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To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors
- phreeza 9y agoThe article fails to mention Amazon, which does still have plenty of non-outsourced blue collar jobs. I doubt there is a lot of the kind of upward mobility at amazon for them that there was for the Kodak janitor in the 80s, though.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoAmazon reimburses 95% of tuition and books for its hourly employees, even if they're studying in a field that isn't directly relevant to Amazon. The training doesn't have to be in a traditional university, either. It does have to lead to a high-wage, in-demand job. There are things that one can criticize Amazon for, certainly, but their support for the personal education and development of their employees seems to quite a bit better than the norm. http://amazondelivers.jobs/about/benefits/ http://amazondelivers.jobs/about/benefits/
- beastcoast 9y agoAnecdotally I know, I got my foot in the door at Amazon by temping and later being hired. Amazon is a great place to start as a temp IMO because they are always looking for talent and you will often be embedded directly with teams and be treated as a regular employee. I also know several former FC employees that moved HQ. Similarly, Apple Store employees can work their way up to HQ.
- mdorazio 9y agoKeep in mind, though, that Amazon is doing everything it can to automate most of those blue collar jobs (warehouse robots, delivery drones, etc.). That workforce has a very limited shelf life.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoAs they should be, if they want to continue to exist.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago>Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy. That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting with the outsourcing companies. This article wants to blame major companies for inequality while conveniently ignoring the existence of the outsourcing companies which are the ones setting the pay for these employees. Stop doing that, raise the minimum wage and benefits that outsourcing companies must pay their employees/contractors, and fix the bloody problem at its source.
- anovikov 9y agoI think in both cases, it's just the market. There is a demand for engineers which is more than for janitors, and with more limited supply. Everything else is just moving money from one pocket into another, it doesn't have economic significance.
- 1_2__4 9y ago"It's just the market" is such a lazy reply. Did entrepreneurs not like making money back then? Or did they realize that a healthy society was just as important as healthy companies?
- eof 9y agoIt was definitely closer to the former than the latter. Things that are obviously profitable now were not hip or obvious, nor was the infrastructure to commoditize everything available.
- cmiles74 9y agoI think this idea that it's okay to have most of the employees at a large plant working for smaller outsourcing companies (instead of, say, Apple or Kodak) wasn't acceptable. I wonder if there was some tangible benefit that was derived from having many full time workers that has either evaporated or has been overshadowed since the 70s.
- nsriv 9y agoAs a resident of Rochester for the last 3 years post-grad, the wasted human talent here is staggering. There are engineers from Kodak that were bought out of their pensions who (anecdotally of course) get passed over for adjunct positions at RIT, because they either don't have the degree or RIT prefers younger adjuncts. Many haven't moved away because of the sense of family among former co-workers, but are whiling away their early retirement. The two major research universities are propping up the city's advancement opportunities, but doing so with tuition increases and recruitment of full-price paying foreign students, which makes the place more vibrant, but has also alienated many. The largest employer in town now is the University of Rochester Medical Center, which provides many of the middle income and higher income jobs but is also making a habit of buying up 'distressed' hospitals. The collapse of Kodak and exodus of money and talent has cratered the city public school system, which has a 47.5% on-time graduation rate. The only shining spot in terms of education is an Arts school, with great links to the still world-class Eastman School of Music. Rochester itself is also a great example of 'white flight' in the post-Kodak era, though it began long before that.
- Spooky23 9y agoI recently spent some time in the Roc recently. It was an amazing tale of two cities. Some areas are incredibly beautiful and prosperous looking, but a few hundred yards away it feels like Detroit.
- ghaff 9y agoThere's a lot of that in a lot of old manufacturing and port cities in the Northeast. There's a lot of demand for nice gentrified downtowns with nice restaurants, housing, etc. But my observation with a lot of these smaller cities is that much of the gentrification is in a fairly small area and much of the rest of the city is the rundown urban decay it's been for a long time.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoMuch of the wealth in Rochester never left. It just moved from city to suburb.
- newforice 9y ago"If you’re educated, you’re in command." I'm not college educated, I've made a comfortable living as a coder. It took over ten years of self-teaching in my 20's while working a FT job but I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I agree with the statement but there's more than one way to become educated. Academia is just one way and possibly not the best way.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThis doesn't work so well anymore. There has been an influx of millions of coders. You can do it, but why? It's easier to just go through the college grinder and pay off your loan over the next decade. Plus you might meet a cofounder.
