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Does it matter if your boss is rich?
This is a question I have rarely thought about over the years, mostly when non-wealthy friends reported unexpected misunderstandings with their wealthier bosses.
There was an Australian woman whose new boss, clearly puzzled, listened to her explain that she had to leave work at a specific time every afternoon to pick up her children from school before he asked her: “Why don’t you just get a nanny?” Unfortunately, she explained, that would be difficult given the salary his company pays her.
Another friend could only afford to buy a property miles away office She surprised her wealthier boss, who lives close to work, by revealing how much money she had saved on train tickets by working from home during the pandemic.
Then there was the CEO who invited his team to his sprawling home for a morning meeting and directed them to what turned out to be neither the dining room nor the kitchen, but the “breakfast room,” a space devoted entirely to breakfast. Larger than the apartments of most of his guests, who had never heard of such a room before.
I was reminded of all this when I looked at some recent international research that helps explain why these moments happen, and why they may be about to become more common.
In developed countries across Europe, Asia and North America, more workers are wealthy than ever before separate Of the less wealthy.
Within industries and within individual companies, there has been “a significant decline in the exposure of top earners to bottom earners,” the study authors say. The great separation paper Published late last year.
Let us consider France here. In 1994, the top 1 percent of French earners worked in places where 9 percent of their colleagues belonged to the same top income group. By 2019, this 9 percent share had nearly doubled to 16 percent.
In the Netherlands in 2006, the top 10 percent of earners were working where about 25 percent of their coworkers had a similar income. By 2020, this percentage had risen to nearly 30 percent.
The larger the upper class of earners, the less likely they are to mix with lower-paid workers.
There are many reasons why this is happening, starting with the decline in industrial jobs. Factory life brings together blue-collar workers with supervisors, engineers, managers and executives. It's different within a bank, insurance company or software developer.
Outsourcing or offshoring jobs such as data entry or payroll clerk roles deepens the gap, by removing portions of low-income workers from the office.
So is the rise of digitalisation, which is automating low-wage jobs. This trend underscores why wealth segregation may be on the rise.
Research for this paper began many years ago, says co-author, Professor Halil Sabanci of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
This was before the launch of ChatGPT and other types of advanced AI in the workplace. Sabanci believes it is reasonable to expect AI to accelerate the separation of wealth that digitalization has already brought about at work.
All of this could have profound political consequences.
Sabanci and his colleagues suspect that the isolation of work elites may have actually helped generate resentment among poor workers who read or hear about the lives of high-income earners, but rarely see or meet them.
“This situation could increase feelings and experiences of being left behind, ignored and misunderstood,” they wrote, adding that this in turn could have helped fuel Trumpism and other forms of populism in Europe.
To be sure, the polarization of voters between wealthy capital cities or coastal cities and struggling hinterlands has been a prominent feature in a series of recent elections, from the 2016 Brexit vote to presidential battles in the United States and France.
In 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen's share of the vote of 15.6 percent in the Paris region was the same 14.4 percent as he got elsewhere, some of the paper's authors wrote in 1988. Previous research.
Thirty years later, support for the daughter of right-wing populist leader Marine Le Pen has fallen to 12.5 percent in Paris, but has risen to 27 percent elsewhere, nearly double her father's share of the vote.
Of course, this change was not solely due to the growing disconnect between top earners and the rest of the workforce. But it is easy to see that this separation could have fueled this shift, and may be about to accelerate it further.
