Contagious sustainability via corporate retention strategies
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2021 12:39 pm
FIRE is contagious to individuals with the right combination of personality plus income potential, due to the radical improvement in lifestyle that is possible while still working within the established systems of our society and without any real pushback from those in power. But to get a whole sustainable society to become contagious, must it offer a radical improvement to our current systems in the eyes of "normal" people? The benefits of ERE are enough to infect a few physicists and engineers, but how should it mutate to get r0 > 1 for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?
The ERE book talks of being "locked in" at a relatively young age to the American way of life, burdened with student loan and mortgage debt, trained for a very specific career path, etc. Capitalism, our education system, our political system, etc. have some nice tricks to keep these systems in place. A society could borrow these tricks and adapt them to a more sustainable way of life.
A billionaire could create a village from scratch in a country with lax regulations, make it as nearly closed loop as possible, scout out a mix of people to populate it, and financially incentivize it enough (e.g. cancellation of debt, free housing) to get them to go all in: leave their old life entirely behind, downgrade a lot of technology, take compulsory courses to learn how to live in said society, etc. Just throw money at the problem. The financial incentives could essentially lock them in by forcing anyone who walks away to pay it all back. But obviously very few if any wealthy people would want to try something like this, even as an experiment.
What corporations are trying, however, is to merge work and life while providing so-called work/life balance. This is kinda sorta possible in that allowing remote work can save a lot of commuting time, but at the same time causes work to "invade" home more easily - e.g. hopping on a Zoom call at an hour that you wouldn't have to be working, since you started your 8 hour shift early by not commuting. For a while before Covid there was the strategy of making work more comfortable with perks like free food and nap pods, which feels nice while you're at work but effectively gets people to stay at work longer. Extrapolating these trends leads to the line between work and life being completely blurred - much like in ERE / advanced Wheaton levels, except it's the Evil Corporation version!
So what am I getting at? Well if you can't provide something completely different than the corporate world to out-compete them, you have to do something which is similar but somehow more appealing from the average employee's perspective. People want to be employed with satisfying work. They need that structure and aren't going to abandon it for ERE en masse. Nowadays, they are increasingly motivated to look for a good "work/life balance," which makes things interesting...
We know that poor work conditions are likely to cause high turnover regardless of pay. If I picture some job retention model with a few variable inputs, and I set satisfaction to 0%, I know I could crank up pay to 100% and still get poor employee retention. What if I flip it - satisfaction to 100% and pay to 0%? This is the realm of retired people continuing to work jobs they love, or serious hobbyists (in some productive hobby) who don't need to make money from it. These people with no pay are much less likely to "quit" than the people with the best paying (but most horrible) jobs in the world! If you can employ people with very satisfying work, while removing all the horrible aspects of being locked into a job, and while satisfying their basic needs, they're yours for the taking. They will however need some of their stability and comfort they're used to, even if "normal" jobs aren't very stable once a recession hits (some marketing may be needed).
Therefore, by providing more satisfaction with less pay, one may have a chance to compete in this crazy job market and snatch up those who are dissatisfied with the traditional way corporations work. Once on board, the employees can be put to work on sustainable solutions to cancel out some of the harm done by the current corporate world. Like the billionaire example above, the "lock-in" will have to be kept in mind - the lifestyle benefits must be so good that once you convert, you're never converting back, and will probably try to convert others in order for the trend to spread.
So how would the average person be willing to take a big pay cut in the hopes for a more satisfying job? Well the trick is we would supply them with a somewhat ERE lifestyle as part of their "total compensation" or corporate amenities or whatever you want to call it. Maybe efficient housing could be provided which could maybe get around some housing regulations by being part of the corporate campus as "2nd offices" that family members and friends are allowed into at any time. No need for a car; just walk a short ways to the building you work in. Cooked meals are provided, not from a catering service, but from employees who must follow a budget-friendly recipe list. An organic farm on campus provides most ingredients; it's staffed by some full-time employees but other employees can work it part time or just tend their own garden in their free time. Maintenance, health services, security, etc. - all internal employees, no outsourcing. Many services provided on campus to employees for free, such as a fitness center and repair shops, and some goods manufactured on site could be sold to employees at cost. This could be a non-profit corp, or a for-profit with profit-sharing, or maybe something else entirely? And of course employees would have the flexibility to set their own schedules and to easily jump into other career paths to fit their interests.
Corporate propaganda would be totally focused on these priceless perks and selling you on the lifestyle where work doesn't feel like work. Due to the efficiency of what is provided by all these perks, it will cost the corporation say $10k per employee per year but feel like $50k per year based on the way people typically spend money. So the corp may only pay someone $20k per year as salary, but "think of it as more like $70k with all these perks!" while it only costs the corp $30k total. Key to the corporate culture will be focusing on quality of life, not your salary. Plus, if the living on campus thing could work, everyone would be in the same happy bubble and the outsiders doing things the old way would be seen as the crazies who are wasting their lives and killing themselves chasing the dollar signs.
