This is not an open letter
Last week, the internet entered an endless tunnel of open letters that led to open letters that led to other open letters. They appeared after a Yelp/Eat24 employee posted an open letter to her CEO complaining about how difficult it was to live on her salary. She was fired, which prompted a variety of reactions, most accusing her of being an entitled millennial.
Most of which miss the bigger point.
Why do we act like talking about a living wage is a form of entitlement?
This issue is especially important as politicians hold the tech economy up as the way of the future. It’s easy to paint a rosy picture. Companies that started with a few people can, if the cards align, soar to insane heights. New companies with new job postings and angel investor funding pop up seemingly every day.
What’s less commented on is the other side — the fact that most of those companies won’t succeed. Often times, those new jobs disappear nearly as quickly as they arrived. And those high salaries? They usually only apply to engineers and executives.
Consider that Bay Area CEOs who work in tech routinely make salaries starting at $100,000 for a newer startup to over $600,000 for someone like Mark Zuckerberg. In the meantime, employees handling customer service may make salaries in the $40–50,000 range, and the delivery drivers and workers that make these companies run are contractors with highly variable wages.
Take, for example, Yelp/Eat24. Yelp acquired Eat24 for $134 million. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman followed the lead of other Silicon Valley CEOs in taking a symbolic $1 annual salary after having acquired a bit of wealth. But he still managed to procure over $60,000 in other compensation — and in 2012, he had a net worth of $222 million. In contrast, Glassdoor lists a user-support position salary at $42,000.
Yelp/Eat24 is hardly alone. Uber is valued at more than $60 billion and while CEO Travis Kalanick’s salary is not readily available, Forbes puts his net worth at $6.2 billion. The median driver salary in San Francisco, however, is around $25/hour. If a driver worked 40 hours a week, every week, with no vacations, it would add up to $52,000.
But let’s think even bigger. Twitter, valued at over $10 billion, pays its CEO over $175,000 but a user support agent makes around $60,000 according to Glassdoor.
If you’re living anywhere but San Francisco or New York, those salaries probably look pretty reasonable. But the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area has risen along with the tech boom. Estimates range, but a recent report placed cost of living in San Francisco at 62% higher than the national average. Rent on an average one bedroom is expected to be about $3,000 a month. And even if you decide you don’t need to live in San Francisco, high rents are spreading across the bay. The farther out you move, the more time and money you’ll be spending on your commute.
What this boils down to is that these types of salaries (salaries for normal jobs, not CEO jobs) don’t even come close to approaching a living wage.
Furthermore, let’s consider what we’re asking people when we suggest they suck it up and move farther out, live with roommates, make sacrifices.
It is not unreasonable, as an adult, to want to live in a space of your own.
It’s not unreasonable to want to have a commute that leaves you some time in your life for interests, hobbies, friends, and family, to want to eat more than rice and beans and lentils, to take the occasional vacation, to put aside money for the future.
What is unreasonable is to continue to ask a generation to make these kind of sacrifices without a light at the end of the tunnel. For most of these jobs, there is no clear upward mobility — no hope that if you just stick it out for a year or two, things will get easier.
These jobs DO support the economy. Service- oriented apps need people to provide the actual service — the employees who are typically the lowest paid. A platform like Facebook or Twitter can’t grow without a team of people dedicated to soothing and managing unruly users. Without those jobs, the code and idea are just pieces of data floating in the void.
So, let’s have a real conversation about the tech economy. One that recognizes that the workers are the backbone of this system and are struggling harder and harder each day. A conversation that really examines who is getting rich off the tech boom and who is not — and whether that’s the future economy America needs.
