They’re only doing what other intelligently managed orgs are: defensive retention via compensation. With the labor force how it is, orgs that prey on precarious workers are in a game of musical chairs. Where do you want to be when the music ends?
The owner of IKEA is a dutch foundation. That's not the same as a charity. Still, IKEA's ownership structure is questionable and occasionally flares up as a matter of interest in the media.
Yeah, we've been finding the same, a lot of the middle tier stuff might look nice, but it's usually kind of crap, maybe because they just don't have the same scale. Feels like the fast fashion equivalent of furniture, a lot of times.
As an alternative, we've found antique shops that have amazing quality furniture for less than ikea's high end lines, if you're ok with the older styles.
To be honest they are pretty clear about it in their packaging.
If it says solid wood it's probably fine.
If it says particle board or fibre board or something other than solid wood it's an "assemble it once and never move it again" piece at best, and a "keep it for a few years" piece at worst.
It's not like it's a problem unique to ikea. Buying particle board or mdf furniture is always going to give you a much worse product (in terms of quality and longevity) compared to something made with solid wood, or at the very least with decent quality plywood.
I've found even the cheap stuff to be long-lasting if you disassemble it before moving it. Carrying or pushing shelves in a way that turns them into a parallelogram is what damages them.
The problem with that approach is the cheap stuff is particle board, and repeatedly screwing into particle board isn't a fantastic idea.
The best result (in terms of a strong joint) from particle board furniture would be to add glue when screwing (i.e. in the hole with the screw) but that completely removes the option of disassembling it.
Person I quoted said good high end. I think you've interpreted good as just "looks good", based on that first minute of the video, which only talks about style.
ÄPPLARYD is a cheaply made sofa that looks nice, with very poor quality fabric just like all IKEA sofas these days
I'm fine with people saying it looks nice but it's tiring when people say it's "high end" and "high quality" and well made
That's a poor heuristic that's repeated ad nauseum. The trouble is even expensive IKEA lines are mostly poor quality but they have such good marketing and styling that people refuse to believe it
But if you're happy with the most expensive IKEA products, good for you!
A breakdown of every ikea item and every specific detail for it?
Yes, i'm talking for experience and i don't really have any data to back this up, i just have a lot of bad experience with any other furniture builder and not a lot of problems with ikea
Bullshit. Amish folks are feeling the economic pain of high interest rates and have seen sales slow significantly. You can get crazy good deals on Amish made furniture right now, and both from in terms of the quality of materials and the quality of the assembly, it will be superior to anything at similar price point to Ikea.
Folks keep acting like it's still 2022 and that we are somehow in a ZIRP era. It's not, and most assets are not selling and are therefor to be had for cheap.
I agree, at the low end it's miles ahead of pricier, worse stuff from Wal-Mart or Conforama (in Europe), covered in wallpaper instead of synthetic veneer. At the higher end, it's very good value. In the middle, it's hard to even find competing products.
Ancient Carpathian oaks, illegally harvested and bought by Ikea, to be mixed with some farmed wood and sold as a controlled and sustainable wooden furniture.
It is a forest that humans have not touched. There are still a few in Europe, and some are strictly protected. However, in countries where corruption is at a high level, local politicians can be bought to issue concessions for the deforestation of those natural jewels.
My impression is that it's really difficult to do at scale because it isn't trivial to tell this tree from that tree, especially post harvest and paperwork is always spoofable.
That's why they source their wood in a country with shitty legislation and corrupt politicians. Because they are "working on it". Their wood supplier is operating on a loss, so no taxes paid to the state.
Russia for the last 8 years have been pushing its woodcutting industry pretty hard at placing a QR code at every single chopped tree and uploading it to the government's centralized DB, analogous to what they do with marking the produced ethanol. Of course, I imagine that at the customs/borders the situation is much more... "solvable", if you know the right people.
Sure. That's only the legal logging operations. Most of the operators also so illegal logging in parallel. They might ship wood pulp or other wood based products instead of logs.
Don't even start about ethanol, because they make samagon (moonshine) out of anything that ferments, including chicken poop. It's just not sold in stores, you "get" it on the black market.
> it isn't trivial to tell this tree from that tree
At such budgets, scale, and lobbying there is no such thing as "ooops, we didn't know where this come from, some lumberjack lied to us". You have folks in suits flying in private jets and arranging agreements (and cocaine and prostitutes as well of course).
That's bs, problem has been known for decades, forestry in Europe has been regulated for centuries. The only problem is price and availability, that's why ikea is fighting teeth and nails to keep "mixed"(FSC® Mix) category and be able to claim it's green while using illegally harvested wood.
Sweden has most forests in Europe, yet its IKEA sources wood from Poland and Romania while selling furniture from cardboard. What happens with all this wood?! Unfortunately in Poland and Romania plastic bag of cash and premium German car go very far while Sweden has more climate activists than trees.
Sweden has almost no forests anymore. We have tree plantations. That's a very different thing, and driving around Sweden is absolutely soul crushing for me who grew up running around in the forests during summers.
Although I agree that this is not a great sight for IKEA, they did not demand that this wood be cut and put on the market for them. They probably sourced it because it was cheap. But the wood had already been cut by that time.
Unfortunately, I would see this purely as Romania's unwillingness or inability to address the issues leading to the illegal cutting of wood. Possibly the usual suspects of corruption, a lack of will to act, and a lack of "resources".
This is a really hard problem in supply chains, it is not like buyers wouldn't change supplier if they knew about the abuses it is just that it is VERY expensive and time consuming to have proper traceability of everything in your supply chain.
At the end of the day it is one very busy person putting purchase orders to some other very busy people. All of them on tight KPIs for their bonuses until eventually it gets to the production site and oops, child labor.
To be honest this problem needs to be fixed top-down through international standards and institutions to ensure proper traceability. Leaving to each company to do it on their own and to country regulations is just stupid and counterproductive.
Subsidizing childcare is also "more money", but only for some workers. If the others don't notice or don't care that they're getting paid less for the same work that's great for the company.
I am in favor of flexible work arrangements, and I have no idea if those have costs to the company, or how much more you'd need to pay the workers to accept the less flexible arrangements.
IANAL, but I'll bet the answer is "yes-ish, in most-ish circumstances and jurisdictions, if the company is willing to pay enough lawyers & taxes & stuff.
(If $Company is not big global retailer like IKEA, then things would probably be far simpler.)
In the US, and presumably elsewhere, no way. My wife tried to negotiate a higher salary in exchange for forgoing health insurance a few times, to no avail.
It won't save as much as you might expect, though, because the insurance provider also knows that the people opting out of the scheme would have (on average) cost the provider less to provide healthcare for.
I’m pretty sure it isn’t up to the company, they have to provide health insurance if certain criteria are met, it doesn’t matter if your partner already has health insurance.
It's better for the company - they can pay less and the employee gets the same equivalent amount in their pocket.
E.g. if the company were going to pay $2k extra but it would be taxed $1k, they would have to pay $3k to get the equivalent "happiness" boost. The employee gets $2k / year either way.
In the USA, you can get up to $5k or so without tax (it’s your money, but you can spend from a tax free account) to fund child care, which works out to almost half for one kid in a HCOL.
Look, I'm a DINK, don't have kids, never plan to have kids, don't even like kids. But child care is important to both the parents and society. Not subsidizing child care often means one parent has to leave the workforce, and that's almost always worse off for everyone than if they were able to afford child care and can contribute
That's exactly why child care workers who look after packs of 15 to 20 kids at a time should be highly valued and paid a decent wage.
It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, hunting, clearing fields etc. in small ways.
It's a better use of labour than splitting every pair of adults into one for this type of work, the other always does child care.
All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.
We should probably also redesign schools so that they need fewer teachers. For example, above certain age it is a waste of time if the teacher has to explain the same concepts over and over again to each class -- kids could instead watch a video, and then discuss it with the teacher.
Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.
People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.
If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.
The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.
The reason is not a secret:
teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.
This is such a regressive view — a household that can only function on 2 incomes is more stressful than one that can operate on 1. Not saying earning potential needs to be the same — but claiming 1 is worse than 2 doesn’t hold water and is a pathological case.
In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”
It's not that we as a society devalue childcare. We just don't live in an economy where it is safe for families to put all their eggs in one basket like that.
In post-WWII US, it was generally easy for fathers to find stable, lifelong careers with a low risk of layoffs and a low risk of an untimely death, which allowed families to thrive on single incomes. But that was an outlier, not the norm.
In most places and in most periods of history, mothers have had to work (sewing, gardening, spinning, knitting, brewing, laundering, midwifery, etc., etc.) because fathers have not had widespread access steady, well-paying, low-risk work. Unless she was independently wealthy, a mother who did not bring in income was playing a very risky game with her children's lives.
The biggest difference is that, today, most work must be done outside the home, which is very difficult for mothers. Childcare helps close the gender pay gap and is necessary for a fairer, less sexist society — at least until/unless our economy returns to primarily home-based work.
In the past extended family would usually live close by, so they could assist the mother inside the home. Today, both parents need to work outside the home, and family is usually too far away to assist.
That is very true. And even in cases where it was not true, families tended to have more children, so older siblings could help look after younger siblings while the family worked.
A household with 1 income is almost impossible for most households, they have to compete in a housing market with other families that do have 2 incomes. This automatically raises real estate prices for everyone.
It is better for everyone, and it does not devalue child-rearing at all.
It is better for the family:
- it has more resources
- it has more income diversification
It is better for the father:
- he doesn't have to carry the weight of income-gathering alone
It is better for the mother:
- she doesn't have to carry the weight of child-rearing alone
- if things go sour, she can maintain herself and/or the family financially
- sha has more choices in life
It is better for the child:
- they get a wider variety of experiences
- they socialize with other kids earlier, which helps in early school-life
- they learn to socialize with more adults too
- there are professionals who have seen many children, who will notice problems before the parents will
It is better for the childcare professional:
- they have another job choice, helping them pick a job they enjoy
It is good for society:
- father, mother and childcare professional can do something that matches their talents, instead of doing something suboptimal for them, thus delivering more value to society
It doesn't devalue child-rearing, it values it more, by having a professional help do it.
I'm always befuddled by that argument. I'm not devaluing plumbing work by hiring a plumber, nor am I devaluing medical work by hiring a doctor. Why would I be devaluing child-rearing by hiring a professional to help?
