05-31-2018, 10:25 PM
(05-31-2018, 08:26 PM)Canard Wrote: Nope, you're absolutely right Dan. The Region pays a fixed price to GrandLinq (Keolis). They can pay their drivers whatever they want.
People who are paid well for what they do and are treated well are better employees. Saying "they're paying too much" because they got a massive response to their hiring campaign is ludicrous.
At some level of massive response it’s ludicrous to argue there is no problem with the salary. There is no reason why “LRT driver” or “government worker” should be massively more attractive than other jobs. Say we post a job and get 100 qualified applicants per position (so, to be fair, not the situation we have here). Don’t you think we should consider paying less? What if we get 1000 qualified applicants per position? 10000? At what point do you think maybe there is no need to pay that much?
Similarly, if there is a low response to the posting, then the fix might be simply to increase the salary.
Except in the short term, gluts and shortages are symptoms of an unwillingness to let prices move to their natural level.
But, as I already noted, it’s not actually clear there is a glut here: if only a tiny fraction of the applicants are qualified, they may need the large applicant pool in order to find enough people. And making the job a little more attractive than it strictly needs to be may pay off in better retention and the ability to be selective, even among qualified applicants.
So what I actually said is much more conditional than people are making it sound. I agree that one cannot conclude that the job is too attractive just from what has been reported in the newspaper. Somebody else made a good point that it’s very easy to apply now; I agree that it would not be surprising to find that many jobs result in large numbers of applications.