeking to be recognised for is that I’m worth paying a higher percentage of the earnings I’m capable of bringing in. I am useful beyond my role in almost every aspect because I’ve taken the time and gotten the relevant education to actually understand the factors that go into these things. I have a deeper understanding of business practices than the average, and I can all but sell a product or service to a client that they currently do not have; aka, priming a sale for the company. I have been directly responsible for several sales at multiple clients over my career. Not nearly at the same rate as our dedicated sales team, since that’s literally their only job, but I’ve given easy sells to so many of our sales staff that, while I’m on the clock billing time for something else, sold another product with all but the papers signed and money transferred. I make other workers jobs easier, which IMO, is worth more than the direct technical value provided. It’s a skill set that I don’t see in my coworkers that are exclusively focused on the technology. There are many other aspects I can enhance that is valuable, and I often step out of my immediate role to help others. That’s just how I am. I want to be helpful, and if something is in the best interest of the client, I will sell it. Even knowing this, and experiencing this first-hand at work, my employer still decided on a layoff.
I don’t feel like any of what I’ve said is unreasonable. 50% of the earnings I directly bill for is my salary, and I provide value beyond that which justifies the amount spent.
I’m neurodivergent, with an executive function disorder, and that classifies me as disabled, yes. I have done everything in my power to meet everyone on their terms, so nobody needs to make accomodations for me. It’s still hard to fit in for me, but I take on the challenge of that as part of the experience of employment; I do everything in my power to make sure that my differences don’t affect the ability for others to operate as they normally would.
yet, I still feel rejected by the systems I’ve worked so hard to fit into. I’m tossed out like trash whenever they feel like I’m not doing enough, when I’m fighting very hard to survive in their world, not made for people like me. All I’ve ever wanted was to be helpful. Let me be helpful, and pay me for the significant efforts I take to be helpful.
Profit is not wages paid to workers other than yourself, even workers performing other job functions. Other workers receive wages because they provide labor, just as you receive wages because you provide labor. Profit is value generated by your labor, and by the labor of other workers, that is appropriated by the owners of a business, claimed for themselves, despite their not having contributed any labor to the productive processes of generating the wealth.
All sophisticated productive systems are based on division of labor, and even most primitive ones entail at least some. Division of labor is as old as the hills, but the unbounded accumulation of private wealth by the labor of workers is not universal and indeed relatively recent.
You should not support the profit motive of your employer simply because you have an occupational specialization. One is not bound to the other.
Along a similar theme as above, you are conflating organization of labor in general, with particularly labor being organized by a private business under the profit motive.
Employers always pay workers, with the rarest exceptions, the absolute minimum required to retain their labor.
Otherwise, they would be eliminated by businesses that were more competitive.
I understand, and I won’t discount this. However, there are costs to my labor that are separate from me. For example: If the business is charging $100/hr for my services, I don’t expect to be paid $100/hr for work. There’s other costs associated with my time, including frictional time between tasks, which may include time between tasks while in transit or simply task switching, or breaks, which the customer is not directly paying for but must be paid to me for my time. Legally here, over the course of an 8+ hour day, I am entitled to 60 minutes worth of breaks, 2x paid 15 minute, plus one lunch break (which may or may not be paid); I also have job tasks that are not related directly to producing profit, so on a good day, when I am exclusively working on a single unified task all day, I can “bill for” at most ~ 7 hours of work (some exceptions exist, but I won’t go too far into detail on this), but on an average day, I’m usually generating 5-6 hrs of “billable” work per day.
I cannot reasonably expect $500 to $600 in earnings per day due to overhead and costs. The associated costs of my work, from floorspace to do my job, electricity for the equipment I need to use, the equipment costs themselves (desks, chairs, computer, etc), as well as the costs for other workers time to support my work, in sales, marketing, accounting, etc. all needs to be covered from that ~ $500/day I’m producing for the company. So me earning ~ $250/day ( $31.25/hr, aka, 65k/yr ), or about 50% of the revenue I generate at $100/hr at 5 hours “billed” per day, needs to include consideration for the efforts of management, accounting/finance, sales/marketing, collection and all the non-producing contributors to my workspace, including but not limited to maintenance/janitorial. What’s left is profit, which likely isn’t very much per hour, but spread across all workers is a non-trivial amount.
At least, that’s how it should work. profit, as a function of revenue, should not exceed more than ~20% is the above mentioned scenario. Of course, the realities of the situation are far more nuanced and complex than that, since most MSPs charge monthly for service, not by the hour, so worker pay for the related team needs to balance against all representative clients of the team, with enough overhead to pay for and properly compensate the efforts of sales, marketing, finance, accounting, management, etc. before profit can be extracted from the remainder. Since every MSP client has a different contract and a different amount paid per month, usually based on that organizations headcount. Profit numbers are not strictly tied to the amount I’m not paid relative to the revenue I generate per hour/day/month for the company.