Half those arguments could be made for child labor. After all, if the child works too then the family has more resources, the father and mother don't have to carry all the weight, the child gets a wider variety of experiences, the father and mother can do something that matches their talents while the child picks up the slack. Right?
Who actually cares more about a child's well-being, an employee paid by the hour or their own parents?
I would not say that the child gets a wider variety of experiences in child labor compared to child care. Child care is explicitly designed to have a variety of activities for children. Child labor is the low skill kind with lots of repetitive actions. Child care also takes the child's needs into account, like having nap times and eating times designed around children, instead of around a production process.
As for caring about the child's well-being? The parents, which is why they should hire the best people they can afford to do various parts of taking care off them. Hire the best doctor for their medical care, hire the best dentists for their dental care, hire the best teachers for their education, hire the best child-care professionals for daycare.
For all these "it is better" points, it still doesn't even begin to outweigh the "you get to spend time with your children" point. This is the most important part of child rearing and once they've moved on you'll be thankful you spent your time with them instead of... whatever all that income/societal optimization stuff is. You get to raise your children once.
If one parent is working, the other home with the kids, chances are that the one working can't take as much time off or has a harder time setting a healthy work-life balance (increasing your pay requires working harder).
Using myself as an example: the only reason I can pick up my kid early from the kindergarten and spend quality time with him is because I can afford to not work 9-5 every day due to my wife also working.
I guess you missed the part where I said that it is better for the child. Reducing my argument to "income/societal optimization stuff" is arguing in bad faith.
As most things it is a balancing act. Children also need to socialize and learn to operate in a social setting independently from their parents. Day cares have an important role in this aspect in our nuclear family based societies. Confining children to be paired to their parents all the time is also not going to be good for their development.
> Kids can get plenty of social interactions and variety with a stay at home parent.
The keyword there is "can". They can, it's just less likely. Especially when a parent takes the "stay at home" part too literal.
> To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.
Well, my experience with my kids was that their daycare was beneficial for them. They did not always want to go, but they definitely enjoyed all their days there. And especially for the first one, they had a lot of experiences that my wife and I would never have even considered as an option.
Comparing them to their classmates when school started, they were way ahead in lots of things. Absolutely in language development, socialization and being able to focus. They were also just way less, for lack of a better term, worried about everything. They knew that the world does not revolve around mommy and daddy, and that they'd be fine in new environments.
I'm not sure I'd use your kids alone as a representation of the experience of day care for the entire population.
And you're only counting the benefits of daycare, but ignoring the opportunity cost of less time with parents and the benefits that come from that.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to daycare, but where is the optimum? A few hours a day? Or the kids in daycare from 8am to 6pm, so they see their parents for maybe 2 hours a day before bed time?
You haven’t addressed the elephant in the room: housing.
Housing costs have risen to match the switch to double income households. Now instead of 1, it takes 2 incomes just to be able to afford housing. This makes the family more brittle since if either parent loses their job both will lose the house.
And with the rise in housing costs people move further afield. Commuting times go way up and people waste more time in the car or on the train. Everybody ends up more stressed than ever before and further behind economically (compared to those whose wealth grows without working).
We like it or not 1 person in the household taking care of the kids skew the relationship between 2 adults into dependentship as the one working outside perceived to be the one bringing the income (while both should) and the one taking care of the kids and household end up feeling dependent. Some may try to be objective and tell yourself the other one is contributing as much, that is not the way it works in our guts, we like it or not and leads to inequality.
This not optimal for many reasons:
- once the kids are going to school, regular "office hours" daycare is not needed and it skew the relationship even more by removing one task to one party. If that time is used for personal instead of household chores activities, that person not bringing the income is eventually seen as a partial freeloader by the one bringing the income.
- relationship can go sour quickly and if it doesn't work, the "dependent" one doesn't feel as free to end that relationship
- the person taking care of the kid's social life is usually not as rich
The elephant in the room being that in most case it ends up being the woman staying at home in an heterogender relationship in a society with an historically patriarcal model because of income levels which further increase the inequalities and dependentship.
I wouldn't call that strangers raising children. Obviously it depends on the amount of hours per day but it is not like you are sending them to boarding school and you only see them during the week-ends.
I also felt that putting my daughters to daycare helped them socially.
Considered "valued" vs considered "useful" is probably the analogy that should be used here.
Subsidizing childcare signals "we value you", while flat increae is signaling "you are useful to us", which can make a lot of impact on moral.
For some people there is no percieved differnce, some would think employer is trying to save on taxes, while for some (many?) there is a real percieved difference as being seen a member of family rather than a disposable hired hand.
For an analogy, one can be given money instead of being invited to a social gathering. One might feel offended, while other may feel happier.
> Is there really a perceived difference on the employees side?
Only if we could generalize all the employees! I am sure there are some who feel better to have holiday gifts, holiday parties, token recognition rewards etc. And there would be some who just evaluate everything on the basis of cold hard numbers. A good company should have policies to cater to as many employees as possible.
The message of subsidized childcare is not generically "we value you", but "we want you to have children while you work for us", which for most employees is more important than money. Compare to companies that avoid hiring women to avoid dealing with maternity leave.
I live in a country with generous maternity leave. I have a family, and we're grateful we could access it. But maternity leave is tricky for businesses.
My anecdote: I worked for a company whose long-time CEO retired. After an involved search, the company found a replacement. She was onboarded and started getting in a groove, then 6 months in it was announced she would be leaving for a year of maternity leave. So we had to find another CEO. 10 months later the original hire decided she would not be returning to the role (she's under no obligation to). No problem, except the replacement CEO assumed this was a temporary position, so she already had another job lined up after her term. Once again, we were searching for a new CEO...
All of a sudden you're working for a company that's had 5 CEOs in 3 years. That's a hard thing for a company to deal with. People will say, "that can happen anyway!". Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong, and yet an incredibly destabilizing environment resulted and the business suffered.
If the company doesn't have someone ready for a promotion to CEO, and needs an "involved" search for a replacement, and doesn't get work done without one, it is an understaffed, unprepared and unattractive company.
It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits. Give people the money and let them use it how they like. When I lived in California I LOVED the parking cash-out law, it meant a few thousand more a year because I rode a bike to work and didn't need a parking spot.
Although, one challenge with things like childcare is that if you applied this on a society-wide level you wind up with childless people having more money, thereby being better able to outbid parents for essentials like housing (this is why a housing scarcity is so insidious). Of course, whether that's a bad thing or not depends on perspective. I have two kids myself and despite living in Europe childcare was so expensive we dropped to one income.
Yup, I don't have kids myself, but like that my company offers benefits to parents. It keeps the company more diverse and more enjoyable for me as well in a sense.
> It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits.
In some cases it also makes economical sense. It can cost a company $1000 to give you a benefit, but to buy it yourself would cost $2000 (and the difference is even greater if the benefit isn't taxed at the same rate as cash would be).
Or the $200 the company spends on beers for me each year, many would perhaps say that they'd rather have the $200 to spend as they please. But in a sense, I get more value than $200 by getting to know my co-workers better and having a better time every day at work.
>Subsidizing childcare is also "more money", but only for some workers. If the others don't notice or don't care that they're getting paid less for the same work that's great for the company.
Such an american thing to say.
No, we don't mind having the company pay colleagues' children childcare on top of our (equal to theirs) salary. We'd hate to be in a society where such a petty mindset would be common, that would be living in some kind of social hell.
HN has an 80 character title max length. The full original title is 157 characters, nearly double that.
The alternatives generally suggested are to shorten the original title, omitting needless descriptives or words (e.g., counts, emotives, etc.) if possible, or barring that, to substitute alternative text, preferably from a subtitle or passage from the article (both to avoid editorialising):
Something's got to give, though, and the submitted title is accurate so far as it goes.
If HN's readers can't be trusted to read even the title of an article, well, the whole premise of a an article-based discussion site seems somewhat imperiled. This may well be the case, of course ...
It's not really grammatically correct I think, but otherwise seems like a good compromise: we only leave out childcare subsidies, which is another monetary compensation, and do mention flexible work schedules which is a non-monetary benefit and might be crucial to IKEA's strategy.
I'd give the submitter more credit than that. The title was cut for length, retaining the earlier (and presumably more significant) aspects of the original. As I noted in my other comment, wordsmithing title is a challenge, and most people probably aren't fully aware of HN's nuances and preferences in the practice.
And you did do a better job of it, as I also indicated a few minutes ago.
Of course, no negativity towards the submitter – I was just trying to make an argument for editing titles more carefully and trying to preserve original meaning. I think you did a better job in the sibling comment though!
Editing titles is permitted. That is, removing specifically indicated guideline violations, or shortening titles to fit length.
Editorialising is NOT the same thing. It is replacing (or adjusting) a title not for length or clarity, but to give a specific slant to a subject or inject the submitter's opinion.
More money = happy workers, unless of course, you don't give them money, but also other economic benefits that are equivalent to money. I'm not seeing the nuance.
You can manage things in your life when they occur instead of spending money to displace them or risk losing your job because of them.
In another way, if you present a worker with the option between two jobs with the same hourly rate, one having flexible working hours and the other not, which would expect to be more likely choice? You can then measure the value of this choice by changing the hourly rates between the two until you see changes in outcome and you would be able to estimate exactly how much "more money" it appears to be "worth."
If you don't have to pay for child care because you can just take off the time to pick up your kids from school, you are saving money your job otherwise forced you to spend.
Being forced to commute at peak time costs more - on a retail salary the difference between a peak and off-peak ticket can mean that the first hour or two of working is essentially pointless, as you're just paying back the cost of getting there in the first place.
Having to pay an extra surcharge to visit the dentist, because you can only go on a Saturday because you need to be at work other days. Flexible working would allow you to just take the Tuesday off no problem and go when it's cheaper.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples that apply to different lifestyles.
hours with your child aren't fungible. you can't pay the babysitter to go see the dance recital for you if you want to be the parent instead of the babysitter being the parent. all the money in the world isn't going to make up for missing the soccer game where your kid makes the winning goal.
Well to be pedantic, with all the money in the world you wouldn't be working for Ikea and the problem wouldn't exist so really that's a problem also solved by money...
