The disabled bring joy and happiness to their caregivers ...

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Oh? If this is the case, then everybody who works there should get paid less than they would elsewhere. Should the doctors, nurses, therapists, cooks and janitors also work for substandard wages? Others in this thread have commented on the fact that nonprofits often DO underpay staff, and therefore have a hard time getting or keeping competent people. The same is true for upper management positions. If you want good people, you have to pay them what someone else would.


True. The fact that there are no shareholders to pay doesn't change the fact that employees still have to make a living. Someone with the ability to run a $100,000,000 company will want to be compensated in line with his ability.


See above - paid commensurate to their abilities. If the pay is reasonable for someone at that level in the private sector, I don't understand your objection.


Agreed. And that is why I put a "mad" emoticon after my comment about paying for their college students' expenses with company money. Such things should be illegal, and carry harsh penalties.



Whether the money comes from the government or private donations is rather immaterial, as far as I can see. A nonprofit has to compete for "talent" with the private sector. While some individuals may be willing to work for less than they can make elsewhere for humanitarian reasons, it just doesn't work that way most of the time.

They have spent over 30 years building this company from the ground up. They may be "too big to fail" at this point, but along the way they could have gone under at any time. If they fail to provide acceptable levels of service, if a competitor underbids them, if they have a financial scandal - their contracts could easily not be renewed. Just because they got some contracts at the beginning doesn't mean there haven't been risks along the way, and those risks aren't much different for the founder of any company - for profit or nonprofit.

I've seen a scandle or two involving local non profits. One of them involved a downtown homeless shelter that was doing well donation-wise then experienced a donation slow down. Board members were receiving six digit annual salaries when the charity could not afford to pay it's electric bill. Board members were called out on the ten o'clock news and the non profit changed it's policy.

It's true that with charities, the board members are highly paid but the charity itself is not providing services to recepients at a cost to them. This classifies them as non profit.

I am discussing executive level compensation.



This is the case because our culture no longer values service for the sake of service. Careers are increasingly focused on maximizing compensation. A university education is no longer about the acquisition of knowledge but about creating careers that maximize wealth.




This is true only when upper level management considers their compensation the most important measure of their value to society.



You can't even compare 100 million profit to 100 million non profit. The mechanisms for generating that revenue are not the same. The risks are not the same. The difficulties in achieving those levels are not the same. The methodologies for running the organizations are not the same.





Again, this holds only when the ONLY value of an activity is it's monetary measure. Is this the ONLY way we measure value added to this society?




A government funded program should maximize the benefit to the taxpayer. The taxpayer has no choice but to fund government programs. Private donations are a personal choice. If I don't like the amount an executive is paid at a non-profit, I simply refuse to donate. This choice to not fund the Levy brothers is removed from the equation. This is an important market force on the operations of non-profits that has been removed because the Levy brothers don't have to compete with other non-profits for limited donations.



Which is precisely the point. Our culture increasingly values remuneration above all else. Non-profits have to compete with profitable ventures because businesses assume everyone has a price and they will pay that price if they can. I think it unlikely that we lose nothing for this.




You are suggesting that because they simply exist today they did nothing of questionable ethics along the way. It is just as logical to say they have always operated unethically. I cannot characterize how they arrived at their current status one way or the other. I am only concerned with the attitude that accumulation of wealth is the best metric of a person's value. This attitude makes some sense in a for profit entity since wealth is the reason for such an entities existence. The false generalization is that since value is measured by monetary wealth in business, that value should be measured by monetary wealth in all other human endeavors. There are no first principle justifications for such a stance. It is simply adopted as social norm in this current society.

Interestingly, there is research in evolutionary science suggesting that altruism, contrary to intuition, actually confers a survival advantage as opposed to a unary focus on self interest, even when the situation has little to no possibility of reciprocity. The measuring of value solely on the basis of monetary gain induces an increasing focus on self interest. Yet it is now 'common sense' to measure success in terms of dollars.

And I am pointing out that others in the organization expect to be paid something at least close to what they would make elsewhere. You have not put forth an argument about why executive level employees should do otherwise.


When did our culture value service for the sake of service?



I disagree. This is true when the individual wants to provide the best he can for his family.



Again, I disagree. Many high-level executives, after retiring from the for-profit sector, serve in non-profit positions and, using the same techniques they used in the corporate world, achieve great things for the organization(s) they serve. While you are correct that the income stream is generated differently, at that level, good management is good management. I feel quite confident that, should they choose to do so, either of these men (absent fraud allegations or other scandals) would be welcomed with open arms at any number of private sector companies.


*

And, since you are simply repeating the same argument you made previously, I will make the same rebuttal:

This is true when the individual wants to provide the best he can for his family.





I do see your point here. It doesn't, however, change the fact that they can simply go elsewhere, if the pay at the nonprofit doesn't match what they can make elsewhere.



Which is precisely the point. Our culture increasingly values remuneration above all else. Non-profits have to compete with profitable ventures because businesses assume everyone has a price and they will pay that price if they can. I think it unlikely that we lose nothing for this.[/quote]

It's business's fault for paying people what the business thinks they are worth? Or it's the person's fault for wanting that pay? Excuse me - I don't think I'm following you here.




