[Closed] Living wage in bike industry

I don't think it. My point is more that with the additional skills learned through frame buildign and basic machining you can also do other work whilst still trying to do other work you love. Maybe you endup repairing some machinerry for a local bussiness fora week with your skills, but that helps to pay for a few more days working on frame to exibit, or help buy that fixture e.t.c.

There's a concept in economics that the value of a product (or a persons labor in this case) can be made up of more than just financial attributes which explains why similar items can cost different amounts.

So in the case of a custom frame builder, you could compare him to a welder. He may well earn less than a welder, but he regains that in job satisfaction. similarly a welder working for a charity drilling water wells in Africa will earn less than a welder working in the Oil and Gas industry*, similarly they earn less than their colleague working in the same job in Iraq as they earn 'danger money'.

Same reason an On-One CNC stem is £20 and Thompson is £50. Same weight, same safety testing, different brand, and the branding has value.

*same for everyone in that industry, there are some people who perceive it as morally wrong as an industry on environmental grounds. I'm no better an engineer than one any other industry, but I earn more because fewer people want to work here.

It's like any industry, there's roles and positions for people of all levels, at the top end I imagine the CEO's are earning salaries on a par with companies of similar sizes in any other industry, if they're not I'd query their fitness to be CEO's!

That's an interesting argument. How do you know someone's a good CEO? Because they're earning lots of money. Why are they earning lots of money? Because they're a good CEO!

It's that kind of emperor's new clothes argument that leads to CEOs earning 50x or 100x the average worker's salary.

Perhaps they have capital at risk on which they make a return?

True, but it comes back to that horrible interview question 'what value can you add to the company'. If youre a good manager or CEO then its probbably a lot, you could hire Dave from the pub for £20k, he'd probably not ruin the company, might not grow either though, and you could save say £100k a year in wages. Or you could hire the guy who wants £120k and has a track reckord of adding 100x that in value to the companies he has managed. There might be hundreds of people who could do the job well, but theres only ever going to be a few who can do it really well and have a track record of doing it well, and thats why they can earn the big money because on a fundamental level they really are worth it even if they dont appear to do much to earn it.

The problem with that argument is that the way they get a track record is by being a highly paid CEO - there's no control group of CEOs who aren't highly paid to compare with.

I'm not particularly talking about the bike industry here, by the way - despite the dinghy ownership above, I still think there aren't any bike industry CEOs earning anywhere near as much as a bank CEO.

I still think there aren't any bike industry CEOs earning anywhere near as much as a bank CEO.

The problem with that argument is that the way they get a track record is by being a highly paid CEO - there's no control group of CEOs who aren't highly paid to compare with.

But how are they judged? Are there some low-paid CEOs out there with demonstrably worse sales, revenue and profits? At least with the banks, no - it's possible to run a bank so badly that you almost crash an entire economy, and still walk away with a multi-million pound payout.

And is it really true that running a company is much, much harder than running a large school, council or country? If it isn't, then why are CEO paid so much more than those leaders?

jimjam - Member
...I think a lot of people would like to paint a picture of the bike industry being populated almost exclusively by selfless volunteers, in it purely for the love, but you don't have to go very far up the ladder to see people who are multi millionaires.

There is a surefire way of making a small fortune in the bike industry.

But before I get to it, remember it's the low wages paid to bike shop staff that started this thread. I'm sure it would make an interesting study for a HR research thesis "How to pay peanuts and not get monkeys".

But yes, the small fortune.

First you do a detailed business plan..

Then find the perfect location.

Order your stock.

Recruit a mechanic - consult manual and insist a beard is grown for cred points (there's steroid creams if it's a lady mechanic) and insist they commute 30 miles each day on a singlespeed.

Expect trade to not conform to your business plan for a year or two. You'll probably have to discount a lot of the dud stock the bike reps offloaded onto the confident newby. "This will sell in days" only they forget to add "..at half cost price".

And most important, start with a large fortune.

CEOs get judged by their directors, shareholders and analysts by the metrics of their companies that are attributable to their leadership: sales, revenue, profits...not by their remuneration.

Scant little evidence that this judging actually changes anything, very few CEOs are fired for poor results and those that are just get another job as a CEO. It's very much a closed shop where head you win, tails you win.

epicyclo - Member
As far as employee value for wages is concerned, bike workers are it IMO.

As a care worker, I agree completely.
We usually have slightly lower wages, but that's fine, because looking after bikes is far, far more important than looking after people.

Scant little evidence that this judging actually changes anything, very few CEOs are fired for poor results and those that are just get another job as a CEO. It's very much a closed shop where head you win, tails you win.

Really? Is the football or commerce?

Rusty Spanner - Member
"As far as employee value for wages is concerned, bike workers are it IMO."
As a care worker, I agree completely.

Sorry, you're right.

However I understandably thought that this govt's policy had totally managed to eradicate the need for carers.
🙂

Not at all.

I can assure you that our selfish, greed obsessed culture is abandoning those in need in ever greater numbers.
🙂

But of course, people don't really matter.
It's sticking to the right ideology that's important.

I work full time as a mechanic for a not-for-profit bike shop. We aim mostly for people without much money. Any money we make goes towards working with people with NO money at all, like refugees and homeless people. Consequently, we don't make a huge amount of money! But we employ quite a few folk, at good wages (more than the living wage) and we run co-operativly so we have no bosses. We probably define the high-value, low cost bike shop employee stereotype! But I get more than when I was a care worker (which is so wrong) and I have low stress and high job satisfaction. I feel safer now than when I was a care worker, as my job is in my hands. I no longer fear redundancy, or any of the awful things that can happen to the low wage worker.

I don't care about the bike industry. I'm sure some buggers are making loads of money, but I know that in my little corner of it, there is a way to get on in life and have a wholesome, safe job, that means I don't fear being able to pay my rent. I'll never be rich. But that's ok for me.

mansonsoul - thank goodness for people like you

I wrote a response to bencooper but it may have been deleted for being too tedious. the short version: there are loads of metrics used to assess the performance of CEOs (of any significance). it's surely not surprising that capitalists put a lot of effort into capitalism?

edit: and obviously the amount someone gets paid has only a tangential relationship to how hard their job is, we all know that. otherwise social workers would get paid six times more than footballers.