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Comment by vivab0rg | Hacker News Reader

One would be forgiven to think a company like Facebook, with a market cap of 224.82B, would pay a little more?

Why would market cap have anything to do with it? Walmart has a larger market cap than Facebook ($239B) and pays $9 / hour to its workers [1].

[1]: http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/19/news/companies/walmart-wages...

Walmart also makes significantly less per worker than Facebook.

Thus proving the point about market cap...

I'm pretty sure $15/hr and 3 weeks paid vacation is extremely good for janitorial work.

Not in this area. $15/hr means that at paying a third of your gross (not net) pay in rent, you'll not afford anything anywhere near the facebook campuses, and will barely afford anything at all in the bay area. [1] The real estate market in this area is amazingly dysfunctional; the working class cannot live here.

[1] http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?maxAsk=833&bedrooms=1

But if you already in he area, it may work. Some people own houses, live with family, are students or have some arrangement that takes rent out of the equation.

Even so, $15/hr might be more than the average pay for janitorial work in this area.

And there are plenty of working class people living here. Were you under the impression that the working class people you see every day are all living somewhere else?

$15/hr may be more than average, but it's still a crappy amount of pay given the cost of living here. I know that working class people live in the area, but a lot of them put up with a lot of conditions that most tech folks wouldn't. Converted garages, having multiple roommates, etc. They may live here, but it is close to bare minimum survival.

Our neighbor had 5 roommates...in a one bedroom. The standard of living here is hilariously low.

In Facebook's defense, I doubt they have many minimum wage folks on staff. These are forcing their vendors, cleaning, catering etc. to pay a livable wage (undoubtedly Facebook will pay for this increase however).

Its not something you normally pay attention too. I have a 8 person office in SF that I get cleaned weekly. I have no idea what those individuals are getting paid of the amount I pay to the cleaning service.

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