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Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

theguardian.com

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Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#411

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

Dude2018 wrote: post #220
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe we live in a meritocracy? EDIT: I guess this is a bad question since it's really a matter of degrees. Perhaps a better question is: How meritocratic do you feel that our society is?

Meritocratic enough for unequal income between skilled and unskilled labour?

Meritocracy is more about how we sort people into skilled and unskilled labor positions. Which is to say that a pay difference between skilled and unskilled labor is the outcome of a capitalist system but a system which gives everyone an equal shot at being skilled labor is a meritocratic one. Which is why I'm curious about your opinion of how meritocratic our society is today.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#412

Post by bsimpson »

jazzyk wrote: post #223
pacaro wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this happened at Microsoft. Back in the day there wasn't such a clear line between contractors and FTEs. The lawsuit did a lot of damage in both directions. It's not clear who benefitted other than the attorneys. Also, if you make these roles direct employees, then you can get into an awkward position wrt 401K contributions, if the delta between your highest and lowest payed employees is too great. My understan…

>The lawsuit did a lot of damage in both directions. It's not clear who benefitted other than the attorneys. That lawsuit single-handedly created an additional layer of intermediaries (whole industry, really), which eats up ~30% of consulting revenue and provides close to zero value.

At the large company I contracted for, I negotiated my rate directly with the company. Then, they had their vendor manager hire me, and agreed to pay them my rate + their markup as an hourly wage for my services. I worked directly for the large company, but was an employee of a vendor whose sole purpose was to manage that company's contractors. It was quite bizarre.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#413

Post by sctb »

dullgiulio wrote: post #20
thanksgiving wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They earn too much to qualify for state health care, but not enough to afford the health insurance offered by their employer. They frequently struggle to find enough money for basics like food and clothes for their children. Victor recently borrowed money from his mother to hold a birthday party for one of his daughters, and from a friend to pay for a dentist appointment. This one might be a little unpopular but it…

You are delusional or you have serious maths problems: if you can afford to give 100 to 10 people, you automatically afford to give 100 to 100,000 people? What logic is that? Then you just say "the evil is means testing" but not why. tl;dr you have no arguments to back up your slogan.

Please make your point civilly without calling names, like the guidelines ask:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#414

Post by oneshot908 »

newobj wrote: post #384
oneshot908 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all sorts of wonderful shop classes and related perks at FB. Older and senior talent in my experience is discouraged from attending these classes. Maybe they weren't always that way or maybe someone smacked them with a clue bat over that behavior, don't know...

are you just making this stuff up? it's totally wrong. and if it did happen, there would be a public discussion about it very quickly.

Why don't you ask about this at an all-hands if you're so sure it's never happened or if you're so sure that everything stupid and wrong at large companies like Facebook gets addressed quickly?

I'm actually encouraged to hear others have had a different experience there. But there's plenty of stupid crap I've seen go down as well, much like other large companies. For not everything rises to the level of public discussion rather it becomes yet another papercut leading to the decision to depart.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#415

Post by jimmywanger »

tptacek wrote: post #402
jimmywanger wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give too many benefits to contractors, they become de-facto full time employees, and you have to pay for benefits and health insurance and all that stuff. That happened back in the day with engineers at Google also. They hired a lot of contractors, but you could really only work 6 months out of the year, or else they'd have to classify you as full time with all the attendant benefits. The food and fitness cent…

I've been a full-time consultant/contractor since 2005 and felt like I was pretty familiar with the IRS classification rules, and this is new to me. Can you cite where you read this?

Sure.

If you take a look at https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/x-26-07.pdf, points 6, 13 and 14 are the most important.

If you give too many benefits to contractors, they could make a plausible case that they're full time employees and will be able to sue for back pay, benefits, and punitive damages. For instance, for point 13, you could argue that a free shuttle would be paying for your travel expenses.

It's definitely a gray area, but large companies have very deep pockets and a very public lawsuit would harm them in ways that would not harm a startup without much money, and policies get made. Google I think is erring on the side of caution, hence selective caps on benefits and employment duration. "He only works for us 50% of the time, there is no way he's an employee."

EDIT:

And free shuttles could also run afoul of point 9 and point 7, which is doing work on the employer's premises and an expectation of certain hours to be kept. A case could be made that if you're providing transportation to a location, and it's only available for a few hours, there's a certain expectation that you're expected to be in a certain place at a certain time.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#416

Post by mahyarm »

deegles wrote: post #351
rhizome wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically they should move to a place with a cheaper cost of living. Theoretically the entire company could do that.

I mean, they slowly are... Seattle is booming. Google, Facebook, et al. are all massively expanding their presence. Admittedly, the COL is going up rapidly there too, but at least there's a huge amount of construction happening. I wish the large tech companies would experiment with more remote-only teams, it would be great to eliminate the commute and live anywhere I want.

When things go bad, the satellite offices get shut down first. That is a reason for employees to stay in the area.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#417

Post by [deleted] »

tyingq wrote: post #373
kafkaesq wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experiences as an on site contract worker don't always line up with that. You keep getting back to your experience as an on-site, and highly paid (compared to most folks) tech worker. The whole point of the original article is the experience of low-paid, contract service workers is vastly different. It seems obvious to me that they are employees of the food service company, and should be. Whether they should or sh…

>You keep getting back to your experience as an on-site highly paid (compared to most folks) tech worker. Yes, because you implied it came with respect. It doesn't always.

[deleted]

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#418

Post by kafkaesq »

Danihan wrote: post #394
kafkaesq wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'll say the regulate-the-problem-away impulse is a pipe dream in the long run. I'll call it "the lesser of nightmares". Being as we've seen where "just let property owners do whatever they want" has lead us to in the past.

Where's that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#419

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

tyingq wrote: post #373
kafkaesq wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experiences as an on site contract worker don't always line up with that. You keep getting back to your experience as an on-site, and highly paid (compared to most folks) tech worker. The whole point of the original article is the experience of low-paid, contract service workers is vastly different. It seems obvious to me that they are employees of the food service company, and should be. Whether they should or sh…

>You keep getting back to your experience as an on-site highly paid (compared to most folks) tech worker. Yes, because you implied it came with respect. It doesn't always.

You really seem set on missing kafkaesq's point, take this specific line from the article, and this specific line from you:

the distance between the two classes of Facebook workers can feel immense.

>I don't personally see a difference other than the average wage for what I do.

As a highly-paid tech contractor it is obvious on which side of that class divide you fall. Even though you were a contractor. So when you say that you were a contractor and were still respected that's not really the point. Of course you were respected, you're on the correct side of the class divide. That is the difference in respect here, not contract work per se, but the experience of being a poorly paid service worker who lives in a garage yet spends every day working at a company employing legions of young and wealthy programmers who live in fancy apartments. That's why she says: “We don’t live the dream. The techies are living the dream. It’s for them.” You're that techie, you're living that dream.

Re: Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet

#420

Post by robocat »

tpallarino wrote: post #400
Dude2018 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meritocratic enough for unequal income between skilled and unskilled labour?

The funniest part of this is that Facebook provides almost no value to society, while the food service workers do.

On the contrary, how we want to use our free time is the most important outcome of society, everything else is work.
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