“They push mops and clean toilets. They cook and serve gourmet lunches. They patrol suburban office parks. They ferry technology workers to and from their jobs in luxury shuttle buses,” Jessica Guynn reports for USA Today. “But they are not on the payroll at Apple, Facebook or Google, companies famous for showering their workers with six-figure salaries, stock options and perks. Instead they are employed by outside contractors. And they say the bounty from the technology boom is not trickling down to them.”
“Nowhere is that trend more pronounced than in Silicon Valley where the economic divide is widening between highly educated and skilled high-tech workers and low-paid workers who are trying to piece together a living in one of the country’s most expensive places,” Guynn reports. “‘It’s not a tech-specific phenomenon,’ University of California-Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti said. ‘But it comes across as a more salient and more poignant trend when you have these people working next to people who are extremely highly educated and skilled and whose wages have improved.'”
“Marcial Delgado, 36, says he used to make $12 an hour putting in about 30 hours a week in the kitchen at Yahoo as a supervisor,” Guynn reports. “Looking around at Yahoo employees, he said he felt like a second-class worker. ‘They made five or 10 times what I was making,’ Delgado said. ‘I felt bad. I was doing the hardest work for the least money.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s a fair wage for cleaning a toilet? What is that service worth? Is it what the market will bear or is the wage unfair because the people for whom the toilets are being kept clean make a certain number of dollars more than the toilet cleaner? Is a toilet cleaner inside a car dealership in Cleveland worth less than a toilet cleaner inside Apple Inc.? If so, why? If not, why not?
MDN, Is your head so far up your butt that you can’t see the issue this article brings up? Instead of trying to channel Rand Paul, how about thinking what happens to an economy if the divide between service workers and knowledge workers is too vast. WHO is going to do those jobs if no one can afford to live near bye? That is the point, not whether one cleaning a toilet is worth more or less. But when the toilet is worth so much more as result of location, then that has ramifications to the broader economy.
People like you always seem to miss the bigger picture. Haven’t you seen anything by Michael Moore? Farenheit 9/11? Sicko? Roger and Me? The US needs a major reconstruction, and people like you always seem to put your head in the sand and ignore it. We will get to it…right after we deal with those Iraqis/Russians/Islam/whatever monster-of-the-week that the Lamestream Media will cook up.
scott31270 also can’t seem to understand that all MacDailyNews did was ask a series of questions. Not a statement among them. scott31270 doesn’t like that. He wants people to be told what to think, like a good little commie.
You contain as much finesse as a hatchet!
‘WHO is going to do those jobs if no one can afford to live nearby?’
The rate of pay for those jobs will have to go up then.
Allow the situation to take its course and what a solution present itself.
Ehhhh, Idunno, I think this situation absolutely requires Nanny to make a really futile and stupid gesture to be done on somebody’s part!
Those solutions have traditionally included revolutions, which never end well for anyone.
You need to put down that Thomas Piketty’s book and think about what you just said. The problems with income inequality are not caused by the gap between service workers and knowledge workers. Hell, that wage gap is probably less than 10:1.
The income gap that is our problem is the one between normal people and the crooks in banking and finance, as well as overpaid corporate executives. In those cases we are talking about income gaps well over 100:1. That’s the problem.
Most knowledge workers spend years going to school and getting a technical degree in fields like engineering that most students are afraid to tackle. That’s why they get paid what they do–because they are few in number. In contrast, a typical janitor does not need extensive training and that’s why the market is loaded with potential janitors and hence their salary level is significantly lower.
BTW, a time will never come when no one is available to clean the toilets in the Silicon Valley because the market will adjust. If the only person available to clean a toilet requires a salary of $50K per year, that’s what that person will be paid or someone will build a robot to clean toilets that costs less than $50K per year.
“If the only person available to clean a toilet requires a salary of $50K per year, that’s what that person will be paid or someone will build a robot to clean toilets that costs less than $50K per year.”
Exactly. Welcome to Capitalism 101, occupiers.
This is exactly what Piketty talks about in his book.
Pinetty’s book may be the most brilliant economic tract of this century. You have a minuscule understanding of the world. You instead should pick it up and read it cover to cover.
One thing you might have missed is the understanding that there is no nor haste ever been a free market economy. And, most importantly, there never will be. So, shove your Ayn Rand, the woman who lived off the welfare state for the last 25 years of her life\, and was grateful for it.
