Technically, if the contract says no other employment without permission from the company, these folks are breaching it.
“It’s a tough life, but being a receptionist was never really meant to pay the bills and support a whole lifestyle.”
Really? How old are you? In late 80s early 90s the receptionist in one of the companies my husband worked had been on the job for many, many years - she was a single mother and that’s how she supported her family in a not so low cost of living area.
I will let employment lawyers chime in on this if they want, but as an employer providing supposedly unbiased reviews of restaurants etc. I sure as heck would not want my employees be also employed by some of these bars and restaurants!
Look, she has not done the easiest thing to save money; Get a roommate to rduce the rent from 80% of her income to 40%.
Do people plan to raise a family on an entry level salary? Don’t they wait until their finances are better?
I’ve been thinking you were a parent. If you are a new grad, what are you doing for work?
I expect that SF and other high priced cities/areas will figure it out. They are popular areas (some short term/bubble like and others longer term) with draws for weather, entertainment, business, etc. As long as a lot of people want to live there, there will be need for lower pay service type jobs. If you cannot get enough people to fill those jobs you need to either deal with less of them or pay more.
Articles with similar themes pop up from time to time about people working in the Orlando area in service jobs who could never afford to go to WDW, Universal, etc. Same analysis applies.
If we do not want to let the market determine wages, who gets to do that and on what basis? And if you artificially inflate the price of something (here labor), what do you do about the Econ 101 reality that it will put downward pressure on demand? And if the gap between CEO pay and entry level employee is too large, what should it be? Again, who determines that and on what basis?
some interesting charts and data on the historical aspects of all this:
From what I have observed (at various non-Yelp companies), this type of thing may happen around deadlines, as opposed to all the time (normal amount of work time is not unusually high). Also, it is generally just non-hourly employees (hourly employees would get paid for the overtime).
How high should the minimum wage be?
It’s pretty common for entry-level salaried workers to be expected to work after hours with no compensation. Some are even asked to work from home, even when they are home sick! If you balk, you’re considered to not be dedicated enough and it is a strike against you.
For hourly workers, they are often prevented from working enough hours to be considered full time and therefore get no benefits. Or, they are compensated, but at the usual rate. Time and a half seems to be disappearing along with unions.
“How high should the minimum wage be?”
Honestly? Probably Zero.
Before everyone gets their flamethrower out, the reality of running a company and paying what it takes to get the employee you need does cost money. Walmart is in the process of making their minimum wage $10/hr because they can’t get the type of employee they want for $7.25 an hour. Walmart, for all the crap they get for paying minimum wage, is now putting upward pressure wages. So for all the wrangling Washington has done over minimum wage, Walmart has made irrelevant.
But like anything else, people need to be protected from themselves, if only a little. But if you are earning minimum wage, you should serious ask your self “Would my employer pay me less if they legally could?” If the answer is yes, then you need to find a way for your employer to find you more valuable.
alh…my main job is hr/compensation,hiring (insurance,pension compliance, etc…)
I never wing it…I have the support of a cpa, employment attorney, actuaries and such. I work for a great supportive company and I have learned many real world realities. (I am not fresh fresh out of college )
The minimum wage should depend on the locality. A national minimum wage is the stupidest idea ever conceived.
I assume you are indirectly referring to countries like Denmark, as an example, that have no minimum wage laws. Denmark compensates for no minimum wage with liberal labor union laws. Essentially the labor unions drive the minimum wage requirements, not the government.
A country with no government mandated minimum wage AND no labor unions would not be a good thing. You need one or the other IMO.
"I assume you are indirectly referring to countries like Denmark, "
Actually, no. I was referring to the US. I don’t think a minimum wage is needed, and economic forces will work (aka the Walmart example). BUT, as a said with my closing statement, people need to be protected from themselves sometimes. With the yelp example, she probably would have accepted a job paying much less, much to her detriment.
