After a remote year, tech’s shadow workforce barely hangs on | Hacker News Reader

After a remote year, tech’s shadow workforce barely hangs on

wired.com

117 pointselsewhen109 comments

When it was short term, I can see the argument both for decency and for a smoother return of keeping people on. I was surprised that my employer pretty much instantly dumped all the facilities related staff when we went to wfh. But now that it has become structural, it's hard to fault places for adapting. I read comments about people continuing to pay their barbers or cleaners. Are they just going to keep doing that? At some point, and where I am it was probably once we realized we'd still be wfh at the end of last summer, I think it's perfectly reasonable to restructure the business to reflect reality. People doing jobs that aren't needed will realistically need to adapt. When things change back, companies and the labor market can adapt back.

The reality is that this isn’t something that can be realistically addressed with personal morals or ethics and/or shaming campaigns.

These are society wide problems. This, literally, is what government is for. Or should be.

With that said it’s honorable and positive for people to notice that our government is not currently set up this way, and to try to make personal decisions to improve things.

But if you’re actually looking for solutions they’re on a larger social scale and involve things that Silicon Valley has often been culturally hostile to, like social insurance systems and organized labor.

Depends on your views. I personally think it's more effective to take on the majority of the work. However, a significant chunk of the US has a "government is the problem" ideology, and thinks the correct way to approach problems is via non-government actors.

I think often that's not really sincere; it's just a way of trying to limit government reaction. But for those who really mean it, employers are the ones who should be playing a big role here as participants in and conveners of communities.

And even if government is generally best suited to solve these problems, there's still a lot for everybody to do here. I hope everybody has been taking action: individuals, companies, NGOs, and all levels of government can contribute to getting us through this.

I retired in 2017 but I worked for a large company that rented an entire 18-story building and many floors of neighboring buildings. Like many buildings it had a card, candy, snack shop not owned by the company. Also, in the multi-level parking garage there was corner rented out to a car detailing place. These people aren't even covered by the company itself, they were remoras on the shark. When the pandemic hit and the building cleared out, I thought about these businesses and how they're basically wiped out.

I love reading about workers unionizing and getting guaranteed pay through the end of the year. But it’s ass backwards that we question whether it’s fair to ask this of corporations. It’s great that some do. But we should expect government to provide services and care for its citizenry.

To be clear, at a time when I’m working from home with reduced cost of living (no commute, not really eating out, and reduced spending on entertainment), I want my tax dollars to go to to those who aren't able to do the same. Pay for these workers to take care of their kids’ needs without worry about what news is coming tomorrow.

>question whether it’s fair to ask this of corporations

When company A makes the moral choice to do so and B doesn't, 'investors' will favor B in every case. This is similar to how Costco is criticised for having a 'low' margin and 'good' compensation for all of their staff[]. The tens of millions of people not earning a living wage is a failure of policy that is the result of unfettered greed.

[] Costco starting compensation is not a livable wage for the cities most of their stores are in. Their compensation is only good in comparison to the average compensation for jobs with similar requirements.

Many investors might not value Costco for those reasons but not all. It's notable the Berkshire Hathaway only recently divested their Costco shares but only after holding them for many years and even sharing corporate board members [1].

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gurufocus/2020/11/17/warren-buf...

You seem to be arguing against yourself. Costco is paying a livable wage, having great sales and their investors are happy. So basically the opposite of your argument.

This is a simplistic analysis of the "duty to the shareholder" principle.

The wellbeing and happiness of the operations staff directly impacts competency, efficiency, and retention. And those all directly affect, among other things, the cost of operations. One doesn't need to resort to investor altruism to make the case that paying better leads to better economic outcomes.

This is no different than when Nike charges $300+ for shoes that have the same BOM and applied labor as a cheaper shoe. In neither case do you see investors pushing for a race to the bottom, simply because of the existence of lower cost competitors.

Depends on the investors and the company, really. Moral choices can have financial consequences later on. E.g., I used to be a big Amazon fan. But over the years they've worn me down with their anti-worker behavior and now I only use them as a last resort. And we now see them getting pushback not just from individuals, but from government all around the world.

We see a similar story for the social media tech companies. The initial line was that FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc weren't responsible for content; they were just a neutral way for users to connect. That was always a dubious argument, but it did let them save a lot of money and time they instead devoted to growth. Now they are being dragged kicking and screaming into mitigating some of the negative externalities of their very lucrative business models. Negative externalities like enabling hate groups, pogroms, and an attempted overthrow of a major democracy. It's not clear what happens next, but I'm guessing having congress beat up your CEO on national television is not going to help their earnings per share.