Generally though higher paid employees tend to have more sway within a company structure and likely don't need to miss these important events, the win here is that something that was generally true for mid management up for most companies now extends down through all the ranks.
Can someone explain to me why corporate management seems unable to grasp the concept of properly paying and providing benefits for their employees to increase retention and have more successful hiring?
Like...is it actual incompetence? Or do they know it's the answer, but just don't want to do it?
I just can't grasp why a manager would refuse to provide proper pay and benefits and then get a Surprised Pikachu face when employees don't stick around.
Because the dollars are easy to measure, but the employee happiness and other fuzzier metrics aren't.
Just like we've known for a while that getting software developers their own offices increases productivity (but costs money/doesn't look trendy), or that getting rid of senior aeronautical engineers might lower quality over time (but saves money).
Yea it's pretty common in the Midwestern owners mindset. They see pain as a motivator and a grit builder. It's what commonly limits the midwest from building advanced tech these days IMO. They simply don't value building a 'better life' and enjoy the power structure as it is.
In the article they said it cost the company $5,000 per employee that left before the first year. So, before they took action they probably measured the money.
This isn't a lack of understanding. It's the principal-agent problem.
Non-founder executives are usually rewarded for short term results. They'll deliver on this even if it means laying off the entire Python language team in the midst of an AI boom. The market is bad at distinguishing these growth hacks for sustainable business, so they'll see 4% quarterly growth and pile on under the assumption that the hockey stick is going up.
By the time reality catches up management has already cashed in their chips.
Most of the market is designed to look for next fiscal quarter. Index fund dump more money in stock going up. Most managed funds make money when stock goes up. So they aim for stocks that go up.
In the end there is only limited number of entities seeking value. Or long term sustainable profitability. For everyone else it is line going up. Or blindly following others.
The same reason that nothing good ever gets done in governments. They only lead for short terms and so never make any long lasting policies that would actually create change over time.
Managers are balancing multiple competing issues. Yes staff happiness and retention is important, but there is going to be some staff turnover no matter what. At the same time budgets need to be managed - managers simply can't pay staff whatever they please, businesses need to be functional and profitable.
$5B (quarterly profit) is $2,400 per employee, and a 3.2% profit margin on $611B of annual revenue. Yes, an extra $9,600 annual pay for each employee would make a huge difference to many, but how low of a profit will shareholders tolerate below 3.2%? Maybe a better argument would be to find a larger bucket (much larger than $5B/quarter) where Walmart could perhaps reduce spending and redirect that to rank-and-file employees?
Also, what's more likely; One of the most efficient supply chain coordination companies in history with razor thin margins is leaving tons of cost savings on the table...or...random internet commenters like us don't actually know that much about Walmart's business nor the basic economics of labor markets?
It was $2k/person per quarter, when most of those employees are making around $30k per year (average of $31k per one source I found). That’s a 30% raise on near-poverty salaries - that’s definitely life changing!
You're basing that off of one of their highest profit quarters ever. 3X the average profit last year.
Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public market), investors will no longer invest in the company. Being a capital starved business with insanely high COGS is a recipe for collapse the minute you have a downturn.
And you'll probably say, "good! then the mom-and-pop stores will come back!" But the mom-and-pop stores, while aesthetically more pleasing to the elite, are in fact a far less efficient way to distribute food product so that would actually dramatically raise prices for consumers and decrease salaries & quality of life in many rural areas.
Turns out things are the way they are for a reason, and there's no grand conspiracy keeping people down.
How much do you think Suresh Kumar's life would change if he made 10 million next year instead of 14.5 million? Do you think he would have to stop buying the groceries he usually does, or that he would have to cancel a vacation? It wouldn't change his life at all. Same for the rest of the people in that list. Every one of them could take just a little less and increase pay for the people who actually do the majority of the work necessary for the company to function and be profitable and it would make no impact on the day to day lives of those executives. Absolutely nothing life changing.
How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead? When you have 2.1 million people working under you, you don’t need to skim much from each of their individual output to make a lot of money.
> How much do you think the lives of Walmart’s employees would change if Suresh Kumar would forego those 4.5 million and distribute it among them instead?
Him alone? Not much, but take a tiny bit from everyone making >1M and increase the pay of only those employees who don't already make a living wage and I'm guessing it would make a huge difference to the lives of those employees while still making no difference to the lives of the people who'd be taking a bit less.
As a bonus, putting that money into the hands of the people who would spend it, and most likely spend it on paying off debt and local goods/services, would help the economy and a lot of other people too.
When i worked in a small business,a factory, the boss, having a hard time getting people to work for hime(due to salary, benefits and work environment) explained it by "people just don't want to work".
Why? Extroverts usually blame the world, introverts look for the reason in themselvs. Many managers are extroverts.
I think there’s an unacknowledged end to that phrase, being that “people just don’t want to work for unfair wages”
But of course employers don’t want to acknowledge that they’re being unfair in compensation. To them, the compensation is just, and therefore people are simply unwilling to work.
I think there is a degree of tolerance that’s shifted. A job is not a job, anymore. Healthcare is insanely expensive. Housing is insanely expensive. Raising kids is insanely expensive. What used to be a “good honest job” has transformed into maximum-value-extracted job.
And everyone is desperate to get as big a piece as they can to ensure their own survival.
ELT are geniuses and deserve their $400K bonus package. Regular workers are replaceable cogs that can be found anywhere and have no skills. It is a perspective issue.
A parallel take to the sister comments: the concept that employees have information and can easily move away from the job is still newish and the prevailing management theories are from decades to centuries ago. Of course it's not only the employer, a significant number of people still see a job as something they're supposed to stay in despite the competitive market.
Employers still keep some assumption that the employee doesn't have a choice or won't execute on it, and there's enough employees working under that model that the assumption doesn't look so wrong at a distance.
Corporate management's job is to make the company more money. It's not obvious that worker happiness is actually necessary or even positively correlated with profit. Just look at Amazon.
It’s not any more complicated than short term rent seeking from investors
That’s literally it
Investors hire managers that will ensure that investors remain the top priority for the lifecycle of the firm
To such an extent that they made up fake rules like the idea that corporate officers have a fiduciary requirement to investors like a mutual fund manager does
This is because the goal of financializing a company is to make it a narrowly focused high margin hedge fund
You can’t do that if labor has bargaining power for control of the firm
It’s a fake rule because it applies a logical construct to a set of groups that it doesn’t apply to
A fiduciary in the finance sense is specifically intentionally hired by somebody to manage their money that is not the case for a CEO in a corporation
You don’t need more than one activist investor for all of your other investors to go along with it so the whole point is, as the lead that you bring in other investors with people who only care about market cap and that’s the whole point of managing a board
Beyond that you’re starting to get a whole crop of CEOs and that’s how they believe they believe they are the investor class and they’re gonna do everything in the act like the investor class including fucking over every employee they can
If you see a CEO with 90% of a company, you know for a fact, they’re trying to be Potemkin dictator
Because IKEA is not a publicly traded company. Don't know about the non profit part, but their management doesn't have to worry about growing the stock price every month at the least.
Paying CEOs in stock leads to CEOs caring about stock prices.
Also, as long as employees are grumbling, but still working, management doesn't care. (And since the extremely inefficient public programs of education and healthcare suck almost all the money out of welfare budgets the unemployment safety net is so weak no one really thinks of acting up.)
That would indeed be newsworthy if countless businesses were to be insisting that they are trying to make their employees wet by pouring sand on them, providing them with T-shirts with the word "WET" printed on it, asking them to wish their dryness away, or (the most enlightened ones) telling their employees to go outside on cloudy days — anything except, you know, simply pouring water on them.
The fact that this kind of scheme is still possible in our society gives me very little hope we’ll be able to solve any of our major, species threatening problems. But at least some of us will be filthy rich when the party stops.
I read the English version (which is rather short) and didn't quite understand: did the government try to buy up shares of IKEA and take it over in the interest of the state/workers?
Not in the interest of the workers, in the interest of the union (LO), they used the companies own money to do this, ie take the company own money and use that to buy the company’s shares by forcing them to sell by equity issuance.
The end goal was to take over companies and be owned by the unions.
This had disastrous consequences for Sweden, many companies left, one was IKEA. It created an hostile climate, instead of the previous decades of consensus between buiness and politics it created an antagonistic atmosphere.
The Social democrats lost their first election in 40 years.
The system was scrapped in the early nineties.
Kamprad got paranoid over the realization that politicians and bureaucrats could take over his life work and thus he moves to Switzerland and then created this non-profit to make sure it always remained in his family.
Kamprad was a fascist that started IKEA with financing from another fascist, and workers did all the work. What exactly do you imagine he contributed?
And why are you misrepresenting the article you linked? The idea to transfer some of the profits from large corporations into union managed funds came from the largest trade union confederation, not "radical Swedish politicians". Social democrats aren't radical, they're reformists, and the reactionary response to the proposal was arguably much more radical than trying to herd it through parliament.
I notice that you try to smear Kamprad in order to set the tone in order to defend union take over of companies by force, a typical tactic of the radicals. IKEA was Kamprad's own creation, not the creation of some union bureaucrat.
The Wikipedia article, both the Swedish and the English version, is fuzzy about the details how it worked, they took the company’s own money and use that to buy the company’s shares by forcing them to sell by equity issuance. Goal was to take over private companies and create socialism.
Social democrats were reformist but became radicals during the leadership of Olof Palme. This was not the only one radical thing that they did, another was the famous Pomperipossa taxation where some Swedes payed more than 100% in taxes. This led to other Swedes leaving the country, like the famous movie maker and director Ingmar Bergman.
As I wrote in another comment, this had disastrous consequences for Sweden, large companies left and we went from a consensus culture around business and politics (Saltsjöbadsandan) to a something much more antagonistic.
This radicalized the right wing in Sweden to become neoliberal for many decades to come, which led to other negative consequences.
Kamprad was adjacent to Nysvenska rörelsen, a lifelong friend of it's founder Per Engdahl, who also supplied the initial funding for IKEA.
It's insane to claim that Olof Palme caused a shift away from parliamentary reformism.
And no, we've never had anyone pay "more than 100% in taxes". That's a myth, based on Astrid Lindgrens pretty weird propaganda story about it.
