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Does it matter if your boss is rich?
This is a question I've thought about rarely over the years, mostly when non-wealthy friends have reported unexpected misunderstandings with wealthy bosses.
There was a woman in Australia who had a confused new manager who listened to him explain that she had to leave work at a fixed time each afternoon to pick up her children from school before asking: “Why don't you just get a girl?” He explained that alas, that would be a huge blow to the salary paid by his firm.
Another friend who is able to buy property miles from office shocked his wealthy boss, who lived close to work, by revealing how much he had saved on train tickets by working from home during the pandemic.
And there was a boss who invited his team to his growing home for a morning meeting and ushered them into a place that wasn't a dining room, or a kitchen, but a “breakfast room”, a place entirely dedicated to breakfast. bigger than many of his guests' rooms, none of whom had ever heard of such a room before.
I was reminded of all this when I came across a recent international study that helps explain why these times are happening – and why they may soon become more common.
In developed countries in Europe, Asia and North America, wealthy workers are on the rise separated from the poor.
Within industries and within private companies, there has been a “significant reduction in the exposure of high-income earners to low-income earners”, say the authors of the book. The Great Divide paper published at the end of last year.
Consider France. In 1994, 1 percent of French wage earners worked in positions where 9 percent of their peers were in the highest wage bracket. In 2019, that 9 percent share nearly doubled to 16 percent.
In the Netherlands in 2006, the top 10 percent of employed workers accounted for about 25 percent of their co-workers' earnings. By 2020 that percentage has increased to 30 percent.
The higher the level of wage workers, 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 industrial activity. Factory life brings blue-collar workers together with managers, engineers, supervisors and managers. It is different within a bank, an insurance firm or a software developer.
Outsourcing or outsourcing tasks such as data entry or clerical roles increases fragmentation, by removing chunks of low-wage workers from the office.
So is the rise of digitalization, which is making low-paying jobs far away. This trend underscores why the distribution of wealth can be determined for growth.
The paper's research began several years ago, says co-author Professor Halil Sabanci of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
This was before ChatGPT and other forms of advanced artificial intelligence were introduced to the workplace. Sabanci thinks it's reasonable to expect AI to accelerate the already digitized division of labor.
All this can have serious political consequences.
Sabanci and his colleagues suspect that the marginalization of high-class people in the workplace may have helped create resentment among poor workers who read or hear about the lives of high-income earners, but rarely see or interact with them.
“This situation can increase feelings and experiences of being left behind, neglected, and misunderstood,” they wrote, adding that this could help drive Trumpism and other forms of populism in Europe.
The division of voters between wealthy capitals or coastal cities, and regions that are struggling has certainly been a factor in a series of recent elections, from the 2016 Brexit vote to the presidential battles in the US and France.
In 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen's share of 15.6 percent of the vote in the Paris region was almost identical to the 14.4 percent he received elsewhere, write some of the paper's authors. previous research.
Three decades later, support for the far-right leader's daughter, Marine Le Pen, has dropped to 12.5 percent in Paris but has risen to 27 percent elsewhere – almost double her father's share.
This change is certainly not due solely to the increased separation of high-wage workers from the rest of the workforce. But it's easy to see that this bias could have fueled change, and may be about to accelerate it.