531–540 of 1001 posts
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This is hilarious. Would've never guessed Bernie had this sense of humor.
Trust me, it's not like Bernie himself was trying to come up with something funny and smart throughout long nights.
Anyway, props to the unnamed Bernie staffer who came up with this. Whoever came up with it, it is just hilarious
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.
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A national $15/hour minimum wage isn't going to fly in places like small town Kentucky or West Virginia. Those places don't have good jobs anymore, and the only businesses left are a drive-thru and a Dollar General. They can barely afford a dozen or so people working at minimum wage now, and they can't run a place with half the employees. Their customers can barely afford to shop there and can't take paying more to c…
One of the biggest Amazon distribution warehouses in the country happens to be in Lexington, KY. I’m sure this $15 / hour wage increase is going to go over very well there. I’m from Lexington, KY originally but live in Chicago now (since there aren’t local jobs for Linux Software Engineers)
Don't get me wrong -- workers are grossly underpaid in most of the US, and wage gains are good. But those wage gains do have to be relative. In NYC/SF, a $15 minimum wage is just enough to scrape by with a couple of 20-30 hour a week jobs. In a poorer part of the US, a $10 min wage is plenty... but anything more might be enough to kill what few businesses currently survive there.
Call me cynical, but it could also be that AMZN will be automating all those lower paid jobs - as in: soon they won't even need 7.25$/H employees because they'll have machines. In this scenario, 15$/H would just be their current price point for the following tier of bottom of the chain not-yet-automated tasks.
Which is fine by me. We've been automating jobs out of existence since the industrial revolution, and should continue to do so. There are very few people doing a job now that was a job in 1750, but there's still plenty for people to do. That's because we keep turning boring, lower-value work over to machines and finding more interesting, higher-value work for people to do. This does produce temporary dislocation. Onc…
>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…
Wow, does the top comment always have to be cynical? This is exactly what everyone wanted Amazon to do. Maybe it's time to suck it up and give praise where praise is due? There are also benefits to paying more salary than your competitors (no hiring shortages, best employees, low turnover, etc), so I'm not going to blindly accept that it's now in Amazon's interest to drag the rest of the industry along with them. But…
If they are doing it to look good that means they are doing because they value looking good in terms of ethics, if that is true then they are essentially acting in the right. They could have easily went to $9 or $10 to avoid government penalties.
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... FFS -- it was shaming of amazon's pay rate for their employees that caused the change in behavior in the first place. I think it is rational to look at what and why actions were taken. Do you believe that the raise of the minimum wage at Amazon was out of good nature? Was it a decision to mitigate brand perception costs against labor costs after a bunch of national stories reported that they were paying so little…
>Do you believe that the raise of the minimum wage at Amazon was out of good nature? Does it matter what the rationale was? I know if I was an Amazon minimum wage employee I could care less what the rationale was. I'd just be thrilled to be getting a pay raise. Where I live the minimum wage is only $11.25/hour. Getting a bump to $15 will be a big deal for those people.
If you're Amazon, yes, it matters a ridiculous amount.
The last thing you'll want is for people to realize that the union drives actually worked. That would mean more union drives and more pay rises on the horizon. Can't have that!
Count the number of mentions of the reason for their decision in their press releases:
https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
I make more as a waiter with absolutely 0 experience. Being a waiter is better, more stable pay than many office and warehouse jobs. Something is severely wrong when food service is more profitable than manufacturing and distribution and tertiary-degree stuff.
What's the wrong here? Waiting tables is a hard job, and not everyone can do it well. It's physically and mentally taxing, and to make money at it you have to be charming which is harder to train than, say, packing boxes in a warehouse. Good-paying waiter jobs tend to be in high-cost cities, so you'll spend more money on housing, transit, and food than a worker in a suburban warehouse. Waiters are also harder to subs…
Maybe not everyone can do it, but once I got laid off from my 4th or 5th IT sales job in 6 years, I said to myself, "self, it's time to find something more stable".
The very first people to offer me a shot were a very busy italian restaurant, and everything is going amazingly well considering when I started, I didn't know how to make an espresso or hold 3 plates!
Still, it is really shocking to me that so many of my colleagues are in the same boat: Reputable college degree, no stable office job.
Our customers are all mostly old/retired couples. We appreciate their patronage heavily, but we greatly wonder why their money is being spent on food and entertainment rather than high tech skills.
This forces us to specialize in skills that will never deliver a 10x leap in innovation. The market for food service is saturated and we will never make enough to jump to the upper class.
>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…
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Why are warehouse workers entitled to anywhere near the share the creator and owner makes?
I wasn't saying they were. This is far from anywhere near. Bezos was not able to make all his money due solely to his hard work, it was off the backs of others including all of us whom have to subsidize the workers that he is making 300k X their near lifetime earnings.
You are kind of right about subsidizing workers, but that's more of the government's fault for how our social services benefits work. It's not Amazon's fault the going rate for labor is below the rate that the government will provide benefits for.
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If you're willing to shame a company for behavior you don't like, I think you should be prepared to give praise when they do exactly what you just asked for. When you constantly move the goal posts just so that you never have to abandon your righteous anger for even one day, what kind of incentive does that give companies to change their behavior?
... FFS -- it was shaming of amazon's pay rate for their employees that caused the change in behavior in the first place. I think it is rational to look at what and why actions were taken. Do you believe that the raise of the minimum wage at Amazon was out of good nature? Was it a decision to mitigate brand perception costs against labor costs after a bunch of national stories reported that they were paying so little…