Do you love reading about the bad side of unions [1] or is there only up side?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

This is particular to British unions, e.g. the unions of Germany would never do something like this. Basically unions run a spectrum of activities as broad as any kind of organisation.

This is a very vague article, focusing on a single person who was employed by Verizon (not sure why they’re big tech). The same person says she’s jealous of her friends at actual big tech (google, fb, nvidia) who are continuing to pay service workers. There are no other companies named as examples. The byline and headline, as well most of the content implies the usual big tech bashing, but they couldn’t find real examples??

https://archive.is/ZsbSq

Thank you. I refuse to sign up for wired! Now if only we could get Reader Mode to work on archive.is links!

Firefox's reader view works just fine on the Wired article. You don't need to sign up for anything.

For me I only get a few paragraphs in the reader view.

Hitting F5 after hitting F9 usually fixes this nicely.

Try a reload, that sometimes works.

(I've noticed this on other sites, not necessarily Wired.)

Reader Mode plugin works for me on this link.

This is basically the same as all other hospitality workers, no?

Although these companies could very easily afford to keep these guys on, which is pretty shameful. Their role isn't to earn money for the company anyway. They are just a cost, it makes no difference if they're actually working or not.

Just like having electricity present in the power outlets is a cost, and technically doesn't make the company any revenue.

I mean, if you're going to perform the fashionable micromanagement. You can technically do without it, if you're using remote servers to face the customers. Your engineers could charge their laptops at home, use cellular hotspots to connect to the remote servers when they're in the office...

Looking at some of the companies out there, I'm beginning to think they think they only need customers and no employees.

A lot of these arrangements are independent companies who operate the cafeteria as a tenant renting (often subsidized) space in the same building. The revenue for those cafeterias comes from the customers and there are none.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand yes a lot of the tech companies can afford it and probably won't impact the bottom line to keep paying them. On the other hand, why pay the cost if it's not required.

I used to have a cleaner come once every 2 weeks pre covid. That's stopped now and I don't pay them anymore. Should I keep paying them to not come in?

Ideally, the government would have a sufficient relief structure in place to do so.

Practically, you already are paying them indirectly through your tax dollars going towards the stimulus and unemployment programs.

People I know in Manhattan are still paying their cleaners even though there’s no more cleaning. These are fewer and fewer as folks permanently decamp from the city.

It impacts the company's bottom line by an amount precisely equal to their pay, payroll tax, and benefits. Because that's how bottom lines work. They're the summation of all the previous lines, +ve and -ve.

Personally, I kept paying my cleaners, because my bottom line isn't that important to me. But it is (and should be) for companies.

Having a trusted cleaning staff available without going through a painful sourcing period can be worth the cost. Long term planning + goodwill and the expensive writeoff make it attractive.

'Can' make it attractive. Even when you consider all of those it may not make sense financially.

But if you don’t have that trusted connection already, there is no reason to keep paying a service for not sending someone over.

AAPL’s recent ~18% decline from ATH is a direct result of this, if they didn’t pay their cleaners to do NOTHING it would not have dropped so much

I don't know whether you should have kept paying your cleaner, but I have been paying my barber every month even though I haven't had a haircut in over a year. To me it absolutely seems like the right thing to do, but is a little delicate - you have to make sure it doesn't end up feeling like charity.

I've been buying gift certificates where I can. For my barber, specifically, I had them just give something on a piece of paper since they're a small shop and don't do gift certificates. Not sure it's the best idea in the world, but it's a balance between charity and them giving me something of value.

Where you live barbers haven't been able to work whole year? Why and where?

They're open, but I haven't felt safe going.

We are still paying our cleaner even though she does not come. We also paid our nanny when she could not come for twelve or fourteen weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, and again when NYC seemed like it was going to have a large second wave. But we are fairly wealthy and it is not painful for us to do this. This behavior seems pretty typical of my friends in similar income levels.

"tipping" culture strikes again! When the wage for certain service workers is too low, we try to subsidize it by tipping them. Now when the government doesn't provide enough coronavirus relief for service workers, some of us keep them on the payroll as a kind of cornavirus relief.

That's a bad thing why? These people are just taking care of the people who take care of them and their kids. It seems logical to me.

The point is that in a politically and economically healthy society, they shouldn't have to.