- newforice 9y agoIt I were starting out today, there's a good chance I'd go the college route too. Back then, it was tougher, I'd been accepted but couldn't afford it without working FT and doing college FT. In retrospect, I'd have gotten to where I wanted to be faster though it wouldn't have been the same journey. ;-)
- robteix 9y agoCoding is a very particular case, though. You can't self-study your way to becoming a lawyer or a doctor. And even in coding, more companies are slowly requiring formal education as a prerequisite for even applying for jobs. We know someone like you can be just as productive as someone from a great school, but that won't matter if you're cut from the selection process.
- ChemicalWarfare 9y agoThe flip side here is if the large company goes belly up - like Kodak did - the "outsourced janitor" might still keep their position at the company they are working for - they will end up working at another customer location.
- nwenzel 9y agoThat would assume that the other customer location is currently underserved or not served at all. Outsourcing is about reducing costs. It's not good or evil. But it depersonalizes decisions on which service to choose and narrows the decision making criteria down to cost. Costs for service jobs are driven by people. So, when a company is choosing their janitorial service and they choose the lowest cost service, that means the service that pays the lowest wages or that cuts the most corners will typically win the contact. Depersonalizing the buying decision and commoditizing human labor aren't good or evil by themselves. But, turning people's welfare into a math problem certainly leaves us open to making decisions we wouldn't have made if we saw the consequences through a human lense instead of only an economic lense. At best, it causes suboptimal outcomes for an individual while maximizing the aggregate benefit. We can fight against it all we want, but everytime we buy a t-shirt, an apple, or an iPhone, there's a supply chain behind it built on the lowest cost provider. We are all part of that process. I hope I'm not evil for buying a cheap t-shirt. But I know I enabled some shady behavior that made it $1 cheaper.
- ChemicalWarfare 9y ago>> That would assume that the other customer location is currently underserved or not served at all. sure. but it's a potential option as opposed to being let go flat out. If Kodak went belly up before that "rags to riches" story of a janitor becoming an exec proceeded beyond the janitor stage - she'd be looking for another job elsewhere, whereas in contractor's case there's a chance of getting reassigned to another "project". It's not as much about "depersonalizing" as it is about convenience of not having to deal with the domain that has nothing to do with core business. The cost factor is also not linear - in terms of straight up cash figures sometimes it costs the same or more to outsource maintenance, security etc vs hiring your own. Works both ways - car dealership for example isn't going to hire a web designer for their site full time.
- kirsebaer 9y agoGail Evans worked as a janitor at Kodak in the 1980s. "She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March... A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory... Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company."
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoThis story is evocative of Trent Reznor's success story.
- chank 9y agoNot even close.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoAgreed, he was in a bunch of bands and had classical piano training his entire life. He was recording on the side and happened to be working as a janitor at a music studio. Trent is more similar to Good Will Hunting than this story.
- GuiA 9y agoThis is why it's so upsetting that companies in Silicon Valley (Google, Facebook, Apple, all of them) hire cooks/janitors/bus drivers/etc from 3rd party companies and offer them none of the benefits their full employees get. Just doing that would be a huge pipeline, and would play no small part in addressing the diversity problem they all claim to be preoccupied with (but don't do much about).
- peoplewindow 9y agoGoogle is famous for having made its early cooks and massage therapists into multi-millionaires by giving them stock options. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html?mcubz=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html?m... Remember that this NY Times article is designed to push emotional buttons. Their entire story revolves around comparing Apple against Kodak. There aren't really any deeper studies or figures provided. You could as well compare a contractor who worked at Kodak with a masseuse at Google and reach the opposite conclusion.
- fatjokes 9y agoDevil's advocate: there is an upside here. Come economic downturns, companies can mitigate layoffs by choosing not to renew contracts. It means that those who planned for stability (full time employees) are more likely to get it, e.g., start a family, take out a mortgage, etc. Those expecting turbulence can avoid long-term commitments.
- hypersoar 9y agoSo the solution to lack of stability is to not allow some people to ever have it?
- mynameishere 9y ago"Devil's advocate" means taking an intentionally contrary view--not literally saying things that the devil himself would say.
