What company would you work for to go to a 1 billion dollar office each day? You'd work for Novartis in Basel, Switzerland. Or maybe Apple with its $5 (or perhaps 6) billion Cupertino campus, or its Austin campus at $1 billion. Or Apple in North Carolina, and so on.
Uber, that company that won't pay its driver employees as employees will spend $1 billion for two San Francisco buildings.
Disney cancelled its $1 billion campus in Florida. It was to serve 2,000 employees. That doesn't seem like enough employees to spend that much money. Is that $500,000 per employee? What would you have wanted if you had the choice? I would have preferred the money. But then I didn't work for a tech giant, thinking I was changing the world. And don't forget, no one is asking them what they prefer.
Are the employees who work in these opulent palaces the "Princes of Industry"? Or perhaps Dukes and Earls? Something in the royalty range, at least.
It must be. There must be a pull towards prestige. Do they make significantly more wages than other people so that they don't have anger over the disparity between their home circumstances and their work environment? Would that be the big draw - to get people to stay at work because it is a beautiful physical environment, great restaurants and food. Who wants to go home?
Do employees value these surroundings as a key benefit? This article doesn't mention the workplace environment in the top 10 Apple benefits. They value health and wellness benefits, vacation and time off (the article says between 15 to 20 days per year - Ha ha!), parental leave, commuting, gym credit, stock purchase program, tuition and self improvement, retirement.
That outlier, Uber, has articles on how much its employees hate the corporate culture. That palace is for the King's Court to revel in rather than for those dukes and earls below- that's the likely story there. And definitely Uber has the medieval sense of peasants out slogging in the fields.
These are some of my questions on the current state of capitalism. Do we live with a capitalist system that's not much changed since it started? Is there an uplift in circumstances of enough of the first world's population - to keep us complicit and celebrating capitalism. Is that the scenario?
The headlines say that sort of thing: "The magnificent progress achieved by capitalism".
No comments:
Post a Comment