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Except civic workers should be making middle class wages, especially ones that don't require extensive education. Why should a gilded class of unionized workers
by zjaffee 8y ago
Except civic workers should be making middle class wages, especially ones that don't require extensive education. Why should a gilded class of unionized workers get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k.
- hondo77 8y agoWhy shouldn't they?
- ForHackernews 8y agoWhy should a gilded class of web developers doing jobs that don't require extensive education get these huge individual wages when the median family income there is still hovering around 55k?
- zjaffee 8y agoBecause there's demand for developers that supply cannot meet, the demand to take on a civic job in NYC is tremendous, yet we constrain supply of these workers by paying very high wages. These organizations are crippling the cities ability to deliver services, if wages were 2/3s of what they were now, they could hire far more employees and potentially provide better services all around. Additionally, public sector unions are completely different than private sector ones. Concessions should be made to workers at the expense of capital not workers who make less than them.
- gamblor956 8y agoYou just answered your own question about why cops and firefighters in NYC get paid so well: there's tremendous demand for their services. And the average cop almost certainly provides more value to society than the average programmer working on yet-another-CRUD-app. If wages were 2/3 of what they were now, even more companies could afford to higher programmers to build them custom CRUD applications to make their basic business processes more efficient and provide better services all around.
- zjaffee 8y agoNo there is tremendous demand to work in those fields, a demand that is not being met because of price fixing. They could lower their wages and hire far more people to provide better services. There is no wage fixing in the tech industry in a way that results in people getting paid more.
- Retric 8y agoThe preference at companies like google for hiring from a small list of schools is self perpetuating and drives up wages. Worse, as with every other artificial limitation on hiring it actually lowers the quality of their employees.
- zjaffee 8y agoGoogle and other top companies don't just hire engineers from a small list of schools though, additionally, they hire tons of people from industry. The majority of hires at FANGs went to state schools with huge student bodies and reasonable acceptance rates.
- Retric 8y agopreference != requirement. Some companies prefer to higher from a specific state school, that again causes them to pay more for less talented applicants. Suppose you have two applications one with your hidden preference and one without. If your preference has say slightly less experience or requires slightly more pay, well they are a slightly better applicant in your mind so that’s ok.
- omegaworks 8y agomiddle class != median income
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zjaffee 8y agoYes it is, the entire definition of middle class is median income. Just because the quality of life for the people within this income range has gone down does not make them any less middle class than they were before.
- omegaworks 8y ago>the entire definition of middle class is median income Nope. Middle class is a class of people, not an income range. They are typically described as people that work in stable salaried employment, with a pension or retirement plan, with the ability to afford a house with their spouse and education for their kids.
- zjaffee 8y agoEither way, a single person making 60k would put them in the middle class should they have a spouse making the same amount. The real median wage is a little more than half of that.
- omegaworks 8y agoNot at all. Let's run the numbers. The average cost of a 1 bedroom[1] apartment in the city nets out at $43k for the year, that's an entire spouse's net salary [2]. Average cost of childcare is anywhere from $15k-30k annually[3]. This is just baseline needs for two working parents. 1. https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre... 2. https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=year®ion=New+York https://neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&salary=60000&from=ye... 3. https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/child-care/young-children/child-care-centers.html https://www.nyu.edu/employees/life-wellness/family-care/chil...
- ramphastidae 8y agoThis is a feature, not a bug. Just because wages haven't increased since the 90s and the middle class has collapsed in the US doesn’t mean the hard-won protections of unions should be slashed to match.
- zjaffee 8y agoUnions in the private sector provide workers protections from exploitative capitalists who exist for the sake of profit and profit alone. Public agencies exist to better society, if we paid these workers less, than we could hire more, and these sorts of jobs would be available to more people where services could potentially improve.
- chrisdhoover 8y agoIts a fucked up situation. It is not equitable at all. For some reason the ever increasing government functionary class gets more and more of their fellow citizens hard earned wages.