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Workers at Chile's ALMA Telescope Strike Over Working Conditions
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Deutsche Welle: "'Employees at the world's largest radio telescope have gone on strike after failing to reach agreement over pay and conditions. Workers say they are not sufficiently compensated for isolation and high altitude.' The strike started on Thursday, and the telescope is currently not operating. Although the project's budget is $1.1 billion, an ALMA technician earns less than $2,000 per month. How does this compare with people working at observatories in the U.S., Japan, or the European Union?"
These guys are earning $2,000 p/m more than ALMA workers who are working in US, Japan or the EU.
Lets get a comparison of wages earned by locals doing similar skilled jobs.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Although the project's budget is $1.1 billion, an ALMA technician earns less than $2.000 per month.
1) Project budget is $1.1 billion. Sure, but over how many years? 1, 5, 10? Comparing a large number over many years to a monthly rate is disingenuous.
2) $2.000. WTF? Only some few european countries still use "." as a thousands separator instead of ",". This is an english language website, use english locale settings because to everyone else, that reads as $2.00 a month, which obviously has to be wrong.
3) Where does the $2000 a month figure come from anyway? It isn't in tfa. Citation needed.
And yes, I'm grumpy, I'm working because I have a major deadline next week.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
So would you get minimum wage technicians to operate a state-of-the-art gear like are these telescopes?
What could go wrong?
If you were exposed in the Atacama, you would most likely be dead in less than 48 hours. TFA touches on this, but it is emphatically not a nice place to hang out.
Sometimes I, too, chafe under the terms of my peonage.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
How is that cheating? I thought that is a simple demand and supply rule.
"cheat"
Not really. The only cheaters are those who lie that there is something immoral about organised labour.
All employees should unite and strike until paid enough to balance the distribution of wealth. And there's nothing employers would then be able to do about it, except turn employees into slaves.
And that's why there are so many lies told about unions.
Oh look, it's the race-to-the-bottom attitude. "I'm suffering, and the solution is to make more people suffer, rather than to lift everyone up."
Meanwhile the guys at the top laugh at you as you remain divided and conquered.
The cost of living in Chile for american expats is under $1000 a month.
The average annual income is $11,039.
If the observatory workers are making $2000 a month, then they seem to be making the equivalent of about $90,000 in the U.S. for local goods and services- tho very little in terms of world products (like imported automobiles and air conditioners).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Dude, i invite you to work in ALMA for a month, a 16,000 ft, with temps as low as 14 F , and winds of 32m/s for $12.50 per our on 12 hour shift with out bathroom or a descent place to eat.... then we can talk
They're probably not working 40 hour work weeks. When you're in a remote site like that, you tend to work all the time. I would not be surprised if they're working 12 hour days, 7 days a week while they're on-site.
Let us forget that they're in Chile for a minute.
If you're going to do a comparison to American salaries, $12.50/hr buys you an assembler / fabricator, not a technician. The work "technician" does get mis-used; but, if we assume that the title is correctly applied... A technician will draw a salary 2x to 3x that amount, depending on their skill level. A really good, experienced RF technician should be pulling a salary that's well into the low end of the engineering salary scale. That's before any premium for working in a remote site like the one ALMA is situated on.
Now for the hard part -- scaling for cost of living. If they are technicians from South America, where the cost of living is lower, you might argue that the salaries should be lower. If a substantial number of the technicians are Japanese, Europeans or American, you can expect to have to pay a salary comparable to salaries in their native country; otherwise, they have no reason to come to Chile (other than for the experience of working at ALMA). If there is a mix, and there is no salary parity -- Chilean's are paid 1/3 of Japanese technician's pay -- then you end up with something like the current situation. To avoid that you might have to pay everyone on the same salary scale.
I hire a contractor for $2000 to fix my roof. He takes the job and begins work. Halfway through he says that $2000 is not enough for his isolation and high altitude. He stops the work, goes on strike demanding more money and prevents me from hiring another contractor. Someone care to explain how that is legal and not a breach of contract?
Contractor's got ol' roofie fixed right up for $2k. Ah, but your balls of steel and the once banned Bay-Watch reruns have got your roof in a constant state of ill repair. So, you ring the roofologist up and say, "I've got another $2000, Doc, so fix me up."
The workers have been around your block though, and risking a blown off head over your smeggin' flat-top just isn't flyin'. They refuse to do the deadly tap dance lest better pay be coming their way too.
Now let's put you in the scientists' shoes: say instead of you fitting the bill it's your land lord's flat wot your rocks 'r blastin' off in. Seein' you commin' they budgeted bucketloads for repairs. Now you're bottled up with more rage than a widowed cuckold, but that don't change a bleedin' thing though, right? No one's breechin' the $2k contract 'cause they ain't takin' the money shots.
So, you can either negotiate a rate or get a new crew who won't be so great as the last guys, since it'll be their first time; The fresh folk'll want more than $2k being as your little game's exposed on the telly now and everyone's wise to your surprise.