- arkitaip 9y agoWe call that a libertarian POV.
- mdorazio 9y agoI'm failing to see how that's an upside at the wider economic level. If companies choose not to renew contracts, people are still getting laid off; they're just getting laid off from the contracted company instead of the company that terminated the contract. All you've done is shift layoffs onto people who, arguably, are the least able to deal with losing a job.
- mathattack 9y agoAnd then Kodak died. How many high paid janitors do they have in their upstate NY headquarters now?
- adwhit 9y agoIndeed. If only they hadn't given their janitors paid vacation, they'd be in Apple's position right now!
- mrob 9y agoKodak died because invested heavily in a technology that became obsolete (analog film), not because they treated janitors well.
- ecshafer 9y agoKodak died for the entirely unrelated reason of not pursuing changing markets and trying to hold onto their core business even though it was dieing.
- jfaucett 9y agoThis story reminded me of something I've often wanted to know when people start talking about economic inequality metrics, namely, how many of those in poverty when entering the workforce will remain in poverty their whole life? To me the longitudinal information here is the most significant metric i.e. what does wealth movement look like for individuals over their lifetime. Virtually everyone in their teens and early twenties is in or near poverty, but what does that same individual look like at 30, 40, and 60? Can any economists / sociologists in here point me to studies / research in this area?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoThey keyword you're looking for is intragenerational mobility, it'll pull up plenty of research, here's one link I found: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a-lifetime-might-be-on-the-decline/ http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a... But actually, I would go the opposite way and say we need to look at multigenerational inequality. Which is to say that our current inequality metrics might look really good even if you were bound to being only 1 quintile higher or lower than your grandparents, every individual would oscillate in a small range through their life but once accumulated it would show up in the data as lots of mobility. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how likely a family is to climb out of poverty over a few generations and then to stick there or how likely a rich family is to sink into poverty and stick there.
- mdorazio 9y agoYou're looking for research on what's called "socioeconomic mobility". The Atlantic has summed up some of this research [1]. Basically it's become harder for American workers to work their way up the income ladder over time. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-...
- peatmoss 9y agoI've heard from smarter people than me that your parents' level of economic attainment is the best predictor of your economic attainment. Everyone may be broke in their twenties, but some of those 20 somethings presumably got a leg up from being in a good (pre, elementary, secondary, post-secondary) school and can ask mom and pop for help on the down payment for a home, etc. Suspect that's still the case, though the other trend of increasing inequality means that more and more at the bottom are slipping out of middle class, while a very select few at the top are headed toward cryoretirement in their ice palaces overlooking a scenic valley on some private jovian moon.
- jchonphoenix 9y agoSix figures in the bay area is less than 79k in Rochester when it's cost of living adjusted. This article is just wrong in many ways.
- dexterdog 9y agoYou can't compare the costs now since Rochester is a shell of its former self.
- peatmoss 9y agoOne of my pet peeves is when articles such as this use averages exclusively to talk about incomes. Averages are sensitive to outliers, and thus may obscure what's the typical condition. If you're going to pick one measure to talk about incomes, median may give a better picture of what's typical.
- jackschultz 9y agoThat bothers me on basically every stat on a news article. They just come up with a number and expect people to believe it. But they don't talk about how it was calculated so people can't confirm it themselves, and very often, if multiple "experts" are the ones calculating the stats, they just pick the biggest outlier to strum up more controversy.
- fatjokes 9y agoI think articles like this usually do mention the stats a bit, but usually start out with an extreme story to hook the reader. It's a common storytelling technique and something I see often in journalism and pop-sci books.
- alexbecker 9y agoIt's not just incomes, it seems like news articles almost always use averages no matter how inappropriate they are. I've complained about this at some length: https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#the-cult-of-averages https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#the-cult-of-averages
- dlrk 9y agoThis also helps explain the "skills shortage". Traditional means of building a skilled workforce are no longer available. The loyalty disconnect can cut both ways. If I invest in training someone, they are likely to up and leave for a better offer. If you employ me, I can be made redundant whenever convenient.
