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This is a perfect example of how demands for socialist implementation are a zero sum game. Facebook's contractors make the $15 an hour that minimum wage workers

• j45 9y ago
  The costs of living in their area may not be affordable at $15/hr.
  • fortythirteen 9y ago
    Is that Facebook's problem to solve? Part of the Bay Area's trouble with affordable housing has to do with their heavy handed rent control policy (another side of price-fixing), which squashes supply.
    • Kalium 9y ago
      It's a mix. It's Facebook's problem to suffer, which means people are going to push them to solve it, even if it's a local government problem.
    • sp332 9y ago
      Yeah, I would say Facebook should get involved in policy because it directly affects their employees and their ability to do business. Also there's a homeless encampment across the street, so it wouldn't be out of line to invest a little in the community they are reshaping. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/facebook-and-google-are-building-affordable-housing-in-silicon-valley.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/facebook-and-google-are-buil... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/02/06/exclusive-facebook-buys-56-acres-in-menlo-park.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/02/06/exclusiv...
      • ryandrake 9y ago
        In what way does this affect Facebook's ability to do business? They seem to be doing business just fine with the status quo.
        • sp332 9y ago
          They're trying to expand their campus. They wouldn't do that if it wasn't going to improve their bottom line. Facebook engineers have asked Zuckerburg if the company could subsidize their housing. Employees are leaving because of this problem. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/27/silicon-aa-cost-of-living-crisis-has-americas-highest-paid-feeling-poor https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/27/silicon-a...
          • ryandrake 9y ago
            For every employee that leaves over something like this, there are 10 lined up who would be thrilled to work there.
            • deleted 9y ago
              [deleted]
            • sp332 9y ago
              If Facebook wanted those 10 engineers they would have hired them first. High housing costs are reducing FB's ability to offer competitive wages.
            • HillaryBriss 9y ago
              but, the ones who are leaving now -- weren't they initially thrilled too? retention can be pretty important.
    • runT1ME 9y ago
      Well, if FB doesn't want to do massive wealth transfer to real estate developers and current land owners it would benefit them to get involved. Part of the reason salaries are immensely disproportionate to the rest of the country is cost of housing.
    • eli_gottlieb 9y ago
      That's not rent control, it's Proposition 13. It incentivizes city councils to build offices (which they can tax) while rejecting housing (which they basically can't, over the long term).
      • HillaryBriss 9y ago
        but at some point housing scarcity causes additional housing unit prices to skyrocket. so the property tax basis for those new high priced units must look pretty good to city councils. i mean, don't city councils also find it highly revenue-enhancing to encourage the replacement of older housing stock and long time owners with new, high priced, units?
    • j45 9y ago
      If Facebook is paying the high end salaries that cause housing/rents to rise, they certainly are contributing, however indirectly one may believe, to the problem. The point remains that both groups of workers are essential to have in close proximity. It may not work for everyone, but where housing is in short supply, and the demand for labour is great, a working dorm/camp setup for those forced to be working homeless might be helpful. You can make $150/hr, if your living expenses work out to $140/hr you're not making (or keeping) much. Like co-working, maybe other setups like co-housing setups might need to come up. They obviously may not work for everyone including families.
  • jstarfish 9y ago
    How do continued subsidies help this problem? If COL in an area is so high that essential personnel can't afford to live within 100 miles or reasonably commute there, it seems to me like the sort of circumstances that lead to a company moving to a more affordable area.
• GuiA 9y ago
  Why does skill come into consideration at all? Does a software engineer with 15 years of experience at Facebook get laundry service or health insurance that a fresh out of college QA engineer does not?
  • fortythirteen 9y ago
    Because the cost of not retaining a software engineer is greater than the cost of the perks. The same doesn't apply for all positions at the company.
  • mattnewton 9y ago
    No but the QA engineer's BATNA has those perks. The janitor's probably does not.
• FireBeyond 9y ago
  Nor will Facebook when they realize that they just "can't afford" to provide all these freebies to staff because at a certain point it becomes too expensive to contractors to be able to live within an affordable radius of their employment. That leads to Eloi and Morlocks, an underclass schlepping 50+ miles, doubling their day, to do janitorial work for companies. Are they (technically) skilled employees with valuable knowledge, to Facebook? No. Is the value they present to Facebook worth more? Arguably so. Or they'll start deserting SF/SJ and who will valet park your car at Facebook after that?
