More fun with Adobe Illustrator

In many cities in North America, housing prices have reached unheard of levels. What young family can hope to own a home today? Yet the stock markets continue to soar into the stratosphere. Many companies make little or no profits yet their stock prices are astronomical. What about wages for a typical worker whether in high tech or in the manufacturing industry? It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that wages have stagnated for years.

Over 20 years ago I made this graphic using Adobe Illustrator to express my frustration with the gap between my wages and the “movers and shaker” of Wall Street and Bay Street. After all these years it seems so relevant if not more so today.

Study in magazine covers. Copyright © Glenn J. Lea 2021.

Stagnant Salaries and rising cost of living

Young people fresh out of university have expectations of finding work with decent salaries yet in no time reality bites and they find they need to share apartments to pay rent. Home ownership? Forget about it. To me, it is an imbalance that can’t be sustained. Soon young people are going to ask, “how is it I spent years learning the latest and greatest technology yet my parents lived better lives than I could ever expect to and they worked in factories, warehouses or on farms.”

So, there it is.

I suppose we could say it has always been that way. Yet I can attest that since I graduated from university in 1994, little has changed for technology professional. Programming languages have changed. We now work with better tools. Everyone works with laptops now. Yet, what has really improved? My office space at Citibank in 1994 was amazing. We didn’t have all the perks like snacks and drinks and a pool table. We worked. We didn’t spend our day in a kindergarten where the workers need toys to keep them loyal to a company. Now, companies hiring technology workers need to attract talent by keeping them hyperactive and giving them all the toys grown up kids need. Companies are no longer just companies. They try to engender loyalty by giving them “privileged access” to part of the “greatest project in history. We are not just making quality software. We are changing the world”.

So what is going on? Are we returning to the sweatshops of the 19th century only working on office chairs and staring at screens all day? I wonder if people no longer have their own lives and goals and dreams. We now live in an age that lacks personal lives where the only meaningful purpose in life is to become part of Company X? And the shareholders love it that way.

Honestly, I am sure workers in the past were proud of being a GM worker or an IBM employee. But work was work. Home was home. The goal was to work to raise a family. The goal now is to make the company your family and feed the shareholders.

Isn’t it time to wake up and smell the burnt coffee pot in the snack room.

Companies are created to make profits. Period. All this gobbledygook about being a good corporate citizen, doing “good”, helping out in society is all part of the deal. Make workers feel that they are part of saving the world, not just making a product. Just look at the ownership of these companies. Follow the money. If the trail leads to Saudi Arabia, well, what does that mean? If the trail leads to a massive home in the suburbs of a city weighed down by equally massive poverty, what does that mean?

I have worked in my career since 1994. Yet, I can command a salary that in real terms is less than what I was making when I graduated. What does that mean? It just doesn’t make sense. I am no longer enamored by the great new corporations of technology. It only tells me that a new generation of workers no longer see meaning in life and see their purpose as being part of a company producing mediocre to average software or perhaps finding an innovative niche to fill with their software.

Welcome to the age of Greed.