

Australian Gas Industry Wants to Curb Pay as Cooks Earn $325k - applecore
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-06/australian-gas-industry-wants-to-curb-pay-as-cooks-earn-325-000.html

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greenyoda
It makes perfect sense that you'd need to pay somebody lots of money to get
them to work on an offshore drilling platform:

\- You're stuck there with basically nothing to do but work for long periods
of time. Can't go visit your girlfriend, etc.

\- The work is dangerous, and you could get injured or killed.

\- There are probably not too many people who have the necessary skills and
experience to do the work safely, which puts the employees at a market
advantage. Also, you can't outsource the work by sending the offshore rig to a
country where labor is cheaper. It's got to be located on top of the gas field
that you own.

I'd guess that whoever posted this article wanted to draw a parallel with
Silicon Valley, where CEOs were colluding to drive down costs via an anti-
poaching cartel because they thought the cost of labor was "too high".

For reference, A$400,000 is equivalent to US$371,600. There's no inherent
reason why average developer salaries couldn't get that high if the
combination of supply and demand were right. As long as employees' work brings
in more revenue to the company than the cost of the employees, employing them
would be profitable for the company (although maybe the poor CEOs might have
to downsize to smaller yachts and aircraft since there would be less left over
for them).

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jonknee
By that logic there are tons of other careers that should involve very high
salaries: long haul trucker, anything on a cruise ship, Antarctic researcher,
stationed on a military submarine, forest firefighter, commercial fisherman,
etc etc etc. By and large oil platform gigs pay a lot because oil companies
have an enormous amount of resources and no one wants to do the work because
they're passionate or patriotic.

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grej
Highlighting a so-called skills shortage and making the case for government
intervention on behalf of the corporations to help reduce "costs" (how much
they pay their employees).

Of course the great irony is that the same corporations calling for government
intervention to help restrict pay would be screaming bloody murder if the
government acted to curtail their profit margins in any way.

~~~
atomicfiredoll
Or, perhaps, the wages of the companies C.E.O.

~~~
grej
indeed

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Lagged2Death
You used to hear this sort of thing about UAW employees all the time, but it
was always exaggerated. The corporate PR people would extrapolate a week of
exceptional overtime pay to a whole year, and/or they'd include benefits and
payroll taxes in the dollar figures, for example.

So I have no facts to add but I'm skeptical anyway.

I mean, sign me up, I'll do your laundry for A$324,000, OK? No? Yeah, didn't
think so.

