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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

#741

Post by pathseeker »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #732
slivym wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who says Amazon doesn’t pay taxes? Can we do away with this now please. Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid. In fact, excusing Amazon's tax avoidance with the income tax it's employees pay is even worse. It's still a problem. We still need to tackle it, and if this pay rise acts to dissuade people from real tax reform and real workers rights then…

Jeff Bezos paying sales tax on his morning coffee is enough for the people looking for an extra dopamine hit by rah rahing Amazon. $15/hour still isn’t enough to live on in many cities and large scale tax evasion by corporations is one of the single most insidious epidemics in our society today.

You need to look up the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. If Amazon was evading taxes and there was any evidence of it, they would be hit hard by the IRS.

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

#742

Post by Smokey28 »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #682
skybrian wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The point wasn't that paying employees more leads to sells. Its more of a remark about the overall world. Your employees are somebody's customers, your customers are somebody's employees, You are somebody's customer. If nobody in the world makes enough to be a consumer, nobody consumes, and thus you have no customers.

Exactly this. I've spent the last year or so studying Ford. His whole point was that if people didn't have the money to buy his product or time to use it (he reduced work hours as well) then your business will never survive. He wasn't banking on employee sales, he was looking at employees as a snapshot of a wider market.

Great example is fast food as well. If you are offering the "lowest cost" food option, and providing the minimum wage, you've got product/purchasing power that are both at the bottom of the food chain. And if employees can't afford to buy your food... then who is going to? Your product doesn't match the market you'd supposedly be selling to.

This is why Ford is considered the creator of the middle class. He took automation and used it as a way to set a different standard for society, one that inherently helped his own product succeed in the long run.

Why is Bezos doing this? Because Amazon succeeds when people have more disposable income. And it starts with his company. sure he might get regulated to do it anyways, but now he is pushing the needle. Regulators might push an overall minimum wage hike to $15 because "if amazon can do it, why cant you?" The merits of that hike aside, know who stands to benefit from people having more money to spend? Amazon.

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

#743

Post by drakenot »

B-Con wrote: post #730
propman wrote: post #687

Amazon says no more RSUs in exchange for $15 min wage, can anyone say how much the RSUs were for those employees? I’m curious as to what the difference is?

Where did you see that? I doubt hourly warehouse workers are getting RSUs to begin with, that tends to be for salaried positions only.

In another change, Amazon will phase out its Restricted Stock Unit program for order fulfillment and customer service employees who are paid hourly. Those workers currently receive shares of stock if they meet certain conditions. But the company says the employees have said "they prefer the predictability and immediacy of cash to RSUs."

For those hourly workers, Amazon plans to replace its RSU grant program with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of 2019. The net effect, the company says, will mean "significantly more total compensation" for the workers.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...

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

#744

Post by AnthonyMouse »

slivym wrote: post #723
propman wrote: post #715

Let’s say $11 was the previous avg wage for let’s say 300k employees (250k full and 100k part time avg). $4 increase is $8000 more a year. That’s $2.4B yearly transfer to workers which is honestly really really amazing, props to Bezos. $8000 means 15.3% in payroll taxes so this wage increase will result in $367.2M in additional payroll taxes. 12% federal income tax as well for that $8000 is $288M per year. So amazon…

>Who says Amazon doesn’t pay taxes? Can we do away with this now please. Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid. In fact, excusing Amazon's tax avoidance with the income tax it's employees pay is even worse. It's still a problem. We still need to tackle it, and if this pay rise acts to dissuade people from real tax reform and real workers rights then…

> Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid.

Blaming companies for doing something the law allows them to do is ridiculous. If you don't think they should be allowed to do that, why do you have a law that allows them to? Fix the law, e.g. by replacing corporate income tax with VAT, so they can't avoid it, and then they won't.

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

#745

Post by krustyburger »

pathseeker wrote: post #741
radicaldreamer wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos paying sales tax on his morning coffee is enough for the people looking for an extra dopamine hit by rah rahing Amazon. $15/hour still isn’t enough to live on in many cities and large scale tax evasion by corporations is one of the single most insidious epidemics in our society today.

You need to look up the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. If Amazon was evading taxes and there was any evidence of it, they would be hit hard by the IRS.

I don’t say ‘evasion’. I say ‘avoision’.

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

#746

Post by esrauch »

lgeorget wrote: post #284
esrauch wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer is that full employment is increasingly not necessary to keep the economy running in this increasingly automated economy.

But how come low wages do not impact negatively the domestic consumption, which is an important part of the GDP?

With increased income disparity, the top can make up for the bottom on domestic consumption metrics.

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

#747

Post by mjs2600 »

joezydeco wrote: post #705
chiefalchemist wrote: post #665

This is: - 25% PR - 25% free advertising for their openings (i.e., Amazon pays well) - 25% necessity (we're at full-employment) - and 25% ROI (they've figured less turnover and better quality employees are worth the investment) The question is: how will this effect other companies in the markets where Amazon employs a measurable number of people.

And 100% "Get out of Bernie Sanders' crosshairs before he regulates us to do this"

I don't think he's getting enough credit for this.

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

#748

Post by WalterBright »

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.…

Ford's move was because he had difficulty attracting and retaining workers for boring assembly line work.

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

#749

Post by [deleted] »

pathseeker wrote: post #740
slivym wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who says Amazon doesn’t pay taxes? Can we do away with this now please. Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid. In fact, excusing Amazon's tax avoidance with the income tax it's employees pay is even worse. It's still a problem. We still need to tackle it, and if this pay rise acts to dissuade people from real tax reform and real workers rights then…

>Can we do away with this now please. Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid. Can we do away with the notion that companies shouldn't pay the amount of taxes required by the law? What should Bezos tell the accountants? Pay 15% above whatever the required amount is? 20%?

[deleted]

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

#750

Post by tomjakubowski »

smsm42 wrote: post #653
mikepurvis wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you look at it. The fulfillment centers are intentionally built out in the middle of nowhere where land and labour are both plentiful and inexpensive. If you live in such a place and Amazon is your employer, it may well be the case that you don't have a lot of other options, especially if what you came from was being on social assistance.

Land may be plentiful in the middle of nowhere but labor wouldn't be. Middle of nowhere is usually sparsely populated, that's why it's middle of nowhere.

The flip side of that is workers in sparsely populated areas are willing (and more able to) commute farther for work.
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