For this discussion I am going to talk about the practice of paying low
for employees using a personal example. I believe that if a company
existed before they implemented any kind of TBL practice into their
operations, the absolute job of HR was to convince a prospective
employee to work for as little as humanly possible. There are still
plenty of businesses that do this today. I know people at staffing
agencies who do this because they get paid on the residual money
after their temporary worker gets paid.
(Called one last night to make
sure this was still good. Learned that this is an old practice that on
one uses anymore. They just charge a percentage of whatever your
hourly rate is. Sorry for getting you riled up) This is mostly because
they were only concerned with making the most profit possible. The
practice is enabled because the labor market is not competitive
(Bahn, 2017). According to Bahn (2017) who is an economist at the
Center for American Progress, the labor market is not competitive
due to reasons like employers having more information than
applicants during the process, workers being "locked in" to jobs
because that is where their health care comes from, non-compete
agreements, and differing licensing requirements across state lines.
The potential negative repercussions of the practice on employees
are that they will never be able to advance from their current
position in society because they are getting paid less than a living
wage. They could struggle just to pay their bills and not even have
enough for that. The community will suffer because there is no
money available for people to invest into local businesses, and the
business might eventually suffer due to the rise in "anti-work"
movements that we are seeing right now.
If a more friendly practice was incorporated, the employees' quality
of life would undoubtable go up due to having enough money to live,
possibly even with some extra left over to have fun every now and
then. Local community businesses would have more customers
available due to the new disposable income, and the employers
would have much more loyal and possibly harder working employees.
They would also likely gain new customers because of their new
"good" image. According to Bahn (2017), the market can bear higher
wages without having to cut workers because the current wage is
artificially low.