The antagonism between labour and capital is inherent, and you either apply force to subdue the exploited party to this conflict, or you negotiate a deal or parliamentary decision. The latter was the core of Saltsjöbadsavtalet, the reformist position represented by the trade union confederation and the Social Democrats. The radical position would be to form militias and engage in militant revolutionary activities, something which the strong reformist movement managed to guard us from.
The right and the fascists didn't think that was enough, however.
It's absurd to blame the victims of fascism for the rise of fascism instead of those who gain from it.
As for the reasoning behind the löntagarfonder, it's quite obviously immoral for people to become rich and powerful by disenfranchising and exploiting other people. Which is how late modern corporations work, you have owners that take the value produced by other people for themselves. The right agrees that this is a correct description, which is why they made sure pensions and wages have been invested in stock markets and investment funds, so every worker is now forced to participate in the casino.
You could disagree with the particular construct of löntagarfonder, but you would need to be very religious to claim that nature or some god made it good and right that the rich get to keep generational wealth and persist in disenfranchisement and exploitation of other people. It's close to the idea of divine right of kings.
It doesn't matter what Kamprad's political opinions was in his youth, using socialism to take over private companies as the Social democrats did is still wrong regardless. Are you going to call the family Rausing (creator of Tetra Pak) for fascist as well because the didn't want union bureaucrats to take over their creation?
In what way would union bureaucrats be better stewards than business owners? We had union bureaucrat recently who ran the country, Stefan Löfven, probably the worst prime minister in history.
Social democrats during the leadership of Olof Palme were definitely radicals. During this era they expanded the government and increased taxation massively, which led to a high currency devaluation, i.e made the Swedes poorer, typical socialism. As Olof Palme's successor Göran Persson said it, something like ~ Social democrats always puts democracy before socialism, Olof Palme did the opposite ~. Fitting end that Palme got murdered like something you hear about from 3rd World Marxist kleptocracies.
More than 100% in taxes is 100% true, here you can read all about it
That is why the Government reacted and made a change to the tax legislation within two months, why would they if it wasn't over 100%? Even the most radical couldn't defend this absurdity.
Saltsjöbadsavtalet was not about parliamentary decision, it was about consensus between employers and employees, which led to the Golden years. A consensus that the Social democrats broke when they passed LAS in the seventies. (Also Social democrats is again abandoning the Swedish model by accepting that EU can pass minimal wage legislation)
Without Kamprad there would be no IKEA, thus nowhere for workers to work. That is the thing to understand, Kamprad was one in a billion, radicals exists in the thousands, useless of course because they don't create anything of value.
Why everything is tied up around the stock market is because of neoliberalism, a consequence of the right wing's radicalization as I described earlier, typical for neoliberalism and marxism is that they both believe in printing money out of thin air and then speculate with it. Who benefits? Not the poor of course, it is the receivers of that printed money, for neoliberalism that would be bankers and capitalists and in marxism that would be bureaucrats and politicians, as it was in the Soviet union.
Obviously you belong to the same political movement as he did. A few years before his death he said in an interview the his friend Per Engdahl was a great man. He was a fascist when he died.
It made a solid impression on IKEA as a company. It's why unions have never been able to form there, it's why the company 'culture' has a distinctly parasocial 'family'-character, it's why the trust invests heavily in keeping refugees in desert camps, it's why Kamprad was disgusted by the idea to pay taxes, it's why IKEA does its sourcing in countries like Russia, Romania and so on, and avoids ecological destruction in Sweden.
Your link confirms what I wrote earlier. Maybe you know someone who could help you translate it?
You're using radical in some highly personal sense, in common parlance it means you're trying to cause social and political change through means like civil disobedience, direct action, mutual aid, militant revolution, rather than parliamentary deliberation and compromise.
Palme was likely murdered by the fascist Gladio/Stay Behind network. So yes, it's how the political hegemony you support usually does it. Either buy the mafia and make money from drugs, or hire upper class murderers that are already financed by their exploitation of workers.
Kamprad had some luck and Engdahl had some money. He wasn't special, Sweden has been lenient with fascists and oligarchs during all of modernity.
No, I'm not part of that movement, another smear, directly from the communist handbook. But you will get nowhere with that here.
It is of course fine to question IKEA's business practices, myself is critical of many, personally I'm all in favour of unions as a union member myself, what is not okay is for bolsjeviks to steal companies by using the force of the government and undermine the entire economic model of society in a similar fashion what happened to the kulaks.
> Your link confirms what I wrote earlier.
No, read again, it confirms that Astrid Lindgren payed 101.06% in taxes. And Astrid Lindgren was not the only one affected by this extreme taxation.
Marginalskatten var runt mitten av 1970-talet mycket hög (se figur 4); den högsta
marginalskatten var i mitten av 1970-talet runt 87 procent. Beaktades även
förmögenhetsskatten kunde marginalskatten överstiga 100 procent för kapitalinkomster
och för rörelsekapital kunde marginalskatten också överstiga 100 procent om hänsyn
togs till både inkomstskatt och egenavgifter (Grosskopf & Rabe, 1991).
Detta uppmärksammades av Astrid Lindgren och föranledde henne att skriva en saga om
Pomperipossa (Pomperipossa i Monismanien, 1976) som levde i ett
fantasiland (Monismanien), framställt som en idyll i mångt och mycket men
där Pomperipossa tvingades att betala mer i skatt än vad hon tjänade (102 procent).
Astrid Lindgren beskrev på ett målande sätt Sverige och sin egen situation vilket
ledde till ett skatteuppror i Sverige och att den 100 procentliga marginalskatten
ganska snart justerades nedåt (Grosskopf & Rabe, 1991) även om marginalskatten
på rörelsekapital fortfarande kunde uppgå till 90 procent.
Never trust left wing radicals on history or on anything actually. Lies are part of their ideology in order to turn society upside down.
And why are you denying it? This is what your movement wanted and still wants, that we all should be tax slaves under an anonymous bureaucracy.
In every answer you keep bringing in irrelevant arguments, but that is typical of left wing radicals, they need to create a myth that they are fighting the good fight against all these fascists, so that they can impose a tyranny on all of us.
You're quoting something that quotes a story Lindgren made up. Pomperipossa is not a real person. Here's from the previous link:
"Även om den fortfarande är en viktig påminnelse om värdet av låga marginalskatter, visar Timbros chefsekonom Jacob Lundbergs undersökning att hon faktiskt aldrig behövde betala 102 procent i skatt."
'Even if it's still an important reminder of the value of low marginal tax rates, an examination by the chief economist of Timbro [a reactionary propaganda organisation] shows that [Astrid Lindgren] never had to pay 102% in taxes'.
Sweden hasn't had bolsheviks since the war. The communist party dislodged politically from Moscow in the sixties, though they continued to receive funds for another decade or two. You must have a very weird view of how power was transfered from the tsar to the bolsheviks. Do you seriously think that the civil war had nothing to do with it and they did it through parliamentary deliberation, like with the löntagarfonder?
She didn't need to pay the 102% tax in the end because of the Social democrats changed the law (as I already described earlier) because it became too unpopular, if they hadn't she would have. Thus is was not made up, it was a reality. Confirmed by the report from Ratio. Thus if Astrid Lindgren hadn't written that article Social democrats would have been perfectly fine with Swedes paying more than 100% in taxes. That is why Social democrats during this era were radicals. And also even after the change in law you could still pay 90% tax.
> You must have a very weird view of how power was transfered from the tsar to the bolsheviks
It didn't happened that way. It was the Mensheviks that took the power from the Tsar in the February Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks took in turn power from the Mensheviks in the October Revolution of 1917 and then murdered the Tsar and his family who was already in house arrest by the Mensheviks. Thus Bolsheviks did not remove the Tsar from power, a common falsehood by Bolsheviks, because he had already abdicated.
The Russian Civil War was a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution against the Provisional Government, which was not accepted by many different political groups, everything from social democrats, liberals to monarchists. Somehow Bolsheviks always forgets this important detail. Wonder why.
But anyway, I was correct about Löntagarfonderna, the implementation, the goal and it's consequences.
You don't seem to understand how marginal tax rate works. It's OK, almost no one on the far right does, but almost everyone knows a little about that story about Pomperipossa.
You're like a machine, just ticking away with confidence. I hope I get to see your movement die out during my lifetime.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a sore loser looks like. No arguments left, only smears. Desperate because you are used to that your bullying tactic works, that people back off and gets sidetracked, but here it didn't, which I already explained to you that you get nowhere with that here.
Swedes rejected your ideas, first in the general election of 1976, were Social democrats got ousted and lost an election for the first time in 40 years, and the second time in of the largest demonstrations ever recorded in Swedish history, the 4th of October demonstration of 1983, against fund socialism.
And if you are old enough you saw your own movement die with the fall of the Berlin wall on the ninth of November 1989. I remember, I saw it on Television.
I'm closer to syndicalism, but unorganised since I'm in a position of leadership.
It's weird to phrase it as "Swedes rejected", when it was the labour buyer's cartel that bused people to the demonstration in Stockholm, and the Social Democrats polled quite high after LAS and the general parental insurance. The string of wildcat strikes at the time didn't affect their polling performance.
It was newspaper scandals that won that election, things like the Pomperipossa story, Ingmar Bergman being investigated for tax fraud and leaving the country, a union leader lounging on the beach in Franco's Spain, things like that. And, of course, mythmaking of the sort you're engaging in here, claiming that reformism is actually bolshevism and whatnot.
If the reforms leads to Bolshevism then it is Bolshevism. What Bolsheviks never accept is that society is more than their political ideas.
It is important to remember that the Social democrats is the political wing to the LO union. It is the union that has permanent seat in the governing board of the Social democrats (Verkställande utskottet), not the other way around. It is the LO union that funds the Social democrats. It is in the union where the real power is (at least back then).
What the union wanted was to get the political wing to implement a legislation so that the union could confiscate private business. This would have been the end of Sweden's pluralistic parliamentarism. Instead an all ruling union with unelected bureaucrats with it's own political wing would have almost total control economically and eventually politically and then later socially.