- fatjokes 9y agoIt sounds like the real reason for inequality is that the pay for "janitorial work" has simply decreased. The article makes a point to say that the pay is the same, accounting for inflation, but it's disingenuous not to highlight total comp, which Ramos had significantly less of than Evans.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoThe reason for inequality is that people are not equal. The work they do produce is not equal in value. More people can do a janitor's job, and/or do without a janitor, so the value of a janitor's work is less. More supply, elastic demand, means lower price point. Through technology, some people are able to produce much more than others, so inequality is inevitable unless there is a balancing force (aka taxation).
- thatfrenchguy 9y agoMimnimum wages, mandatory health insurance / vacation, ... All the things every country in the world does except one.
- AdrianB1 9y agoIn Soviet Russia you get even more. Not kidding. Do you want to move there?
- thatfrenchguy 9y agoI have no idea what you are talking about.
- 21 9y agoMaybe he is referring to the fact that the Soviet bloc also gave you a job and a flat to live in.
- 9y ago
- mathiasben 9y agoThe underlying cause of this whole issue is the changes in tax policy instated in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, previously income was taxed at higher rates unless deductions were utilized which forced those earnings back into the economy creating jobs funding research, etc.. As it's become easier to retain more earnings there's little incentive not to optimize an entire corporation solely with the purpose of generating returns at the expense of all else. To resolve this USA should consider reverting back to the Internal Revenue Act of 1954. Under this rule set income over $400K/yr was taxed at 90% or it was reinvested in the economy. Do this and this inequality issue will sort itself out in the same time frame it took to do the damage.
- scarface74 9y agoWhat incentive would anyone have in making more then 400K a year if you were going to be taxed at 90%?
- EricSoll11 9y agoGood day everyone, a good hacker needed for a new company in USA, Russia, Qatar. kindly contact me thru my email for more details below... outlook_b0bdf9e4193cc046@outlook.com eric.soll44@gmail.com Thank you.
- Spooky23 9y agoGovernment was similar to this. Many of my mid to high level colleagues in IT about 5-10 years ago came up through the ranks from clerical jobs. My longtime director/mentor started as a tabulating machine operator in the 70s. All of those types of people are pretty much gone into retirement now. We don't have that type of advancement because most of those entry tasks in both IT and business are farmed out to a permanent underclass -- a contract bodyshops with mostly South Asians on work visas.
- sandworm101 9y agoIt isnt just the cleaning staff. IT, especially startups, have a culture of pigeon-holing people even when they are on staff. It's a symptom over-specialization imho. People are hired according to extensive and exacting criteria. Once hired, managers find it difficult to think of the person as anything else. Honestly, that is a large part of why i broke free and enlisted. I'm now in an organization that sees increasing skills and promotion as essential. If i fail at my job (pilot) i wont be fired but given a different role. Call it a throwback to the 60s if you want, but im less stressed now than i ever was as a consultant. (And forget everything you think you know about the military. The rcaf isnt anything like american movies.)
- aplaice 9y agoEntirely irrelevant to the content of the article, but is there a solution to the problematic interaction between sticky headers and full-page scrolling? At least in Firefox, if you press Space or PageDown (to scroll down a "page"), on the linked article, you'll lose several lines of the text, as they're obscured by the header. Illustrating: <------ page 1 ---------> <------ page 1 ---------> <------ page 1 ---------> <------ page 1 ---------> <------ page 1 ---------> <------ page 1 ---------> <----- lost line -------> <----- lost line -------> <------ page 2 ---------> <------ page 2 ---------> <------ page 2 ---------> <------ page 2 ---------> <------ page 2 ---------> <------ page 2 ---------> Chrome isn't afflicted by this (on the linked article), due to the fact that its page scroll is slightly shorter than Firefox's (on a webpage without any sticky headers, Firefox gives you about 1.5 lines of context from the previous "page"/screen, when you page-scroll; Chrome gives you about 5). However, if the height of the sticky header were greater (as often is the case), Chrome would also be affected. This is obviously in addition to the annoyance of the sticky header wasting vertical screen space, but the latter is just an aesthetic preference, while the former is broken functionality. Yes, I know that on Firefox I can just use reader mode, but it seems sad that after almost 30 years of the development of the web, going back to a design that could easily have existed in the 90s, is an improvement.
- sw00pur 9y agoThere's a bookmarklet around Google that removes fixes headers.
- vadym909 9y agoGood point - in the race to offer superb benefits to its best employees, companies made it harder for themselves to directly hire low skill and low pay employees. After all you can't afford to offer free massages and laundry to the guys delivering groceries for you making $15/hr or the receptionist making $20/hr.
