The thing about rich bosses
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It matters that your boss is rich.
It’s a question I’ve rarely thought about over the years, mostly when non-wealthy friends have reported unexpected misunderstandings with wealthier bosses.
There was an Australian woman whose clearly confused new manager listened to her explain that she had to leave work at a certain time every day to pick up her children from school before asking her: “Why don’t you just get a babysitter?” She explained that alas, that would be difficult on the salary her company was paying her.
Another friend who could only afford a property miles away office surprised her wealthy boss, who lived closer to work, by revealing how much she had saved on train tickets by working from home during the pandemic.
Then it was the executive who invited his team into his sprawling home for a morning meeting and ushered them into what turned out to be neither a dining room nor a kitchen, but a “breakfast room,” an area devoted entirely to breakfast, which was scheduled. larger than the apartments of most of his guests, none of whom had ever heard of such a room before.
I was reminded of all this when I came across some recent international research that helps explain why these moments happen and why they will become more frequent.
In the developed countries of Europe, Asia and North America, wealthy workers are becoming increasingly wealthy separated from the less well off.
Across the industry and within individual firms, there has been a “significant decline in top earners relative to low earners,” the authors say. The Great Divide paper was published at the end of last year.
Consider France. In 1994, the top 1 percent of French earners worked in places where 9 percent of their peers were in the same top income group. By 2019, that 9 percent share had almost doubled to 16 percent.
In the Netherlands, the top 10% of earners worked where about 25% of their employees had a similar income.By 2020, this percentage had risen to almost 30%.
The greater the number of high wage earners, the less likely they are to mix with the lowest paid workers.
There are many reasons why this is happening, starting with the decline in manufacturing jobs. Factory life brings blue-collar workers together with supervisors, engineers, managers, and executives.It’s different inside a bank, an insurance company, or a software developer.
Outsourcing or offshoring of jobs, such as data entry or payroll clerk roles, deepens the divide by removing chunks of lower-income workers from the office.
So is the rise of digitization, which is automating low-wage jobs.This trend highlights one reason why the wealth divide may be widening.
Research for the paper began many years ago, said co-author Halil Sabanci, a professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
This was before ChatGPT and other types of advanced AI were introduced to the workplace. Sabanci believes it makes sense to expect AI to accelerate the wealth divide that digitization has already caused at work.
All this can have deep political consequences.
Sabanci and his colleagues suspect that the isolation of elites in the workplace may already have helped fuel resentment among poorer workers who read or hear about the lives of high earners but rarely see or meet them.
“This situation may increase feelings and experiences of being left behind, neglected and misunderstood,” they write, adding that this in turn may have contributed to the promotion of Trumpism and other forms of populism in Europe.
The polarization of voters between wealthy capitals or coastal cities and struggling hinterlands has certainly featured prominently in a number of recent elections, from the 2016 UK Brexit vote to presidential battles in the US and France.
In 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 15.6 percent of the vote in the Paris region was about the same as she received elsewhere, some of the paper’s authors wrote. earlier research.
Thirty years later, support for Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the right-wing populist leader, has fallen to 12.5 percent in Paris but has risen to 27 percent elsewhere, nearly doubling her father’s vote share.
This change was certainly not caused solely by the separation of high earners from the rest of the workforce, but it is easy to see that this separation could have fueled the shift and may have accelerated it.
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