Your timeline is completely messed up, jumping years back and forth, probably intentionally to confuse the reader what actually happened. Here is a real timeline with the most important dates
1973 September: Social democrats wins election
1974 : LAS Lag om anställningsskydd (Employment Protection Act)
Abandoning the spirit of Saltsjöbadsavtalet from 1938
1974 : General parental insurance
1975 August : LO union present the idea of Löntagarfonder (Employee funds)
20% of company profits should forcibly be transformed
to equity issuance and handed to the union
No limit on number of shares, i.e eventual union takeover
1975 November : Dictator of Spain Francisco Franco dies
1975 New Years: Union boss Hans Ericson vacations in Spanish Canary Islands
1976 March : Astrid Lindgren writes here famous story about high taxes
in "Pomperipossa i Monismanien"
1976 April : Ingmar Bergman leaves Sweden
1976 May : Reduction of taxes as a response to
Astrid Lindgren critique about high taxes
1976 Summer : LO union decides on supporting Löntagarfonder
1976 Autumn : Right wing opposition attacks the Löntagarfonder,
calling it "Öststatssocialism" (East State Socialism)
1976 September: Social democrats loses election to the Right wing opposition
First pure right wing government since 1936
Coup d'état as a famous social democrat called it
1978 : Pamphlet "Fritt näringsliv eller fondsocialism",
opposition from the Swedish employers' organization SAF
1979 September: Right wing wins election
1982 Februari : Revised version legislation for LAS
(note this is by the right wing government)
1982 September: Social democrats wins election
1982 October : Big Bang, massive devaluation of 16% for the Swedish Krona (SEK)
1983 October : Massive demonstrations against Löntagarfonder
1983 December : Revised and water downed version, because of the massive protests,
of Löntagarfonder implemented
5 different funds
each fund could not own more than 8% of a company (less than 50%)
1985 September: Social democrats wins election
1985 December : Swedish Centralbank (Riksbanken) decided together with the
social democratic finance minister to approve de facto
unlimited loans for commercial bank customers
1986 Februari : Prime minister Olof Palme murdered
1988 September: Social democrats wins election
(probably would have lost if Palme hadn't been murdred)
1989 November : Berlin wall falls
1990 August : Iraq invades Kuwait, increased interest rates follows
1990 October : Investment company Nyckeln cannot pay its debt
speculation on real-estate with massive loans
Begins the Banking, Housing and Financial crisis in Sweden
Banks and real-estate companies goes bankrupt...
It's still insane to claim that Lenin has ever been the main ideologue of LO and SAP. Clearly you've never heard about "IB-affären" or Erlander's "arbetskompanier".
The greatest hour of the Social democrats was when they kicked out the Bolsheviks from the party in 1917 as reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This made Social democrats a reform party that accepted the already existing parliamentary system and the monarchy ("den borgerliga demokratin"). And by doing so the Social democrats paved the road to becoming one of the most successful political parties in the West.
By marginalizing the Bolsheviks it is likely that this saved Sweden from a bloody civil war, a civil war that our dear neighbors in Finland suffered from. Our modern history could have been very different, Swedes fighting other Swedes in bloody battles, an open wound that could have been present to this day. For saving Sweden and Swedes from this horror, I’m ever grateful.
That is why I rank Hjalmar Branting as the greatest leader of Social democrats, greater than both Hansson and Erlander.
I am of course fully aware about these affairs you mention, what I’m arguing is that Bolsheviks was accepted back into the movement in 70s.
There were many signs of this, not only in the policies that was enacted but also things like the open flirtation with communist dictatorships and letting well known communists back into the movement.
They used to be in Switzerland for the tax structure anyways. The move back to Sweden and the lax regulation was designed to repatriate the business.
> species threatening problems
The human species is facing a threatening problem? I think I know the problems you're talking about, but it seems to me, they're mostly threatening to the current social and economic order, and not to the actual species.
It's marketed as the latter by the former. It's a clever strategy. It has reformed the conversation in the light most favorable to their interests and not yours.
> some of us will be filthy rich when the party stops.
It could be worse. It could be private equity. This company at least produces _something_, and to the extent there are species threatening problems, they are spending a fair portion of their money there.
"It Could Be Worse" is the absolute worst apologist argument, for anything. Please never excuse something bad, because you can imagine, or see somewhere else something even worse.
> “IKEA respects the rights of co-workers to join, form or not to join a union of their choice without fear of reprisal, interference, intimidation or harassment,” a spokesperson said.
From my understanding, it's illegal to not say this in the US - or at least, saying something that would contradict any of it will land you in hot water with NLRB.
How much they actually respects the rights of workers, is another question.
You make it sound as if the US is a paragon of workers rights. From what I can say it's pretty bad in the land of the free. Nowhere near the civilised world at least.
That is not the intention, it obviously isn't. But oddly enough, this is one of the areas there are some real force behind labor law in the US. If a manager or spokesperson at the company ever said something that contradicted what the IKEA spokesperson said, they could quickly be forced to backtrack and issue a statement like what they actually said.
Former NLRB employee and lawyer Matt Bruenig loves trolling people with this on social media. If anyone with employment responsibility is blustering against unions in social media, he'll send an NLRB complaint about "threatening retalitation for protected activity". You don't need "standing" to do this, by design. The targets are quickly told by their laywers to back down, because the law really is amazingly strict on this.
Ironically the Supreme Court further watered down what regulatory actions the NLRB can take against companies retaliating against unionizing workers just a couple of days ago.
US law is actually pretty good as far as worker’s rights are concerned. The problem is that successive U.S. administrations (both Democratic and Republican) have failed to enforce the law. The Biden administration has been a welcome exception in this regard.
The other, bigger, problem is that US law is no longer decided in the legislature and is being unilaterally rewritten by the Supreme Court which is quite decidedly anti union and has been rolling back all sorts of protections which are clearly enshrined in law but have been “interpreted” (in quotes because now they don’t even pretend to be interpreting the text differently) out of it by the Supreme Court.
(TIL Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA's founder, was a part of the pro-nazi Nysvenska party during WW2. If he were from occupied Norway, he would never even have gotten the chance to start IKEA, people didn't buy from quislings. But Sweden was neutral, a very different climate after the war.)
> Sweden was "neutral" but big on nazism topics such as eugenics.
Social Darwinism, including eugenics, was quite socially acceptable until the Nazis made it unpopular by association, and even then many countries (US, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, I forget which one in Latin America that sterilised poor women without telling them, etc.) still continued practising some parts of it for decades after. It only really became accepted as flat out wrong in the developed world what, in the 70s-90s (as an example, Canada's last residential school closed in 1997)?
It'd be more correct to say that the Nazis were big on Swedish topics such as eugenics. Sweden was world leading in eugenics 'research' for decades before the Nazi party was founded, and the State Institute for Eugenics Research wasn't closed down until 1958.
I don't like big multinationals anymore than the next guy, but if you're going to link an article to strengthen your argument you might consider linking to the original (instead of an article based on a reddit post based on the article): https://www.onlinemba.com/blog/why-ikea-is-non-profit/
Then we also note that the original article was published by an MBA scheme website, apparently re-writing one of The Economists articles (to generate clicks?).
With regards to your TIL, it's also worth noting that Kamprad's memberships were not public information until 1994 (during a "confessional" letter to IKEA employees), by which IKEA had long become an everyday staple in Sweden. Contrary to what was suggested, the Swedish population in the 1950s didn't see a furniture store owned by a Nazi sympathizer and thought "here is someone I can relate to, take my money!".
Hamsun was rich, famous and beloved before the war. After the war, his books were burned, his wife and sons were imprisoned and there was a huge court case which nearly financially ruined his family
> Hamsun was subjected to humiliating clinical psychiatric tests in Oslo, and having been told that he was suffering from "lasting weakened mental capacities", was eventually fined 325,000 kroner after a civil action found him guilty of NS membership.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/08/knut-hamsun-ce...
225 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadBaby steps.
Honestly it's ikea or luxury stuff, anything else does not make sense.
You can't beat ikea quality and quality at any price point.
As an alternative, we've found antique shops that have amazing quality furniture for less than ikea's high end lines, if you're ok with the older styles.
If it says solid wood it's probably fine.
If it says particle board or fibre board or something other than solid wood it's an "assemble it once and never move it again" piece at best, and a "keep it for a few years" piece at worst.
It's not like it's a problem unique to ikea. Buying particle board or mdf furniture is always going to give you a much worse product (in terms of quality and longevity) compared to something made with solid wood, or at the very least with decent quality plywood.
The best result (in terms of a strong joint) from particle board furniture would be to add glue when screwing (i.e. in the hole with the screw) but that completely removes the option of disassembling it.
ÄPPLARYD is a cheaply made sofa that looks nice, with very poor quality fabric just like all IKEA sofas these days
I'm fine with people saying it looks nice but it's tiring when people say it's "high end" and "high quality" and well made
That's a poor heuristic that's repeated ad nauseum. The trouble is even expensive IKEA lines are mostly poor quality but they have such good marketing and styling that people refuse to believe it
But if you're happy with the most expensive IKEA products, good for you!
A breakdown of every ikea item and every specific detail for it?
Yes, i'm talking for experience and i don't really have any data to back this up, i just have a lot of bad experience with any other furniture builder and not a lot of problems with ikea
I find it funny you've asked another poster for the exact price of a piece of Amish furniture. But won't substantiate your grand claims. Interesting
Folks keep acting like it's still 2022 and that we are somehow in a ZIRP era. It's not, and most assets are not selling and are therefor to be had for cheap.
The problem is availability (online and in person) and warranty (not only in a legal sense , but quality assurance)
Can you tell me what's the price of a table with 4 chairs from a Amish workshop, for example?
That's a "forrest".
At least in Europe, almost all land has been influenced by humans, and "forrest" is misused for farms that grow trees.
To refer to an actual forrest, an additional qualifier is needed.
It is a forest that humans have not touched. There are still a few in Europe, and some are strictly protected. However, in countries where corruption is at a high level, local politicians can be bought to issue concessions for the deforestation of those natural jewels.
My impression is that it's really difficult to do at scale because it isn't trivial to tell this tree from that tree, especially post harvest and paperwork is always spoofable.
Don't even start about ethanol, because they make samagon (moonshine) out of anything that ferments, including chicken poop. It's just not sold in stores, you "get" it on the black market.
At such budgets, scale, and lobbying there is no such thing as "ooops, we didn't know where this come from, some lumberjack lied to us". You have folks in suits flying in private jets and arranging agreements (and cocaine and prostitutes as well of course).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-use-of-wood-from-the...
