[Senko]

Well I'll chip in my understanding (or at least how I intend to run it if I get time) is that the differing history (massive wars and bigotry, increased corporate control etc, major early domination by Japanocorps, old style values being resurected by beings who new them or people who idolize their idea of them) have shaped a very different business environment.

The first effect is that you've gone from a rich/poor dichotomy to more of a tiered or feudal structure. This gives us 4 categories of employee corporate, corporate restricted, national and sinless with different categories and benefits.

Tier 1 Corporate
General
These guys are trained, shaped and prepared from birth to serve their corporation as best as they can but in return because they are corporate they get huge benefits.
Pay and Hours
A corporate employee works a cushy normal job consisting of 36 hours per week with an OPTIONAL 20 hours overtime payed at either 1 for 1 days off or 200% pay. They are generally paid enough that they're able to live a medium lifestyle or a high one if they're particularly skillled/posses a unique skill set. The upper levels of management and those with untrainable uique skills (for example a mage with a rare area of expertise) get a package that allows them to live a luxury lifestyle.
Retention
So long as they aren't sacrificed to cover for a higher up they have a job for life either in their area of work or if it is removed they get retrained for another or either a small corner office to keep them out of the way or a nice retirement package if their too old to retrain.
Levels
S: The hereditary rulers of Triple A corps; Luxury lifestyle, may not even need to work or work random hours to maintain their hold on the business.
A: The upper management or unique skill sets paid a luxury salary with other perks.
B: Middle management or uniquely skilled indivduals (mages, adepts etc) high with other perks.
C: Common workers (office staff) and new people with untrainable skills (mages) medium with a standard package.
D: People only good for manual labour but part of a coporate id: 40 hour low lifestyle job.
Advancement
A-C all offer opportunities to train and improve your or your kids opportunities.

Tier 2 Limited Corporate
General
These guys are not as highly regarded as corporate workers and are generally at best regarded as a sort of new money position but they do still get benefits from their position.
Pay and Hours
A limited corporate employee works a normal job consisting of 40 hours per week rarely get paid overtime payed but are usually expected to put in 30 minutes to an hour extra unpaid work before and after their official shift taking care of paperwork and the like. They are generally paid enough that they're able to live a medium lifestyle and occasionally high one if they're particularly skillled/posses a unique skill set but the upper levels is generally denied to them. They also get slightly worse conditions in terms of time off/sick leave than a full corporate employee.
Retention
So long as they aren't sacrificed to cover for a higher up or are incompetant they will often have a job for life either in their area of work or if it is removed they get retrained for another. Of course if they're too old to retrain or unsuitable for any existing fields they'll get a redundancy package and have their corporate access revoked.
Levels
B: Middle management or uniquely skilled indivduals (mages, adepts etc) high with other perks.
C: Common workers (office staff) and new people with untrainable skills (mages) medium with a standard package.
Advancement
There are still opportunities to train and improve your or your kids opportunities but must now be done in your own time rather than work time however they are at least partially subsidized.

Tier 3 national
General
These are the huge percentage of the population who have a non-corporate SIN.
Pay and Hours
Works a "standard" 40 hour week but often can be expected to put in 10-20 additional hours outside work performing the jobs required of them. They are generally paid enough that they're able to live a low to medium lifestyle and very, very rarely a high one if they're particularly skillled/posses a unique skill set but these are generally snapped up into tier 2. They generally only get the bare minimum in terms of sick leave/annual leave and other perks.
Retention
Only have a job as long as management has a use for them and may have their value-training assessed for certain jobs so they're fired as soon as they hit the turnove point.
Levels
S: The upper management and heads of governemnets, can earn a luxury wage.
B: Middle management or career beureucrats in government roles as well as uniquely skilled indivduals (mages, adepts etc) high with other perks and reasonable job security as long as they're competant.
C: Common workers (office staff) and individuals with untrainable skills who are being assesed for tier 2 medium with a mininmal job security.
D: People only good for manual labour long hours for low pay low lifestyle.
E: Subsidence level these are people working in high risk/low skill jobs to earn either just enough to live or in some cases indentured servitude. Typically criminals or other undesireables who still have a legitimate SIN but no have no real prospects.
Advancement
None really.

