<story><title>American companies are suppressing wages for many workers</title><url>https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-suppressing-wages.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelbuckbee</author><text>The linked article mentions outsourcing, but it was this other _fantastic_ article [1] on the structural issues of the current wage economy that really helped me understand just how different things are:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.&lt;p&gt;The effect of all this “domestic outsourcing”—and, let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt’s papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they’re “re-classified” as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart “lumpers,” the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there’s enough work for them that day.&lt;p&gt;“This is what’s really driving wage inequality,” says David Weil, the former head of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor and the author of The Fissured Workplace. “By shifting tasks to contractors, companies pay a price for a service rather than wages for work. That means they don’t have to think about training, career advancement or benefit provision.”&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;1 - &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millennials&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;highline.huffingtonpost.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;poor-millenni...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>American companies are suppressing wages for many workers</title><url>https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-suppressing-wages.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tabeth</author><text>And why wouldn&amp;#x27;t they? It&amp;#x27;s time to bring back mechanisms, legal or otherwise, to prevent this from happening again. Usually the collective workforce of a company has significant leverage over a company, but with the advent of globalization, the &amp;quot;gig economy&amp;quot;, and technological unemployment in some ways this leverage is harder to capitalize on, or even worse, nonexistent.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if there&amp;#x27;s any empirical proof for this, but like competition between companies, I think &amp;quot;competition&amp;quot; or tension between employees and employers for a given organization is also good for capitalism.</text></comment>