The Hidden Part of Our Pay

On the map, outside Austin, a new dot appeared in 2021. Called Snailbrook, on thousands of acres, Elon Musk is reputedly planning a utopian community for his employees. It can incorporate when at least 201 residents live there.

Whereas the median rent in the area is $2,200, employees were told that Musk subsidized housing, only for them, will start at $800 for two or three bedroom houses. He plans to add more than 110 homes:

Snailbrook’s subsidized housing is just one example of the different ways we can be paid.

Workers’ Pay

The “cash” your boss pays you could be only a part of your pay. At Google and Meta, a bunch of perks are possibilities. However, with their cost cutting, some of those extras disappeared. In addition to layoffs, last year, Meta eliminated its free laundry perk while Google removed 31 massage therapists from its payroll. (Forcing employees to choose between a free ride or free dinner, Meta moved dinner to 6:30, one half hour after its last shuttle left.)

The Hustle gave us a wonderful image of some Big Tech extras:

Meanwhile, the Balance added the benefits some employers provide:

Our Bottom Line: The Wage Landscape

Looking at the numbers, we can start with how much we earn. Because states have different minimum wages, costs of living, and industries, the wage landscape is different across the U.S.:

Also wages have grown by different amounts:

These are some of the numbers:

For a slighly different perspective, I always like to visit the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker. Below you can see that year-over-year wage growth from December 2021 to December 2022 (the solid green line) was 6.1 percent:

Where are we? Returning to where we began, Snailbrook becomes a small part of our pay geography.

My sources and more: Moving from the specific to the general, the WSJ Musk article is a good place to start for one type of hidden pay. From there, the Hustle newsletter looked at perks while the Balance had more about benefits and of course we had our government stats. Then, leaping far from Snailbrook, our wage tracker was from the Atlanta Fed. And finally, if you want to look at other company towns, a shoe manufacturer had this one and I can’t resist recommending, Facebook’s Parent Company Will Make Employees Do Theire Own Laundry.