Talia Jane: An example of what income inequality is doing to America

Being an English major isn’t the problem. Minimum wage isn’t the problem (in this case)…. Do I like that CEOs make pathetic amounts of money? Not particularly. But turning this girl’s inability to work for what she wants into a conversation about poverty (Poverty! She lives in the Bay Area alone and has a corporate job and can afford fancy bourbon! Not exactly the picture of a third world crisis!) and wage issues, it’s utter bullshit. This is about this girl’s personal responsibility to be an adult and find a job, or two (God forbid she have to give up a weekend day to be a waitress), an an affordable living situation and an affordable city in which to work…. The issue is that this girl doesn’t think working a second job or getting roommates should be something she has to do in order to get ahead after three months of an entry level job in the most expensive city in the country.

(Ed. note: Emphasis mine)

I’m not going to come down on the side of believing Talia Jane to be a wholly innocent victim in this scenario. Yes, she chose to work at Yelp, and she chose to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Yes, the problem is bigger than one individual…but it’s the stories of individuals which tell the story of greed, corruption, and the willingness to exploit workers by refusing to pay even the barest of living wages.

Yes, San Francisco is an impossibly expensive place to live. Corporations- and tech companies are among the worst- often refusing to take the Bay Area’s cost of living into account when calculating employee compensation. So what happens when employees speak out and make the case that they can’t live- in Talia Jane’s case, almost literally- on $8.15/hr.? People tend to side with companies, who tend to fire employees for having the temerity to speak about their plight:

“So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week. Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent. She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we’ve got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven’t seen him in the past few months. Do you think he’s okay?”

No reasonable person would argue that a business owes it to employees to subsidize an employee’s preferred lifestyle. Employers in most cases do market studies to determine what fair compensation is for specific jobs…but for Yelp to argue that $8.15/hr. is “competitive” or “market rate” in San Francisco is either the height of arrogance or a willful blindness to reality (or perhaps both). I don’t expect Talia Jane took a job with Yelp thinking she’d get rich…but expecting to be able to live, eat, and pay her bills doesn’t seem like something that should be considered unreasonable. This is especially true when you consider what senior managers are paid, even as they expect front-line employees- the ones who actually interact with customers and facilitate a company’s success- to survive on what in San Francisco can and should be considered starvation wages.

“Will you pay my phone bill for me? I just got a text from T-Mobile telling me my bill is due. I got paid yesterday ($733.24, bi-weekly) but I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1245) for my apartment that’s 30 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work. That’s $11.30 a day, by the way. I make $8.15 an hour after taxes. I also have to pay my gas and electric bill. Last month it was $120. According to the infograph on PG&E’s website, that cost was because I used my heater. I’ve since stopped using my heater. Have you ever slept fully clothed under several blankets just so you don’t get a cold and have to miss work? Have you ever drank a liter of water before going to bed so you could fall asleep without waking up a few hours later with stomach pains because the last time you ate was at work? I woke up today with stomach pains. I made myself a bowl of rice.”

This is where I’d expect to hear Conservatives chime in with the refrain that Talia Jane should get a better-paying job if she wants to live better. Or live somewhere other than San Francisco. Or they have some other insulting bromide to offer that does everything except acknowledge and address the problem, which is that it’s now easy to exploit workers…because if one quits, all a company has to do is plug in another warm body. Supply and demand, knowhutimean?

Too many are far too willing to blame workers for their plight when their arrogance and smug self-superiority blinds them to the truth that workers aren’t necessarily the problem. The problem is a system which allows for and even rewards companies for shamelessly exploiting workers and treating them like chattel.

Trust me when I say, there are far more embarrassing things in life than working at a restaurant, washing dishes, or serving burgers at a fast food window. And one of them, without one shred of doubt, is displaying your complete lack of work ethic in public by asking for handouts because you refuse to actually do work that at the ripe old age of 25 that you think is unworthy of your witty tweet creating time.

A “complete lack of work ethic” and “asking for handouts?” I wonder if the author of that screed stopped to think about how insufferably arrogant she’s portrayed herself to be? I’m not going to deny that there might be a nugget of truth contained within this thoroughly dismissive and disrespectful rant, but it completely ignores the reality that workers aren’t the root cause of the problem. No, the proximate cause of the exploitation of workers like Talia Jane is a business environment in which workers are seen as disposable, interchangeable parts who need not be considered of value beyond their productive capacity. Once used up, they can be tossed aside and another prole plugged in.

From where I sit, the question is simple: DO companies have a responsibility to pay their employees a living wage? Or does their responsibility end with paying whatever the market will bear? When there’s an oversupply of labor, does an employer have an implied or actual responsibility to compensate and treat employees as anything more than cheap, easily replaceable units of labor?

[Talia Jane’s] anger is like that of many low-wage workers, who are treated like chattel by the companies for which they work.

They’re also treated as worthless by many in our society, particularly conservatives. After all, if they wanted to be able to live on their pay, they’d get better jobs, or go out and make themselves more marketable. There’s a reason we’re seeing protests for a $15 minimum wage around the country, and why letters like Jane’s will become more popular. Workers are the lifeblood of a company - even the unskilled workers. They deserve to be treated as such.

Workers like Talia Jane are why the movement for a $15 minimum wage (hardly enough to allow for an extravagant, self-indulgent lifestyle- especially in San Francisco) is gaining momentum. Oregon’s legislature last week passed legislation that, once signed by Gov. Kate Brown), will see Oregon’s minimum wage increase over the next six years. In 2022, the minimum wage in Portland and most of the rest of the state will be $14.75/hr. In less prosperous parts of the state, it will be $13.50/hr. Neither wage will provide workers the ability to bathe in Cristal before setting out for a night of clubbing in their Bentleys, but it’s a step in the right direction.

What companies need to understand is that their employees aren’t “overhead.” Good employees who work hard are integral to a company’s success. Employers who regard and treat their employees as chattel and a drag on their bottom line will ultimately suffer through lower customer satisfaction leading to lower profits. Talia Jane’s story illustrates the current reality too many companies see- that in an era with an oversupply of labor, they can afford to pay lower wages and treat employees poorly. Should she get a better paying job? Of course…and I hope she will. The truth that Conservatives and the companies they support choose to ignore is that treating employees with respect and dignity- including paying a living wage- should be a bare minimum expectation. No company should be allowed to pay wages which employees can’t live on. That should be basic; the sad thing is that it should even be considered necessary to state what should be blindingly obvious.