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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.
But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.
Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.
Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.
[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.
"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @01:11AM (6 children)
Which works out great of you've got extra cash to invest. Until recently you had to have thousands of dollars in order to invest in that fashion, which most of these workers wouldn't. Between account minimums and the minimums on various mutual funds, poor people couldn't get into the markets at all. Which is just as well as they didn't have funds they could afford to lose.
Even now though, if there's a recession at the wrong time, you can have done the right things and still be eating dog food as you work until you die.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @02:33AM (5 children)
IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that if you don't have any money left over at the end of the month you can't save or invest any. I don't think you're educating anyone with that "insight." I and the original poster offered a better place to put any savings you have than where they usually go: sitting in a fucking checking account yielding nothing point nothing. Downmarkets are not a problem at all if you use stocks for what they are for: long term savings.
There are a lot of whiners on this board that seem to have a stunted financial literacy. Let me reiterate again though: step ZERO is making enough money and or keeping your expenses low enough so that you HAVE money to save or invest. It may not be possible to do this all the time, but for example, buying a new car, top of the line trim, can prevent you from ever having that extra money. I saw the office cleaning lady step out to a brand new top trim SUV. Brand new! Like they say on the local Spanish FM station, no credit, bad credit, no tax ID, no problem! It's not a coincidence that the ad that ran just before that one was for a voodoo shaman to fix your problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @06:27AM (4 children)
You gotta have money to make money. How is that advise helping anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @03:31PM (3 children)
Because you don't have to be fucking royalty. The equivalent of 8 months doing without cable tv is enough to get you on the right track for saving for your future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @04:16PM (2 children)
That assumes that you've got TV or that it's not just bundled into the rent. Some people do have fat that they could trim from their budget to save and invest, but an increasing number of people don't as the rents go up and wages remain stagnant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:08PM (1 child)
I'd love to hear that bootstrappers logic when the savers are wiped out by vehicle maintenance, medical debt, or any other unplanned major expense. They're trying to prop up the pyramid scheme of modern capitalism by blaming the poor people for being paid shit. Just ridiculous and shows the lack of basic math skills these idiots have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:44PM
Indeed, the billions of wealth that some people have had to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the money that workers aren't being paid. Saving anything and investing it will help, but not over the course of even a few generations. And only if a market correction doesn't wipe it out.
Not using credit cards helps a lot, but only if you've got the money to be able to avoid them in the first place.