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Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

cnbc.com

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Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#151

Post by chrisseaton »

Steltek wrote: post #94
chrisseaton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you deserve to be made fun of I don't think anyone deserves to be made fun of, full stop. Grown-up criticism is fine.

Political humor, especially satire, can sometimes cut through the fog of bullshit quite clearly.

I disagree I think it muddies the waters! A political comedian will have an agenda that they try to get across using satire, but they tell half-truths and exaggerate to make their jokes work. It's toxic, as some people don't understand the satire, or misunderstand which bits were exaggerated for comedic effect and which were based in fact.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#152

Post by shimon_e »

ralmidani wrote: post #39

Amazon should be commended for making a move in the right direction. I personally think people should be paid more. $15 * 40 * 52 comes out to $31,200. Before payroll and income taxes. That's barely enough to survive in a small city like Flint, MI (I live in a suburb of Flint), let alone somewhere like NYC, Seattle, or SF.

This is minimum. It should apply to people with no experience, in training, or living in the middle of no where. There is no reason to live in an expensive city if you can make the exact same amount of money in a cheap city.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#153

Post by zacharytelschow »

ralmidani wrote: post #39

Amazon should be commended for making a move in the right direction. I personally think people should be paid more. $15 * 40 * 52 comes out to $31,200. Before payroll and income taxes. That's barely enough to survive in a small city like Flint, MI (I live in a suburb of Flint), let alone somewhere like NYC, Seattle, or SF.

> I personally think people should be paid more.

Great. So start a company and pay your employees more.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#154

Post by david927 »

zacharytelschow wrote: post #132
ashelmire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think turning your employees into welfare-dependent wage-slaves is far worse than unprofessional or bullying, but I guess that's just me and most decent people. CEOs of large public companies have to take public heat, by name, quite often. It's a huge part of their job; otherwise they'd be COOs.

> turning your employees into welfare-dependent wage-slaves I wasn't aware staying with a particular employer was compulsory.

After we create a Universal Basic Income, you can say this without looking callous.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#155

Post by beaconstudios »

emodendroket wrote: post #129
RankingMember wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to imagine that the quality of service people are providing isn't that high either if they're miserable. I think about peoples' quality of life in a call center whenever I'm stuck on hold with Verizon or some other faceless corporation.

People pretty regularly just told customers whatever they wanted to hear to get them off the phone. The more scrupulous among us wouldn't say anything false or break any rules but would deliberately upset customers to get them to ask for a supervisor (call length was a major metric which affected your pay substantially, so if you couldn't really do anything for them this was the best strategy).

"when a measure becomes a target" and all that.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#156

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

School-Cotton wrote: post #15
nebulous1 wrote: post #4

I mean, they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. Good move. They have more to do though. I've went through a few articles on this but I didn't see any of them mention what Amazon's minimum actual pay was before this, just the federal minimum wage. Anybody know?

Did Amazon actually pay any worse or have worse working conditions than any other unskilled warehouse job? If so, why didn’t the employees change jobs? If not, why is so much criticism directed at Amazon specifically, rather than at capitalism itself?

If you criticise the entire system, it's pretty hard to identify a point of change that people will actually rally behind.

If you specifically target a few of the more infamous culprits, by getting them to adjust you can establish a precedent and build from there. This move probably isn't going to win Bezos any new fans, but there'll probably be a reshift of focus towards some of the similarly bad employers.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#158

Post by shimon_e »

adventured wrote: post #96
WisNorCan wrote: post #43

With almost a million employees the decisions by Amazon are impacting a large part of the (150 million) US workforce. The dysfunction in our government is rising at a time that corporations are growing bigger than ever. The obvious result is that companies like Amazon will have an outsized effect on the major issues for our society, like minimum wage and healthcare.

Nothing has actually changed about the scale of corporations. That's just a popular talking point (it's actually always a popular talking point). US GDP in 2000: $10 trillion US GDP in 2018: $20 trillion Largest market caps in 2000: Microsoft & Cisco, about half a trillion dollars. Double that to match the doubled GDP, and you get an Amazon today. Amazon is not more powerful than these companies at their peaks: GM, F…

How does it look with population increase taken into account?

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#159

Post by ttoinou »

ralmidani wrote: post #39

Amazon should be commended for making a move in the right direction. I personally think people should be paid more. $15 * 40 * 52 comes out to $31,200. Before payroll and income taxes. That's barely enough to survive in a small city like Flint, MI (I live in a suburb of Flint), let alone somewhere like NYC, Seattle, or SF.

I think that they should be paid one million dollars each month, because why not, and creating inflation is always good for the economy

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#160

Post by rc_mob »

Shivetya wrote: post #87
swebs wrote: post #17

>In addition, the company also pledges its public policy team will lobby for an increase to the federal minimum wage from $7.25 — it doesn’t identify a specific wage that it’s targeting, but instead says, “We believe $7.25 is too low. We would look to Congress to decide the parameters of a new, higher federal minimum wage.” I'm going to take a wild guess and assume it will be $15/hour. That way they'll get to look pr…

$15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. There is a greater tolerance for whom you will accept at current wage points. The other effect of a much higher starting wage is you will have people enter the market who did not think the wage was worth their time. The people who cannot be relied on to show up on schedule, quit and want to come back, have some issues in their credit or criminal backgroun…

This sounds like good problem to have. Companies can pick from a larger pool and find better workers.
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