I think we know that America isn't healthy in any respect right now. Part of that is we don't think it's necessary to take care of each other.

Well, on one hand at least the money goes directly to the one in need and not through the government as a middle man. There's no department heads or managers of managers to pay in between this transaction.

Pros: no government "middle man" taking a "cut" (although I'd like to see how much % was used to administer the trump/biden checks, for instance)

Cons: Totally arbitrary. Have a generous employer? Great! Stingy employer? Sucks for you. I'd also imagine that whether you'd get this kind of "relief" depends on your job, kind of like how waiters get tipped but fast food workers don't.

This isn't tipping, but assured maintenance.

We usually think of wages as payment for work produced, and generally, if the cost of producing a thing isn't exceeded by the value created, you won't pay that cost.

But the true cost of labour is its upkeep, sustenance, that of its family, the training, risk, and uncertainty associated with the employment, as detailed 245 years ago by Adam Smith (Book 1, Chapter X, Wealth of Nations).

And that means, in a time when work is impossible, paying a maintenance wage to ensure future productive capacity.

That's exactly what unemployment benefits should be. It's an emergency measure, funded by taxation of society, to allow for those who would be affected by a calamity to weather the storm and emerge on the other side capable of resuming their productivity.

Unemployment insurance in the US is handled state-by-state, with commensurate variance.

But virtually no states offer unemployment insurance as a routine basis for self-employed individuals, which would include individuals with small businesses, gig workers, or independent contractors, which largely describes housecleaning services workers.

The US did pass emergency national legislation (the CARES Act) which allows (but does not AFAIU require) states to extend unemployment insurance to those workers. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20200617001228/https://money.usn...

Mind: I agree with your point from an ought perspective, unfortunately the is is at odds here. For the US, this means individuals have to step in.

My comment above only means to illustrate the economic rationale by which one might choose to do so. Unfortunately given market mechanics, most people will like decide not to. That's the cause of much of the economic disruption and dislocation of the past year, in the US and elsewhere.

As someone who is distinctly not of your wealth level, I have mixed feelings about the companies which compose my modest wealth (equity) burning a lot of money for services not rendered. And may never be rendered at the same level again.

>money for services not rendered

is a convenient abstraction. in reality we're talking about people.

it's so miserably brutal to come into the comments of any article on hn where wealthy people (engineers) bandy about about working class people. i don't have much else to say because i'm not going to debate whether ___ tech company, at some (even nontrivial) cost to their equity holders, should help support people that make minimum wage. i'm only leaving this comment so that some can reflect on their position.

The thing is, if you leave it up to the companies to look after these people, it’s going to turn ugly every time. It should be the governments job to make sure everyone has a baseline level of life quality.

In the meantime do we do the right thing, or do we wait for the right solution?

We fix the thing needing fixing right now with the tools we have.

But that's the problem - if some companies do the "right thing" (whatever that means), it lessens the pressure on society to establish this baseline.

Companies shouldn't have to do the "right thing" - they're concern is to make money for their owners. They should follow the rules of society, but should not be expected to offer charity whenever something calamitous happens.

Everyone has to do the right thing. That's the categorical imperative.

But if everyone must do the right thing, why not legislate it so that they will be enforced?

Why give the illusion of choice between the right thing and the profitable thing?

Such is the nature of "doing the right thing" - it must be a free will choice. This is not a matter of law, but a matter of maturity of society.

People kill over disagreements about "the right thing". Your reduction is not meaningful or useful.

It's not my reduction - the person I responded to used it and I coattailed

I agree.

The level of economic struggle in the US is unnecessary.

At what point do we people stand in solidarity to remedy this state of affairs?

We did that for gay people, black people, women, etc...

Should we not do that same thing on this quality of life matter?

It’s a math problem. The US standard of living is fairly high and that’s expensive to maintain. Pick a number in your mind of how much money the government should guarantee every adult citizen every year.

If you seized all the wealth of every US billionaire and gave it equally to all US citizens 18 or older, each citizen would receive less than $20K. Not per year, but once ever.

There’s a lot of people demanding a lot of goods and services and most of that work is an actual grind.

There’s a difference between saying (obviously correctly) that gay people, black people, women should all be equally able to participate in the economic engine. It’s another thing entirely to eliminate the heat, friction, and struggle in that engine.

Oh don't know, with wages basically flat for decades, the people would very likely be much better off having taken home the tens of trillions they didn't.

In that scenario, we would be talking about a small number of people, and the word unnecessary would be much harder to support.

