Netflix“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.