Tier 4 sinless
General
Those who for one reason or another don't possess a SIN at all.
Pay and Hours
Don't normally have a steady job.
Retention
None as they're only used for expendable purposes by any legal company.
Levels
N/A
Advancement
None really.

So you have the corporate staff who even at the lowest level with no real skills still enjoy security, perks and are part of the "elite", then the limited corps who are skilled or lucky enough to posses something of interest to the corps and as such enjoy a better level of living conditions, at the bottom of the regular jobs are the national sins who would have to work hard and be highly skilled to get into even middle management jobs and have huge ques trying to get into a few low paying jobs, right at the bottom are the sinless who range from homeless starving up to multi-million dollar runners. I don't think there'd be the same nationalized health, unemployment, education systems. If you don't have the money to pay for your kids education then they don't get educated unless your corporate staff. Although I did consider a sort of substitute level school system where you get the bare minimum (read, write, add basic sums) and if your lucky don't get shot/stabbed/pregnant.

[Bruce]

That's a little more detailed than I generally worry about, although I basically agree with your divisions.  Although National SINs might well include career bureaucrats, politicians, attorneys, and other professionals who would be at Middle to above Lifestyles.  (Less lush than equivalent Corp positions, of course.) 

[Senko]

I suppose that's true enough hadn't really though about the high level careers (politicians, CIA head etc) on the basis that they wouldn't be really avaiable to the average sinner. Still you could fit that in as a S category for national, I was using that for corporate in the sense of "Special" or not something you can really expect to attain. As for people in more common career roles even if they're a career beureucrat I wouldn't rank them above a B level so just add that to the national sin I'd say.

[Ursus Maior]

Senko, I think your list is really helpful for newcomers to the game. It also seems to work nicely with the current rules on SINs. Maybe some additions or modifications, though. I don't think there would be full corp SINners that do only unskilled manual labor. You can only acquire full corp SIN status by birth or at least being born into the corp, at least in SR5. And this means your parents must have been either full corp SINners, too, or worked their way up so far that they were promised to have their childrend granted full corp SINs. Maybe this status is also attached to certain conditions like scoring high on a pre-school IQ-test. Why else give away full corp SIN, if not to a future leader? Full corp SIN means full rights, propably (minor) shareholder status and definately a life in bliss. Not luxury, but top notch education and the chance to get everywhere in the corp. If you work hard enough, of course.

Maybe full corp SINs could also be earned at retirement age for very succesful workers. The golden wrist watch of the SR-universe. This would be like setting slaves free in ancient Greece and Rome, making them quasi-citizens and their children full citizens, although stigmatised as "homo novi", as newcomers.

Limited corp SIN however means, you valuable enough to the corp to get noticed. You are an asset that they would like to keep. Either you were born into the corp, but your parents were never succesful enough to achieve full corp SIN or you were recruited from the outside world. The national systems produce high quality brain, too, at least sometimes. So the corps will buy them from the open market like today: Like what you do? Earn more while working for a AA corp and earning a risk-free pension and a safe education environment for your children.

National SINners on the other hand have pretty much all the options they do today. They will have to work more, there will be more strings attached to everything, but you can work as a wage slave in a corp and hope "to be noticed" or subject yourself to the unsafe job market of the non-corp world. That ist small and micro-business and of course public offices that have not been privatized. The job markets will be less safe, with more hire-and-fire because of failing businesses, but the workload will be less than wage slavery. You will not own a pension in small and micro-business, but you will in public service. It will only amount to Low Lifestyle, but it'll be yours. Unless there is a crash or something.