The core of my issue with all this is that companies do not understand all the contributing costs associated to labor, and how the revenue that individuals generate is distributed for the business, and what each employee costs/earns over the course of a day/week/month; and definitely don’t understand how much profit they earn per employee hour. I know this because this is a factor in burn rate, and I have asked business managers about burn rate and I’m usually met with looks of confusion or mystery in the matter. Burn rate is simply all those associated costs (salary/compensation, and all associated rent/electrical, and equipment costs) for an employee separate from the revenue they generate. Burn rate is used as an indicator of costs that should be accepted for downtime, and informs how much downtime should be tolerated by the business; that financial number, when known, can quickly inform how much to spend on redundancy, which is something that information technology advisors strive for. When a system is fully redundant, or multiple levels of redundant with no single-point-of-failure (SPOF), then the operation of the production equipment can be reasonably guaranteed 24/7, resulting in no downtime, less redundant systems will require downtime to perform maintenance, upgrades and unexpected faults. So if the burn rate, multiplied by the estimated average downtime of the system, is less than the cost of making the system fully redundant, the system shouldn’t be redundant; simply, it is cheaper. However, if the burn rate is significantly more than the cost of making the system redundant, given the estimated average duration of downtime, then the system should be made to be more redundant. This is something I very strongly understand. Sometimes it is simply not financially beneficial to add redundancy to a system (whether server/network/workstation or otherwise). Things that only affect one, or a small group of employees, generally do not justify being redundant; which is why your PC at work generally only has one ethernet connection to a single switch which is probably shared with a subset of workers in the workplace (as an example). You, and the people on that same switch (SPOF for that group of workers), don’t represent enough of a burn rate to justify making those systems redundant. This is a fact that is universally true for most workers. The costs associated with employing you while you are incapable of producing profit due to a major network fault that keeps you from working, are not enough to justify the added cost of redundant network connections from your workstation to redundant network connectivity on the network side. If the switch you’re connected to fails, a replacement can usually be prepped and replaced from a cold spare in a matter of hours, so for those hours while you cannot work, you’re burning money while a technician corrects the problem.
This cost is directly extracted from what would otherwise be profit. This is where profit is converted to overhead in real-time.
Profit, or additional overhead that will often not be utilized, needs to exist, for these edge cases where things have an unrecoverable fault and employees are incapable of doing their job. Profit itself isn’t horrible to have, excessive profit is definitely a problem though. There should always be more overhead/profit for the business to function correctly, and not collapse at the first significant failure. If the profit is excessive, then that’s literally taking money out of the pockets of workers to pay the upper-class.
My point is there is a legitimate purpose to having additional overhead above and beyond the direct and indirect costs of labor. That additional overhead may, or may not be profit at the end of the day, depending on what’s happened.
I understand all this and I accept it as a worker, what I would not and will never accept is when companies are making so much profit on my labor, that goes above and beyond any burn rate or coverage of excessive costs of incidentals, that they can still extract profit from a particularly poor month for downtime. If everything is operating well, then yes, that excess revenue can definitely become profit. Looking at the big picture, this is a trade-off. Profit should be sacrificed for the continued survival of the business during times where performance is poor, or downtime affects the ability to generate revenue.
I think my business diploma is showing. I will only add this: I received just enough education in business to know I don’t want to be a part of the business/management systems. Trying to figure all this out and make intelligent decisions on these types of things, seems like a horrible thing to have to do. I suspect this is why I get such dumbfounded looks when I ask about burn rate, because people want to spend so little time thinking about this stuff that they simply don’t. While I can’t really blame them for that, simply put, it’s their job. They decided to be in that role, and that’s a part of it.
This is all separate from the fact that companies/corporations are built with the express purpose of generating profit; which is an entirely different discussion usually fraught with some very unpleasant and often unethical topics. This fact has been more or less codified. There have been court cases of shareholders vs companies where the shareholders have sued because business leaders wanted the majority of profits to be repaid to employees in the form of bonuses and raises. IMO, this has fostered a culture of bad faith practices where profit is prioritized above workers on a consistent basis.
I’m not going to apologize or explain away the greed and profiteering of companies; I understand that’s what they exist for. Whether I agree with that or not, it’s the reality of the situation. Profit is the inevitable outcome of unused overhead which should always exist. Excessive profit, above and beyond safeguarding the business from failure during “slow” times or where revenue is difficult or impossible to generate, is simply greed. Unfortunately, in a capitalist world, greed seems to be the name of the game. It seems to be the foundation of all modern business, and also the thing that both makes it terrible trying to work within the system, or for it. Unless you’re at the top (C-level, shareholder, board of directors, etc), you’re on the losing end of business greed.
I am not quite understanding why you are inspecting operating costs so deeply, since the subject is not strongly relevant to whether an enterprise has private owners who claim profit.
Every enterprise creates products that are sold for some value. Production requires a variety of non-labor inputs. The enterprise must also pay operating expenses.
The sale value of products minus the sum of inputs and expenses is the value of the collective labor for all the workers in the enterprise.
The value is distributed within the enterprise. In the case of a privately owned business, distribution of value, like all operations, is controlled by owners, who pay workers the minimum amount required for their labor to be provided, and claim the rest of the value as profit.
For an enterprise that is cooperative, no owners claim profit, and workers may choose how to distribute value among themselves, realizing the full value of their labor.
In either case, some value may be invested in expansion of the enterprise.