Yes, the point has been missed on this article. It has more to do the the large tech companies using contractors as a shield against unskilled workers. They know very well that those contractors are not paying it’s workers a livable wage. Sometimes they are not paid at all because these jobs attract a lot of migrant workers. It is a page straight from Walmart’s playbook on low income jobs. Nobody is suggesting that a person cleaning a toilet should command the same pay rate as a top notch computer programmer. But, the article does not cover the fact that some of those low wage toilet workers will eventually work their way up from where they are now and hopefully own their own business someday.
“Nowhere is that trend more pronounced than in Silicon Valley where the economic divide is widening between highly educated and skilled high-tech workers and low-paid workers who are trying to piece together a living in one of the country’s most expensive places..”
Clearly this article is making the case that there should not be such a divide between the pay of highly skilled and educated workers, and unskilled laborers. By adopting the socialist “living wage” rhetoric, you are similarly arguing that the pay for unskilled labor should be higher than it is.
I respectfully disagree. I do not believe that people who are not willing to invest time and energy in themselves to earn an education, or go to a trade school to learn how to weld or become an electrician or plumber deserve extra wages magically for free. If you are worth more than you are getting paid, prove it by paying your dues.
I worked more than my share of shit jobs where I got minimum wage when I was younger. I do not recall ever griping about my shitty low pay or feel I was entitled to more for working an unskilled labor position, it was my rite of passage, and a stepping stone to where I was going in life.
If you are underpaid and undervalued, then work your way up, show that you are worth more. Either learn a trade skill or get a degree and get a job making more. Or even start your own business and learn the difficulty of earning a profit on top of your own hard work and the labor of those that you hire and manage.
How is the concept of a living wage socialist? Seems like pretty basic capitalism to me when you suggest that paying people less than it costs them to feed and house themselves is not sustainable in the long run.
I grew up with the sound Republican understanding that economies and societies are best regulated by the free enterprise system. Free markets cannot exist unless the sellers and buyers are equally free to negotiate mutually beneficial terms. It is just plain silly to suggest that a billion dollar corporation and a janitor making minimum wage have equal negotiating power.
Allowing the workers to bargain collectively and prohibiting employers from engaging in unfair labor practices are ways that every Western society uses to level the field and allow a free market in labor to function. Societies that don’t do that either fall to populist revolutions or suppress revolution by becoming authoritarian.
The allowing workers to bargain collectively has transferred most unskilled work to Asia. Societies that allow that to happen end up with poorly paid janitors.
You have a severely limited understanding about how capitalist economies need to behave in order to survive.
It isn’t about “willingness to educate themselves.”
There will never be a society where everyone receives the same education and achieves the same goals.
People are diverse in their knowledge, intellect and skill set.
you can’t make everyone an engineer. Sorry, that’s not how it works. And the non-engineers will always greatly outnumber the engineers.
And there is the leverage that societies place on limiting educational opportunities. Schools restrict their enrollments based on many different factors. As an extreme example, many more people qualify for medical educations than can get them. All levels of educational systems struggle with the finances necessary to train and educate people.
Even if one meets all relevant standards for admission, there is no guarantee of acceptance.
This is the dystopia we were promised. Enjoy.
In ‘Silicon Valley’, the cost of living is indeed FAR too high for custodial staff to afford. This situation is nothing new around the world. Younger friends in Palo Alto and New York City all complain about what it costs to live there. Meanwhile, there is severe competition among those who can actually afford to live there to find decent housing.
One, not exactly happy, solution I know of in Dubai, UAE, is to bring in low wage workers from the Philippines, have them live on the outskirts of the city and bus them into the city every day.
If it’s economics, its all about supply and demand. In this case it’s about workers. To for the low supply jobs with the highest demand in order to receive the highest wages. If all you’re qualified to do is custodial work, sorry!
Error correction: “GO for the low supply jobs with the highest demand…”
Here’s an article about supply and demand in labor markets:
http://www.econoclass.com/economicsoflabormarkets.html
Splain’ it to them Maggie.
Splain’ it to them Uncle Milty.
Education, if they don’t like there wage they should go back to school.
I made over $50. Being a Union Carpenter. But not everybody could do that type of work.
Yeah, “Union”. That says it all.
