Netflix and a Living Wage
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt
As a Netflix subscriber, it was with great interest that I read the article by Susan Sheehan in The New Yorker about Netflix as a delivery system. Ever wonder who touches all “those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes” so you can receive movies in the mail? Sheehan describes these workers at the forty-one hubs around the country. She writes, “The majority are women who were born in Africa and in Asia.”
Here’s what their work day is like: “At 6:30 A.M., they sit down in ergonomic chairs and begin the process known as ‘rental return.’ An associate tears open an envelope that contains a sleeve enclosing a disk, tosses the empty envelope into a recycling bin, removes the DVD from its sleeve, checks the title on the DVD (when ‘Black Dog’ arrives in a sleeve for ‘The Triangle,’ the mismatched sleeve is discarded and ‘Black Dog’ is re-sleeved), checks the condition of the sleeve (those with coffee stains or other evidence of having been used as coasters will also be replaced), checks the condition of the DVD (for scratches and cracks), and extracts customer notes (‘THROW THIS DAMN DISK AWAY. IT DOES NOT WORK AFTER EPISODE 2, CHAPTER 4!’). Fingers flying and heads swivelling, the women each open between four hundred and fifty and eleven hundred and fifty returned rentals an hour.”
“Tuesday is the busiest day of the week at Netflix”people tend to watch DVDs on the weekend and mail them back on Mondays”but by 11 A.M. the day’s incoming envelopes have been processed and the associates have an hour for lunch. Netflix hires associates from temp agencies, starting at nine dollars an hour. Those who can maintain a fast and accurate pace become permanent employees after three months. Benefits include a free DVD player and a Netflix subscription. ‘If I see a title often, I’ll take a chance on it,’ a slender woman from Hong Kong said. She enjoyed the first two seasons of ‘Entourage’ this way.”
Most of us pay $17.99 a month to get our movies this way and Netflix has 5 million subscribers. Do the math… that’s over $89 million a month. I gather that postage is the primary expense for Netflix in this process since I learned that “Netflix is one of the ten largest users of first-class mail in America.” With all this money generated every month, you think these women deserve more than $9 per hour. That’s $360 a week / $1440 a month / making the grand total for the year is $17,280. Could you live on that??
The New York Times had a story earlier this year by Jon Gertner called What Is a Living Wage? He writes, “Workers in some of Baltimore’s homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs.”
What is a living wage? Many would argue that $9 an hour is a living wage… especially with the minimum wage still stuck at $5.15. The article tells the story of a movement in Baltimore, that later became the Living Wage movement which included “the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.”
Gertner goes on to ask, “Does America Care About the Gap Between Rich and Poor?” It’s a long article but worth reading and something to think about the next time we all tear open the red envelope and watch a movie on our comfy couches in our comfy homes on our overpriced plasma TVs.
Um, ya’ll? Perhaps you should do a little more research. $9.00/hour is standard for industrial, customer service/tech support and low level admin jobs (temp and perm) in many cities, including my own which has a Netflix hub. Higher level temp and perm admin/customer support jobs only pay $10 – $12.
I agree that it’s not a living wage for most U.S. cities and concede that it’s certainly not a one-person living wage in mine unless you like sharing your apartment with large insects and have no vehicle. But it’s nowhere near bottom-of-the-barrel, either. That’s still almost $4.00 above minimum wage.
These employees have voluntary agreed to work for the wage they are being paid. $9/hr must be acceptable to them, or they wouldn’t be doing the work. I can’t imagine living on $17k/year myself, but I know that my parents manage to spend only about $12k/year total, despite having the financial ability to spend more. So it is possible to live on $9/hr. $9/hr seems like a good starting pay for unskilled labor. Presumably those who want more pay will develop their skills and get a better paying job. Actually, I’m surprised Netflix employs people to do this at all – I would have expected the level of automation to be higher. But I’m sure you wouldn’t want that, because then these women wouldn’t have jobs at all.
Thanks for the interesting article about Netflix. When I lived in Philly I used the service for almost a year and was happy with it. Now that I’m on the road all the time, the idea of getting mail from one central place doesn’t quite work for me. It is a shame that the wages are only $9 an hour however, in some of the cities the warehouses are located, that is considered better than the minimum wage.
At somepoint in the next five years anyways, there won’t be any mailing of movies at all. That’s when all movie content will be downloadable to your computer. No need to wait a day or two to watch a movie. It’s already happened in the adult video business, soon it will be the mainstream way of content delivery. Apple Computer just announced the availability of movies for sale via Itunes so stay tuned!
Timothy, I don’t think that Netflix will become obsolete that fast. For the price of one movie download on iTunes I get a month’s worth of unlimited movies, the only restriction being how fast I can turn them around. And if I want to keep the movies I can either opt to pay for them (usually at a fraction of the iTunes download price), or I can rip them to my hard drive, which I frequently do. I do not know if the DVD rip applications are available for Windoze machines, but there are at least three excellent freeware apps for Mac.
Well, 9.00 an hour seems like a lot to me, but I only make 10 an hour working at a major university and the majority of staff in the department make less.
What would be a living wage? $20 an hour.
Seems to me that the job requires no skill. Just the ability to do repetative boring tasks. When my kids get older I will look to see if our local hub is hiring. Seems like a good entry pay for no skills. Also a good way to teach my children to get the skills necessary to have better paying jobs.
Life is what YOU bring to the table, no what others bring you.
i used to work at netflix and the startign wage of 9 per hour are for temp full time employee as with temp part time it is 10.5 per hour.
but you have to also relise is that fulltime employees work over 8 hours on mon.tues.wed
so they are paid ot and also esp tues they have double time because they literally stay over 12 hours