do wageslaves dream of electric wives, tamagotchi SOs Options

[Fortune]

[Demonseed Elite]

I could definitely see an idea like this working in a Shadowrun setting like Hong Kong. There are still quite a few wageslaves in HK who have traditional Chinese families where marriage (or at least the illusion of it) is socially important.

[SL James]

[PlatonicPimp]

Dude, in the 1950's your corp provided you with a mistress when you reached a high enough position. It was called a secretary. I doubt they'd have batted an Eyelash at providing you with your company wife. The part they might have had toruble with is if they fired you, they might not want your company wife back. Throw her in with the severance package, I guess.

[Butterblume]

I have a friend who is a secretary. A pretty good one.

A good secretary is often more valuable than the executive she is working for. The executive is replacable, she is not.
Maybe they didn't get that 50 years ago :D.

[Warmaster Lah]

Actually thats what I have heard in general Butterblume.

Now, Wagslave Signifigant Other might actually be a new type of job profession.

Sort of mix between old school Geisha, maid/nanny, courtesan, and professional vegas hustler.

[emo samurai]

Why aren't they paid as much, then? Why do they even hire comparatively useless people at millions of dollars a year?

[Butterblume]

That's a very good question. I don't know the answer.

[Fortune]

Because the world ain't always fair.

[Warmaster Lah]

[emo samurai]

Definitely, if the hierarchy of value is as you say.

What do veeps do, anyway, besides look sharp and fire people?

[Kagetenshi]

Depends on the company. For example, at a bank a vice president will generally do what a middle manager would do at any other company, but will have a title they can feel good about.

~J

[Warmaster Lah]

Well many of your High Exec types do hold degrees in Business or some such. But a lot of them get up to the high positions because of their Sharklike tendencies.

I was a part of the rat race and I saw what went on around me. Its the high charisma people and manipulators who make it to those types of positions. By playing politics, kissing butt, scheming, in addition to working hard. Its not really that type of charisma, in that all the other dog soldiers will like them, just that the higher ups will like them.

[PlatonicPimp]

In the fifties, it was generally understood that any woman in the workforce was trying to find a husband or a sugar daddy.

Yes, these days a good executive assistant is more valuable to the company. It was true in those days too, but the social implications were different. Back then, it was understood that a woman would quit when she married, so she was always viewwed as temporary. Today executive assistants can be of both genders, and it's assumed that everyone wants a career. However, the fact that women have lower salaries than equivalent men, and the whole glass ceiling thing, are residual effects of the previous era.

And executives do exactly what the name says: they execute tasks. What those tasks are is based on the companies goals, and how they do them is based on their personal incinations. The good ones find ways to improve how the ompan does business without sacrificing core values. The bad ones move numbers around to try and justify their salaries. The incompetent ones lose a great deal of money to stupid ideas. The good ones use their discretionary powers to do what needs to be done to make the company work. The bad ones use it to rule their corporate fifes with prejudice. The incompetent ones use it to fuck up everyone elses work as well as their own. My own corporate experience is limited, but in my estimation the good and bad ones are about evenly split, but the incompetent ones outnumber both by 10 to 1.

[Backgammon]

There is also a certain level of management where incompetant people get promoted to. You see, if you're incompetant, having you too close to The Workforce, the mass of employes actually doing work and making money for the corp, is bad. Because you're gonna drive down your team and hurt the business. But if you're a high level manager, the strategic decisions you make are critical and it's of course highly important that you know what you're doing.

So in between those two, there is a soft spot, where you can put incompetants. Not too high, not too low, just at the right spot where they can do absolutely nothing.

As to why they don't just fire these idiots, well, it's hard to fire someone. You need to justify it, you need severance packages, you need to hire someone new, train them, yaddy yadda. It's just easier to stick them in the squishy zone.

[SL James]

[Gyro the Greek S...]

[SL James]

For as awful as Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back was, I can't help but be reminded of this quote.

[hyzmarca]

Women don't make less money that equivalent men. that's pretty much a lie created from the blatant abuse of statistics.

What the statistics say is that the mean income of all women, in aggregate, is less than the mean income of all men, in aggregate.

Now, many will beat on this drum and pretend that it means that there is some sort of "wage gap". It does not. What it means, in general, is that women tend to take lower paying positions, often work less hours, and are more likely to choose to be a homemaker than a man is.

And there lie the problems.
In the issue of women tending to take lower paying positions, it is true that some jobs are stereotypically female, although gender stereotypes have less influence than they once did; it is also true that many women choose to take these stereotypical positions of their own choice.
Doctors are going to make more money than nurses, deal with it. There are only two ways to rectify the wage gap in these cases. Either every business must meet a gender quota and employ an equal number of males and females in every position, or there must be a single government-mandated flat wage for everyone regardless of their job. Thus, a nurse will earn just as much as a doctor who will earn just as much as a schoolteacher who will earn just as much as a janitor.
This may not be a bad idea, but no one has been willing to go through with it, yet.

The tendency for women to work less hours generally relates to family leave, specifically maternity leave and children's sick leave. Women are more likely to take family leave than men are and they've got more of it, as well. The solution here is to require that all leave be at full pay, although that really sucks for the employers.

The issue of some individuals choosing to be homemakers is a more difficult one. You see, homemakers work the equivalent of 80 hours a week, sometimes more. The tasks they do are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Yet, they get paid nothing. Often, they get paid less than nothing. And that is a problem of fairness.
The fair thing would be to have the government give 6-figure salaries to all registered homemakers. I fully endorse and support this solution.

[Kagetenshi]

[SL James]

[Kagetenshi]

Most people would call it that. They'd be wrong, but they'd call it that.

But why does it matter what it's called, since no nations have followed through with putting it in place?

~J

[nezumi]

[PlatonicPimp]

There is a problem with giving everyone a flat wage. Certain jobs are more neccessary to the functioning of society. Certain jobs require more qualifications that a potential employee would have to earn. Certain jobs require mor odious tasks. If the reward for all work was the same, you'd find less people willing to do ht e difficult but neccessary jobs in favor of the easy jobs. There needs to be a difference in reward to encourage the proper distribution of labor.

I'm not saying we have that. Far from it, in fact. I think our society prides itself on it's ability to support useless people in luxury, as evidenced by the pay scale of sports stars, entertainers and those "Squishy" executives.

[Kagetenshi]