- user5994461 9y agoJanitors at Kodak in 1987 lived at a great time when there were jobs and the rent wasn't half of your monthly income. They likely bought their home long ago and are retired now, sitting on comfortable assets. Janitors at Apple in 2017 can barely pay rents and they will never own their home, likely owned by the Kodak janitors from 1987. Feel free to replace janitors with any other job title.
- bluedino 9y ago>> Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She >> pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her >> four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour >> works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, >> leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid. Assuming she's only losing 20% to taxes and other deductions, she can't even cover rent. How is she paying her rent? Is there another person or public assistance?
- kelukelugames 9y agoWith dependents and her income level, she is paying a much lower rate.
- choxi 9y agoWe should tax wealth, not income. [1] The majority of income the top 0.1% make is from investments and gets taxed as capital gains, only about 15% of their income is taxed as ordinary income. [2][3] We have an economic system where it's dramatically easier to make money the more money you already have. If you have $50M, you can park it in an index fund to get 4% returns and make $2M every year just off of your investment returns (which then gets taxed at 15% instead of 35% for ordinary income). If you don't spend all of that $2M, you'll continue to make more money just by having more money. By taxing income instead of wealth, we're also essentially penalizing labor and rewarding wealth. We shouldn't penalize something that actually contributes to the economy and instead ask people who have more (not earn more necessarily) to contribute via taxes. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/to-reduce-inequality-tax-wealth-not-income.html?mcubz=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/to-reduce-inequali... 2.http://www.businessinsider.com/the-critical-difference-between-the-top-1-and-the-top-1-capital-gains-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-critical-difference-betwe... 3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/11/20/the-top-0-1-of-the-nation-earn-half-of-all-capital-gains/#6c7ceb647893 https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/11/20/the-to...
- conanbatt 9y agoMaybe we should stop thinking taxes are the solution to inequality. "Cutting all the high trees so the forest looks even".
- JamesBarney 9y agoTaxation is both effective, and far less invasive to markets than many other solutions.(like minimum wages, enforced labor unions, changing the way companies pick or compensate CEOs). So that's why it's brought up so often. What are some solutions you're aware of that are equally effective and less invasive?
- microcolonel 9y ago> Taxation ... minimum wages, enforced labor unions, changing the way companies pick or compensate CEOs None of these are solutions to inequality. Tax-backed redistribution efforts (think new deal) have had no measurable positive impact on absolute or relative poverty; nor have minimum wage laws. The idea of corrupting the CEO compensation and hiring practice at the national level is about as boneheaded as they come. All of these actions decrease efficiency, and none of them have a significant positive impact on poverty. I just don't see the point of insisting we "do something!" when none of the similar "solutions" we've tried have made for any positive change, and all of them have measurably cost us in efficiency and growth. The "do something!" model of governance is cruel and deficient; if it would be better, all things considered, to do nothing, then do nothing!
- aceon48 9y agoWhile I agree with a lot of the comments and the article, can we just point out that they say Kodak's former janitor became CTO? That would be commendable had the company done well, but perhaps having a janitor CTO contributed to their downfall...?
- tomxor 9y ago> her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a year. Interesting... I'm developer at a comparably tiny company, I get paid slightly less than her per hour but a larger salary overall, and my rent is less than half of hers (and it's not considered cheap around here). I know i'm not paid top notch but all I read here is it's hard to be a janitor in expensive places. [EDIT] Maybe this is not a fair comparison, I'm not paid hourly, and all I have revealed here is that I work rather a lot of hours. She does 44ish hour weeks, and to be fair as a cleaner you are unlikely to physically be able to work more (consistently). The ratio of pay to rent is ridiculous though, (that is a fair comparison) my rent is way under half hers. If housing is that expensive in that area then janitors should be paid more...
