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To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

nytimes.com

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Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#31

Post by princekolt »

newforice wrote: post #11

"If you’re educated, you’re in command." I'm not college educated, I've made a comfortable living as a coder. It took over ten years of self-teaching in my 20's while working a FT job but I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I agree with the statement but there's more than one way to become educated. Academia is just one way and possibly not the best way.

But the simple knowledge of this fact is so scarce that it makes almost no difference. And since most schools don't care about coding (or, where I'm from for example, about anything not related to get the most students to pass the equivalent of SATs), this is not going to change soon.

I was so surprised when my father told me that back in the 80s, in a small city in the interior of Brazil, in a public school, he was taught BASIC as part of the school curriculum.

Over twenty years later, in a prestigious private high school in the capital city, coding was only mentioned once by a school director when shaming students for only using computers for "foolish tasks", while completely ignoring the fact his school didn't give a single coding class, not even as extra curriculum.

Programming should have the same importance status as maths in school, if not more.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#32

Post by fatjokes »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #10
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #3

>Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy. That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting wi…

you see, part of outsourcing is a sleight of hand where the worker is twice removed from the work giver. it kills the worker negotiating power. if you consider a janitor hired to a company that works for a megacorp, he's bargaining against the wall "this is what megacorp can pay, so there's no way we can raise your salary" - and works both way: megacorp cannot rate, engage and more importantly retain the individuals…

That just means the worker is not as valuable to the company and easier to replace, so they have no incentive to "rate, engage and more importantly retain" the individuals. Why would a business want to pay the premiums (longer vacation, high pay) associated with long-tenure, non-essential personnel? More experience, institutional knowledge, etc. all make an employee more valuable. But how much of that do you need for janitorial duties?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#33

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

kirsebaer wrote: post #16

Gail Evans worked as a janitor at Kodak in the 1980s. "She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March... A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory... Less than a…

This story is evocative of Trent Reznor's success story.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#34

Post by zuminator »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #3

>Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy. That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting wi…

The issue that the article is highlighting isn't so much the low pay of janitorial staff (in fact it states that Ramos makes about the same that Evans did). The issue is that there's little or no possibility for upward mobility for Ramos as being part of an outsourced labor staff. I'm not sure if I unreservedly accept this premise; judging from where I work, at least, the outsourced staff have a little bit of a better opportunity to for entry level in-house employment simply by exposure to word of mouth.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#35

Post by fatjokes »

It sounds like the real reason for inequality is that the pay for "janitorial work" has simply decreased. The article makes a point to say that the pay is the same, accounting for inflation, but it's disingenuous not to highlight total comp, which Ramos had significantly less of than Evans.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#36

Post by mathiasben »

The underlying cause of this whole issue is the changes in tax policy instated in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, previously income was taxed at higher rates unless deductions were utilized which forced those earnings back into the economy creating jobs funding research, etc.. As it's become easier to retain more earnings there's little incentive not to optimize an entire corporation solely with the purpose of generating returns at the expense of all else. To resolve this USA should consider reverting back to the Internal Revenue Act of 1954. Under this rule set income over $400K/yr was taxed at 90% or it was reinvested in the economy. Do this and this inequality issue will sort itself out in the same time frame it took to do the damage.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#37

Post by FLUX-YOU »

cmiles74 wrote: post #14
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #3

>Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy. That is the outsourced companies causing inequality. They are the ones paying people terribly, not the company contracting wi…

I disagree. Large wealthy companies are working hard to directly employ as few people as possible. Part of what they gain from this is the ability to pretend that the companies they hire to perform this "non-core" work are entirely separate black boxes. It would be embarassing to Apple to be treating their employees this way so they hire an outsourcing firm to do it for them. As large companies, like Apple, race to s…

But if the outsourcing companies were providing opportunities on their own, their employees could afford classes, living expenses and work on skills to eventually work at Apple.

Apple gets quality janitors and security guards while paying the outsourcing company more.

The outsourcing companies are the actual ones running the race to the bottom. Stop that, and Apple will have to reconsider (at which point, we get to argue all over again if their new solution is morally acceptable)

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#39

Post by chank »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #33
kirsebaer wrote: post #16

Gail Evans worked as a janitor at Kodak in the 1980s. "She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March... A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory... Less than a…

This story is evocative of Trent Reznor's success story.

Not even close.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#40

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

jfaucett wrote: post #21

This story reminded me of something I've often wanted to know when people start talking about economic inequality metrics, namely, how many of those in poverty when entering the workforce will remain in poverty their whole life? To me the longitudinal information here is the most significant metric i.e. what does wealth movement look like for individuals over their lifetime. Virtually everyone in their teens and earl…

They keyword you're looking for is intragenerational mobility, it'll pull up plenty of research, here's one link I found: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a...

But actually, I would go the opposite way and say we need to look at multigenerational inequality. Which is to say that our current inequality metrics might look really good even if you were bound to being only 1 quintile higher or lower than your grandparents, every individual would oscillate in a small range through their life but once accumulated it would show up in the data as lots of mobility. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how likely a family is to climb out of poverty over a few generations and then to stick there or how likely a rich family is to sink into poverty and stick there.

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