Unfortunately, I would see this purely as Romania's unwillingness or inability to address the issues leading to the illegal cutting of wood. Possibly the usual suspects of corruption, a lack of will to act, and a lack of "resources".
At the end of the day it is one very busy person putting purchase orders to some other very busy people. All of them on tight KPIs for their bonuses until eventually it gets to the production site and oops, child labor.
To be honest this problem needs to be fixed top-down through international standards and institutions to ensure proper traceability. Leaving to each company to do it on their own and to country regulations is just stupid and counterproductive.
Ikea’s boss solved the Swedish retailer’s global ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare
Cutting it off there just makes it seem like ikea thinks "more money = happy workers" when in reality it is more nuanced than that.
I am in favor of flexible work arrangements, and I have no idea if those have costs to the company, or how much more you'd need to pay the workers to accept the less flexible arrangements.
(If $Company is not big global retailer like IKEA, then things would probably be far simpler.)
But collectively it can work; the company may talk to the union and offer either X benefit which costs $Y or $Y applied to salaries.
In every other developed country everyone has healthcare, irrelevant of job - even people that don't have a job.
Healthcare is not tied to your job, it is a basic human right.
So this discussion makes no sense outside the US.
workplace nurseries are tax free as is any child care for lower incomes. other benefits are tax free up to a certain amount.
E.g. if the company were going to pay $2k extra but it would be taxed $1k, they would have to pay $3k to get the equivalent "happiness" boost. The employee gets $2k / year either way.
$2k tax free -> $2k in your pocket
$3k + $1k tax -> $2k in your pocket
I know single-income families at various levels of income across the country; it is certainly possible almost anywhere - if you want it.
You can buy double the house with 2 incomes instead of 1.
I'm guessing this is some slur for rural areas. You know the ones that typically have large families?
It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, hunting, clearing fields etc. in small ways.
It's a better use of labour than splitting every pair of adults into one for this type of work, the other always does child care.
All contributions don't get paid, and all that get paid don't contribute.
Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.
People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.
If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.
The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.
The reason is not a secret: teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.
It is not a job anyone should pursue.
1) We move close to my or her family.
2) We get a lot more money.
I don't see anyway around it, we need family support or money to pay someone else to help.
Raising kids is absolutely contributing to society.
In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”
In post-WWII US, it was generally easy for fathers to find stable, lifelong careers with a low risk of layoffs and a low risk of an untimely death, which allowed families to thrive on single incomes. But that was an outlier, not the norm.
In most places and in most periods of history, mothers have had to work (sewing, gardening, spinning, knitting, brewing, laundering, midwifery, etc., etc.) because fathers have not had widespread access steady, well-paying, low-risk work. Unless she was independently wealthy, a mother who did not bring in income was playing a very risky game with her children's lives.
The biggest difference is that, today, most work must be done outside the home, which is very difficult for mothers. Childcare helps close the gender pay gap and is necessary for a fairer, less sexist society — at least until/unless our economy returns to primarily home-based work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap
It is better for the family: - it has more resources - it has more income diversification
It is better for the father: - he doesn't have to carry the weight of income-gathering alone
It is better for the mother: - she doesn't have to carry the weight of child-rearing alone - if things go sour, she can maintain herself and/or the family financially - sha has more choices in life
It is better for the child: - they get a wider variety of experiences - they socialize with other kids earlier, which helps in early school-life - they learn to socialize with more adults too - there are professionals who have seen many children, who will notice problems before the parents will
It is better for the childcare professional: - they have another job choice, helping them pick a job they enjoy
It is good for society: - father, mother and childcare professional can do something that matches their talents, instead of doing something suboptimal for them, thus delivering more value to society
It doesn't devalue child-rearing, it values it more, by having a professional help do it.
I'm always befuddled by that argument. I'm not devaluing plumbing work by hiring a plumber, nor am I devaluing medical work by hiring a doctor. Why would I be devaluing child-rearing by hiring a professional to help?
Who actually cares more about a child's well-being, an employee paid by the hour or their own parents?
As for caring about the child's well-being? The parents, which is why they should hire the best people they can afford to do various parts of taking care off them. Hire the best doctor for their medical care, hire the best dentists for their dental care, hire the best teachers for their education, hire the best child-care professionals for daycare.
If one parent is working, the other home with the kids, chances are that the one working can't take as much time off or has a harder time setting a healthy work-life balance (increasing your pay requires working harder).
Using myself as an example: the only reason I can pick up my kid early from the kindergarten and spend quality time with him is because I can afford to not work 9-5 every day due to my wife also working.
Plus they get the benefit of time with parents, parents can focus on doing things they think is valuable for the kid.
To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.
The keyword there is "can". They can, it's just less likely. Especially when a parent takes the "stay at home" part too literal.
> To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.
Well, my experience with my kids was that their daycare was beneficial for them. They did not always want to go, but they definitely enjoyed all their days there. And especially for the first one, they had a lot of experiences that my wife and I would never have even considered as an option.
Comparing them to their classmates when school started, they were way ahead in lots of things. Absolutely in language development, socialization and being able to focus. They were also just way less, for lack of a better term, worried about everything. They knew that the world does not revolve around mommy and daddy, and that they'd be fine in new environments.
And you're only counting the benefits of daycare, but ignoring the opportunity cost of less time with parents and the benefits that come from that.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to daycare, but where is the optimum? A few hours a day? Or the kids in daycare from 8am to 6pm, so they see their parents for maybe 2 hours a day before bed time?
Housing costs have risen to match the switch to double income households. Now instead of 1, it takes 2 incomes just to be able to afford housing. This makes the family more brittle since if either parent loses their job both will lose the house.
And with the rise in housing costs people move further afield. Commuting times go way up and people waste more time in the car or on the train. Everybody ends up more stressed than ever before and further behind economically (compared to those whose wealth grows without working).
This not optimal for many reasons:
- once the kids are going to school, regular "office hours" daycare is not needed and it skew the relationship even more by removing one task to one party. If that time is used for personal instead of household chores activities, that person not bringing the income is eventually seen as a partial freeloader by the one bringing the income.
- relationship can go sour quickly and if it doesn't work, the "dependent" one doesn't feel as free to end that relationship
- the person taking care of the kid's social life is usually not as rich
The elephant in the room being that in most case it ends up being the woman staying at home in an heterogender relationship in a society with an historically patriarcal model because of income levels which further increase the inequalities and dependentship.
IMO society is worse now with dual income + strangers raising children.
The only major benefits I've seen are 1) Woman have access to birth control 2) Women have equal rights. Everything else is debatable as "better".
I also felt that putting my daughters to daycare helped them socially.
If anything subsidized childcare feels like charity and I don't want charity, I want to be paid well for my work, so I can take care of my family.
For an analogy, one can be given money instead of being invited to a social gathering. One might feel offended, while other may feel happier.
Only if we could generalize all the employees! I am sure there are some who feel better to have holiday gifts, holiday parties, token recognition rewards etc. And there would be some who just evaluate everything on the basis of cold hard numbers. A good company should have policies to cater to as many employees as possible.
My anecdote: I worked for a company whose long-time CEO retired. After an involved search, the company found a replacement. She was onboarded and started getting in a groove, then 6 months in it was announced she would be leaving for a year of maternity leave. So we had to find another CEO. 10 months later the original hire decided she would not be returning to the role (she's under no obligation to). No problem, except the replacement CEO assumed this was a temporary position, so she already had another job lined up after her term. Once again, we were searching for a new CEO...
All of a sudden you're working for a company that's had 5 CEOs in 3 years. That's a hard thing for a company to deal with. People will say, "that can happen anyway!". Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong, and yet an incredibly destabilizing environment resulted and the business suffered.
And if anyone did anything for the business...
Although, one challenge with things like childcare is that if you applied this on a society-wide level you wind up with childless people having more money, thereby being better able to outbid parents for essentials like housing (this is why a housing scarcity is so insidious). Of course, whether that's a bad thing or not depends on perspective. I have two kids myself and despite living in Europe childcare was so expensive we dropped to one income.
> It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits.
In some cases it also makes economical sense. It can cost a company $1000 to give you a benefit, but to buy it yourself would cost $2000 (and the difference is even greater if the benefit isn't taxed at the same rate as cash would be).
Or the $200 the company spends on beers for me each year, many would perhaps say that they'd rather have the $200 to spend as they please. But in a sense, I get more value than $200 by getting to know my co-workers better and having a better time every day at work.
Such an american thing to say.
No, we don't mind having the company pay colleagues' children childcare on top of our (equal to theirs) salary. We'd hate to be in a society where such a petty mindset would be common, that would be living in some kind of social hell.
The alternatives generally suggested are to shorten the original title, omitting needless descriptives or words (e.g., counts, emotives, etc.) if possible, or barring that, to substitute alternative text, preferably from a subtitle or passage from the article (both to avoid editorialising):
dang comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908533>
Guidelines: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> ("In Submissions", title guidance.)
Something's got to give, though, and the submitted title is accurate so far as it goes.
If HN's readers can't be trusted to read even the title of an article, well, the whole premise of a an article-based discussion site seems somewhat imperiled. This may well be the case, of course ...
> IKEA solved ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, flexible schedules
It's not really grammatically correct I think, but otherwise seems like a good compromise: we only leave out childcare subsidies, which is another monetary compensation, and do mention flexible work schedules which is a non-monetary benefit and might be crucial to IKEA's strategy.
And you did do a better job of it, as I also indicated a few minutes ago.
Editorialising is NOT the same thing. It is replacing (or adjusting) a title not for length or clarity, but to give a specific slant to a subject or inject the submitter's opinion.
Dang: "Editorializing is editing a title to put one's own spin on it." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32085439>
Wordsmithing titles is a bit of an art and often a challenge.
As mentioned above, was trying to fit the title without editorializing....
Ikea improves salaries, flexible working, childcare to solve ‘unhappy worker’ crisis.
Kid aid plus dosh foils toil says Swede sofa shop boss
surely there's a command line tool for abstract2dailymail
78 characters
More money = happy workers, unless of course, you don't give them money, but also other economic benefits that are equivalent to money. I'm not seeing the nuance.
In another way, if you present a worker with the option between two jobs with the same hourly rate, one having flexible working hours and the other not, which would expect to be more likely choice? You can then measure the value of this choice by changing the hourly rates between the two until you see changes in outcome and you would be able to estimate exactly how much "more money" it appears to be "worth."