I have said nothing about their ethics, one way or the other. The Levy brothers may, in fact, be scum of the earth - I don't know and, for the purposes of this discussion, I don't care. They have spent 30 + years building a business. One which does serve the public interest - as seen by the State of New York, anyway. They could have, instead, built a company which served only their interests. Should they be penalized for serving the public by means of a salary cap?

You seem to be arguing that anyone who enters into business with the government as their main client should forgo obtaining personal compensation matching their personal abilities. Such altruism is laudable, but you have failed to provide support for the idea that it should be a prerequisite for working at a non-profit.



Altruistic behavior can be its own reward - absolutely! But, one cannot neglect one's own needs entirely without suffering some sort of harm eventually. Giving food to the homeless shelter downtown is a good thing - but you can't just sign over your entire paycheck every week, can you?

Even if I accept your argument that executives in such a company should be paid less than they would be in the private sector, it is still a good way to benchmark whether they are being compensated fairly. If such a position would pay $100,000/year, they are grossly overpaid. If it would normally pay $10,000,000, however, it would be difficult to argue that 1/10th of that is unreasonable.


* edited to correct a bad quote tag

Last edited by another_1 on 03 Aug 2011, 9:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The problem with these conversations is that there are just too many directions and side paths to take. So I'll highlight one thing in response and hopefully you can accept that you made other statements that could just as easily have been expanded on.

Building a business is intrinsically a profit generating exercise. If they were doing so for 30+ years then what was the point of doing it as a non-profit?

This is why the health care industry is in such disarray financially. People want $50,000 a year to empty a bedpan and that's just impossible. The money is not there.

The mindset that allows people to provide quality care but only if the price is right must be abandoned because it's bankrupting the healthcare industry. It's bankrupting medicare. The need to care for people is a calling that should be answered by one's soul, not their bank account.

There is a lot more to it than just emptying a bedpan. I think that's one of the problems...that care for the disabled is just these trivial tasks that don't need much compensation. And so you wind up with a lot of workers willing to do only trivial tasks, because that's all they're paid for.



I absolutely disagree. I don't think overcompensation is a problem in healthcare. If healthcare (of which caring for disabled is a subset) is considered something that people should just be willing to do for survival money and warm fuzzies, then you have a small number of people willing to do that and the rest of the employees are just people who couldn't get a job anywhere else

I agree, wholeheartedly, with your first sentence. I was rather dreading the length our posts would reach if we continued going point-by-point! I'm simultaneously glad and disappointed that you've decided we are at an impasse - I have little doubt you could have responded to most of my objections. I hope you will do me the same courtesy in return - neither of our positions on this is immune to challenge.

Perhaps they chose to build a non-profit to benefit the community? One's desire to personally benefit, and the wish to benefit others do not need to be mutually exclusive.

Shall we call a truce, then? I expect that we could argue this for days, finding new areas on which to agree and others where we do not, but I don't see where that would be beneficial.

People gotta eat, no matter how valuable they feel their work is. And imagine you have kids, and like most parents, want the best for them. You may not have the luxury of working for a pittance because it's the right thing to do - your kids need food, clothing, a place to stay, an education, etc and they depend on your wages to get that.

Besides, if the US government stopped spending a ridiculous amount on the military, they'd have plenty to spend on improving people's lives. Honestly, WW2 is over, you don't need to stay mobilized forever. That's the real drain on government money, not your woefully-underfunded weaksauce Medicaid.

Heh. I'm not sure I see an impasse. But I agree we would go in circles for days. I suspect there are some differences in definition that are interfering with communication.

Truce implies a cessation of conflict. I sensed no hostility., so how about just sharing a virtual beer?

I am not talking about healthcare for the disabled, I am talking about healthcare in general. Everyone involved in healthcare thinks they should have huge salaries just for providing care, from the CNAs on up and it's bankrupting the system! Medicaid or medicare either one can't afford to pay what they want, so what do doctors do? They dump medicaid, not medicare so much and medicaid patients cannot find doctors and doctors make plenty of money, just not enough to satisfy themselves. In other words, doctors can be greedy and that's a real shame because it's the patients who suffer. Doctors, RNs and LPNs all make enough money to live comfortably but they always want more at the sake of patient care.

On a more personal note, my disabled Aunt who is by no means rich had to pay $2000 out of her own pocket for a caregiver to accompany her on a treatment related trip and by all accounts the care was not very good. The caregiver wasn't even trained properly and was in a hurry to get back home. She even talked my Aunt into taking an earlier flight because she could not wait to get back home and it cost my Aunt another $200 for that, again, out of her own pocket. My Aunt is elderly and her retirement was spent because of her Parkinson's complications so $2000 is a lot to her and to top it off, the caregiver was unprofessional. It's ridiculous. A change in philosophy and ethos is needed. It should never be about the money in the healthcare industry. That's a major conflict of interest!

Even in agreeing, still we disagree!

I'd say that, rather than a difference in definitions, we are simply arguing from different areas of focus. You seem to be arguing the philosophical/ethical position, while I am taking a more pragmatic approach to the issue.

No hostility whatsoever. Just trying to balance things by providing an alternate point of view.

*clink* Ahhhhhhhhh!! !! !! !! ! Nothing like a cold beer on a hot summer night!

LOL.

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