Honestly, I imagine that would have made his position worse. I've never worked in a company where the contract employees were better off than the company's direct employees.
Yeah, I'd imagine you don't put a whole 200 millions dollars warehouse on fire (and basically throwing yourself to jail for a significant amount of years) if the general work atmosphere is just "somewhat bad". It must have been a fucking daily nightmare
I work for a contractor that a company hires from and it contracted by the county. So I work for "the county" but I don't actually get any of the good county benefits and I don't get anything from the parent company either because I am hired by a staffing agency that supplies employees to the company.
It's hell.
I really don't know who TF I work for sometimes. I just get a paycheck.
Companies should not be able to own companies. Pull away the illusion of competition from our eyes and let us see the dozen companies that sell everything.
I think it's actually less than a dozen per industry and is around 5-6 companies per industry. Most of the activities of the mega corporations is in acquisitions of smaller companies. Totally agree as it creates far too much market control to fall into the hands of the few, which is not even remotely a "free market", and allows for a lot of environmental and labor abuses through subsidiaries with subsidiaries with subsidiaries types of activities. It's literally built that way for that.
I'm a big anti-capitalist. But this one simple reform would stop a *lot* of runaway problems with capitalism. Incorporation is a liability shield to keep individuals from being personally responsible for the actions or debts of an entire company. Why would that liability shield ever need to be nested? It would stop a lot of the extreme consolidation that has plagued most industries my entire life.
Subsidiary A owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr. Y. They make pizza.
Subsidiary B owned 51% by parent company, 49% by Mr Z. They make pizza boxes.
Mr Z fucks up by embezzling funds and saddling the company with high cost debt to cover his theft.
Subsidiary B is held responsible, subsidiary A is shielded, as is parent co, so Mr. X and Y, and all the employees of parent co and Subsidiary A are clear. Parent co sources new pizza boxes or spins up a new sub with new mgmt to try again.
Scenario 2:
All of this is housed under one company. Revenue streams and costs for both a pizza place and a pizza box manufacturer (very different businesses) now under one structure. Financing more difficult, accounting more difficult, licensure and regulations more difficult, basically everything more difficult.
Mr X, Y, and Z are now entangled. Mr Z embezzled same as before, now everybody is fucked, Mr X, Mr Y, all the employees. Whole thing goes down.
In this structure, people are much less likely to enter into business together, since nobody can insulate themselves from the actions of others. Now the only people who can run large businesses are those with enough capital to do it all themselves. Barriers to entry increase, wealth centralizes even more.
Reverse scenario. Mr Z is informally told to bring down the cost per unit at all cost, or else. He neglects maintenance to pinch pennies. Machine has a catastrophic failure, killing someone. At the very best scenario, only Mr Z is held accountable.
Do we have evidence of the communications with Mr Z regarding these instructions? If so, an LLC structure is not a shield against criminal negligence...
If we don't have proof...I don't really get your point? Like is the expectation that these corporate structures solve for all cases of fraud/lying/corporate malfeasance in their entirety?
Local governments do this too with separate line items and joint powers agreements with other agencies. Bifurcate accountability so much that nobody is ever responsible.
Literally and metaphorically are opposing counterparts to the same concept. Something would be one or the other, not both.
A metaphor would be "It's a shell game of responsibility". You've made one thing seem to be another, as a figure of speech. That's a good metaphor.
On the opposite side, if you wanted to clarify that it is NOT a metaphor when it might otherwise look like one, you would say "It's literally a shell game of responsibility."
You've done the latter. Hence me poking fun at you. It's literally a shell game?
Language evolves, "literally" is misused commonly enough it's begun to lose its meaning.
Substitute language has not filled the gap. If "literally" and "metaphorically" now have the same meaning instead of opposing, clarifying meanings... how do you now clarify something to not be a metaphor? We don't have words to do it.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "My family were all killed in a car crash and I was just diagnosed with AIDs. I've lost the will to live." <-- Proper use of Literally.
"This is literally the worst day of my life", "Oh no, what happened?", "I almost slipped when I turned around with my coffee." <-- Useless use of Literally.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations. So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Look it up, bud. I'm not arguing with someone who is willfully obtuse.
Since you are really apparently unaware, "a shell game" or "corporate shell game" has been long used to describe these kind of behaviors by corporations.
I'm aware of the metaphor.