Then there are the SINless. They are practically like foreign laborers used to be in the early apartheid in South Africa or later black workers were in general: You live in a really bad part of your sprawl and if you leave it, every ID check will alert the cops. Basically you are a fugitive all your life, an illegal. I cannot imagine that in SR, where up to 30 percent of the people are SINless, these all become criminals. There will be a lot of unlicensed business, shebeens, fleamarkets, backalley shops or whatnot (look into a township in South Africa), but even grey economy cannot thrive on criminals and fellow grey businesses allone. This would make the SINless economy have a 100 percent import deficit. So SINless need a way to earn money, but not work inside the SINless community. Much like illegals work illegally today as domestic servants, nannies or construction workers and whatnot. SINless might even get a "work pass" (again borrowing from apartheid South Africa) and work cheap manual labor for a corp. This would be even lower work than wage slavery. No paper pushing, no bolting together parts in a factory, but cleaning chemical waste in disposal sites or anything similar that gets you killed in no-time (think Elysium here). These migrant workers get shuttled from the Barrens to their working site by bus and receive payment daily after work (hopefully). Thus they avoid ID checks and provide a limites cash influx into the SINless community.

Chances of rising up into the world of SINners are almost non-existent however. Outside your grey economy you are a pariah, inside you are a milk cow: Your outside-earned cash lets you buy goods inside the grey and black economy, but you can never save up enough money to start your own business. Exceptions are rare and entirelly dependent on luck. The only SIN regularly earned by those unlucky, is a criminal SIN, making it even worse. Now you're branded for life. After doing time, you might own some favors to the real criminals, pulling you even further down into the criminal life. Even if you manage to stay clean, being a criminal SINner means, you have to pay taxes, but cannot find a job. You're forced to project your criminal SIN all the time, so the illegal transport busses corps use to shuttle you to the hazadous work sites, won't pick you up. Unless you find a job inside the grey economy, you will have to become a full blown criminal to provide.

[TheDai]

I guess the term "wageslave" is just how Shadowrunners and Rulebreakers see the "hard working, honest citizens". (My character calls them corp-monkeys)

If I see this correctly, every Facility of an AAA-Corp is basically its own state. Every penny of your wage gets sooner or later back in the hand of the corp. But in the end, you have a decent life, don't have to worry too much enjoy your trids and have a family. Full Corp-SINners have the best life in the world, although it doesn't mean it's easy. But most important: It would be incredibly boring to play one of these, going to work, going home, going to work again, repeat.

Seattle itself is overcrowded as hell. You will find anything but fairness. In the Barrens, you see freaks of all kinds. Every shop owner knows how to use his shotgun and fires is about once every few months. The Police abandoned these places years ago, and so Organized Crime is the only thing that keeps the Barrens under control. If you mess around with the wrong people, sooner or later you wind up dead in a dark corner. Out of fear, most of the people remain calm most of the time.

It's the same as the giant corps. The Mafia and Yakuza don't fight each other openly, they have their territories and almost free reign. If you pay them, it's unlikely you'll get harmed by them or other people.

But not everything is bad in 2075. Where people are, there are jobs. Children are still being born, most people in Seattle are not starving to death. The Streets could be cleaner, of course, taxes could be lower, and every now and then you hear gunfire a few streets away from you. Apartments are probably smaller then today (depending on where you live, I guess), food isn't as tasty as today, the youth is more violent as it once was and you do not expect fairness anywhere, especially if you are an ork.
But it's a living and some people still die of old age, instead of being shot down.

Even in a dystopian future such as Shadowrun, people don't just sit there and wait for it all to end. They work, they enjoy life, they do whatever they can do make a good life. And thanks to Trids, a very popular night-life and everything everywhere for the right price, it should not be much harder to have fun than today.

But of course: what we experience is something completely different. WE ARE the gunshots, other people here in the distance, WE ARE the people fighting the cold war for Corps or Organized Crime, WE ARE the ones hating corp-monkeys more than anything else. For us, the system is ill and needs to be cured by bullets, or we believe that we are the only ones truly understanding this world and shifting it to our advantage.

[Lusis]

Excellent points all.

The big thing to remember in SR is that a runner is the outcast of society in more ways than just economic.  He's the misfit, the anarchist, the opportunist, the the socipath, the psychopath.  So it's no wonder the books are written with an anti social outlook.

AAA corps are the fiefdoms of the future.  They are small socialist states where every need can be provided for by the state. Though just like socialisms, corruption allows benefits to be doled out according to status and rank. Still, people adjust. The "20 hour workday" cynicism of the SR fluff needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it originates in the world view of the people mentioned above.

