“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?