- RealityNow 9y agoFantastic article, we've truly been seeing a bifurcation of the workforce, and the development of a plutonomy. The interests of capital and labor are inherently opposed because the incentive of the employer is to reduce costs, and capital has been winning out. I think there's a false tendency to blame Apple for this predicament. It's not Apple's responsibility to provide for the welfare of our country's citizens, it's our responsibility - and it's only through our government that we can really change things. No vacation, benefits, and 80% of one's paycheck going to rent is our government's responsibility to fix, not Apple's. The most obvious policy here would be some sort of universal basic income. This would naturally prop up wages for the low-paying jobs like janitor that nobody wants to do. Having to work under those precarious conditions for such lousy pay (relative to cost of living) and no prospects for advancement must be a downright miserable experience, the literal definition of wage slavery. 6pm-2am shift means she probably never even sees her kids during the week. All for a meager $600/month in disposable income after rent is paid (which when you're a contractor without vacation and benefits isn't much). And she'd never be allowed to complain about it because she'd be told that she should be grateful to have a job, there are people in Africa starving, she should've studied harder in school, and she shouldn't have had kids. What a world we live in. Many oppose universal basic income on ideological grounds, but enough with this ideologically-driven bullshit that ignores the unnecessary suffering of the wage slaves at the bottom. Nobody in a first world country should have to live a lowly life like that janitor.
- pjmorris 9y agoDo you know the history of Speenhamland? The empirical results of that experiment in a basic income was that it acted as a subsidy to employers, enabling them to pay below subsistence wages that were made up for by the government-funded UBI. There's a parallel to how food stamps and other support enable large corporations today to pay less in wages, as the difference will be made up through taxpayer funding. I don't want to ignore suffering, but I suspect something like a jobs guarantee would achieve the same ends in a more equitable fashion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system
- 9y ago
- zanny 9y agoThe roots of modern wealth inequality on deep, vast, and way more complicated than companies just outsourcing unskilled labor because they are optimizing for profit over being charitable. * Automation advances in every industry. It is like AI - there is no sudden on switch when everything is automatic and post-scarcity is suddenly achieved. It is a slow march of small improvements and optimizations over time. Productivity per human labor hour has increased a hundredfold in the last century on the backs of this automation and innovation. * A combination of social organization, peer pressure, the variable range in the quality of a persons parents, the variability in wealth of a family, the trends towards and away from high median wealth, the prevalence of anti-intellectualism, the laws at the time, the laws in the past, the general availability of materials, the competitive market internationally, and ones own biology contribute to the prevalence or absence of an educated populace. No society has figured out how to take every human born and turn them into a scholar, however. We all have the disenfranchised who are not educated (in fields the market deems valuable) but still need avenues to survive. This creates our unskilled labor market. * The laws of your country influence how wealth moves throughout it. The laws of other countries also influence the behavior of private actors in your economy when interacting with foreign ones. The market is global - business decisions are not made based on arbitrary lines on a map, they are made based on the planetary market forces and trends of all seven billion+ people. Thus, you cannot set local policy (that influences wealth inequality) in a vacuum. * Aside fiscal policy, you also have, relatively independent of other variables, how open your society is to innovation and entrepreneurship. This is another cultural marker, but if your country supports and incentivizes startups you can offset the problem of a waxing classical labor market. It also has the converse effect of generating jobs through its successes. * Finally, and least significantly, is fiscal policy. In some countries the lack of a trustable market or rule of law can make this much more meaningful, but if your company has a functioning internationally connected economy nowadays all your fiscal policy is doing is pushing the boat rather than building it. Policies like favoring investment over salary favor increasing inequality, but are not the cause of it - they just accelerate it. The TLDR is automation, education, globalization, entrepreneurism / innovation, and fiscal Policy, but there are more, and these alone are just as abstract trends as wealth inequality is above them, just as much as how the future of humanity itself is just a abstraction above that. Together all these effects, and more, influence the total market and control how prosperous or despondent people are. When citing historical wage averages as having stagnated in the US in the seventies it is not one aspect in isolation - from what this article talks about in regards to corporations only hiring immediately for its core competency and outsourcing other labor - but the combination of all of them. Rising automation reduces the need for labor. Rising populations increase the supply of labor. Fiscal policy favors wealth centralization. Globalization favors economies of scale. Giant companies throwing around more money means more influence - which means more regulatory capture. Regulatory capture means exploitation. Exploitation is always parasitic - it suffocates growth and prosperity to fill few pockets. Exploitation and rent seeking go hand in hand. Regulatory policy and capture come back again, creating rentiers markets to pillage and exploit more. Globalization reduces the sovereignty of individual nations, making it near impossible to fight back with just one government run by its people. It feels inevitable. That as we advance in our ability to make so much from so little, that the real beneficiaries of it have to be those who were first movers on it, that were sociopathic enough to discard anyone else in the pursuit of power. To condemn billions to suffering and to suffocate markets and drain pocketbooks to make fractions of a cent more, to centralize resources just slightly faster into your control and domain of influence. Like global warming, like space colonization, like scientific innovation, none of these are the purview of one slice of Earth's surface area. None are limited in scope to a few people. They matter to everyone, but we have no functional system of making everyone matter in regards to them. These market forces are operating beyond the bounds of one country - beyond the walls of Kodak and Apple. They are operating on the entirety of humanity and all their macroeconomic behaviors are dictated by the entirety of the accessible market capital can reach. But what is supposed to keep them in line, constrain capitalism to be to the benefit of both workers and capitalists and not just the later, is still isolated to thin strips of land subdivided by thousand year old traditions. Focusing on the individual pieces of the puzzle remains valuable, but something as pervasive as rising inequality - of understanding the movements of markets, of a global economy that is beyond the complete knowledge of any one person anymore (it is simply moving too fast) - is the product of a billion causal relationships, not just whether companies want to invest in their employees now to prosper their local economies in the medium term.