Being forced to commute at peak time costs more - on a retail salary the difference between a peak and off-peak ticket can mean that the first hour or two of working is essentially pointless, as you're just paying back the cost of getting there in the first place.
Having to pay an extra surcharge to visit the dentist, because you can only go on a Saturday because you need to be at work other days. Flexible working would allow you to just take the Tuesday off no problem and go when it's cheaper.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples that apply to different lifestyles.
Generally though higher paid employees tend to have more sway within a company structure and likely don't need to miss these important events, the win here is that something that was generally true for mid management up for most companies now extends down through all the ranks.
Like...is it actual incompetence? Or do they know it's the answer, but just don't want to do it?
I just can't grasp why a manager would refuse to provide proper pay and benefits and then get a Surprised Pikachu face when employees don't stick around.
Just like we've known for a while that getting software developers their own offices increases productivity (but costs money/doesn't look trendy), or that getting rid of senior aeronautical engineers might lower quality over time (but saves money).
Specifically midwesterner’s who think pain is honor and grit vs a waste of energy and distraction.
I'd think turnover rate could act as a proxy for employee happiness.
Non-founder executives are usually rewarded for short term results. They'll deliver on this even if it means laying off the entire Python language team in the midst of an AI boom. The market is bad at distinguishing these growth hacks for sustainable business, so they'll see 4% quarterly growth and pile on under the assumption that the hockey stick is going up.
By the time reality catches up management has already cashed in their chips.
In the end there is only limited number of entities seeking value. Or long term sustainable profitability. For everyone else it is line going up. Or blindly following others.
Walmart is a public company, so you can just look at their profit margins. They’re sub-3%.
Amazons margins are only higher because of AWS.
https://stock.walmart.com/financials/quarterly-results/defau...
Also, what's more likely; One of the most efficient supply chain coordination companies in history with razor thin margins is leaving tons of cost savings on the table...or...random internet commenters like us don't actually know that much about Walmart's business nor the basic economics of labor markets?
Also, once you remove the profit incentive and kill the dividend (which goes into the world's pension funds via the public market), investors will no longer invest in the company. Being a capital starved business with insanely high COGS is a recipe for collapse the minute you have a downturn.
And you'll probably say, "good! then the mom-and-pop stores will come back!" But the mom-and-pop stores, while aesthetically more pleasing to the elite, are in fact a far less efficient way to distribute food product so that would actually dramatically raise prices for consumers and decrease salaries & quality of life in many rural areas.
Turns out things are the way they are for a reason, and there's no grand conspiracy keeping people down.
How much do you think Suresh Kumar's life would change if he made 10 million next year instead of 14.5 million? Do you think he would have to stop buying the groceries he usually does, or that he would have to cancel a vacation? It wouldn't change his life at all. Same for the rest of the people in that list. Every one of them could take just a little less and increase pay for the people who actually do the majority of the work necessary for the company to function and be profitable and it would make no impact on the day to day lives of those executives. Absolutely nothing life changing.
Him alone? Not much, but take a tiny bit from everyone making >1M and increase the pay of only those employees who don't already make a living wage and I'm guessing it would make a huge difference to the lives of those employees while still making no difference to the lives of the people who'd be taking a bit less.
As a bonus, putting that money into the hands of the people who would spend it, and most likely spend it on paying off debt and local goods/services, would help the economy and a lot of other people too.
Why? Extroverts usually blame the world, introverts look for the reason in themselvs. Many managers are extroverts.
That's a really odd conclusion to come to IMO. I feel like it's more about the amount of self awareness and not extroversion vs introversion.
But of course employers don’t want to acknowledge that they’re being unfair in compensation. To them, the compensation is just, and therefore people are simply unwilling to work.
I think there is a degree of tolerance that’s shifted. A job is not a job, anymore. Healthcare is insanely expensive. Housing is insanely expensive. Raising kids is insanely expensive. What used to be a “good honest job” has transformed into maximum-value-extracted job.
And everyone is desperate to get as big a piece as they can to ensure their own survival.
Employers still keep some assumption that the employee doesn't have a choice or won't execute on it, and there's enough employees working under that model that the assumption doesn't look so wrong at a distance.
That’s literally it
Investors hire managers that will ensure that investors remain the top priority for the lifecycle of the firm
To such an extent that they made up fake rules like the idea that corporate officers have a fiduciary requirement to investors like a mutual fund manager does
This is because the goal of financializing a company is to make it a narrowly focused high margin hedge fund
You can’t do that if labor has bargaining power for control of the firm
What makes it a fake rule? Why should it be any other way within bounds of the law?
> It’s not any more complicated than short term rent seeking from investors
Any evidence?
Doesn't "short term rent seeking" contradict "top priority for the lifecycle of the firm"?
Would love a reference or two that investors force this. I know activist investors exist, but only for a fraction of companies.
Do customers flock to companies that treat employees much better?
A fiduciary in the finance sense is specifically intentionally hired by somebody to manage their money that is not the case for a CEO in a corporation
You don’t need more than one activist investor for all of your other investors to go along with it so the whole point is, as the lead that you bring in other investors with people who only care about market cap and that’s the whole point of managing a board
Beyond that you’re starting to get a whole crop of CEOs and that’s how they believe they believe they are the investor class and they’re gonna do everything in the act like the investor class including fucking over every employee they can
If you see a CEO with 90% of a company, you know for a fact, they’re trying to be Potemkin dictator
Also, as long as employees are grumbling, but still working, management doesn't care. (And since the extremely inefficient public programs of education and healthcare suck almost all the money out of welfare budgets the unemployment safety net is so weak no one really thinks of acting up.)
In other news, water found to be wet.
and what a meatball and smoked salmon pizza would taste like
That would indeed be newsworthy if countless businesses were to be insisting that they are trying to make their employees wet by pouring sand on them, providing them with T-shirts with the word "WET" printed on it, asking them to wish their dryness away, or (the most enlightened ones) telling their employees to go outside on cloudy days — anything except, you know, simply pouring water on them.
https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...
https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6ntagarfonder
The end goal was to take over companies and be owned by the unions.
This had disastrous consequences for Sweden, many companies left, one was IKEA. It created an hostile climate, instead of the previous decades of consensus between buiness and politics it created an antagonistic atmosphere.
The Social democrats lost their first election in 40 years.
The system was scrapped in the early nineties.
Kamprad got paranoid over the realization that politicians and bureaucrats could take over his life work and thus he moves to Switzerland and then created this non-profit to make sure it always remained in his family.
Kamprad was a fascist that started IKEA with financing from another fascist, and workers did all the work. What exactly do you imagine he contributed?
And why are you misrepresenting the article you linked? The idea to transfer some of the profits from large corporations into union managed funds came from the largest trade union confederation, not "radical Swedish politicians". Social democrats aren't radical, they're reformists, and the reactionary response to the proposal was arguably much more radical than trying to herd it through parliament.
The Wikipedia article, both the Swedish and the English version, is fuzzy about the details how it worked, they took the company’s own money and use that to buy the company’s shares by forcing them to sell by equity issuance. Goal was to take over private companies and create socialism.
Social democrats were reformist but became radicals during the leadership of Olof Palme. This was not the only one radical thing that they did, another was the famous Pomperipossa taxation where some Swedes payed more than 100% in taxes. This led to other Swedes leaving the country, like the famous movie maker and director Ingmar Bergman.
As I wrote in another comment, this had disastrous consequences for Sweden, large companies left and we went from a consensus culture around business and politics (Saltsjöbadsandan) to a something much more antagonistic.
This radicalized the right wing in Sweden to become neoliberal for many decades to come, which led to other negative consequences.
Kamprad was adjacent to Nysvenska rörelsen, a lifelong friend of it's founder Per Engdahl, who also supplied the initial funding for IKEA.
It's insane to claim that Olof Palme caused a shift away from parliamentary reformism.
And no, we've never had anyone pay "more than 100% in taxes". That's a myth, based on Astrid Lindgrens pretty weird propaganda story about it.
The antagonism between labour and capital is inherent, and you either apply force to subdue the exploited party to this conflict, or you negotiate a deal or parliamentary decision. The latter was the core of Saltsjöbadsavtalet, the reformist position represented by the trade union confederation and the Social Democrats. The radical position would be to form militias and engage in militant revolutionary activities, something which the strong reformist movement managed to guard us from.
The right and the fascists didn't think that was enough, however.
It's absurd to blame the victims of fascism for the rise of fascism instead of those who gain from it.
As for the reasoning behind the löntagarfonder, it's quite obviously immoral for people to become rich and powerful by disenfranchising and exploiting other people. Which is how late modern corporations work, you have owners that take the value produced by other people for themselves. The right agrees that this is a correct description, which is why they made sure pensions and wages have been invested in stock markets and investment funds, so every worker is now forced to participate in the casino.
You could disagree with the particular construct of löntagarfonder, but you would need to be very religious to claim that nature or some god made it good and right that the rich get to keep generational wealth and persist in disenfranchisement and exploitation of other people. It's close to the idea of divine right of kings.
It doesn't matter what Kamprad's political opinions was in his youth, using socialism to take over private companies as the Social democrats did is still wrong regardless. Are you going to call the family Rausing (creator of Tetra Pak) for fascist as well because the didn't want union bureaucrats to take over their creation?
In what way would union bureaucrats be better stewards than business owners? We had union bureaucrat recently who ran the country, Stefan Löfven, probably the worst prime minister in history.
Social democrats during the leadership of Olof Palme were definitely radicals. During this era they expanded the government and increased taxation massively, which led to a high currency devaluation, i.e made the Swedes poorer, typical socialism. As Olof Palme's successor Göran Persson said it, something like ~ Social democrats always puts democracy before socialism, Olof Palme did the opposite ~. Fitting end that Palme got murdered like something you hear about from 3rd World Marxist kleptocracies.
More than 100% in taxes is 100% true, here you can read all about it
https://timbro.se/smedjan/den-sanna-sagan-om-pomperipossa-i-...
That is why the Government reacted and made a change to the tax legislation within two months, why would they if it wasn't over 100%? Even the most radical couldn't defend this absurdity.
