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Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

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

#671

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ttoinou wrote: post #285
czep wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All it matters is people interacting voluntarily My point is that it is most certainly not voluntary. There are people in the world who are not as lucky or intelligent or resourceful as you, me, and most others on HN. Try to empathize and put yourself in the shoes of the disadvantaged, they do not know the world as we do, they cannot shop around for high paying jobs, and if they miss a paycheck, they may very well…

Putting myself in their shoes is exactly why I think they should be allowed to do whatever they think is best for them. What paycheck would they risk loosing if they can't find a job anyway ? Minimum wage exclude and marginalize poor people Asymmetry and inequalities are everywhere. I don't know which perfect egalitarian symmetric insert here another utopic adjective society you live in, but it's not certainly not mi…

> Minimum wage exclude and marginalize poor people

The elimination of minimum wage would marginalize poor people even more.

It's easy to think that the demand for labor is nearly infinite but at a super low wage. I mean, I'd gladly pay someone $2/hour to clean my house, and there are probably people desperate enough for money to buy food that they would do it. But minimum wage laws generally forbid it.

But consider employees at McDonalds. Walmart cashiers. Any other minimum wage job. If you eliminate the minimum wage, you create a race to the bottom. Eventually, you end up with people willing to flip burgers or work a cash register for $2/hour. They'll be living in a cardboard box with all their belongings in a shopping cart, but at least that $2/hour will buy them some semi-decent meals to survive.

Without a minimum wage, sure we'll probably see 0% unemployment, or something very close to it. But you'd end up absolutely tanking the median wage and standards of living. The term "working homeless" would replace the term "working poor" until some extremely low-quality housing popped up that someone could live in for $200/month.

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

#672

Post by bhupy »

bostik wrote: post #658
bhupy wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't using welfare to fill in the gaps the most efficient solution? A well functioning market drives down the cost of goods and services to the minimum possible price, provided there's adequate competition. Commoditization is a good thing. The fact that bread and milk only cost a few dollars is net-good for society. Commoditization of labor should, thus, also be similarly good for society. At the end of the day,…

> * But isn't using welfare to fill in the gaps the most efficient solution?* If you need welfare to cover the cost of living for full-time workers, then that is very much corporate welfare.

By that logic, any welfare is corporate welfare. Single payer healthcare paid for by taxpayers allows corporations to not provide their employees health insurance benefits.

For sure, that's one way to look at it, but the rest of my comment lays out why welfare is the least bad way to maintain standard of living.

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

#673

Post by samplesizeme »

skybrian wrote: post #663
rubidium wrote: post #491

There's been similar moves in the past. Most famous of which is Ford's $5 / day. http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/blogs/post-per... Ford's quote from the time is relevant today: “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers.…

Yeah, I don't take that explanation at face value because it's describing a perpetual motion machine. Sales to your own employees are only going to be a trivial amount of revenue for any reasonable business. And I'm sure he knew that. But interpreted charitably, it's showmanship. This is a way to show leadership, get a lot of publicity, and hire better workers, so what's not to like?

Give credence to the theory of velocity of money, and there is more to back this up.

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

#674

Post by jonlucc »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #150
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't contractors set their own rates?

In modern America, many "contractors" are just regular employees in every respect except that they're employed and contracted out by a third party, so they don't get the same privileges, protections, and benefits as "real" employees. A lot of companies (Lexmark is one I know for sure) like to trot out press pieces on how well they treat their employees, leaving out the fact that maybe 80% of the people working for th…

My company does this to an extent, but they claim it's to avoid trouble with "co-employment". As it was told to me when I was myself a contractor (that is a regular employee of another firm who hired me to work on-site at the company of which I'm now an employee), they have to withhold certain benefits because if they treat me like an employee, I could sue to get them listed as a co-employer, making me eligible retro-actively for benefits the regular employees received during my time there.

I've never quite understood the system, to be honest. My company pays a contract company for my time. The amount they pay for my service is much more than the cost of hiring me as an employee, because they have to pay my portion of my managers' time along with enough to cover my benefits and some profit for the contract company. The company could have just hired me directly for some portion of the cost. The only downsides I see are that they can tout they didn't fire any employees when things get tight and they slash the number of contractors.

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

#677

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

kidsnow wrote: post #670
smilbandit wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and thus grew the middle class. The middle class is something we truly need to focus on growing again.

Those making $200k-$500k are the new middle class. Are you making that much but only own one house? Are your cars more than 5 years old... Ding... you're in the middle class.

Depends on location.

In the Bay area? Sure.

I live in suburbs outside Portland, OR. My wife and I together make about $150k/year. We both own cars less than 3 years old. We only own 1 house, but we take a 2-week vacation a 1-week vacation every year.

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

#678

Post by Faark »

ttoinou wrote: post #298
CydeWeys wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following this argument. So, because the world used to terrible centuries ago, and still is in some undeveloped or wartorn nations, we should be OK with it continuing to be terrible here in one of the richest nations in the world, even though it doesn't have to be?

The argument is 1) there is no common definition of what is acceptable, globally it depends on our current living standard hence ultimately the society's level of development 2) on an individual level some would not make the same choices as you so it is ridiculous for you to make judgments on behalf of others 3) if we had implemented those kind of laws earlier, either everybody was forbidden of improving its conditio…

You can repeat the living standards meme as often as you like, but when people think the system is rigged against them, they will try to burn down the current system (best case just by election) and replace it with whatever might be more fair. And become susceptible to crappy populist promises.

So: yes, the rising inequality is a problem, no matter how badly some want to sell that as just a part of life (at least the way we currently structure it).

And i don't want a communist utopia. But also not reducing taxes for top earners to zero.

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

#679

Post by bhupy »

rifung wrote: post #657
bhupy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If a job doesn't provide the means to survive then the government is subsidizing these jobs assuming you make sure everyone has enough to live. Another issue is that the unemployment rate is no longer meaningful although that could be solved by having another statistic but unemployment is much easier to measure.

At the end of the day, we as a society rightly demand a minimum standard of living for everyone, and we collectively pay for that in one way or the other. Either we pay taxes to fund a welfare state, or we pay inflated prices for goods and services to maintain wage floors. The argument I'm making here is paying taxes for welfare is more progressive, as the burden falls on richer people. Paying inflated prices for goods and services is regressive as it's a burden that falls equally on the rich and the poor.
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