The literal story is about food workers who can't afford to raise a family in Palo Alto. The intended message seems to be that Facebook should pay food workers more than $20/hr.
I think it's acceptable for people to ponder outside of that claim.
“They look at us like we’re lower, like we don’t matter,” said Nicole of the Facebook employees. “We don’t live the dream. The techies are living the dream. It’s for them.”
The smaller indignities are numerous. At the end of every shift, Nicole watches large amounts of leftover food go into the compost – food that she’s not allowed to take home. Cafeteria workers only enter Facebook’s medical clinics if they’ve been selected for a mandatory drug test. Facebook recently held a “Bring your kids to work” day, but cafeteria workers’ children were not allowed.
are going to go untalked about. And what's the problem with saying that Facebook should pay it's workers more than $20/hr? If it's not enough to live on, that's kind of all there is to it isn't there?
- The prices of their needs are high enough that they can't afford them (given the amount they make)
- The amount they make is low enough that they can't afford their needs
Its reasonable to attack both issues, not just the one.
On that one in particular - is there a law against that? I know rules on food service workers taking things home vary quite a bit.
Apparently chocolate cookies had an unfortunate and inexplicable habit of being crushed under other products and being deemed unfit for sale.
Once the policy changed and staff had to throw damaged products in the garbage compactor, apparently a lot less chocolate cookies were getting damaged.
That is to say, a take-home box of food a day shouldn't be a problem on financial grounds, so rules like this are more of a power of ethics issue. In abstract.
However, in most cases (I don't know about facebook in particular) food service workers are contractors, and I'm sure the economics don't sort themselves out that way.
Anyway, facebook leadership could discourage this sort of nitpicky loss control.
One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorised crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in it.
The reality is that the fair market isn't perfect, and even jobs that are low on the totem pole but essential must be compensated in such a way where people don't need to work 60 hour weeks to barely afford a shithole home and car.
That's an extreme opposite from living wage.
(That might be OK, provided the now displaced workers choose to move someplace with a lower cost of living where they are able to make ends meet being paid an amount commensurate with the value they create.)
Secondly, there is a massive flaw here that I can't quite put into words, so I'll attempt to show my reasoning for what I'm getting at:
* Workers are paid for (in a perfect world) by the profits of a business that generates revenue providing a service. Therefore, whatever that service generates in revenue is passed to employees in whatever structure. By extension of the above, the rarer a service is by whatever measure be it difficulty, hazard, required equipment, regulation, training, etc. the more expensive that service is and therefore the higher paying that job should be. This is why neurosurgeons make more than McDonalds cooks.
* Cafeteria chefs, short order cooks, waitstaff, baristas, etc. are all examples of jobs that are almost universally terrible, universally poorly paid, and absolutely essential to many people's daily lives. They may not generate very much value individually, but if tomorrow they all decided to fuck off and not come to work, society as a whole would notice and be definitely worse off for it. In addition, to large groups of the population such jobs are their only source of income. We therefore have a situation where many entire sectors of the economy are composed of jobs that do not pay their workers enough to live, yet we absolutely need them. This doesn't make sense and is not sustainable.
What I'm saying is: you cannot have a situation where someone's still essential job does not pay them enough to live. Eventually, something has to give: we have to accept that just because someone lives a life of simple labor that they are not ours to then condemn to a life of check-to-check stress, lack of healthcare, and poor living conditions, especially when the majority of those in that life did not choose it, because who the fuck would choose that, but were forced into it by circumstance, fortune, poor decisions early in life, or some combination of the three.
Now, how we solve this problem I'm not remotely qualified to say. Basic Income is one idea, raising minimum wage is another, both of which will have far reaching implications that I can't even get into right now. What I'm saying is: the current scenario is not morally right, and not economically sustainable. We need something different.
Even well paid programmers, managers and other well paid people can't raise a family in Palo Alto.
You can't pick the most expensive and costly neighborhood in all of US and use that as a benchmarks for what people should expect from the economy.