UNION has nothing to do with it. I own a “OPEN SHOP” construction company in the midwest. The going rate is that much for a NON-UNION worker because the number of skilled carpenters is shrinking every year. You paid for the EDUCATION (skill) of the worker. Low skilled jobs for the uneducated will always be lower.
Sorry, but anyone can clean a toilet. I’d like to see everyone make a living wage, but that varies drastically by location.
My company has a profit sharing plan, in which we get a bonus five times a year. Everyone benefits as long as they’ve been employed full time for a year. If they are working through a temp agency they do not. That’s just the way it goes.
And because they are working in high-tech office, do not make them High-tech.
The opportunities afforded to individuals in this country are among the greatest if not the greatest in the world. The only barriers to success are in the minds of individuals. “Your only limits are the size of your ideas and the degree of your dedication.”
I am not wealthy, by any stretch of the imagination, however my living standards are greater than the greatest of kings not that long ago.
I pushed a mop when I was a kid. The only difference is that the first question was, “Have you finished your homework?” If the answer was “Yes,” then I accompanied my father to go CLEAN THE SAME SCHOOL THAT HAD GIVEN ME THE HOMEWORK. (And there were a wealth of textbooks in the trash too lemme tell ya!)
The left in this country is obsessed with equality. Not equality of opportunity, but this bizarre perception that someone who completes 8 to 10 years of schooling should be deemed no more valuable than someone who hasn’t.
This is just not going to happen, and the day it does will be the end of what remains of the only country that was designed from the ground up to give the lowest of us an opportunity to grow.
“The opportunities afforded to individuals in this country are among the greatest if not the greatest in the world.”
At one time- yes, not so much in many parts of the US.
Young adults emerging from higher ed these days are saddled with so much debt that they will not be likely to afford a home for a very, very long time. The entrance gate for the average kid coming out of high school trying to get ahead is gated, locked, guarded and up a fairly steep driveway.
I gather you live in Greater LA and a kid of modest means could do the bootstrap thing, but that is not the case in many parts of the country and the trend is away from social and economic mobility. Today the biggest predictor of success is who your parents were/are- not how much drive, ambition, talent and effort you put in.
Darwin, the education debt is not a burden for those that chose to major in STEM majors that are in high demand. If a student gets into serious debt getting a lower paid, lower demand liberal arts major then they made that choice. If you want the highest pay, make sure you are focusing your training on where the best pay and labor demands exist.
Not everyone is going to work in STEM majors yet they are still burdened with incredible debt.
Doctors and lawyers are damn well paid, but they have to be given student debt loads that are often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you think paying back the loans for a doctorate in the sciences, engineering, or technology is any easier, ask one of them.
Not
We know that when CEO’s make 40x the average employee salary, the economy is healthy and strong. We also know that when CEO’s make 400x the average employee salary that the economy is nit robust and the USA suffers and gets weaker. Is it really hard to figure out that we tax the crap out if companies whose contracted employees make such paltry salaries? Is it too much to expect that we stop taxing income and tax transactions? Only the dead and fools never change. Which do we want to be?
I just retired being a Carpenter. And thank god I am healthy. But in a few year from now baby boomer are retiring an kid do not want to do that kind of work. So good luck building you home.
Carpentry is a noble occupation with an illustrious tradition and, at one time, transcendent practitioners (Matthew 13:55)
The problem is, the programmer in Boulder, Co. vs Cupertino, Ca. If you pay the bathroom attendant a living wage in Cupertino, you may not get a bathroom attendant, but instead a refugee programmer, trying to get their foot in the door.
Societies should have affordable living for all members of the classes. However there shouldn’t be a class separation in the first place. We are all supposed to be equal.
Another option is to have the Cupertino programmer clean his own toilet, or take shifts doing so. (I am not advocating this, it’s just for illustration.)
This is not a problem you are going to fix. Is $12/h right for a food service supervisor at Yahoo? No not really, but neither is $50.
It seems, there are employees on surfboards, riding waves, and others just body surfing, not catching much, if any, wave. The surfboarding employee rakes in a logarithmic scale of the revenue the company makes, while the body surfer bobs up and down as the wave passes them by.
I have seen some companies “profit share” where all the employees get a bonus, no matter their station. Maybe that’s how it should be done.
$11 billion… If the CEO makes that much on stock, then why not get paid $1 salary? Steve did it. Schwarzenegger did it. It’s time for the top brass to think about the rest of the company.
You can’t force it. It needs to be inspired.
