581–590 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
does google employ or contract-out many lower-paid employees?
Yes. All of their warehouse workers are employees of Integrity Staffing, not Amazon. Presumably Amazon is directing Integrity to bump up its wage.
Also, the parent's question was about Google.
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?
> they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. That's because they treat their workers terrible. They're a huge company with a lot of profit and how people at the bottom of the chain are treated is maddening. They're seen as an example of how not to treat workers (and for good reason). They definitely should not be lauded for this: They did some calculations a…
In 2016, they made a profit of $857 million on a revenue of $30.1 billion--- i.e. profit margin of 2%, compared to Alphabet's 9.7% or Facebook's 36%(!!!). It's the number that investors care about, because it tells them how likely they are to get money back out of a business when the invest money into it. It's also a number the company cares about, because it tells them how much of a shock to their fixed costs they could stomach without suddenly finding themselves spending more than they make to keep the doors open.
Amazon's (relatively) razor-thin margins are what make the company so paranoid about costs like wages and benefits; they've seen America's history of burning hulks of older companies wrecked by making pension promises when profits were high that they couldn't honor when profits tailed off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Isn't "constantly moving the goal posts" the name of the game in capitalism? Good on Amazon for increasing their minimum wage, but why shouldn't it also be met with a healthy amount of skepticism. Companies definitely do things for the common good (I don't see much competitive advantage gained from going 100% renewable energy - a common move for many tech companies - apart from maybe attracting better/more employees)…
If good behavior isn't rewarded, how do you think companies might act in the future.
People, as well as companies, respond to incentives.
>“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the announcement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.” Ha ha. This shouldn't have taken much thinking Jeff. It's a no brainer, no? The more you pay your people, the more they can spend on your stuff.
> The more you pay your people, the more they can spend on your stuff. This is the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
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> $15 an hour will push a lot of people out of being employable. Or maybe it will just force employers to pay better wages to those they employ already. $7.50 / hour is what they pay kids here to stock grocery chains.
I think the point is that many people aren’t worth $15/hour. Having a well-stocked grocery store is worth $15/hour if the person doing the job is fast. But slower stockers may lose their jobs altogether. Most companies I’ve worked at have had mailrooms. Very few have had people actually working in them. Which tells me that when the buildings were designed, the mailroom was considered valuable enough to include in the…
Who cares? If markets are allowed to compete freely, unskilled labor rates trend towards zero. Most of the people currently working at $7.50 probably would be paid even less if the law didn't forbid it now.
We live in a capitalist society where people are expected to work for a living. Saying that someone doesn't deserve to be paid a living wage is the same as saying they don't deserve to live.
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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)
Lexington, Kentucky is the 60th-largest city in the United States. That is not the "small town Kentucky" that the grandparent is talking about. (S)he is talking about small businesses (or business franchises, like Dollar General) that are barely scraping by in small towns -- a gas station, a diner, a dollar store -- typically with a only 1-3 employees working at a time. A place like that would take a substantial hit…
The small mom and pop stores have been closing at record paces due to things like Walmart and Amazon. A higher minimum wage might speed that up, but it just moves things faster in the direction they've been moving for decades already.
The thing that blows my mind is what the federal government (by the definition of the IRS) considers the poverty level is based on the cost of food plus inflation, while entirely negating the cost of living. Minimum wage is made based on the poverty level, but the poverty level is wildly inaccurate due to not taking into account housing.
>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…
Amazon knows most of that $15/hour will be paid into Amazon - regardless of employer - as they have 51% of American commerce. They're turning America into a huge company town.
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Quick back-of-the-envelope math: Let's assume this raise will affect 250k workers this coming holiday season, bumping their pay from $12 to $15 (+$3). Over 12 weeks at 40h/week, this represents an additional $360M in labor cost. Using AMZN's 2017 revenue of 177.9B, this equates to 17.7 revenue-hours.
Why are you comparing 12 weeks with the entire 2017 revenue? You'd have a better argument that this is peanuts for them if you'd make a fair and clear comparison.
They aren't. They're comparing to revenue per hour. It doesn't matter what period of time you calculate revenue per hour with, you always get the same number.
Opponents of the minimum wage argue that it reduces employment by creating an artificial floor on wages, that jobs are lost because employers can't afford to pay the minimum. But if you can't pay the minimum, then you didn't really have a job to offer in the first place! By extension of this logic, employers could argue that they are losing jobs because they can only afford to pay someone who will work 12 hours a day…
> If you can't pay a basic living wage, for fair hours, in safe conditions, with necessary medical benefits, then you don't have a job to offer. Why not let the employees decide if the job is worth taking? If there exists people willing to voluntarily take a job given its wage/conditions, you have a job to offer.
On top of that, taxpayers will have to foot the bill by funding welfare to all these people whose labor is being exploited. Especially since they increasingly don't have the negotiating power of a union to make this idealistic vision you have of the job market fair to both sides.
Techies like to believe they're enlightened when they lean libertarian, when in reality all that amounts to is privatized gains, socialized losses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick back-of-the-envelope math: Let's assume this raise will affect 250k workers this coming holiday season, bumping their pay from $12 to $15 (+$3). Over 12 weeks at 40h/week, this represents an additional $360M in labor cost. Using AMZN's 2017 revenue of 177.9B, this equates to 17.7 revenue-hours.
Why are you comparing 12 weeks with the entire 2017 revenue? You'd have a better argument that this is peanuts for them if you'd make a fair and clear comparison.
In any case, it's not clear that revenue hours is a meaningful comparison anyway because it ignores how much of their cost is labor vs anything else.