That real grind matters. Without it, even more of us are worse off.

I agree it is a math problem, but disagree on framing it in immediate terms and in mere dollar terms.

Just insuring everyone can see the doctor costs the nation less and makes more of the dollars earned liquid.

There are a lot of things we can do to improve on the struggle. That does not have to mean dollars paid directly to people.

People say it's the government's responsibility to take care of impoverished -> government says it's the people's responsibility to vote for reps that pass progressive legislation -> people say reps should write progressive legislation -> and on and on and on. And in the meantime so many starve and suffer.

You wrote this in response to someone who made a point of saying they weren't close to wealthy. There are many engineers here but all income and wealth levels are represented.

> There are many engineers here but all income and wealth levels are represented.

how much would you like to bet that not a single engineer here makes minimum wage?

I’m not wealthy, so perhaps $20 that there are engineers here making poverty income? Keep in mind there are more than engineers here, was my point, as well as that it was weird to exploit a person who specifically identified as not wealthy to jeer at anyone claiming to have difficulty paying for no service.

You're talking about a hypothetical that just doesn't apply - the person I responded to said themselves that they have equity in a company. They were not making poverty wages.

Please don’t conflate the poverty bet you initiated with the non-wealthy claim they initiated.

Remember that there are people from all over the world here. I've worked for $600-700 a month on writing code before.

Pretty much every founder of an early-stage bootstrapped startup is making less than minimum wage - and many of us are deeply negative.

So you took on outsized risk for outsized reward and you expect the same consideration as someone living in poverty? Really? So social services and etc? But then of course if you IPO you would talk about how you made it all on your own? Can't have it both ways.

Still, you owe me $20. :)

For sure. I'm not saying the big tech cos necessarily ought to do what I have done. My just sharing my private decision.

Which company valuations in particular do you think are being affected by paying for “services not rendered”? I’m not sure if you’ve looked at equity valuations lately, but I don’t think services being paid for and not received is hurting equity valuations one bit, everything is expensive!

In this case, you have a personal relationship with a cleaner. What if you hire a cleaning service instead that sends someone different every time. Would you still continue paying to service that you don't receive, even if you know that it's all going to the employees?

Probably not, unless it were like a mom and pop type situation. To be clear, I am not saying anyone else ought to do what we have done. I don't view it as a universal obligation.

One weird thing I notice living here in Japan are how practically everywhere you go there seems to be old people doing useless jobs presumably just to provide dignity - I don’t know the particulars on why that bank is hiring someone to stand all day saying “welcome” to anyone who passes through the door, or the elderly men on construction sites that bow at all who pass, but maybe it’s not as crazy as one thinks.

Sounds pretty close to the Walmart greeters in the US.

and this might be unpopular to say, or it might be cultural or classist, but those jobs provide the literal opposite of dignity :( (although I appreciate some of the holders might feel differently).

Maybe. I honestly don't know. It probably beats staying in your empty home all day, or being relegated to an old folks' home. I hope I can let you know in 50 years.

People who are in old peoples home would be in real pain if they had to stand whole day. Physical pain I mean, old peoples home tend to house people whose health is really gpong down.

It might be better than booking a doctor appointment every day because you have no one to talk to, which happens with the NHS.

>but those jobs provide the literal opposite of dignity

I think that has more to do with Walmart than being a greeter. There are plenty of high end luxury shops where there is a well groomed man or woman at the front door who does nothing but greet you and open the door.

again, perhaps it's a personal or a cultural thing, but it's not about the "class" or standard of a joint/employer.

It's the idea of a bullshit job + jobs as an ends rather than a means + the additional distasteful nature of being waited upon like that.

So they are an important part of the store’s security team. I worked at a Meijer (better union Michigan/Ohio Walmart) and the greeters were on the security budget and team.

Aren’t greeters mostly to provide some level of theft prevention?

In some areas they seem to ask, but you can just walk by or flip them off. It's unclear to me what they really do to their bottom line.

It's called loyalty, it goes both ways, but American companies don't understand it today. You shouldn't just treat people like a tool or equipment like American companies tend to. Sometimes people need something from the company and the company provides, then in return the employee works harder when they can.

In college (in the US, 2015 ish) I worked at the on-campus bookstore part-time. My only job was to say welcome to people and ask if I could help them find what they are looking for so that we'd get graded well by secret shoppers.