I guess I am inventing a commune that runs itself as a corporation (at least it would appeal more to those afraid of Communism)? Plus with the capability to provide a wide variety of goods and services in the same location. I don't know... is there anything to this?
The ERE book talks of being "locked in" at a relatively young age to the American way of life, burdened with student loan and mortgage debt, trained for a very specific career path, etc. Capitalism, our education system, our political system, etc. have some nice tricks to keep these systems in place. A society could borrow these tricks and adapt them to a more sustainable way of life.
A billionaire could create a village from scratch in a country with lax regulations, make it as nearly closed loop as possible, scout out a mix of people to populate it, and financially incentivize it enough (e.g. cancellation of debt, free housing) to get them to go all in: leave their old life entirely behind, downgrade a lot of technology, take compulsory courses to learn how to live in said society, etc. Just throw money at the problem. The financial incentives could essentially lock them in by forcing anyone who walks away to pay it all back. But obviously very few if any wealthy people would want to try something like this, even as an experiment.
What corporations are trying, however, is to merge work and life while providing so-called work/life balance. This is kinda sorta possible in that allowing remote work can save a lot of commuting time, but at the same time causes work to "invade" home more easily - e.g. hopping on a Zoom call at an hour that you wouldn't have to be working, since you started your 8 hour shift early by not commuting. For a while before Covid there was the strategy of making work more comfortable with perks like free food and nap pods, which feels nice while you're at work but effectively gets people to stay at work longer. Extrapolating these trends leads to the line between work and life being completely blurred - much like in ERE / advanced Wheaton levels, except it's the Evil Corporation version!
So what am I getting at? Well if you can't provide something completely different than the corporate world to out-compete them, you have to do something which is similar but somehow more appealing from the average employee's perspective. People want to be employed with satisfying work. They need that structure and aren't going to abandon it for ERE en masse. Nowadays, they are increasingly motivated to look for a good "work/life balance," which makes things interesting...
We know that poor work conditions are likely to cause high turnover regardless of pay. If I picture some job retention model with a few variable inputs, and I set satisfaction to 0%, I know I could crank up pay to 100% and still get poor employee retention. What if I flip it - satisfaction to 100% and pay to 0%? This is the realm of retired people continuing to work jobs they love, or serious hobbyists (in some productive hobby) who don't need to make money from it. These people with no pay are much less likely to "quit" than the people with the best paying (but most horrible) jobs in the world! If you can employ people with very satisfying work, while removing all the horrible aspects of being locked into a job, and while satisfying their basic needs, they're yours for the taking. They will however need some of their stability and comfort they're used to, even if "normal" jobs aren't very stable once a recession hits (some marketing may be needed).
Therefore, by providing more satisfaction with less pay, one may have a chance to compete in this crazy job market and snatch up those who are dissatisfied with the traditional way corporations work. Once on board, the employees can be put to work on sustainable solutions to cancel out some of the harm done by the current corporate world. Like the billionaire example above, the "lock-in" will have to be kept in mind - the lifestyle benefits must be so good that once you convert, you're never converting back, and will probably try to convert others in order for the trend to spread.
So how would the average person be willing to take a big pay cut in the hopes for a more satisfying job? Well the trick is we would supply them with a somewhat ERE lifestyle as part of their "total compensation" or corporate amenities or whatever you want to call it. Maybe efficient housing could be provided which could maybe get around some housing regulations by being part of the corporate campus as "2nd offices" that family members and friends are allowed into at any time. No need for a car; just walk a short ways to the building you work in. Cooked meals are provided, not from a catering service, but from employees who must follow a budget-friendly recipe list. An organic farm on campus provides most ingredients; it's staffed by some full-time employees but other employees can work it part time or just tend their own garden in their free time. Maintenance, health services, security, etc. - all internal employees, no outsourcing. Many services provided on campus to employees for free, such as a fitness center and repair shops, and some goods manufactured on site could be sold to employees at cost. This could be a non-profit corp, or a for-profit with profit-sharing, or maybe something else entirely? And of course employees would have the flexibility to set their own schedules and to easily jump into other career paths to fit their interests.
Corporate propaganda would be totally focused on these priceless perks and selling you on the lifestyle where work doesn't feel like work. Due to the efficiency of what is provided by all these perks, it will cost the corporation say $10k per employee per year but feel like $50k per year based on the way people typically spend money. So the corp may only pay someone $20k per year as salary, but "think of it as more like $70k with all these perks!" while it only costs the corp $30k total. Key to the corporate culture will be focusing on quality of life, not your salary. Plus, if the living on campus thing could work, everyone would be in the same happy bubble and the outsiders doing things the old way would be seen as the crazies who are wasting their lives and killing themselves chasing the dollar signs.
I guess I am inventing a commune that runs itself as a corporation (at least it would appeal more to those afraid of Communism)? Plus with the capability to provide a wide variety of goods and services in the same location. I don't know... is there anything to this?