Hacker News Reader

Comment by btreesOfSpring | Hacker News Reader

i think the article attempts to address this question by this hypothetical:

> Can you imagine what would have happened if Uber decided, because men gobble more food than women, that only women should get free catering in the company’s cafe, and men would have to reach into their wallets?

View on HN

Would it be remedied if the company offered to provide the same number of calories to each person (regardless of gender), with the obvious implication that women would be more satiated than men? What if Uber offered to provide the men their required calories at some additional charge?

My questions don't directly address what happened at Uber, but I'm trying to figure out where the boundaries lie.

Seems to me that, if you can afford to offer free catering but not for people who eat too much, that you can't actually afford to offer free catering. If the extra cost for the few is too much, you can't afford the whole.

Same way with the jackets. If you can't spring for the extra $ for the womens's jackets, you really probably shouldn't be buying jackets for everyone at this time...

I doubt the issue was "can't" so much as "won't".

There is very clear precedent on this from the way IRS treats perks as either deductible or wage compensation. Basically if your perks are not universal to all of your employees they cease to be deductible perks and start being treated as wage payments to those certain employees and therefore subject to Social Security and income tax withholding.

With cafeteria food you can either provide free food to all of your employees, or run a cafeteria that charges for food at-cost (the cafeteria cannot operate at a loss).

Having an executive cafeteria used to be a thing in companies. This is discrimination based on employee rank. The IRS treats executive cafeterias as wage compensation. Discriminating between employees of the same rank based on things like race would be racism, sex would be sexism, etc.

The jackets were not provided to certain employees, therefore they are not a perk and their value is wage compensation according to the IRS. So this is exactly like denying all the women SREs a bonus because they are women.

BTW it is very likely that those jackets were deducted as perks so this decision is not just overt discrimination by Uber but also breaking tax law.

Interestingly, if the women's jackets were more expensive than the men's, would that not be equivalent to having different 'cafeterias' depending on status (specifically gender)? I suppose that one solution would be to ask the garment supplier to put all the jackets on one invoice line, at the average cost, but that seems obfuscatory and possibly fraudulent.

In this case they were more expensive but not more valuable, since it was just the difference between bulk and individual prices. If the company buys every employee the same chocolate bar, it doesn't matter if Brad's cost $0.10 because it was part of a bulk order whereas Jane's cost $1.50 because it was bought at the retail price.

>Having an executive cafeteria used to be a thing in companies.

Well, yeah. When you have 90% marginal tax rates and the IRS hasn't caught up with taxing non-cash compensation/perks, then you tend to look for every possible perk you can give such employees! Anything short of "okay, what would you spend your next $X of take-home pay on? Tada! That's a perk for you now!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com