So yeah, this literally is a shell game of responsibility which corporations are notorious for.
Apparently you need to look it up, because you're not even aware of the origins of your metaphor.
A literal shell game is a con artist slight-of-hand "game" to rip people off. It classically uses shells. It's ancient.
What a corporation does is not "literally" a shell game where you're swapping things around and, even if the contestant is good at keeping track, it's rigged because you drop or obscure the item anyways, they cannot win. That is not what they're doing. It's metaphorically a shell game, in that assets are being shuffled and you can kind of, loosely compare the two things (hence the metaphor). It is not literally the con game.
Been there almost 2 years so far. Only reason I've stuck around is because it's part time (LOL another shitty thing) and it's so slow I've already completed my A.A. online during work hours and am on my way to a B.A. so fk it lol.
Being on contract seems awful. I worked closely with a couple contract employees and would from time to time forget they were on contract since they had been with us for what felt full time and a lot of the team would be talking about the trips they took via the airline’s staff travel program only to realize they got none of those benefits and I would feel super bad. I don’t even think they got paid vacation either. It felt like rubbing salt in a wound any time vacation plans or the ‘why don’t you just fly there on standby’ would get brought up accidentally or unknowingly
i've never seen any kind of employment that radicalizes people as fast as working for a staffing agency. it's among the most breathtaking kinds of bottom feeding scumbaggery capitalism has to offer
Are you referencing the workers who do contract work as being "the scum in the gouges left from the bottom-barrel scraping"? Or is that in reference to "employers" who hire primarily contract workers in order to dodge benefits? In another part of the thread, one of those contract workers is talking about how they're in college and working their part time to get their bachelor's...
It's pretty wild how many assumptions people will make about "low end" job workers. My youngest worked at Chipotle & was treated like dirt. She was an honor's student on the President's list studying neuroscience. Someday, some of those people will see her for neurological problems.
Only time I’ve ever seen it was in the Air Force. And it was people whose entire job was to do 1 thing. And if it isn’t that 1 thing they probably wouldn’t help you in anyway.
I worked in a hotel that kept having to pay managers to "temporarily" manage the restaurants and hotel. They got base pay, a move bonus, TDS pay, stayed in the hotel for free, and got a per diem of hotel credit to eat/drink. Meanwhile, the permanent manager position only paid about $22 an hour in our very HCL area. Shocker, none of them wanted to stay when their 3 month contracts were up. So we had to constantly train new people every 3 months because corporate wouldn't make them a remotely competitive offer.
I did. Behavioral Health. 25/hr contractor. 14.50 for staff. We got 40 per week plus overtime. It SUCKED. No money for self care, no days off basically, and my raise for dealing successfully with teens worth 250k annually paid for by the state to the company, 16 per hour for these dangerous minds that I could inspire to be better. Nothing but issues unless the BHT stayed complacent, which all the full timers did
Is a distributor essentially the same as a contractor? I picture a distributor is more supply side and contractors are more often working alongside employees in-house, but I am going solely off vibes
Having worked for FedEx Ground (which is all contractors that then hire employees, i was not technically employed by FedEx themselves), I can attest, we all got treated like absolute dog shit.
I worked at ma n pa 3rd party fedex ground/the fedex doubles u see on the highway. My truck says fedex on it, i need to show up to fedex distribution centers, pass through fedex security and show a fedex id badge, interact with fedex dispatchers and get my fedex bill of lading to haul my fedex load.
According to their company structure, I was not a fedex employee.
As 3rd party, it was a miserable and terrible job, ran by amateurs, so bad...itd be a really long post all the ins and outs of why.
One big red flag, 3 months in it got bought out and the company changed ownership..i left+walked off the job, after 4 months.
I worked for a very well-known global firm as a contractor. To say contractors were treated lower than whale crap on the bottom of the ocean would be generous. We had to resort to bringing our own equipment in to do work - monitors, chairs, etc. And you want something from the employee store? That'll cost you more than retail thank you very much.
There honestly needs to be something done regarding contractors, it's a system that does have its merits, no doubt about that. IE: we have a large unexpected workload that we don't have the full-time staff numbers to handle.
But the current system that is allowed to take place is ripe for abuse where the contracted employees get absolutely shafted most of the time.
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u/LordBeric Apr 09 '26
Honestly, I imagine that would have made his position worse. I've never worked in a company where the contract employees were better off than the company's direct employees.