Comments on: Netflix and a Living Wage

By: Queercents » Blog Archive » WWYD: Consigning Bad Jobs to Others

Queercents » Blog Archive » WWYD: Consigning Bad Jobs to Others — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:37:19 +0000

[...] using Netflix because they pay their workers $9.00 per hour – the ones that touch millions of “those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes” so we can receive movies in the mail. Most of the reader comments concluded that it was fair pay [...]

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By: flower

flower — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:33:41 +0000

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

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By: Queercents » The Working Poor and Living on Minimum Wage

Queercents » The Working Poor and Living on Minimum Wage — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:15:13 +0000

[...] Awhile back I wrote about the workers of Netflix and their $9.00 per hour jobs. Most of the reader comments concluded that it was fair pay for unskilled work happening in these Netflix hubs. However, the point of that post really was to pose the question about what equates to a living wage. The number really is arbitrary as we've learned this week with all the minimum wage news and debate. [...]

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By: Kirbside

Kirbside — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 06:00:52 +0000

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.

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By: TW

TW — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:44:53 +0000

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.

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By: Constance Reader

Constance Reader — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:53:14 +0000

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.

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By: Timothy B

Timothy B — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:54:06 +0000

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!

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By: Doug G.

Doug G. — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:54:46 +0000

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.

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By: Constance Reader

Constance Reader — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:46:18 +0000

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.

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