Bank of America raises minimum hourly pay
npr.org
npr.org
It is still nominally a white collar occupation but has, indeed, suffered in terms of prestige, compensation, and socioeconomic makeup of workforce versus other middle class mainstays, against a backdrop where the upper edge of the middle class is doing exceptionally well for itself.
Citation available if I Google for the academic papers but the handwavy version is “I write about this sort of thing for a living so uh self-cite for the moment.”
They're paying state, local, and federal taxes, are they not?
That might be true in your state, but at least in Michigan it goes into a huge pot which is then redistributed to counties/cities. https://www.rcocweb.org/DocumentCenter/View/188/A-Guide-to-R...
>If these mega corps don't operate in your city, they aren't contributing to it financially in any way.
But by your own admission they contribute at least a portion of the budget for local schools? I'm sure state and federal funding ends up at the city level through a multitude of other programs as well (eg. medicaid). Moreover, such companies have to exist somewhere. Your city might not have an office of megacorp A, but it might have an office for megacorp B. That doesn't mean you should only buy stuff from megacorp B, because it's more efficient for companies to consolidate their operations and adopting this attitude would make everyone worse off.
Living in a community that isn't poor and decaying?
When money leaves a community, it means that it won't be used to employ people in that community, buy goods in that community, or generate tax revenue for public good in that community. The market's relationship to the community can become much more extractive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_states_by_minimum_w...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minimum_wage_by_stat...
Consultants/contractors are a different story, but such employees here are normally perm employees.
Banks are in the service industry (as is just about everything else; only resource extraction and manufacturing are excluded), so not just "more of". It is definitively a service industry position.
> like being a cashier.
The physical action of the work is a lot like being a cashier, but the environment in which the work is done is usually different, and that environment (especially with respect to the type of clothing the people usually wear within that environment) is what traditionally defines "white collar". As such, tellers are considered white collar by most people.
Office environment is key to what you say. That is why you would be considered white collar. The literal white collars may be gone, but what you call "dressing like slobs" is just a modern adaptation of the same white collar idea.
Now, as it pertains to tellers, banks are typically considered to be an office environment, thus why most consider them to be white collar.
You've claimed this twice, but I would guess that almost no one thinks a bank teller is white collar.
Sure they work in an office environment, but their role is more similar to the cleaning crew than to the branch manager.
Nothing about the day-to-day work in terms of autonomy, education, responsibility or any other key intangibles of the job match "white collar". It's akin to being a secretary or a mailman or working in a call center.
And you confirm that they work in an office environment, so that bit isn't in question. Perhaps you are confusing most with all? It is certain that not everyone sees "white collar" that way, but we're not talking about everyone.
It's very similar in the UK where plenty of full time jobs try to act like some sort of temp thing. Salary quoted as hourly rate, zero contractual hours, etc. In other words, in all aspects the employee is expected to do whatever the company demands. If they demand zero hours worked, the employee will work zero hours, and if they demand 40 hours a week, that's what the employee has to work.
In my view this should be basically illegal. Either make it a contract work where employees turn into service providers who can have multiple clients (that is true contractors), or make it full employment with pre-defined minimum hours worked so that the terms of engagement are clear for both sides.
How often this is the case I don't know.
It makes me wonder if it is purely pay for each individual worker, as much as it might be conditions surrounding it.
I've worked jobs where the pay was not great, but the culture and atmosphere were great, and it was fun. I've worked jobs where the pay was better, but the culture and atmosphere were horrible and i wanted out so bad ... I would have told you I wasn't paid enough, but that wasn't the whole story.
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/06/the-real-problem-with-the-c...
I'm not sure they were ever common, but certainly exist. A lot of them have been since removed, though, making them less common than they used to be.
> Several big banks have increased their starting pay for hourly workers in the past few years, in part due to the difficulty of attracting workers to these relatively unglamorous and non-remote-friendly jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that banks will need to fill some 27,000 teller positions every year for the next decade.
> Bank of America has been raising wages relatively aggressively for its hourly workers since early 2019, when it paid $15 per hour. The bank has previously said that it plans to pay all such employees $25 per hour by next year. And even today, the company is already paying significantly above the median wage for all U.S. bank tellers, who earned $18.10 per hour in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's a wage pressure story.