As to the MDN take.
Have you priced housing in Silicon Valley or within commuting range? It is fairly outrageous unless you are making a salary of the kind the tech overclass makes. The same is true for many other things in that part of the world.
I have no problem with programmers and engineers making good money, but I also do not have a problem with someone doing grunt work making a living wage. What it costs to live in Cleveland is far different from what it costs to live in San Jose and comparing the two is not really germane if you want the toilets cleaned.
If costs what it costs to live in London, Los Angeles, Lisbon or Lagos for different market reasons, but those doing work should be able to command the market price. What so many in American business want is market wages for professional class people and below subsistence level wages for the rest.
The same is true of the opposition to Unions which are nothing but a system to provide contract protection for workers. Funny how many of the pundits decrying unions have contracts with their employers but think it wrong for common worker to have the protection of a negotiated contract.
I do not think Janitors in Silicon Valley should be able to afford a house in Atherton and an Audi A6 to drive to work, but they should be able to afford a modest apartment and a VW Jetta.
No worries Darwin,
These workers will make ends meet with government assistance and food stamps. It’s called corporate welfare, and the workers will take the brunt of criticism for being bums and leches.
Initiate Project Mayhem.
Some actors do absolutely nothing compared to everyday labourers. Yet they earn millions per movie, and continue to reap royalties for years and years. Should their toilet cleaners be paid millions too?
Take, for example, the kids (aged around 10) who got jobs acting on Harry Potter. By the time they grew up to be 18 they no longer needed to ever work again. they are multi-multi millionaire. Should their toilet cleaner also be independently wealthy?
If you are a toilet cleaner you do NOT deserve to be paid millions. Neither do actors….but thats another story.
Actually, actors do deserve to be paid what they are being paid or nobody who wants to stay in business would be paying it. Same goes for athletes, etc.
The pool of marketable actors and NBA-capable players is infinitesimally small. The pool of potential toilet cleaners is virtually infinite. Hence the pay disparity.
Not that it is relevant to the point you’re trying to make, but actors don’t get royalties. They get up-front fee for appearing in a film and that’s it. In fact, it is rare that anyone gets royalties from a Hollywood movie these days; writers, composers, directors and other creative team above the line usually sign away their royalties to the studio in exchange for a hefty sum up-front. All the copyrights then belong to the studio, which is much easier to collect and administer than if there were twenty different authors, getting varying scale of royalties from various streams of revenue.
I’ve hired many, many people over the years — everyone from janitors to people that can design nuclear devices. My hiring philosophy has always been
1. I’m going to hire the least expensive, FULLY QUALIFIED person. If there are no fully qualified persons available, I’ll hire the one that requires the least effort to train. (This does not mean the person who requires the least training. Sometimes people that need significantly more training take much, much less effort to get up to the required experience level.)
2. I’m going to try to get that FULLY QUALIFIED person as inexpensively as I can and still get the best effort out of them. It does neither of us any good to hire them at less than they are absolutely certain they are worth. They will not do their best job as they will constantly believe they are being cheated.
3. I’ve never offered anyone a job for more than they think they are worth and likely never will. However, I do make sure they are aware, as much as possible, what the general population believes their value is as well as me trying to understand what their self value is. I want no surprises for them or for me.
That all said, if I can get a candidate for a certain position for $10 an hour and the candidate/employee is happy with that salary and does a great job, I am not going to change that employee’s salary to $20 just because some pundit says $10 is below standard or below average.
Really? This is not special. It has existed and continues to do so since the modern age. How much do the janitors and food service workers in the high-rises on Wall St? This is called Blue-Collar vs White Collar jobs and they have always existed in the corporate world.
I find it funny that people claim to hate doing minimum wage jobs, when it is practically the only way to go up in life. Some of the comments here reminds me of a friend who lives out in Virginia who wanted to be a video game designer, but was stuck selling iPhone cases at a Charlottesville mall. He was a crazy weirdo who blamed everyone else on his problems, but wouldn’t help himself deal with his issues. I think he even came here to MDN and made some rants about his life (which is how I found out about this site 🙂 I bet he is still jobless now, just because he thought he was above practical work.
“Looking around at Yahoo employees, he said he felt like a second-class worker. ‘They made five or 10 times what I was making,’ Delgado said. ‘I felt bad. I was doing the hardest work for the least money.’”