[Senko]

Just to clarify why I had manual labour for people with corporate SINS. It was because I figured even for the priviledged 5th generation corporate family you'll occasionaly have someone who just isn't that good whether its because they're not that bright, can't focus or whatever. They can't have their corporate SIN removed and be dumped on the street because their (presumably loving) parents and grandparents are valuable productive corporate SINNERS who may object. This seemed like the best option for someone you can't get rid of and you don't want them in a position where they'll make a mess so you give them a nice manual labour position that just requires them to run a broom over some corporate facilities or an office with no work and forget about them. Its not a position anyone will ever achieve if they don't start off as (a) a corporate SINNER by birth, (b) have other familiy who are all productive corporate SINNERS and (c) aren't suited to more valuable positions.

[Ursus Maior]

I got your idea behind that, but I think my opinion is diffrent here. Think about the ultra privileged of our modern society or the aristocracy of old: Even for a child that is mentally severely challenged, a full corp SIN family will not allow pure manual labor. It's beneath their status. Mega corps are rich enough to "pull through" these rare cases. And they will, because the benevolence of their highest assets depends on it. If your full corp SINners start thinking that the corp will not care for them and their families in the highest standards if need be, the corp has a problem.

Thus, even those kids that would drop out in "real" national SIN life will get supportet til the very end. If the early pre-natal tests show severe complications, the corp might suggest abortion anyway. But otherwise there are tons of programs even today to provide rich children a degree. Even if it means sending the child to corp military school or even taking care of her/him without consent of the parents. Someone argued for mega corps being socialist states. That pretty much nails it. Mega corps are "authoritarian strong states" and economic power houses under one roof. They will pay for everything in your life, if you are part of their "ruling party" (aka full SINner), but if you fail to live up to the standards, they will enter even your most private and intimate spheres of life. Corp security and intelligence will also monitor you all the time, so taking away your children because of "unproper parental behavior" will be easy.

Manual labor for full corp SINners, I guess, will only happen to the very few extremely mentally and physically challenged children that cannot be treated with pre-natal, nano, bio, cyber and genetic therapy and can serve the corp only in one way: Being a poster boy/girl for philantropic corp projects, cutting figurines from wood for holiday decoration.

[Senko]

I think you may be thinking different person for manual labour than I am. What I'm talking about is someone who's not mentally suitable for the high pressure/high intellect jobs e.g doctor, theoretical sciences but is capable of carrying supplies, cleaning corridors and functioning in daily life quite fine. They aren't good enough for the prominent careers but they can be given simple manual labour jobs or the easier low pressure office jobs e.g security guards or receptionist and contribute to the corporation and earn a living perfectly well (although they don't have to compete against the huge pool of limited/nation sinners). If someone was actually categorized as special needs (or whatever the correct term is these days) and physically/mentally had extreme difficult with regular work (and wasn't mentally suited to more advanced fields) then they'd be taken care of in full comfort and priviledge. The other factor is some people actually prefer to be out doing physical work rather than stuck in an office and you always have the lazy or chronically incompetant. This is how corporations deal with them the major difference here being if they ever did pull themselvers together doors are open to them that aren't open to the majority of the workforce and there's always the "Uncle he was mean to me" factor that would ensure they'd get taken care of and have others do a bit extra to make a good impression on them because they are related to the movers and shakers. Social elite or not I can't see a corporation supporting someone and taking a loss when they could give them work to do and make a profit of them while being able to say they're taking care of their people by ensuring even Joe Slob who set burnt his name into his classroom carpet has a job where he can be a productive member of society.

[Bruce]

Every bureaucracy, from the beginnings of such things, has had to deal with people who are essentially incompetent but too well connected to just push off a cliff.  The most common solution is to create a position which sounds wonderful, pays reasonably well, but has absolutely NO responsibility or authority of any consequence.  The relatives are satisfied, the subject thinks they're a vital part of the organization, and everything moves along. 

e.g. 'Corporate Counsel for Consumer Complaints'.  Sounds important, doesn't it?  Except that all the real work is handled by lower-level employees, and actual court cases are seen to by competent attorneys.  Our vital employee assigns case numbers which determine how important these cases are to the corporation; the reality is that all of that is handled by internal corporate judges, who set the case dockets.  Our employee can cheerfully compliment himself on how his work is necessary to make sure cases are correctly noted as to their importance to corporate functioning, and no one who wants to keep their job is going to tell him otherwise.