So, you are saying you would prefer everyone to not have a job, than for most people to have a job but with some people making a lot more money than others.
There aren't as many lies told as you think. Some are valid critiques of viewpoints similar to yours.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Techician jobs range from about $20,000 to $35,000
For example:
https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/hr/jobs/nlogon/120716015331
Except everyone has a different idea of a just distribution of wealth.
Why are jobs with the lowest skills that are already overpaid the most likely to unionize? Why has no union ever dissolved itself after achieving its objective?
That right there is one of the lies. So long as there is work to be done at even razor-thin profit margins there will be jobs available.
Basically for any business the gross income is distributed into two broad categories:
Operating costs
Overhead (rent, utilities, sunk costs, etc)
Input resources (incremental costs)
Cash reserves and forward-looking investments
Net profit distribution
Employee salaries and bonuses
Executive salaries and bonuses
Shareholder dividends
Let's assume we can't touch Costs without hurting the company. That still leaves everything in the Profit section open to negotiation - *nothing* there will directly impact the viability of the company.
- Cutting dividends would likely hurt stock prices, but would have no effect on operation of the company beyond reducing future capital that can be raised by selling more.
- Cutting executive salaries might drive off some executives, but there's only so many executive positions available in the world and it's unlikely an executive will leave that labor market to lay bricks unless the salaries get to be comparable, so that's a pretty weak argument.
So why exactly shouldn't employees, the ones actually doing the work that's generating the profit, be negotiating for a bigger piece of the profit?
In the 1950s the average situation was that the top executives in a US company were making 30x as much as the lowest-paid employee. Today that number is somewhere well above 300x (the top executives are making 300x the *median* employee salary) Why is that? Granted those executive salaries wouldn't go all that far when spread around a large company, but they're probably plenty to give everybody a 10-20% raise and still let the executives make 50x as much as the janitors. Why exactly would that be a bad thing?
Yes, some unions overreached themselves and started cutting in to operating costs. That's a bad thing and those unions deserve to crumble, and the company deserves to collapse if they can't find more reasonable employees. Far more though just fought for their piece of the profit, or even more important things like reasonably safe and non-hostile working conditions. Are you really going to argue against that?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We're discussing employment, not serfdom.
There is a bathroom. Its in this building. There is also a nice room in there where everyone can eat, with a microwave and hot drinks. Sack lunches are provided (free, as part of site food service), and sometimes hot food can be had. It is also common to eat a sack lunch in the cab of a car, or sometimes just the base of the antenna. Management is fine with leaving the car engine running and heater on, so heated in the car is best if you don't want to drive back to the building. Oxygen bottles with the noise tubes are provided - and strongly encouraged. Though many employees don't like using them.
Of course, you only hear SynFlood's side of things because all non-union employees are directed not comment on the ongoing strike, which is why I am posting as AC. Some of his points are valid and a real problem. The food is bad, and should be better. The 12 hour days are real, and stupid - it should be 10 for the same total pay, giving workers more time to relax, call friends/family, or take a shuttle into San Pedro. But some of his points are not valid, and misrepresenting the issue makes solving the real problems that much harder.
I was corrected by a collegue which says 'we have two bathrooms, one is broken, and the other is only for 'number 1', so if you have to 'number 2' , then you are ... well i think is clear
(sorry for the wrong use of 'without' i was corrected by a colleague a few moments ago)
Huh, I don't remember Twain using that line with regard to politics, and it's irrelevant if he did anyway. The political landscape was not nearly so polarized in his day. Not the rhetoric, that was always vitriolic, but the actual level of conversational divisiveness between "members" of opposing parties
We live in a time when the political masterminds are leveraging the divisiveness in our society to neutralize the political power of the populace, leaving themselves free to act in their own interests without fear of retribution come election time. By fanning the flames of tribalism with your "humor" you are doing a disservice to both yourself and the nation. In the face of the substantial cross-party government excesses that are being exposed that is an unconscionable crime. For crying out loud, even the secret court charged with overseeing the NSA found it's actions unconstitutional, and yet they have continued unabated. Now is a time for national unity in the face of a threat worse than any this nation has ever faced, not petty divisiveness in the name of "humor"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Go find work elsewhere then.
Striking just shows at they can't. Otherwise they already would have.
I've worked in high-altitude mines in northern Chile and suggest that the working conditions are similar, but the pay is better in mining. There is a large pool of skilled and semi-skilled people who work in the high altitude mines (Collahuasi, Quebrada Blanca, Pascua Lama, Los Bronces, Andina, El Teniente just to name a few) that are the same labour pool that the telescopes are competing for.
The demand for skilled people in mining is driving up wages in Chile. Since these telescopes are competing for the same skilled people, they better pay competitive wages or else watch their people head elsewhere.
...or could just mean that you can't abide some asshole exploiting your fellow man, and you have the courage to stay and fight.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.