So join the communist party, bring down the US government, destroy all incentive for technological invention and innovation and KILL Apple as well as all other progressive technology companies. Congratulations, you’ll have killed off you toilet cleaning job as well as all prosperity in the country. Well done.
My solution: Offer education opportunities to everyone who want them.
THEN, when educated and qualified to actually perform the 6 figure jobs, perform that work. The USA technology sector is BEGGING for qualified workers!
Meanwhile: There is no way on Earth any custodian is going to make 6 figures. So you get to either feel bad or kick yourself into gear getting the education you require to do the job you desire. You decide you future. I’m all for enabling that choice as much as possible for everyone. But for gawd’s sake:
BE QUALIFIED!
BE TALENTED!
BE SKILLED!
Otherwise, boohoo. 😥
“I felt bad. I was doing the hardest work for the least money.”
What he sees is computer geeks sitting all day long, staring at a screen and poking at a computer keyboard (this is what his teenage son does all summer long, when there’s no school). Meanwhile he sees himself doing hard physical labour.
He was in fact doing the easiest work, that ANY of those developers (and practically anyone else out there) could do with about 30 minutes of training.
That this is the case is clear to anyone with a functioning brain. That a journalist would use this quote to make an argument is quite silly.
Loon Level Liberals (and Conservatives) are a dime-a-dozen. History is full of the damage they’ve done. History is also full of craziness that has spurred them on to be destructive. Obviously, the current bad attitude of Kill The Poor, Feed The Rich is going to inspire people to want to destroy the system imposing such insanity. It’s sad to watch, knowing it does not have to be this sick and twisted.
Do you, personally, think that a college education is important? I did go to college, but I had some friends complain that they didn’t have the money to go, and was stuck doing custodial. They seem to blame tuition prices for the reason they don’t have an ideal job. Yet they won’t do anything about this. What do you think?
I entirely understand and I want nothing to do with the absurd current system of higher education in the USA based on wealth. It’s absurd. I very much champion the system in Denmark whereby higher education is always an option for those who want it and are willing to work for their classes. As I believe someone has posted here in the thread, education is consistently the key to a country’s prosperity.
Meanwhile: There are many very good community colleges around the country. I’d at least strive to attend them and strive to learn as much as possible. Within the technology community, great value is placed on personally acquired knowledge and experience. Not intending to start a flame war, consider the education of Edward Snowden who worked in high end, lucrative jobs for the NSA. He never finished high school. Instead, he was personally motivated to learn on his own within his area of talent and interest.
IMHO: Anyone motivated to gain a higher education deserves a higher education. No dire socialism required.
I am one of those high-salary/benefits software and systems engineers at our favorite company.
My BA is in Music and what I learned in college played directly into how I can see what needs to be done in software and SA work. It taught me to be collaborative and a teacher (as well as a learner: everyone I work with knows something that I don’t).
I go out of my way to show respect to the blue collar and admin folks around me. They work diligently, so if I can offer them good feelings and smiles, we all win.
That said, if Shadowself was my boss and we were interviewing candidates for an opening in our group, I could happily back him 100%. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said, “This one’s green, but bright. If you can afford the spin-up time and I can get my hands on his mind technically for a few months, we’ll have a winner in the group.” Sometimes it’s a “Hire”. Sometimes we find someone instead who can hit the track running already. Boss’s call. I’m happy either way.
I’ve suggested to pleasant and smart security contractors in our chats that they pursue certain chains of CS study at the local JC (and hobby-learning at home) where, if they dig in, I might be able to tell Shadowself, “We need some training time with this one, but he’ll be good long-term.”
But if the security guard or cook or custodian won’t press his/her knowledge levels accordingly, I’ll salute them when we cross paths but not expect them to reap the “indispensible techie” rewards of being a direct tech contributor. I hope they’re satisfied in the trade-off of labor and self-development for recompense.
Living Wage is a movement I back, anti-Union though I remain (urgh: conflict flag?).
Folks, I am impressed with the majority of the comments to this article. It delights me to see your brains engaged.
Every person on the face of the earth who is full-time employed should be earning enough to get to and from work and feed a family and house a family and clothe a family and obtain medical care for the family with enough left over to have a little entertainment fun. Period.
Any corporation which fails to adhere to that standard should be denied a tax deduction for any salary or other form of compensation which is more than 50 times the amount paid the lowest paid employee or contract worker.