A recent trip to Denver provided some insight into the American workforce to which politicians are ever-eager to supply raises (using employers’ money, naturally).
It started at Massport’s newly renovated Terminal B, whose budgeted cost was $124 million (Globe). The public WiFi was completely non-functional, as is typical at Logan Airport. Frustrated passengers, each of whom paid a fat fee (through their airline ticket purchase) to be there, could be heard asking each other “Did you get it to work?”
[We did better than New Yorkers financially; they are planning to spend $4 billion to update one of the terminals at LaGuardia (nytimes). This is just slightly less than what Dubai spent to build the largest building in the world. The new LaGuardia terminal is supposed to be 1.3 million square feet (source) compared to 18.4 million square feet for Dubai. So it will cost Americans nearly 13X as much per square foot, assuming that the LGA project comes in on budget. What’s interesting about this is that U.S. airlines say that the only reason Emirates can out-compete them is that Emirates is subsidized. (USA Today) Is it surprising to have lower costs when your main hub is in a country that builds stuff for 1/13th what it costs big-city Americans?]
Denver International Airport does have working WiFi (apparently one massive tech failure was enough for that airport). The “Uber Select” driver, an immigrant from West Africa, had a fancy Mercedes but was unable to locate the 200-room downtown Ritz-Carlton. The “Uber Black” driver, an Arab immigrant, on the return trip had a yet-more-expensive car but was unable to operate the climate control system in automatic mode (it was an unseasonably cold rainy day and he arrived shivering with the system set to “Lo” temp and with manual fan set at about 75 percent; when I suggested raising the temperature above “Lo” he cranked up the fan speed to 100 percent).
What seems to be missing from the debate about wages in the U.S. is any discussion of worker quality. It is almost a Zen koan: What is the market wage for a WiFi engineer who can’t deliver WiFi?
You could try Amtrak.
Do you have any reason to believe that an engineer is at fault for the bad WiFi? Isn’t it possible that the fault lies with some manager or executive?
Also, regarding Dubai, it has a reputation for treating its construction workers, who are nearly all South Asians, extremely poorly. My cousin and his wife have worked in the region for a few years as teachers. He told me that the term used there to describe South Asian, Filipinos, etc. is “dark skinned foreigners” and that they are treated rather poorly by their employers, the authorities, etc. because of their skin color. This is from a Human Rights Watch report:
Through interviews with workers, government officials, and foreign embassy representatives, as well as a survey of media reports in news and trade journal publications, we highlight what appears to be the most common concern of the construction workers: extremely low wages, typically withheld by employers for a minimum of two months along with their passports, as “security” to keep the worker from quitting. Having incurred large debts to recruitment agencies in their home countries, paid to finance visa and travel costs, notwithstanding the legal prohibition against charging workers such fees, the workers feel compelled to remain in these jobs, despite the low—and in some cases, more protractedly unpaid—wages.
Moreover, while engaged in the hazardous work of constructing high-rises, workers face apparently high rates of injury and death with little assurance that their employers will cover their health care needs. A lack of reliable and comprehensive statistics, including the failure to enforce company reporting requirements about deaths and injuries, is indicative of the entirely deficient capacities of the agencies tasked with investigating labor practices. Human Rights Watch learned that 140 government inspectors were responsible for overseeing the labor practices of more than 240,000 businesses employing migrant workers. Of greater concern is that the same deficiency of oversight may mean an absence of appropriate enforcement of health and safety standards, which may directly account for worker deaths and injuries.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/uae1106/1.htm#_Toc149111147
Vince: Are you sure that it is foreigners who are evil exploiters? One of my Facebook friends just posted http://www.alternet.org/labor/waffle-houses-diner-empire-based-right-wing-politics-and-ripping-workers , for example. Are you able to say that workers in the U.S. are cruelly exploited but that workers elsewhere are even more exploited? Is the only way to avoid exploitation to stay out of the workforce everywhere on the planet and instead collect SSDI/welfare/child support/etc.?
Hotel wifi also does not work well, more often than not. The fact that it is a fancy hotel where they are charging you $10 or $20/day for it doesn’t seem to make any difference – in fact, because such hotels put in their systems earlier they may work even more poorly than the free wifi at Motel 6.
There are a couple of factors here, both in airports and hotels: They don’t see providing wifi as their main business, so they treat it as an afterthought and farm it out to some low bidder (in the case of hotels, whoever will let them keep the most of the fat fees). 2nd, wifi doesn’t scale easily – it works well when you have only a couple of users but when you have hundreds at once it tends to bog down, esp. if some of them are streaming movies, etc.