First of all, at gross $12.25 hour, that’s $25,480 annual. It sounds like her withholding was too high, if she only nets $8.15hour. (Or is there also a city employee tax? But I’m also curious if this net is correct.) Next, her commute costs more than gasoline. It’s $11.30/day RT on BART x avg 21 working days/mo. It’s too simple to tell her to drive. I don’t know if she’d come in via a bridge, with tolls, but even if not, she’d likely have to pay to park, which tops the BART cost.
Then, her rent is $1245. She was being paid bi-weekly, which comes out to an in-hand of about $1588/month. Rent and commute and she’s got $100 left.
We can look at this two ways (at least.) One, to be blunt, a nincompoop who set herself up for rent and transp costs that sound like over 90% of her net income. (No, she didn’t look for a cheap deal with roommates in the city, and bus it to work. That’s choice. Not The Man.) Or, we can turn this into a statement on inequality and expect The Man should have subsidized her choice of this total baseline expense.
So which direction does this thread go? The difficulty is that this particular young woman made some bad choices. That’s why many of us feel little, if any, sympathy for her.
If $12.25 per hour gross gives a net of $8.15 per hour, then she is either over withholding taxes by a lot, or has lots of other payroll deductions (benefits like 401k, and insurance type stuff).
@lookingforward She should be getting taxed 22.65% by the federal government and 4% by the state, with all but 7.62% being refunded. There is no city income or employment tax. This should leave her taking home $8.99, not $8.15. Something else must be going on here.
As to the situation itself, I’m a low wage San Francisco worker. Personally, I’m a college student with financial aid, so this is fine. Most of my coworkers aren’t in such a situation. They need to work multiple jobs, and often still don’t make ends meet. This is a serious problem we need to address, and I’m all for using the State to go at inequality. That said, before you move across the country, you need to be sure you can support yourself. She should have appraised herself of how much money she was going to make and how much it would cost to rent and commute, and planned accordingly. She clearly didn’t do this, or she wouldn’t have flown out to the Bay Area thinking 40 hours at $12.25 was actually going to cut it without some sort of other housing or income source she didn’t have. Can’t really escape the fact that she done messed up here.
@DecideSomeHow It took Walmart what, 20 years? With all those years in the meantime teaching employees how to apply for government aid, basically asking the taxpayer to subsidize their low wages? I’m not very impressed.
“I’ve got vision, dental, the normal health insurance stuff — and as far as I can tell, I don’t have to pay for any of it!” except copays.
…as far as I can tell, that is.
I want to be clear, for some posters, that I hate what a low salary does to someone who does try their darnedest to make ends meet, shares living, maybe has loans, a kid, family to help, etc. We see posts from kids who have a single parent trying to support a family on little. And situations where, eg, only the employee gets health insurance and can’t afford it for the rest.
I don’t know what the real, workable solution is. And I suspect we can’t really fully go there, on a thread.
Spaceship, I calculated a little over $9.
If Walmart is asking the taxpayers to subsidize low wages, are they also asking the taxpayers to subsidize underemployment? Clearly, each store could hire several more employees and still make a profit which would decrease the amount taxpayers pay out in unemployment benefits. How about all other companies that make enough money to hire more employees than they actually do?
I do see where she is coming from, but I feel she went about this in the wrong way. She shouldn’t have aired her dirty laundry in public. Maybe it would’ve been better to go talk to human resources privately. Written a private letter to the CEO. By doing this she seems like a whiner and complainer and she’s ruined her career opportunities. Yes, California and the Bay Area is overpriced. Yes, maybe companies could pay their employees more, especially in an area where the cost of living is high. But, this girl could’ve done some research as well. Maybe move to a less expensive city, maybe get roommates, maybe try applying to other high paying jobs while she’s at Yelp, maybe get a second job, whatever. Sure, some things are easier said than done and maybe she has tried to do all these things, but come on. Maybe when she saw how much the job was going to pay, she should’ve realized that the salary was too low and living in SF just wasn’t going to work. You don’t have to live in San Francisco. I dislike how some people think that living in glamorous cities like New York, San Francisco, and LA is some sort of milestone that everyone has to fulfill. Lots of people live wonderful lives without living in a glamour city!