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Comment by yuzi | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why companies that know they are paying poverty like wages for an area don't just move the company or segment of the company to a more affordable area. It seems obvious to me they really just don't care about their employees.

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1) Well they'd have to fire their current employees and then move. Nobody is going to move their call center employees to Cleveland. They'd just fire/rehire.

I'd imagine their employees would rather have that job than no job. Otherwise they'd just quit right?

2) A lot of millennials would rather live near poverty in SF than living middle class in Kansas City. I think that is nuts, but it's no sweat off my back.

I've lived in Cleveland my entire life. It's not that bad :(

I don't think he was implying Cleveland was bad; just that very few people will make such a big move to keep their job.

That unwillingness kind of invalidates a lot of peoples complaints though.

Actually, the point was that no company is going to pay to move their employees. The company would just fire employees @ the current location and hire employees @ the new location.

1. it doesn't have to be that way and often you don't need to move across the country, in some cases 40 min to an hour away would probably make a difference.

2. In life we have a responsibility to understand what happens when we put people in difficult situations, even if they don't. Sometimes your employees get trapped. They start out trying to make it work, but find themselves in trouble. For example: http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/online-vancouver-ads...

Why is it the company's responsibility to determine if you can afford to work for them or not? They would adjust their practices if the market demanded it.

> Why is it the company's responsibility to determine if you can afford to work for them or not?

Using the word responsibility changes the meaning of this. How about we use a different phrase:

> Why [should the company care] if you can afford to work for them or not?

Because that's the point of working for a company.

The point of working for a company is to exchange services for money, not to feel cared about. It's the responsibility of the individual to assess whether what they are being offered is going to work for them. There's no hidden information here - had Talia done a budget she would have realized that her plan was not going to work.

Obviously they can do what they want, but does it make them good people? Not in my book.

> Obviously they can do what they want

Not in the most of the civilized world, no.

That someone agrees to something doesn't mean it does them any good. And while everyone is (or should be) free to accept bad deals, other people should be banned from proposing at least the most harmful ones. Hence the laws and regulations regarding employment, salaries and so on.

Well, this is from a European perspective, where there actually are such laws.

And what is unemployment in article's subject's age group in the Eurozone?

So if I hire someone, it's my responsibility to find out their living situation and expenses and calculate if they can afford to live on what I'm paying them? Personally, if an employer tried to violate my privacy that way in the interest of protecting me from myself, I'd walk.

No one is suggesting anything of the sort. An employer already does research into what generally is the normal pay and costs of living for their area. So generally speaking they know if the pay they are offering would put a zero asset person near the poverty line.

Isn't there room in the economy for jobs that aren't for people fully supporting themselves? Part time call center work would be an ideal high school/college job.

Right, so there are situations where it's not a bad thing. But let's get real, we know we're not talking about hiring teenage kids for after school work. That's not the core problem and not why people are discussing this. And that's something employers can account for during the hiring process.

I'm not willing to concede that - it's a call center job. The expected turnover in call centers is likely the same as fast food at < 1 year.

Here's how the hiring process went for this particular job: she walked in off the street and they hired her the same day. Does that sound like the hiring process you're familiar with for any job with a career path?

If Talia had applied at McDonalds and then complained the way she did, do you think her argument would be more or less valid?

I suspect were not going to agree and that's ok.

Everyone has different priorities and there's no shortage of companies putting a priority on profits/growth over taking the time or risking costs associated with looking out for others within our company or communities. I've avoided discussing Talias case because I think the problem is bigger than that. Even McDonalds shouldn't pay poverty like wages for their area. Even McDonalds can spend the time to find out if they're hiring a person just looking for supplemental income.

Also, maybe the turnover wouldn't be so high if they paid better.

The comment you replied to, and Talia's original post, is representative of the market demanding it.

The market demanding it would be Yelp being unable to hire CSRs in SF at their current wages and being forced to raise wages to attract talent.

That's one scenario, but there are others.

If enough consumers decide to stop doing business with a company because of the company's behavior, then that's also a kind of market demand. The article gives one example of such a customer, though it's unwise to extrapolate too much from a single data point.

Yes, but ultimately it goes back to being unable to hire at current wages. Let's say that consumers stopped doing business with Yelp and they did not raise wages as a result. Yelp does not have a monopoly and someone would create a competing business and hire away their employees. Yelp would either be forced to raise wages or do without customer service/go out of business.

The market and the mob are two different things.

The market is beginning to demand it, and Talia's story is one example of that.

If you want to understand why some people are afraid to speak out about the situation, you needn't look further than the backlash that Talia herself got.

That's not the market demanding it. Yelp could easily fire uppity workers and replace them with people willing to work for that wage.

I find it curious, then, that instead of doing that they're doing the exact opposite: increasing wages, tripling paid time off, and adding on 11 paid holidays.

That is right and I see most of startups and small business feeling the heat already. I left my last company for the only reason that with the salary they were giving me I could not even qualify for most of the apartments in bay area.

Fixing real-estate prices by deregulating land usage is number 1 thing government can do to help poor people in bay area but they wont.

It's not. They are free to make up their compensation. People are free to say negative things about that compensation. And the company is free to fire those people.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the criticisms are correct (or for that matter, that the compensation is correct).

For some reason it's okay for developers at tech companies to get paid market wages for their skills but not okay when it's CSRs.

Companies start by not having a low-skill, low-wage support staff at all. Then they add it, but they add it locally - in the Bay area, if they're a Bay area company. Eventually, cost wins out and the call center gets moved somewhere cheaper, like a dying Midwest industrial city, or India.

But that sort of move requires a great deal of corporate maturity. It's okay to overspend in the name of short-term convenience when you're still kind of a startup.

What I don't get is why they don't have the call center in Concord instead of SF. Office space is cheaper, and there is plenty of labor available out there.

I think that's what Yelp ended up doing with Eat24, moving the office to Phoenix if I recall correctly.

The founder of Zappos had this problem. He realized there was no way he could do shipping or call centers in the Bay Area. So he moved shipping to Kentucky and call centers to Nevada.

Comments on HN if they Yelp had done that:

> "I can't believe Yelp forced their employees to move to a different location just so they could keep paying them lower wages."

Or maybe they could move them and give them a raise from all the savings found elsewhere.... Like rent, property, taxes and so on.

In Canada CN move their head office from Toronto to Calgary. They paid for the moves, gave everyone a one time extra bonus plus raises. They saved billions and not that many complained.

> CN move their head office from Toronto to Calgary

Are you talking about the CN railway whose HQ is in Montreal...?

Montreal wages are a lot lower than both Calgary and Toronto, too.

Possibly! But maybe remote work? Why not open that up?

Fly them to SF and buy them a month of housing if you're worried about the in-person-break-in phase: the result will pay for itself.

In short, for both employers and employees, the "flyover region" reputation is a self-fullfilling prophecy.

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