Mandatory Wage Policy (9/19)
•
by tsewell
It's been a few weeks now since I started manually paying people in order to avoid paying the excessive Work Tax. While it hasn't been perfect, things have gone well enough that I am not only going to continue doing so, I am going to make it mandatory if you want to work for me.
The truth of the matter is that the only way to make a profit with today's market conditions is to bypass the Work Tax. At this moment, salaries are over 85cc and most commodities are either at or below the break even point.
I try to stay abreast of the current Job Market salary, attempting to pay the equivalent of two or three cc more than the highest job offer. In fact, tonight when I pay out wages, I will be increasing employee take home pay to 77cc total, which would equal a gross pay of 88.5cc. If you have questions regarding the wage policy, please refer to the first article.
If you want to ask questions or otherwise communicate with me, please feel free to contact me.
If for some reason this is unacceptable to you, for whatever reason, that is OK. If you feel you need to look elsewhere for employment, there are no hard feelings. You gotta do what you gotta do.
Facebook
Twitter
Discord
Comments
i still want to know how many employees you have!
cuse if you hire more than a few hundred a day that would be a lot of work!
[removed]
Ooops I was originally at just over 40, now I'm down to 33. I guess some people didn't like only getting paid twice a week, or maybe they thought high taxes are a good thing.
No one that knows better pays much work tax. The eUS work tax is strictly there to turn younger players away from the eUS to maintain status quo and power of the oligarchy.
So thats why my visa was rejected. 🙁 oor could be eNigeria is hostile either of those.
Great work! \o/
The disparity between tax on normal business and no tax on "donations" is possibly the most ridiculous game mechanic in a game with a lot of issues. You are doing the only thing that can be done to work around it. It's hugely inconvenient, creates a lot of busy work, and requires the employee to trust that they will be paid. High taxes favor communes, which favor established organizations and groups of players who know each other outside the game. It's so stupid I'm not sure why I'm still here to be writing this comment, to be honest. If I want corruption favoring certain people I can get that in real life. Gaming is supposed to be an escape. I'll probably either be leaving the eUSA or the game altogether.
"The truth of the matter is that the only way to make a profit with today's market conditions is to bypass the Work Tax."
That is factually inaccurate. Running inefficient companies is your own mistake. It is a simple fact that it is possible to make a profit with the current conditions.
Factually inaccurate? Really? Time for Math class, I think.
HRM is currently .17cc/HRM. Current job market salary is 85cc/shift. With full bonuses, a single worker at Q5 Quarry creates 500 HRM/shift. 85cc/500HRM equals .17cc/HRM. Therefore, it doesn't matter whether you buy your raw materials on the market, or manufacture them yourself, it's the same cost. The 12000 HRM it takes to make a Q5 house costs 2040cc.
With full bonuses, it takes 30 shifts to produce a Q5 house. 85cc/shift * 30 shifts equals 2550cc.
Adding the two costs together, it takes 4590cc to produce a house. Accurate enough?
So right now, a Q5 house is selling for 4540 on the market. Uh oh, there already seems to be a problem, huh? Wait, wait wait, there is also the VAT to consider, Granted it is only 1%, but that is deducted from your selling price. When you factor in the VAT, you end up only getting only get 4495.6cc for each sale.
4495.6cc/received - 4590cc/spent gives you a profit of -95.4cc. (Notice the negative sign there)
I have a spreadsheet that automatically calculates these figures for each quality level of house. Let's look at the results, shall we?
Q LEVEL / Cost to make / Selling Price / After VAT / Profit
Q1 / 382.5cc / 375cc / 371.25cc / -11.5cc
Q2 / 765cc / 777cc / 769.23cc / 4.23cc
Q3 / 1530cc / 1428cc / 1413.72cc / -116.28cc
Q4 / 3060cc / 2735cc / 2707.65cc / -352.35cc
Q5 / 4590cc / 4540cc / 4494.6cc / -95.4cc
These numbers are facts, and nothing you can do or not do changes them. Running a company efficiently? Maybe you are talking about manager work, I dunno. I stay away from the food and weapons markets for just this reason, Manager work unbalances conditions. Someone like me who has many companies can undercut the competition, by trading personal energy for decreased salary costs. Not a fair playing field.
Saying that you're not making a profit because you feel that the optimal approach creates an "unfair playing field" is overly idealistic. Play the game mechanics. The game mechanics allow profit at current tax rates. Refusing to act in a way that makes said profit is your own choice.
>excessive
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Especially given that word is you got your companies from the old MI orgs, but that's none of my business.
Sigh, still nursing this grudge, Pfeiffer? Yes, it's true I still have two Q7 weapons factories from the MI days. However, out of the 156 companies that I own, I paid in full for 154 of them, including four of six Q7 weapons companies.
MI companies were initially attached to organizations. Unfortunately, when the admins did away with orgs, we had to do something with those companies. We tried to get the eGovernment to designate our orgs as national orgs, but it was to busy with the hostile takeover of the eUSMilitary to get around to doing that. We were forced to donate them to higher ranked members of the unit.
It was easy to shift control of companies and was done quite often. Wait until server reset so there were fewer active players. Set the price low, but not low enough to be on the first few pages of the market. Donate that amount of gold to the intended owner, and let them buy the company. The old owner would donate the gold received back to the MI. We did it all the time.
Then came two changes that threw a wrench in the process. The admins initiated the 10G donation limit, and restricted the selling price of companies to 90% of actual cost. The method of switching ownership of companies disappeared.
When I decided to taper off my participation in the MI, I was able to give back the RM companies and the lower quality companies I was in possession of. It was a pain donating 10G a day for weeks on end, but we did it. But the selling price for a Q7 Weaps company is 1107G minimum, which made this method of reimbursement prohibitive.
I have never heard any complaints or criticism from anyone involved with the eUSMilitary about the way MI assets were administered during my tenure.
The sad part is that I only sell houses, specifically Q5 houses. As stated above, I don't participate in the Weaps or Food markets because Manager work complicates things, I use one of my Weaps companies to supply my own weapons needs, and the other five sit there unused.