- The overlap of Trump votes with the highly concentrated counties is very high. Trump knew how to connect with voters, when he spoke about rigged markets. He spoke to the average worker’s fears. In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton won 472 counties that represented 64% of US Gross Domestic Product, compared to the 36% for the 2,584 counties that voted for Donald Trump. In many small towns, a single meat packing company, insurer, hospital system, or big box store owned by a distant company has now replaced locally owned businesses. Trump was tapping into a profound, justified anxiety across the country.
From:
Related to that chart, how many of those same employees are in professions at high risk of being automated away? A livable wage is a great cause, but if your job is going away anyway it's only a bandaid without repositioning yourself in the workforce.
It would be interesting to know a couple things about the data, including the percentage of employees who receive benefits, and how that compares to smaller employers. Also, I'd like to know the total SNAP benefit amount normalized to the company's revenue per employee. I guess my point is that we don't so much know how shitty the pay is if we can't accurately compare it across all employers. I bring this up, because for example Cleveland Clinic is on Ohio's list, and I'm sure I'm not alone in not immediately thinking of them when thinking of evil companies. Wichita public schools makes the list in Kansas, which is even more fucked up, since it means that us federal tax payers are paying for their complete unwillingness to collect state taxes to do any good whatever. These data are really interesting, but just a little incomplete, IMO. Hating big companies is easy, but the hard part is how to fix our tax code to encourage better behavior--we can only do that with good data. (Anyway, don't get me wrong--as a taxpayer I'm getting pretty goddam sick of paying Amazon for everything and then still having my tax dollars go to their employees, when that company barely pays taxes themselves. Walmart is easy to hate, and for good reason, but at least they pay taxes.)
I would make two observations: 1) Fast food work is effectively unskilled labor. Small businesses utilize a lot less unskilled labor because they generally start as sole proprietorships and expand when the proprietor's expertise outvalues the proprietor's time. The Cleveland Clinic likely makes the list because "As of 2018, it has over 52,000 employees, a figure that includes over 11,800 nurses and over 3,600 physicians and scientists" - which means they don't outsource custodial and housekeeping. With less than 1/3rd of their employees being healthcare practitioners, 2/3rds of their employees do not enjoy elevated status. 2) The fix is easy: remove healthcare and retirement from private offerings. As a business owner I have a powerful incentive to avoid providing benefits: it already costs me 50 cents to pay them a dollar and when nobody else is providing decent benefits whatever benefits I provide aren't going to enter into salary calculations (because people aren't clever enough to do the math). I'm too small to turn employee insurance into a profit center. Walmart is not. It's easy to hate big companies because they take full advantage of every loophole they've lobbied into the tax code and the corner barbershop couldn't find a lobbyist with a phone book and a flashlight. It's interesting to me that most of the reactions to this article are actually a reaction to the chart, which was stolen flagrantly from BFX's original post (where it received substantially less notice).
On the topic of the article...no-compete clauses have become fucking insane. I had to sign one with a 50-mile radius as a college intern for one company. I'm there to learn and to give you some cheap labor in the process, and I still have to sign the thing?! It's become so insanely overused to be destructive against professional mobility more than anything else, and I'm glad somebody is shining a light on that.
I know a guy who was assistant manager at an office supply store. He had a 75-mile, 3-year noncompete. I mean, jobs were turning shitty when I pulled the ripcord on the whole TPS report world eleven years ago. Now they're straight bullshit. I don't know much but I know that my daughter is going to learn that "employee" is an unenviable fall-back, not a goal.
This is yet another area where the powerful and powerless have diverged. Try to give an executive level person anything more than a 6 month, strictly in market non-compete and they will laugh so hard they choke. McDonald's, on the other hand, routinely uses them.
Amazon took issue with the way Bernie Sanders recently characterized their SNAP-eligible employees. Something like 90% of this demographic CHOOSES to work part-time jobs for their own reasons, therefore they are not eligible for Amazon's full-time benefits that kick in after 35-hour work weeks. So yeah... the issue is more nuanced than simply "Bad company, raping public multiple ways." But it is the underlying systems - employer-provided healthcare, minimum hours, etc. - that lead to employers making these decisions that have unintended consequences. And every employee that finds a way to cut costs or increase profits will get a good employee review. Will they always fully understand the impacts of their decisions on the global job market? No. Probably not. They just saw that part-timers were getting the same bennies as full-timers, and that the math didn't pencil out. So they suggested we "provide benefits at 35-hours", and save money. You really can't fault the base thinking, there. It's the knock-on effects further down the pipeline that we have a hard time predicting and calculating until after the fact... then it's a news story.
My hometown has turned into a one-employer town around a meat packing plant. I knew it was started locally; the founder's brother lived up the street. As far as I can tell, it's still owned by the local founder. It and all the neighboring counties went Trump in 2016. I assume there's still a lot of anxiety, even if you bump into the major employer owner at the bar. You're still subject to his whim, and you're so far down the food chain he won't care if he sells and retires out of the area.