The tech titans in Silicon Valley don’t seem to care that the people cleaning their lavish offices make insanely low wages in one of the most expensive places on earth.
The average pay for Silicon Valley tech workers is the highest in the country, but the janitors there make way less than their counterparts in places like New York and Chicago. Case in point, New York’s janitors make $25.25 an hour compared to $11.04 in Silicon Valley.
This is outrageous. In a place like Silicon Valley such wages are near poverty.
And, you’re probably not going to believe this, it takes two and a half years before they are eligible for health insurance. Can you imagine starting a new job and being told you have to wait two plus years?
Not surprisingly the janitors overwhelmingly authorized a strike over the weekend.
From the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday:
Janitors who clean offices in Silicon Valley and Alameda and Contra Costa counties voted Saturday to authorize a strike after contract talks with management representatives broke down over wages and health benefits.
As many as 6,000 janitorial workers, members of Service Employees International Union Local 1877, could go out on strike at any time after Saturday’s nearly unanimous vote in San Jose, Gina Bowers, a spokeswoman for the union, said.
From the employer side:
Jim Beard, chief negotiator for the cleaning contractors, said workers were offered wages and benefits that added up to an additional $3 over four years.
“We think this is a pretty good deal,” Beard said. “It covers the increasing costs of health and welfare.”
It’s a disgrace how we divvy up wealth in this country. The disparity in pay among the top and bottom half of our society has been widening more and more each year.
From CBS News earlier this month:
There have always been “haves” and “have-nots” in the United States, but over the past three decades, the gap between them has gotten a lot wider, statistics from congressional numbers crunchers show.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed - by 228 percent.
No where is this chasm more pronounced that among the elite, so-called enlightened on the West Coast in this more than golden tech hub we all know as Silicon Valley.
Maybe Google’s founders and all those other tech executives who have more money than they know what do with need to start putting pressure on the contractors they hire to treat workers fairly.
Google’s founders are now worth about $18 billion each. It may be a good time for them to remember when they were broke and working out of a garage.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
The discrepancy between NY and Silicon Valley janitor pay is unreal. Wonder if this has to do with immigrant populations in SV driving the janitor pay down. Perhaps the issue is deeper than just the Google guys wanting a bigger piece of the pie? In any event — $25 an hour is A LOT of money for unskilled work (it is unskillled, or easily learned, isn’t it?). At those wages, i bet the position competes seriously for entry level business positions!! I mean, let’s put it into perspective - that is $52,000 a year!! Yes, clean offices are important but come on — I bet teachers earn less than that when they start out!.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:53 am
lexma, the pay rate in New York likely reflects the cost of living there. Even at $52,000 a year, you’d be hard pressed to find decent housing and you’d struggle to keep your head above water there. One could argue that the cost of living in Silicon Valley warrants a higher wage, too, but I don’t know how the cost of living there compares to that in New York.
Eve, I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here, but I’m wondering if you can post the figures that define the “haves” vs. the “have-nots”. I’m genuinely interested in where we draw the line between those two groups. To me, it is about as clear as “us” and “them”–I know a difference is implied (in the mind of each reader), but how is it defined?
Does lifestyle choice come into play when looking at “haves” and “have-nots”? I’ve known people who got by comfortably on less than $25,000 a year, and I’ve known folks with six-figure incomes who struggle to make ends meet. Some people just “must have” new cars, for example, while others of us have never owned a new car. There are big differences between people in different family circumstances, too:
- a single earner
- a single earner who is part of a couple
- a single earner with children
- a single earner couple with children
- a dual-income family with no kids
- a dual income family with kids
It gets even more complex when you look at families with more than one or two children. My wife and I are expecting our tenth in November. Once we started on that path, we knew that our lifestyle would be different than that for those around us who have no children, or fewer children. We’ve decided to live in an exurban community, go without cable or satellite TV, and are expert bargain hunters. If you looked just at our income, perhaps we would be classified as middle class. In the eyes of our community, some assume we are wealthy because we can afford (or so they assume) so many children. Others assume we are “have nots” because we have so many children and because we go without cable, a lake home, and various recreational vehicles. For ourslves, we feel we’re doing very well: our needs are met and we do have some discretionary funds.
The longer I live, the more I believe that people need to be paid a fair wage that allows them live in their communities without needing to hold down two or three jobs just to survive. I also believe, however, that much of what we Americans consider necessary to our “survival” is often couched with wants rather than just needs. My wife and I lived in a major metropolitan area with five children on less than $30 per year. It was hard–no doubt about it–but we did not consider ourselves poor by any means. We’ve come to realize that the fact that we have shoes on our feet (and spare shoes in the closet) puts us in the top 5-10% of the world’s wealthiest people. We also knew it would take us a long time to reach the place where we are now–of relative stability and less financial strain. Unfortunately, many others of our generation (and younger) have rushed out to accumulate, in their first few years of independent living, all of the trappings of the “good life” their parents had accumulated over 20 or 30 years. In the process, they set themselves up for serious financial difficulties and they miss opportunities to learn how to build that “good life” one day at a time.
[Okay. I’ll get off my soap box now.]
One final comment to consider that is more directly related to the wages of janitorial staff: as budget times have gotten tighter, the company I am now with cut down on the number of custodial staff to save money. They pushed a significant amount of the cleaning work back to each employee. We now clean our own workspaces, and common workspaces. Janitorial staff only vacuum once a week now. The size of the cleaning service that operates here was significantly reduced a few years ago. If higher wages are granted to these employees, I anticipate that other businesses will take similar steps.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Hey, Eve,
Among other things, the 20th century might be remembered as the period when, for a brief, shining moment, the lower-middle class had a taste of the good life. Think about it: the evolution from six-day to five-day, 40-hour work weeks; improved safety conditions; the right to organize. Compared with previous centuries, it was a golden age for labor. Now unions are in retreat, and people are working more hours to cover living expenses. We’re mostly a society that consumes rather than creates. Here’s hoping the workers in Silicon Valley can see some improvement in their wages.