How much tech workers are paid
With a group of Google employees announcing this week that they had formed a union to have more muscle to negotiate workplace issues like s***** harassment and tech ethics, I thought it was a good time to check out the employee pay at America’s tech powerhouses.
The figures show both the considerable fortunes of some tech workers compared with most Americans and the wide divergence between the companies. There’s also a lot these numbers leave out.
These are the most recent yearly compensation figures for the typical worker at these companies, from documents released for annual meetings of shareholders:
Alphabet (Google’s parent company): $258,708
Facebook: $247,883
Microsoft: $172,142
Apple: $57,783
Amazon: $28,848 ($36,640 for full-time workers in the U.S.)
For comparison, the typical pay for full-time, year-round workers in the United States was about $52,000 in 2019. Apart from Amazon, these companies only disclose the pay calculated from their global work forces.*
One thing that jumps out is Apple and Amazon’s relatively low compensation compared with the rest of Big Tech. (Amazon has more information here on the workplace benefits that aren’t counted in the compensation figure.)
A big reason for this is the composition of the companies’ staff. Apple has a large number of employees at its retail stores. And a big chunk of Amazon’s rapidly growing global work force of more than 1.2 million are people who are working in warehouses and package sorting centers. Google and Facebook’s employee ranks are mostly office workers in relatively highly paid jobs like engineers.
The big omission from these compensation figures is the shadow work force of contractors at pretty much all the Big Tech companies. At Google, for example, direct employees are outnumbered by temps and contractors, who tend to have lower pay and less opportunity for advancement than the company’s full-time workers.
How the tech giants pay and treat their contract workers is going to be a big issue in 2021, and it’s something my colleagues and I will continue to follow closely.
*These figures are all medians, which means numerically half of employees make more and half make less.
The New York Times