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Hospital Uses Executive Bonus Money to Give its Workers A Raise

posted by martyb on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:08AM   
from the take-it-from-the-top dept.

gewg_ writes:

Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas[1] will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month...
The wage increase will cost the hospital about $350,000 a year. The expense will be covered with money from the upcoming quarter's bonus pool for the hospital's 60 vice presidents and top executives.

After this, every worker employed by Dallas County will make at least $10.25 an hour (still not a living wage by many measures).
Note also that this will barely put a dent in that pool, expected to be at least $3M for the year.

[1] People who have memories of November 22, 1963 will remember that as a historic location

• Re:Perspective? Re:Perspective? (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @02:41PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @02:41PM (#56413)

  Okay, looks like another problem with perspective - it is over 10% of the pool. We finally get to correctly state: the executive DECIMATED their bonuses for the good of the workers.

  Where I come from, the boss gets paid last. Where I come from, bonuses are paid when performance exceeds expectations. If this organization has been choosing to pay bonuses to its executives while keeping its workers dependent on food stamps, then I see that as transferring money from the SNAP program into executive compensation. I really hate when my taxes are used to make a company look successful or to pay executive bonuses.

  Honestly, you can use "decimated" and its connotation of 10% mortality to make this seem like a huge sacrifice, but no one's going to die. These exec's are not making any kind of a grand sacrifice here. They still get 100% of their salaries, benefits, and retirement. They give up, on average, less than $6000 each, from a bonus pool of $50k each. Which is, let me remind you, BONUS money for excellent management performance.

  In the libertarian utopia, companies pay their employees as much as possible in order to recruit the best labor. Don't you think "as much as possible" is more than the legally mandated minimum? I think this is an excellent move. I'm not going to criticize it as too little sacrifice from the execs (although do I think even using the word "sacrifice" inflates the exchange), and I'm not going to suggest that the hospital should pay all of its employees the Dallas median wage. I think it's an excellent demonstration that paying its lowliest employees a reasonable wage is not going to bankrupt a well run organization and an excellent demonstration that the multiple between lowest and highest paid employees has gotten out of hand.

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• Re:Perspective? (Score: 2) by RaffArundel on Tuesday June 17 2014, @09:54PM

  by RaffArundel (3108) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @09:54PM (#56666) Homepage

  Honestly, you can use "decimated" and its connotation of 10% mortality to make this seem like a huge sacrifice, but no one's going to die.

  Nah, that was a joke that fell flat. There was something FINALLY that really was 10% (I have to listen to sports fans throw that word around a lot) so my stream of thought went that way.

  Let's be even more clear - there is nothing altruistic about this move. They want to keep the employees so they don't have to spend even more money hiring and training new people. If that makes the workers' lives better I am all for it. The submitter clearly finds anything less than full blown class warfare unacceptable - so I got trolled by TFS.

  In the libertarian utopia, companies pay their employees as much as possible in order to recruit the best labor. Don't you think "as much as possible" is more than the legally mandated minimum?

  Do libertarians actually believe that? This is a sincere question - because I thought they believed in paying that mythical "market value" (re: artificially deflated due to lack of actual competition) for talent.

  I guess the problem with answering your question is - what is "possible"? I speculate if you are just in it for the profit, "as much as possible" is actually "as little as possible". Conversely, if you have a business and you actually want your employees to be dare I say happy, perhaps the bottom line profit isn't what matters and you judge your success on customer satisfaction. In which case, it would be stupid to pay them a cut-rate amount.

  In this case, the hospital decided that paying the person previously at the lowest rung $8 an hour was a bad thing. They could easily afford it, so they gave them a raise. I'd like to see more of that.

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