alt Hacker NewsJust curious, why would you expect him to be paid less? I know historically pay is bad for prisoners, but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same? I could potentially see paying someone less if they were coming in with much less experience than what's usually hired for in the role, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
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You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.
>but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
Why would the salaries all bump up to big American city salaries instead of resting somewhere in the lowest range worldwide? If we purely judge work completed.
If you're a remote worker your competition is the world not people in the major city the company is based in.
I speculate: Supply and demand. He doesn't have many options, so doesn't have leverage in negotiating.
Well that’s basically what I’m wondering. Is this a normal employment arrangement - subject to same state payroll tax, labor laws, employee rights, etc - with the additional detail that he resides in prison? Or does the employer need to go through some gateway enforced by the prison with maximum compensation or other restrictions?
But otherwise, in terms of why he’d default to being paid less… yes, what the other commenter said: supply and demand, aka leverage. Turso could choose to be a good citizen and pay him the same as any other employee, but that’s subject to all the questions I posed above, regarding the structural requirements placed on them as the employer.
I assume he doesn't have to pay rent while in prison and gets free meals, so unless they take some of his income, he might actually be doing pretty good.
I guess if you look at pay as solely a result of 'work done' you'd come to this conclusion, and it should work this way, but really its got more to do with the relationship between employer and employee. A person in prison has a very different legal status than someone who doesnt and they do tend to get paid less.
Because the level of payment almost always depends on the level of competition for a particular person's work. When you're in prison, there's practically no competition for your work. So it's expected that he'll be paid much less.
> but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
He should, but the median salary of engineers in Taiwan is like, 40,000 USD, vs SF which is 160,000 USD. Or London, if one wants to argue something about English language ability or whatever, is 80,000 USD. Literally half that of SF.
Salaries aren't determined by labor value, they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC. All correlations are used as excuses, when the core, real, reason always comes down to, employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
This annoyed me enough that I started a co-op about it, and we're doing pretty well. I'm still annoyed though. Apparently glommer, the CEO, pays him "full salary" (market rate?), which makes them a good person, but a bad capitalist. They could easily pay basically a slave wage and leverage this dude's ingrained passion for programming to get huge output for almost nothing - that's what the rest of the industry merrily does.
Because US constitution forbids slavery except as a punishment. A lot of prisoners doing labour right now are compensated literally pennies.
The 13th amendment specifically allows slavery of prisoners.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply the author isn’t paid fairly by Turso. A few posts down, the CEO of Turso asserts that they do pay fairly. The OP in this thread might reasonably wonder about this because several states do in fact use prisoners as unpaid slave labor.