Saltsjöbadsavtalet was not about parliamentary decision, it was about consensus between employers and employees, which led to the Golden years. A consensus that the Social democrats broke when they passed LAS in the seventies. (Also Social democrats is again abandoning the Swedish model by accepting that EU can pass minimal wage legislation)
Without Kamprad there would be no IKEA, thus nowhere for workers to work. That is the thing to understand, Kamprad was one in a billion, radicals exists in the thousands, useless of course because they don't create anything of value.
Why everything is tied up around the stock market is because of neoliberalism, a consequence of the right wing's radicalization as I described earlier, typical for neoliberalism and marxism is that they both believe in printing money out of thin air and then speculate with it. Who benefits? Not the poor of course, it is the receivers of that printed money, for neoliberalism that would be bankers and capitalists and in marxism that would be bureaucrats and politicians, as it was in the Soviet union.
It made a solid impression on IKEA as a company. It's why unions have never been able to form there, it's why the company 'culture' has a distinctly parasocial 'family'-character, it's why the trust invests heavily in keeping refugees in desert camps, it's why Kamprad was disgusted by the idea to pay taxes, it's why IKEA does its sourcing in countries like Russia, Romania and so on, and avoids ecological destruction in Sweden.
Your link confirms what I wrote earlier. Maybe you know someone who could help you translate it?
You're using radical in some highly personal sense, in common parlance it means you're trying to cause social and political change through means like civil disobedience, direct action, mutual aid, militant revolution, rather than parliamentary deliberation and compromise.
Palme was likely murdered by the fascist Gladio/Stay Behind network. So yes, it's how the political hegemony you support usually does it. Either buy the mafia and make money from drugs, or hire upper class murderers that are already financed by their exploitation of workers.
Kamprad had some luck and Engdahl had some money. He wasn't special, Sweden has been lenient with fascists and oligarchs during all of modernity.
It is of course fine to question IKEA's business practices, myself is critical of many, personally I'm all in favour of unions as a union member myself, what is not okay is for bolsjeviks to steal companies by using the force of the government and undermine the entire economic model of society in a similar fashion what happened to the kulaks.
> Your link confirms what I wrote earlier.
No, read again, it confirms that Astrid Lindgren payed 101.06% in taxes. And Astrid Lindgren was not the only one affected by this extreme taxation.
Confirmed by this report https://cms.ratio.se/app/uploads/2014/11/den_svenska_modelle...
Never trust left wing radicals on history or on anything actually. Lies are part of their ideology in order to turn society upside down.And why are you denying it? This is what your movement wanted and still wants, that we all should be tax slaves under an anonymous bureaucracy.
In every answer you keep bringing in irrelevant arguments, but that is typical of left wing radicals, they need to create a myth that they are fighting the good fight against all these fascists, so that they can impose a tyranny on all of us.
"Även om den fortfarande är en viktig påminnelse om värdet av låga marginalskatter, visar Timbros chefsekonom Jacob Lundbergs undersökning att hon faktiskt aldrig behövde betala 102 procent i skatt."
'Even if it's still an important reminder of the value of low marginal tax rates, an examination by the chief economist of Timbro [a reactionary propaganda organisation] shows that [Astrid Lindgren] never had to pay 102% in taxes'.
Sweden hasn't had bolsheviks since the war. The communist party dislodged politically from Moscow in the sixties, though they continued to receive funds for another decade or two. You must have a very weird view of how power was transfered from the tsar to the bolsheviks. Do you seriously think that the civil war had nothing to do with it and they did it through parliamentary deliberation, like with the löntagarfonder?
Or are you lying?
Edit: Your buddies at the reactionary think tank has made a neat little graph at the bottom here: https://timbro.se/skattekoll/marginalskatt/
No shit. Talk about desperate argument.
She didn't need to pay the 102% tax in the end because of the Social democrats changed the law (as I already described earlier) because it became too unpopular, if they hadn't she would have. Thus is was not made up, it was a reality. Confirmed by the report from Ratio. Thus if Astrid Lindgren hadn't written that article Social democrats would have been perfectly fine with Swedes paying more than 100% in taxes. That is why Social democrats during this era were radicals. And also even after the change in law you could still pay 90% tax.
> You must have a very weird view of how power was transfered from the tsar to the bolsheviks
It didn't happened that way. It was the Mensheviks that took the power from the Tsar in the February Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks took in turn power from the Mensheviks in the October Revolution of 1917 and then murdered the Tsar and his family who was already in house arrest by the Mensheviks. Thus Bolsheviks did not remove the Tsar from power, a common falsehood by Bolsheviks, because he had already abdicated.
The Russian Civil War was a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution against the Provisional Government, which was not accepted by many different political groups, everything from social democrats, liberals to monarchists. Somehow Bolsheviks always forgets this important detail. Wonder why.
But anyway, I was correct about Löntagarfonderna, the implementation, the goal and it's consequences.
You don't seem to understand how marginal tax rate works. It's OK, almost no one on the far right does, but almost everyone knows a little about that story about Pomperipossa.
You're like a machine, just ticking away with confidence. I hope I get to see your movement die out during my lifetime.
Swedes rejected your ideas, first in the general election of 1976, were Social democrats got ousted and lost an election for the first time in 40 years, and the second time in of the largest demonstrations ever recorded in Swedish history, the 4th of October demonstration of 1983, against fund socialism.
And if you are old enough you saw your own movement die with the fall of the Berlin wall on the ninth of November 1989. I remember, I saw it on Television.
It's weird to phrase it as "Swedes rejected", when it was the labour buyer's cartel that bused people to the demonstration in Stockholm, and the Social Democrats polled quite high after LAS and the general parental insurance. The string of wildcat strikes at the time didn't affect their polling performance.
It was newspaper scandals that won that election, things like the Pomperipossa story, Ingmar Bergman being investigated for tax fraud and leaving the country, a union leader lounging on the beach in Franco's Spain, things like that. And, of course, mythmaking of the sort you're engaging in here, claiming that reformism is actually bolshevism and whatnot.
It is important to remember that the Social democrats is the political wing to the LO union. It is the union that has permanent seat in the governing board of the Social democrats (Verkställande utskottet), not the other way around. It is the LO union that funds the Social democrats. It is in the union where the real power is (at least back then).
What the union wanted was to get the political wing to implement a legislation so that the union could confiscate private business. This would have been the end of Sweden's pluralistic parliamentarism. Instead an all ruling union with unelected bureaucrats with it's own political wing would have almost total control economically and eventually politically and then later socially.
Your timeline is completely messed up, jumping years back and forth, probably intentionally to confuse the reader what actually happened. Here is a real timeline with the most important dates
By marginalizing the Bolsheviks it is likely that this saved Sweden from a bloody civil war, a civil war that our dear neighbors in Finland suffered from. Our modern history could have been very different, Swedes fighting other Swedes in bloody battles, an open wound that could have been present to this day. For saving Sweden and Swedes from this horror, I’m ever grateful.
That is why I rank Hjalmar Branting as the greatest leader of Social democrats, greater than both Hansson and Erlander.
I am of course fully aware about these affairs you mention, what I’m arguing is that Bolsheviks was accepted back into the movement in 70s.
There were many signs of this, not only in the policies that was enacted but also things like the open flirtation with communist dictatorships and letting well known communists back into the movement.
You have clearly not met any of the people involved.
They used to be in Switzerland for the tax structure anyways. The move back to Sweden and the lax regulation was designed to repatriate the business.
> species threatening problems
The human species is facing a threatening problem? I think I know the problems you're talking about, but it seems to me, they're mostly threatening to the current social and economic order, and not to the actual species.
It's marketed as the latter by the former. It's a clever strategy. It has reformed the conversation in the light most favorable to their interests and not yours.
> some of us will be filthy rich when the party stops.
It could be worse. It could be private equity. This company at least produces _something_, and to the extent there are species threatening problems, they are spending a fair portion of their money there.
I would personally attempt to avoid using language that people could interpret as moral bullying.
From my understanding, it's illegal to not say this in the US - or at least, saying something that would contradict any of it will land you in hot water with NLRB.
How much they actually respects the rights of workers, is another question.
Former NLRB employee and lawyer Matt Bruenig loves trolling people with this on social media. If anyone with employment responsibility is blustering against unions in social media, he'll send an NLRB complaint about "threatening retalitation for protected activity". You don't need "standing" to do this, by design. The targets are quickly told by their laywers to back down, because the law really is amazingly strict on this.
US law is actually pretty good as far as worker’s rights are concerned. The problem is that successive U.S. administrations (both Democratic and Republican) have failed to enforce the law. The Biden administration has been a welcome exception in this regard.
The other, bigger, problem is that US law is no longer decided in the legislature and is being unilaterally rewritten by the Supreme Court which is quite decidedly anti union and has been rolling back all sorts of protections which are clearly enshrined in law but have been “interpreted” (in quotes because now they don’t even pretend to be interpreting the text differently) out of it by the Supreme Court.
(TIL Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA's founder, was a part of the pro-nazi Nysvenska party during WW2. If he were from occupied Norway, he would never even have gotten the chance to start IKEA, people didn't buy from quislings. But Sweden was neutral, a very different climate after the war.)
Social Darwinism, including eugenics, was quite socially acceptable until the Nazis made it unpopular by association, and even then many countries (US, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, I forget which one in Latin America that sterilised poor women without telling them, etc.) still continued practising some parts of it for decades after. It only really became accepted as flat out wrong in the developed world what, in the 70s-90s (as an example, Canada's last residential school closed in 1997)?
Then we also note that the original article was published by an MBA scheme website, apparently re-writing one of The Economists articles (to generate clicks?).
With regards to your TIL, it's also worth noting that Kamprad's memberships were not public information until 1994 (during a "confessional" letter to IKEA employees), by which IKEA had long become an everyday staple in Sweden. Contrary to what was suggested, the Swedish population in the 1950s didn't see a furniture store owned by a Nazi sympathizer and thought "here is someone I can relate to, take my money!".
How about Knut Hamsun?
> Hamsun was subjected to humiliating clinical psychiatric tests in Oslo, and having been told that he was suffering from "lasting weakened mental capacities", was eventually fined 325,000 kroner after a civil action found him guilty of NS membership. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/08/knut-hamsun-ce...
> In later years, studies and inquiries have shown that justice was administered unevenly and—by today's standards—harshly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_purge_in_Norway_after_Wo...