Ironically, as soon as they began to ask where to find something I was required to point at another employee and tell them "He can help you!" so that I stay at the door doing the same thing over and over again.

Comic stuff.

> My only job was to say welcome to people and ask if I could help them find what they are looking for so that we'd get graded well by secret shoppers.

> Ironically, as soon as they began to ask where to find something I was required to point at another employee

If that were me, I would have substituted "Can I help you find anything?" with something more like "Do you need any help?"

Those two phrases are functionally identical in American English in a retail context. The literal difference would not be appreciated by an annoyed shopper, unfortunately.

Allowing people a sense of dignity and purpose is really fundamental to mental and physical well being; it's a concept that should resonate with us in the tech industry since lack of either or both is one of the precursors to burnout. Something like Universal Basic Employment is certainly an idea we should all get behind.

I get your point and I want to believe - but I always think about how a big chunk of UBI will just go straight to the landlord. What about getting behind more public housing, instead/first?

For most people AFAIK the work needs to be meaningful. Finding meaningful work for everyone seems hard.

Some of this is part of corporate retirement. If you're old but have nothing to do in retirement, your company may demote you so you still have "something" to do.

But another part of it is that Japan used to have a lot of pedestrian deaths by cars, like far more than US ever had. They remember this and it's why construction sites and parking garages have 5 apparently useless security guards watching everything.

I’ve lived in Japan for a long time, but I’ve never been sure, either, what the purpose of those seemingly useless workers is. I suspect, though, that it’s not charity but rather customer service. The person saying “welcome” repeatedly at the bank entrance also occasionally directs customers to the proper window or helps them operate the ATMs; those customers come away a bit happier, and the tellers are interrupted a bit less. The elderly guys at construction sites may have a similar function: by occasionally directing traffic and keeping passersby away from danger, they reduce slightly the possibility of complaints from neighbors and costly accidents.

Back in the early 1980s, I used to see a book in Tokyo bookstores called Japan’s Wasted Workers by Jon Woronoff. I assumed it was about those bank welcomers and the like. Peeking into it now at the Open Library [1], though, I see that it focuses on white-collar workers.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/search?q=Japan%27s+Wasted+Workers&mo...

We kept paying our cleaner when we were in lock down because we can afford to and we know she needs the money.

Some companies are still keeping them on.

From the article:

> [...]some of them—including Nvidia, as well as giants like Facebook and Google—continued to pay their service workers.

It sounds like a heresy nowadays, but I think in order for society to be comfortable, there needs to be a strong feedback loop between reward (getting paid, getting promoted, getting attention from others) and doing something that others would willingly buy.

I am pretty convinced that a lot of the tensions in our society are caused by the fact that many of the things we need on a daily basis are produced by corporations where the feedback already is massively diluted by the time it reaches individual replaceable instruction-following workers. Just paying people for doing nothing would only make it worse. Since people wouldn't see a way to feel recognized by mindfully creating something others need, they will look for other means of getting recognition. And in the current climate most of these ways are very divisive, since they involve forcibly taking something from another person (or forcing topics into their attention) rather than producing something others would want to buy.

The tensions accelerated drastically when the COVID bailouts started and they will only get worse until we get most of the people back on track of putting their mind into producing value for others. Except, we would need to actually start enforcing antitrust and let a few behemoths crash to make that happen.

>I am pretty convinced that a lot of the tensions in our society are caused by the fact that many of the things we need on a daily basis are produced by corporations where the feedback already is massively diluted by the time it reaches individual replaceable instruction-following workers.

This problem has been coined alienation from the product the workers make

The biggest argument for universal income: avoiding economies of dependency for low skilled people. Would work only if paired with re-skilling, though, because people get depressed if they just do nothing.

I have a great solution to that problem: give the people who work money. Crazy, right?

Seriously though: UBI would encourage more working without registration. What you can already see with students where their parents pay their education. Often times they just work on the side "illegally". And a whole lot of other issues that come with UBI. Additional government dependency and so on. Advocates for UBI are like advocates for roundabouts really. If properly planned it could be a non consensual help. But reality does not plan well.

This reads like a dystopian novel.

People expect this and that from corporation, they should share their wealth, etc.

You have a STATE! USE IT!

People are lost and hurting and they are looking at corporations to save them?!

How long before a FAANG badge is worth more than a passport from any country?

"Son, you learn real good and perhaps you will get a tech citizenship and escape this country".

Indian government categorizes outsourced software engineers working on their premises under facilities too. So these shadow workers actually worked remotely.

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