Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> the average cereal worker makes $120,000 a year

Wow - why aren't workers in lower paid careers like service dropping everything to get these jobs? Why weren't people scabbing to get them during the strike and offering to work for $110k instead?

View on HN

The payrate information is incomplete, such as pay per hour or number of years of service required to attain the payrate that will result in a gross income of $110k.

Also might include working nights and weekends.

It is annoying to see analysis done simply by using nominal wages, and have it ignore time of day the work is performanced, risk of bodily injury, whether or not you get to be home for dinner with the family, location of the work, whether or not you work weekends and holidays, and what the effective pay per hour ends up being.

Reminds me of a software engineer colleague who complained endlessly about city bus drivers making more money than they did.

"Well, go become a city bus driver then."

"Um, uh..."

Or maybe he was asking why engineers were paid so low compared to blue collar jobs. If our work is valued the same as bus drivers, then ok, he should switch careers. But if it's not valued the same, as HN frequently demonstrates with its discussions boasting about massive dev salaries, your colleague is rightly asking why engineers are paid so low compared to bus drivers.

Which camp are you in? Either way, maybe it's time for a tech union, clearly these workers at Kellogg and other industries are getting their demands met. Why aren't we?

They were scabbing. Predictably, quality appeared to go through the floor as a result

eg) https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/147225737151065293...

Yikes is that people interfering with food again to support the aims of the union? Nasty tactics.

Are you assuming malice where sheer incompetence could be at play?

Doesn't seem to be without precedent?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/14/kelloggs-video...

I don't think it's ever even remotely acceptable to do this over a workplace dispute. What about you?

Also assuming a couple images in tweets form a set of representative and trustworthy data.

A very good point, too.

I'm pretty sure it's just inexperienced workers with zero training or experienced supervision making obvious, predictable mistakes in food preparation (over-baking, failing to evenly apply icing to pop-tarts, etc).

Your reading seems like a very big stretch given how pedestrian most of these mistakes are.

> making obvious predictable mistakes in food preparation

Obvious mistake of not putting plastic or insect larva in the food?

Yes to both, bulk food has got a lot of insects and foreign matter when it comes into a factory.

You don't have to work to put insect larvae in food, especially grains. It's separating out larvae that's the usual challenge. Seems like exactly the kind of QA challenge you'd have with a completely green workforce.

I'd assume these production lines involve contact with any number of plastic parts that could break or shave off if operated incorrectly. Same with the glue from packaging hitting the food if you don't do it right.

I think the implication is that it is not intentional, but a result of the poor quality of work that the inexperienced substitute work force has.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com