- galfarragem 9y agoThis. "I look at the big tech companies, and they practice a 21st-century form of welfare capitalism, with foosball tables and free sushi and all that,” Rick Wartzman, senior adviser at the Drucker Institute and author of “The End of Loyalty,” said. “But it’s for a relatively few folks. It’s great if you’re a software engineer."
- esarbe 9y agoWhat strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting poverty cause. The current economical status quo is accepted as a given and all the harm it causes is dismissed with the shrug of a shoulder. "It can't be helped, the poor sods should have made better life choices to avoid ending up as janitor" is the attitude by which the matter is dismissed - as if requiring everyone to be a member of the educated elite just to be able earn a decent living. There is so much wealth out there. This wealth is the product of society's common strive. Why not try to change the world instead of just submitting to the way things are?
- solidsnack9000 9y agoAs long as we accept the need for people to be janitors, we must accept that becoming a janitor is not a "mistake", it's a useful thing that we all want to see happen for some people. We can't on the one hand say, that we need people to do this job and on the other hand say, "tough luck" to those that do it.
- jaggederest 9y agoDoing janitorial work is not a mistake, but being a janitor for 40 years certainly is. It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue.
- wavefunction 9y ago>It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue. Not everyone is a 'striver.' Some folks just want to pay their bills and enjoy what time they can with their family and friends.
- jaggederest 9y agoEven those 'non-striver' people would prefer to have growth over time, in their position, wage, and skills. Humans are not static - we like to learn and we get very frustrated when we can't improve over time.
- mmcnl 9y agoThis article seems very anecdotal to me, and thus tells me nothing. Jobs come and go. Jobs once held in high regard are now common jobs. Also people nowadays have (good paying) jobs that didn't exist decades ago.
- ciconia 9y agoThe way I see it those janitors, security people and other such workers whose jobs are today almost universally outsourced, are also contributing in their own small way to the company's bottom line and to its success. Why should they be treated any different?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- indigo0086 9y agoLove when threads like these dissolve into "How can we further overcomplicate tax law to benefit to ultimately benefit the government"
- dlp211 9y agoTIL taxes only benefit the government and never go to anything useful like the food stamps my family sustained itself on while my baby brother went through chemotherapy, or the Post 9/11 GI Bill that allowed me to get degrees in CS and ECE which led me to a job at one of the world's largest tech companies, or the unemployment that allowed me to properly transition from the military into the civilian workforce.
- banned1 9y agoA number of the ideas in this thread are a little crazy. I wonder what is the economic potential of a tax that is vested over the people who propose it and their families. For example, it would be like "if you propose taxing wealth at 80%, the government goes into your house and your family's houses to take 80% of your wealth as a 5 year experiment." "Oh you live in a 300k dollar house? Confiscated! We are moving you to a tiny house valued at 60k with all others who think like you" I wonder if that would help folks come up with more sensical solutions. We could vote on the ideas, and the winners get the ideas implemented on themselves first!
- hippich 9y ago"Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company" From a Janitor to CTO in under 10 years - I wish I could dream that. I started playing with code around 6yo and now 33.. Could it be that it was really rare period of time where such thing was possible?
