From today’s New York Times:
I am ashamed to say that until recently I was part of the majority: I am the chief executive of a company that gave different benefits to different groups of employees.
Like so many companies before us, my company, Rent the Runway, had two tiers of workers. Our salaried employees — who typically came from relatively privileged, educated backgrounds — were given generous parental leave, paid sick leave and the flexibility to work from home, or even abroad. Our hourly employees, working in Rent the Runway’s warehouse, on the customer service team and in our retail stores, had to face life events like caring for a newborn, grieving after the death of a family member or taking care of a critically ill loved one without this same level of benefits.
I had inadvertently created classes of employees — and by doing so, had done my part to contribute to America’s inequality problem.
When you’re founding a business, you take your cues on corporate culture from larger, already successful organizations. In America, some of the biggest companies have decided to handle the dual pressures of keeping costs down while retaining “corporate talent” by ramping up benefits packages. Companies like Starbucks and Walgreens compete for top-tier candidates by offering cushy policies in areas like parental leave or vacation.
But the best benefits are reserved for corporate talent, for whom the competition is considered steepest; employees who work at hourly rates are an afterthought (and that doesn’t begin to factor in companies like Uber that opt to consider the people they work with “contractors”). When I started Rent the Runway, I simply followed suit.
But over the years, I began to reflect on how the system that I and others had constructed may have been perpetuating deep-seated social problems. Last month, I equalized benefits for all of our employees at Rent the Runway. Our warehouse, customer service and store employees now have the same bereavement, parental leave, family sick leave and sabbatical packages that corporate employees have.
We know the grim statistics, such as only 14 percent of civilian workers in the United States have access to paid family leave; one in every four new mothers go back to work just 10 days after giving birth; and people who make more than $75,000 a year are twice as likely as those who make less than $30,000 to get paid leave.
Of course, chief executives and their leadership teams have outsize salaries as well as outsize benefits. C.E.O.s at the 350 largest companies make 271 times the earnings of the typical worker. The people with the most means have the most flexibility in their lives, not only because they have the ability to throw money at their problems but also because their companies grant them this flexibility to keep them happy.
Read the complete article here.