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  Just wait until the "high demand, highly skilled workers" get squeezed too and then remember your words. Most of software engineers do work that at some point can also be replaced by machines. How many of us do really cutting-edge stuff? I think it's a moral issue. We need to find a way to structure society in away that even people who don't have the hot jobs of the moment can survive.
  • fortythirteen 9y ago
    It's certainly a moral issue, but it's not Facebook's moral issue. It's an affordable housing issue that Bay Area cities are failing miserably at.
    • Chaebixi 9y ago
      If it's a moral issue, it's hard to give Facebook a pass for going "not my problem." Especially since they have the cash to actually act morally.
      • landryraccoon 9y ago
        You're not really addressing the point of the person you replied to. Increasing wages does not help if the housing supply is the underlying problem, since everyone is still bidding for a fixed resource. It just means everyone pays more rent. Wage increases in the bay area are always at least partially wealth transfers directly to landowners. Facebook can't solve that by paying more, the housing policy in the bay needs to change to allow more density.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    > We need to find a way to structure society in away that even people who don't have the hot jobs of the moment can survive. We have several ways to do this, but evidently none of them are acceptable to the people who have the power to implement them.
• dmreedy 9y ago
  I think that's a pretty narrow, reductionist take, asserting that they don't add any new value to Facebook. Those "high demand, highly skilled workers" don't support themselves (clearly). Neither is the perceived value of working at Facebook the same without the perks that these contractors provide. I'm not sure it's possible to isolate the value-add of developers from the environment they work in and the infrastructure that supports them, in the same way it's difficult to separate the value-add of a local business from the value-add of the public road that it's built next to. No one is an island. Also, I don't think I saw a quote where these workers asked for "all the perks". Just perhaps an opportunity to not be homeless.
  • Kalium 9y ago
    If housing prices are their main concern, they may wish to consider the opportunities to be realized by asking questions about zoning and permitting.
    • dmreedy 9y ago
      By all means, they can slot it in between their three jobs. Not everyone has the means for political action. Frequently, those who need it most are those least able to participate.
      • Kalium 9y ago
        Alternately, Facebook can take dictatorial control of Menlo Park and address the issue that way. But there may be some potential downsides to this as well, and other voters and activists react rather badly when well-compensated people or their employers mobilize against the policies that drive expensive housing. It's a losing situation all around. What's left that might be a winning option? Convert contract services into in-house services, (and downside services until the costs are considered acceptable)?
• eigenvector 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you think it's about supply and demand. Obviously engineers and managers are going to make more money than low-skilled workers. But this is about perks that are equally offered to all employees - except those who are deemed unworthy of even being an employee and have no potential job ladder toward becoming one. At companies like Facebook and Google, perks aren't divvied up by how skilled you are. A junior HR worker or accountant gets the same free food as the top engineers. One could hardly argue that they are equally important to the company. The division is between white collar and blue collar workers - the former get all the perks, and the latter get nothing. When you offer the perks to lawyers (an oversupplied profession) without a second thought but withhold them from the technician who fixes stuff at your datacenters in the middle of the night (someone who actually works on your product), it smells more like classism than anything else.
  • mattnewton 9y ago
    I just don't think that's true. At Google or Facebook or wherever you're not getting a floor to yourself and a personal admin/assistant as a junior engineer, but you can as an SVP. Similarly as a contractor for an external services company you aren't going to get all the perks as the employees of the company. And they have to be separate for tax reasons. And of course this is shitty. I think there needs to be something done about the housing market and general CoL in the area though, as well as asking one employer to pay a bit more. Having Facebook subsidize the area might look great while they have money but isn't sustainable; they should be putting pressure on Facebook to back/lobby for affordable housing initiatives on behalf of it's employees.
• dcre 9y ago
  This is not just about the choices available to Facebook in this situation. The better question is how we can change the economy to distribute not just money but opportunity more evenly. That is what is at issue here. The differential value software engineers create over janitors is not because of their intrinsic worth but because of their position in the economy. There is no reason to think engineers should be more entitled to the surplus value they produce than the support workers who are equally essential to the process. Saying "this is just how supply and demand works" is a refusal to think.
• eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >Now that they have that - and without offering any new value to Facebook - they want all the perks that high demand, highly skilled workers get. It's a never ending cycle. Everyone wants everything they can bargain for. Welcome to real life. Nobody goes and reads God's Supply Meter to decide what job they're gonna do or where they're gonna live. People don't make personal career choices to optimize the GDP; they make them to maximize their own standard of living. Now workers behave exactly as the system says they should -- and you complain? Shouldn't any worldly, aware capitalist understand this?