- la6470 9y agoJust double the minimum wage and stop wasting our time and breath!!!
- averagewall 9y agoThis sounds negative from an America-centric view. Seen globally, poverty has plummeted and countries have become more equal. If you care about people suffering, the cleaner at Apple is probably much better off than the farmer in China who could easily be dead from famine by now if it wasn't for the global economy - driven by companies like Apple. It may also be misleading to compare a contractor cleaner today to an employee cleaner 30 years ago. I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and seen as lower status than it was in the past? Maybe someone who's a cleaner today would have been unemployed in the 1980s? In that case, the article is comparing lower socioeconomic status (SES) people to higher SES people and complaining that the lower one is worse off, which is a tautology.
- e12e 9y ago> I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and seen as lower status than it was in the past? I'd say there's more technical skill (certifications and iso standards) to adhere to in cleaning today, than 30 years ago - and each worker clean larger areas (and probably works harder than 30 years ago, suffering under tight micromanaged schedules). That's my impression (though mostly in Norway). Note that cleaners might be better, more efficient and doing a more demanding job, and still have lower status...
- CPAhem 9y agoThat's globalization for you. Apple's software is based on open source BSD. They sub-contract the building of their phones to China, and they are made mostly with Korean chips and displays. Apple can import cheap indentured workers from overseas on H1B visas. They avoid US tax by pushing their profits through Ireland. Kodak was a far more progressive company that invested in their employees. Apple is now the world's biggest company, Kodak is dead.
- kbart 9y ago"Kodak was a far more progressive company that invested in their employees. Apple is now the world's biggest company, Kodak is dead." Kodak have missed digital revolution and stayed on analog for too long, that's why it's dead. Treating its employees better had nothing to do with that (except maybe hasten downfall a little).
- foxhop 9y agoThis post hits close to home. I went through this when I worked full time at tech helpdesk / call center. I was a contractor of a contractor of a contractor of the Navy. Me <- Contractor (payroll company) <- Contractor <- Contractor <- Navy Each step took a bit off the top, I made $17/hr no vacation, no health insurance, no sick time. At one point my contractor (they signed my checks, a faceless shell) who I never met or communicated with called me at work and tried to reduce my pay. I felt so angry and upset. I ended up arguing that I would quit if they touched my pay. I learned when I quit that: Me ($17/hr) <- Contractor ($35/hr) <- Contractor ($55/hr) <- Contractor (???) Its all about liability, health insurance is a liability, sick time is a liability, vacation is a liability, and the possibility of paying for layoffs is a liability. Trickle down. Also related,I was also working part time in retail where I learned that over 80% of the staff was part time to avoid paying health or vacation or sick time... This is common practice in retail. These companies have huge workforces of part time people, they avoid giving people enough hours to be full time... Its terrible and needs to be fixed.
- ben_jones 9y agoWhat gets me is the sheer romanticization of the rich and powerful. Culturally we turn people into gods who by there very virtue can do no wrong. And because of it we'll never be able to rework income inequality - because we've all wanted to be on top of it since childhood.
- ScottBurson 9y agoI think one of the most important issues raised by this article is toward the end: > Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid. $2300 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. Service workers like janitors can barely afford to live here at all.
- dionidium 9y agoThey should move. There are janitorial jobs all over the country, most of them in areas where you could rent a nice two-bedroom for 1/3 that cost. There is just absolutely no reason to stay in the SFBA with prospects like that. I wish more people realized this. They'd be much happier somewhere else.
- kevinchen 9y agoThere are many reasons why someone can't simply move. Maybe they're caring for parents who live in the area. Perhaps they want their kids to attend well-funded Bay Area schools, so the kids can have a shot at earning more money. It could be they can't save up enough money to make the jump. The list could go on and on... my point is, moving is hard, especially so for those with little disposable income.
- dionidium 9y agoYes, of course! Been there! But a lot of stuff will be easier once/if they pull it off. Pop culture insists on a very silly perception of the non-coastal parts of the country. There's still a lot of opportunity elsewhere -- at drastically lower costs of living. Moving isn't easy, but everything else in their lives will be easier once they do. One impediment to this, as I see it, is that the culture is telling them the opposite of this. And that's actively harmful to their long-term prospects.
- austenallred 9y ago