Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees • Hacker News Board

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

#791

Post by maym86 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

outside1234 wrote: post #727

maym86 wrote: post #620

Jeff Bezos in the announcement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us" Is this an attempt to pressure its competition with less money in the bank to do the same, loby for a higher minimum wage and drive them out of business? Maybe it's a reaction to the union organizing taking place a whole foods and they think this will be cheaper in the long run. I don't…

He is going to lay off all of the employees through automation. You can have $150 an hour for warehouse employees as a minimum wage if there is only one of them.

Why would he bother raising wages then? No need for him to raise wages to do that. He isn't doing it for the sake of it. There is some other incentive involved. Automation happens either way and they have been gradually doing it for years without raising wages significantly.

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

#792

Post by shimon » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #771

psychometry wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No democrat is getting any substantive bill through Congress and signed into law until 2020. I don't think they're afraid of Bernie.

Midterms will be here in a month. "Bernicrats" (Left progressive Democrats) have been doing extremely well in recent elections and polling. If you're not afraid as a Republican or a corporation, you haven't been paying attention. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/internal-... (Internal RNC Poll: Complacent Trump Voters May Cost GOP Control of Congress) http://time.com/5411948/national-voter-registrat…

You're not wrong, but you do realize that the outcome of a midterm election won't affect the president's authority to sign or veto bills?

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

#793

Post by ctvo » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #600

leesec wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're down voted. People like to shame Amazon/Walmart for their wages and working conditions, but I guarantee they're doing a lot of the exact same things as other companies who are less criticized, Target, Meijer, etc.. Like he said, Amazon has it's issues but the employees were free to quit and work at other similar positions in similar companies.

If I cheat on my wife, can I point to somebody else who's also cheating on their wife and that exempts me from criticism? Does somebody have to be doing a completely unique bad thing in order for people to be able to criticize them? People criticize Amazon and Walmart more than other companies because Amazon and Walmart are bigger than those other companies. That seems like an entirely fair reason for them to get mor…

If as a society we agree that companies have a moral responsibility / obligation to pay their employees a wage that provided X, Y, Z your analogy would make a lot more sense.

In America at least, we do not have agreement.

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

#794

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #777

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People like having a job, they don't like having to shop around in a place where there might not be too many opportunities. But that's the point, isn't it? They put the warehouse there because it's where the cheap labor is. If you shame them into not paying less than $15/hour then the next warehouse they open might as well be in a place where $15/hour is the prevailing wage, or it was $14.75 with low unemployment a…

It's weird to me how we tend to talk about whether worker protections are harmful in hypothetical terms, when we can actually look at history and see that society improved as more protections for workers were implemented, and inequality has gotten worse has gotten worse as worker protections have waned. I love a good philosophical exercise as much as anyone else, but the real world has shown us the answer sheet for t…

When times are good, people agitate for "worker protections" and get them because the economy is doing well enough to absorb the cost. Then when the economy declines, capital successfully lobbies to relax the rules to keep the country's industry competitive.

The result is that good times correlate with more labor laws, but the causation goes the other way.

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

#795

Post by dfilppi » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

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?

Because capitalism has nothing to do with it.

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

#796

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

Smokey28 wrote: post #742

MrStonedOne wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provid…

[deleted]

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

#797

Post by kidsnow » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #785

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high. The 2 br, 1 bath, 800 sq foot apartment I live in 3 years ago for $900/month would probably be $2,500 in SV. Likewise, the 1850 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 bath house I live in now that I bought for $338k in 2015 would probably have been over $1,000,000 in SV.

No, it’s not middle class. If you recently bought a $1M plus condo in SF, you are most certainly upper class. I don’t care if it was a 2 bedroom apartment.

It's not about dollars. It's about your behaviors. Behaviors of the middle class. Middle class people typically do things like own one home, work two jobs, save for their kids' college, keep their cars for a while, etc.

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

#798

Post by iceman7733 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #267

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.

One other valuable thing about office jobs is that they're usually a stepping stone to other higher paying office jobs, whereas as a waiter there's not really any position to move up to.

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

#799

Post by robbiep » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #708

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford's $5/day wage doesn't happen in a vacuum. The showmanship and publicity causes pressure on other manufacturers to pay that much. Otherwise, anybody working at a competitor will just be thinking to themselves "I'm just working here to get experience so I can have an edge on other applicants at Ford." Competitors that pay less will be dealing with high turnover unless they match Ford's wages. And it's not just car…

Okay, but I doubt this had much effect outside Detroit. Anyone know the history? This would be like claiming that high salaries in Silicon Valley are somehow going to fix inequality nationwide. There is some spillover but it only goes so far.

The history of the ford plant and the $5 a day wage was a seminal moment in the growth of the Industrial Age and the middle class, in general, worldwide (or at least in the western world). There are hundreds of sources, you should be able to find some good ones without too much trouble

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

#800

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #752

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.

America has always been a nation of middle class people, even back in colonial times. The exception was the southern slave economy, which didn't have much of a middle class.

it's a pretty big exception, even if the other part is true. (And thanks for acknowledging the exception up front!)

At the high points, 20% of the total U.S. population were enslaved. At that point, it's not just an exception, it's a problem with the entire premise, even if the entire rest of the population was 'middle class', which they weren't.

What allowed the U.S. economy to function with an unusually large portion of _white_ people being "middle class" (compared to Europe)... was all the African people who weren't. There's no reason to treat those 20% of people as not part of the U.S. economy, they were a _crucial_ part. If we were to look at what portion of the _entire_ population of the U.S. was "middle class", including those 20% enslaved people, for whatever definition of 'middle class', that'd be closer anyway. There's no reason to look at things without them though, as if they were just a footnote. 20% of the population!