I actually do, but the reasoning isn't because I am deluding myself into thinking I am being kind to the employees (it is because I am trying to be kind to the customers, by making the food cheaper). I realize you want to be nice to other people, but you should realize you are doing it wrong (or at least doing it to a different set of people than you intended)... as noted, I treat the janitors with respect and don't ignore them and even do things they ask me to do as I tend to know who they are in a way most people don't (partly as I tend to be the only person still hanging around in the middle of the night, but also because I don't have any issue talking to them as I don't do the bad thing the article is complaining about). I have even hired janitors for my spaces and I make sure to pay them well and treat them with respect. You aren't being kind to people when you pick up their job function... you just aren't.
Following the logic here and above, do you make sure to create very large and annoying to clean messes in office spaces / spaces were janitors will clean so that, by the nature of the work, pushes their employer to increase the pay for the job?
No, because 1) in cases where it is a building I am working in/for such a thing is likely to have direct and potentially significant negative blowback on me for increasing the company's costs; 2) in other places many people (I am guessing including yourself) are sufficiently privileged to not see the "us vs. the overlords" dynamic and so look at people who increase these sorts of costs with contempt; and 3) as noted elsewhere in this thread, helping the janitors isn't the only goal: keeping costs low for society IS valuable and so it can be perfectly rational to avoid creating messes you know someone else will have to clean in order to lower the costs on society to clean them... but only if you realize you are not doing this to be nice to the janitors.
Like, the issue I am having with this thread is that a ton of people who seem to have some concept of what the ethical thing to do here is--and I don't even necessarily disagree with the concluding actions!--but I don't think they actually have the perspective to realize that the reasons why those actions might or might not be ethical are completely different from what one might intuitively expect due to the incentive structure of working for a company under capitalism. And so then you are all taking this idea of that ethical conclusion and trying to make me feel shitty for how I treat the janitors somehow when the janitors are categorically not the people you are helping with your ethical outcomes :/. Yes: the result of this thought process applied en masse would be horribly inefficient and seemingly costly for a ton of people, but the janitors would call you a hero as they are paid by the hour.
My context: while I myself am yet another privileged software developer, I am also a strongly-left-leaning elected government official who often has deep heart to hearts with friends who are union organizers... people who fight daily on behalf of people in these situations, and it is when I channel them--not some heartless asshole who refuses to even look at janitors--that I feel most strongly about these issues. The idea that you are doing someone a favor by going out of your way to not help them in their personal life but to do part of their job is just such a strange thought process to me... I have houseless people in the area CONSTANTLY asking for work, and if there were tasks that needed to get done maybe we could hire them to the beautification program we're in charge of (which explicitly works with houseless employees); so sure: if you care about them, you might literally litter our streets with trash ;P.
The reason to maybe not cause messes (and I don't, because while I am not an asshole to the janitors I am not optimizing for them over everyone else) is not to be kind to these people in the way the person I replied to seems to think: it is because it is an inefficiency--a cost to the system as a whole--and that cost to the system will be born by someone else, whether it be tracked directly back to you or indirectly cause increased costs for food or other staples. The fewer people who work at supermarkets or restaurants, the cheaper food will be--your taxes are paying for our beautification program, so your taxes might be lower if there is less work to be done--but this comes at a disproportionate cost to the people who relied on those jobs, so don't think you are doing them the favor... if you were truly wanting to do them a favor, you would, in fact, do this awkward thing of trying to cause messes.
What I don't do, though: go out of my way to clean up messes caused by other people when I know someone else has a job to clean them. Example: I now no longer clean streets myself if I walk past a pile of trash... I pull out an app on my phone and take a photo of the trash so the aforementioned local beautification program sends a person out who is excited to be paid money and the program can show that it is being successful to the community and thereby people will be OK with the taxes being paid for it. The person who was sent out to pick up the trash gets to have the dignity of a job instead of me handing them money (which I also do!!! but they really hate taking the money from me like that, and it frankly isn't scalable or fairly allocated anyway). Meanwhile, I spend my time working on software or whatever I do which earns more money than this person was paid to pick up the trash in the same amount of time, which helps bring money into the area to pay for the local taxes. This is almost entirely a win/win/win.
