Workers with higher salaries are increasingly removed from their colleagues below. What explains this segregation at work?
It’s rare, but Nike’s executive director, Elliott Hillbegan his career in the worldwide shoe giant as.
According to Hill himself, when he started as a sales intern at Tennessee in 1988, he packed boxes in the warehouse and answered office phones when necessary. Ambitious and loyal, he was rising in the company’s hierarchy until, in September 2024, he was invited to leave the reform to become president and executive director of the footwear manufacturer.
This type of career progression – from the mail room to the meeting room, from the factory floor to the direction – It looks like fictionalfantasy or at least from a distant past. Today, people do not remain in their jobs for decades, as Hill did, as companies are often sold, restructured, divided and reorganized.
Now workplaces are increasingly divided into income, which can prevent a humble trainee from interacting with high level executives. This situation has harmful consequences for social mobility, cohesion and equality.
Worrying segregation in the workplace. Why?
A study recently in American Journal of Sociology He analyzed the new world of the labor market, focusing on data on the workplace and wages in 12 advanced economies over nearly three decades, starting in 1990.
The study covered companies from countries such as Sweden and Denmark, some of the most egalitarian societies in the world, as well as Canada, Japan and others.
This study focused on Analyze only people with high income – 1% and 10% richer – and their exposure to workers who earn as much as they and those at the bottom of the salary scale.
With some variations, it was found that workers who earn the most are increasingly surrounded by other workers who gain more.
At the end of the study, one in eight co -workers was a person who earned very well compared to one in 11 at the beginning.
Although the evolution from one year to the next may seem ineffective over a 25 -year period results in a substantial social change.
It is not just about the fact that those who earn more surrounded by others who earn more. In almost every country, workers with higher salaries are increasingly separated from workers at the base of the salary scale.
Distance between workers and managers. Why?
The separation of wages is particularly accentuated in the sectors of the transforming industry and finances, which points to three of the profound causes of increasing distancing: restructuring of the workplace, deindustrialization and digitization.
Traditionally, the transformative industry was characterized by greater interaction between different workers, for example, in factories where the boss and workers had regular contact.
With a common emphasis on thinness, in recent decades the workplaces have been reduced and restructured through processes such as externalization and subcontracting. This tends to create a particular type of structure: a small and highly qualified headquarters, with other services and operations to be performed in another location.
In global industries, this may mean that poorly qualified and routine jobs are moved to countries with low wages, while positions such as managers and engineers remain at headquarters.
In addition, the digitization of work processes tends to eliminate the little qualified and routine work and create more homogeneous companies. Many average remuneration jobs are eliminated.
Distance generates distance (and stagnation). Why?
When workers with lower salaries stop working in the same building, the same facilities or even the same company as superiors, have less chance of being promoted internally.
In addition, segregated workplaces, workers with lower salaries also do not have access to information and influence that workers enjoy higher wages. Consequently, they have worse perspectives of upward mobility.
Companies are not, of course, the only source of inequality. Inequality of opportunities, where the options of elevation of the future, such as education, are abundantly available to some and completely out of reach of others, is difficult to measure and even harder to correct.
However, organizational inequality is an important part of Puzzle. Today it would be highly unlikely that Elliott Hill, if he got the same stage at Nike, could realistically aspire to his executive director one day.
