Is it good employer strategy to pay my employees just enough so that they can’t save money, so that they can never walk away from the job?

Like, there is a threshold where if they are able to save X per month, they will eventually use that against you and quit at an inopportune time?

And if that threshold falls below state mandated minimum wage, what steps can be taken to mitigate this?

  • Em Adespoton
    3·
    3 months ago

    To me it sounds more like they have a dying business and want to hide this fact from the employees for as long as possible.

    I worked for one of these once. And one of my skills is in retaining co-workers. Eventually we ended up with a bad credit rating, nobody would invest in the company, and the company couldn’t afford to keep the lights on AND pay its debts. It made/sold a great product that the market wanted, but some bad years racked up bad debt that the owners couldn’t get out from under.

    So, eventually those of us who were left just wrote our own pink slips, got the owner to sign them, and nobody went back to work the next day. Owner sold off everything of value to cover as much debt as possible and declared bankruptcy.

    Then they partnered with someone else and started a new debt-free company and hired back a lot of the same employees (it WAS a fun place to work when we weren’t having to worry about if we were going to be paid that month).

    I went somewhere else instead, where my starting wage was 3x what I’d been getting at the other place, with options for bonuses and raises.