[Ursus Maior]

I'm with Bruce here, Senko. A corporation, especially mega corps is not always doing what is economically the most productive. They are states and societies, full of diffrent kinds of agencies. And the social elite will not have one of their "failures" clean up hallways. In fact, what you see happening even today in corporations (that are not state societies) is that children of execs get jobs and internships, without all the qualification John Doe would need.

If that kid also went to corp school, corp college and corp university, chances are that a) corps can avoid a lot of "total failures" and b) the few that exist will be taken care of. As Bruce said, create a position, where he/she can get a solid pay cheque and have zero chances of screwing up or producing financial losses. In fact, they might pay Johnny Rotten a second MA program and a PhD program as well. Maybe he will find something he can actually do well, maybe he will be the next best friend of a senator or be married to one etc.

[Reaver]

Every bureaucracy, from the beginnings of such things, has had to deal with people who are essentially incompetent but too well connected to just push off a cliff.  The most common solution is to create a position which sounds wonderful, pays reasonably well, but has absolutely NO responsibility or authority of any consequence.  The relatives are satisfied, the subject thinks they're a vital part of the organization, and everything moves along. 

e.g. 'Corporate Counsel for Consumer Complaints'.  Sounds important, doesn't it?  Except that all the real work is handled by lower-level employees, and actual court cases are seen to by competent attorneys.  Our vital employee assigns case numbers which determine how important these cases are to the corporation; the reality is that all of that is handled by internal corporate judges, who set the case dockets.  Our employee can cheerfully compliment himself on how his work is necessary to make sure cases are correctly noted as to their importance to corporate functioning, and no one who wants to keep their job is going to tell him otherwise.

Sounds like the mess I am dealing with....

9 billion dollar modernization of an aluminum smelter, yet the assholes in charge couldn't organize a rock fight in a gravel pit...

[Senko]

Ok I can see that for an incompetant being shuffled off to a made up office job but what about the people who actually enjoy doing manaul labour e.g. bricklaying, carpentry and the like? Not janitorial work but still hard physical work often outdoors?

[Reaver]

Ok I can see that for an incompetant being shuffled off to a made up office job but what about the people who actually enjoy doing manaul labour e.g. bricklaying, carpentry and the like? Not janitorial work but still hard physical work often outdoors?

who/what would you rather have as a Megacorp?

1: A person that you have to pay top dollar to due to their education in the trades?

2: The schmuck that is willing to sign a contract for 5 years of barely above min wage and is willing to have a skillwire and programs installed?

3: A drone that can work for hundreds of hours before needing a maintenance call?

Today a Carpenter makes about $35/hour if they are unionized (including fringes, $65 hour), an electrician makes around $45/hour unionized ($70 with fringes) and an ironworker about $60/hour unionized ($75 with fringes....)

What would a drone cost? $25,000? $45,000? 

sounds like a no brainer to me.....

[Ursus Maior]

Ok I can see that for an incompetant being shuffled off to a made up office job but what about the people who actually enjoy doing manaul labour e.g. bricklaying, carpentry and the like? Not janitorial work but still hard physical work often outdoors?

I would say that being brought up in a corp as part of the elite (= full SIN), you would be taught that manual labor is below your worth and it is the job of the wage slaves to do so (or drones). And that it is a sign of the ever-progressing corp society to develop away from such inhuman work (play begins showing renaissance farmers sweating in the sun, starving to death or succumbing to malnutrition and diseases).

If you absolutely must work with your hands to achieve personal happiness, you will be given the opportunity to become an artist of some sort. So you don't "work", you create masterpieces. It's the same today actually. My cousin had to fight his parents to become a carpenter although he could have gone to college. And that was a simple white collar family.