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Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years, according to a study from UC Santa Cruz's Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the labor think tank Working Partnership USA, which examined the economic impact of technology companies.
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
I know there are a lot of "elementary rules" when it comes to running a business. "Location, location, location", "law of supply and demand", etc. But one corporations in today's day and age just don't seem to get is this one:
Invest in your employees, and your employees invest in you.
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery. We have this subconscious that interferes with our ability to work at a constant rate of speed and productivity; it requires sleep for one thing, and it distracts our ability to focus continuously due to emotions which interrupt our concentration. Emotions, including feeling jaded by our employer who decided to give all the new employees a raise, but cut veteran employee bonuses and benefits. Or feeling depressed, because your employer is continually threaten to cut your position and move it to another part of the country if you fail to meet your quota. Et cetera, et cetera.
Most employers have forgotten now that when employees feel -valued-, their emotion doesn't impede their production, but rather boosts it.
At some point all of this is going to come to a head. Like Bastille Day.
Corporate America is endeavoring to lead us into neo-Feudalism.
It's just that they decided that they were going to ruin us to achieve them. It's working well so far.
Americans ruined themselves by voting hard right parties into office, the fact that someone like you claims elites sold you out when you gullibly believed in republican and democrats corporate bullshit tells us all we need to know. Nothing short of a movement of working folk from below would ever get the elites to look out for you. Your one of the most ignorant people on slashdot. A delusional right wing retard who doesn't seem to get, the more hard right you become, the more you are screwing yourself, right wing ideology is the ideology of elites and big business. But you are so drowning in your own idiocy and dunning krueger that you can't tell which end is up down there.
Americans learned nothing from their own history, the new deal was probably the best thing to ever happen to americans, and the next generations afterward gullibly believed whatever corporate right wing talking points your media and talk radio hosts in spades because they don't read nor study history.
When the banks got bailed out you voted republicans back into office a giant wtf, americans are pretty much shit for brains. You had your banks bailed out in front of your eyes and yet you still vote for the arms of big business. The demopublican duo.
I hate being a grammar nazi, but that article in the link looks like it was written by a third grader. There's enough misspellings to make an editor want to kill himself.
“High prices, which out to be a cost of doing business for them, are actually a key revenue driver,”
"is telling clients that the start-up economy is has turned into a sophisticated"
Makes it hard to take seriously.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Real wages have been down for decades, and no, the Trump tax cut didn't change that https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...
I have an MBA and I cannot afford to pay for the house I grew up in. My father paid for it on a single wage and hadn't finished college. It is easy to see where the culprits are: a high reliance on imports for manufactured goods and a significantly large share of earnings being diverted away from labour and going to the highest earners.
When I worked in the valley, at a variety of places, there were never more than 5% of workers born in the US. 95% immigrants. Yeah, I think that affects wages just a little bit.
And don't forget, in the late 1990s you had "webmasters" and "HTML developers" who were fare less skilled than JS guys.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is why you unionize. So workers get a larger share of the profits.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
they've got the H1-B program. They can pit you against workers from around the globe. Workers who trained themselves. Billions of them. So many that a few are bound to work out. Plus they can work them 80+ hours a week and not worry about burnout since there's a 100+ guys right behind them and behind those 100 guys is you.
This is what happens when workers get too confident in their abilities to start to think they can make it on their own. A single employee can't effectively negotiate with a mega corporation unless that employee is in the top 10% of geniuses, and, well, the reality is 90% of us aren't. If we were we'd know that, because 100-10=90...
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Itâ(TM)s kind of funny to read about how the U.S. is dying when you still have loads of people trying to come here.
Its a relativity problem. You see, if the whole continent is sinking into the sea, people clamour to the high land, even though its also doomed and sinking just as fast. Eventually everyone ends up crammed on the highest peak when that finally goes under.
You are watching people running for the highest hill and construing it as a sign of that hill's innate supremacy over the low-lands. The flood won't be nearly so impressed when it gets there.
In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global wealth (by a myriad of reasons, prominently featuring luck, malignancy, savagery, brutality and kleptocracy, which would take ages to go over) and therefore looks like the tallest peak where to shelter from the global disaster. Also many, if not most migrants only care about their next meal and long-term planning does not figure much in their actions.
The collapse of the economic house of cards, Ponzi scheme, or whatever name you give to the scam is in fact imminent and global. All the metrics you care to look into point firmly to a crisis of massive proportions that will hit hardest in the places which consider themselves most lofty and untouchable. As such catastrophes usually do.
Or to put it yet another way, hordes of people were immigrating to the US on the very Wednesday right before the Black Thursday too.
Well, no. Closer to 'Gentrification : Hey, that is a really nice community you have there, I think we can get the owners to kick you out and give it to us'.
All these gendrified areas tend to be places where the locals have built something appealing enough that wealthier people want it for themselves, now that it is built.
Elites basically came up with this: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities.
Neoliberalism--the opening of markets and borders--enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. Our elites, in embracing globalism, have institutionalized a system that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost foreign labor that serves capital's desire for lower costs.
For someone who is professional class, someone who has a nice income and who does NOT make their income from labor but from providing intellectual services (doctors, lawyers, teachers, white collar work in general) then moving production overseas is overall a plus. THEIR job is usually not threatened by factories closing and jobs being exported overseas and their costs go down as labor wages go down due to cheap crap from China. In other words, globalization leads to a net INCREASE in take home pay for the professional and upper classes. (Always has)
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of new, cheap junk. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go.
That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking deplorable peasants, all over again.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
because they won't release those stats. They use contractors to hide it. The published stats are for FTEs. A huge part of the reason to use contractor firms for that is to hide those stats.
Anecdotally the last 4 places I've worked at are pushing 80%.
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In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global wealth (by a myriad of reasons, prominently featuring luck, malignancy, savagery, brutality and kleptocracy, which would take ages to go over) and therefore looks like the tallest peak where to shelter from the global disaster. Also many, if not most migrants only care about their next meal and long-term planning does not figure much in their actions.
VS Heinlein
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Robert A Heinlein
You are right about something. The U.S. is dangerously close to allowing that kind of bad luck here, and if we go it will be the collapse of Rome all over again.