[MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?

[Madrona Tree]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at email.msn.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 7:23 PM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?


> This strikes me as very strange, Madrona.  If AOL cannot financially
> tolerate paying salary, paying benefits, as well as managing and
> equipping that many employees, why insist that they be employees?
> Such insistence means that certain business opportunities will
> simply have to be passed over as non-viable.

Or companies will simply need to learn to work efficiently enough to make
the opportunities viable.  What I mean is - if the *only* way to make money
is to use unpaid labor, then I would have to say that that opportunity is
non-viable.  However, I betcha anything that using unpaid labor is not the
only way to solve the problem of customer service.

If I were OSI, I would close the current Counselor program (which they have
done), hold employment interviews for new Admins (with obvious preference to
previous counselors -- job experience counts), streamline the Admin program
to 10 Admins per shard, pay them $6.50 an hour for 16 hours/week, and have a
nice little counselor program.

So - I wonder what my 'nice little counselor program' would cost?  A little
math:

Assuming Origin pay the Counselors $6.50 per hour (highest minimum wage rate
in the U.S (Washington State)), and add approximately 30% for the taxes
companies must pay on top of the wages they pay employees, I have figured a
ballpark figure $8.45 per hour for the cost of each counselor's hour of
work.

Surely OSI could save themselves money by paying each Counselor the minimum
wage rate in their particular state, but for the purposes of this thought
exercise, I'm going to assume they'll want to pay everyone the same amount
of money.  Also, I don't know what kind of minimum wage laws they have in
other countries, so I will also assume that Origin will hire all U.S.
employees for their counselor positions.


      $8.45
x     16 hrs/week
-----------
    $152.00
x      4.3 weeks/month
-----------
    $653.60
x     10 employees
-----------
 $6536.00
x     24 shards
-----------
$156,864 / month

Out of the purported 200,000 subscribers, that's about 16k subscribers'
money going to a counselor program.  It seems like a lot, but really it's
only 7.9% of the subscription rate -- or about $0.79 per month.  Not too
many people would balk at $10.75 versus $9.95 if that was the original cost
of subscription.  Perhaps next go-round, companies will build this cost into
their cost-of-business... as Customer Service *is* a cost of doing business.


> Surely an example of an extensive volunteer effort underpinning
> some element of a corporation's business must exist today.
> Perhaps not on the scale of AOL's services.

I'd like to see an example -- I can't think of any...?


Madrona Tree.



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