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

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

#811

Post by tyingq » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

maym86 wrote: post #791

outside1234 wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To stop a union from being formed. Unions often institute work rules that contractually forbid automation.

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

#812

Post by mikestew » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #714

Drybones wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why frugality means you're middle class. I also don't understand how $200k-$500k, a very sizable income, even in the SF bay area, is magically the middle class now

$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.

$200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high.

No, that means the middle class can't afford to live in SF. This isn't the first time I've heard this, and I don't know why anyone might think this. As a more extreme example, "middle-class in Pebble Beach is $1MM/year or $20MM net worth". No, there is no middle-class in Pebble Beach, only rich people live there.

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

#813

Post by GaryNumanVevo » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

kidsnow wrote: post #667

I was driving past In-N-Out burger yesterday and they offer $16 an hour to start and then goes up to $18 an hour. No wonder the employees there are usually happy.

Branch Managers usually make 6 figures there too! Their food is also pretty good for the price.

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

#814

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

caro_douglos wrote: post #789

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I consider myself the quintessential middle class. My point was that kidsnow said $200-500k is middle class, but it really depends on location. It often feels that the majority of people on Hacker News are living in a Silicon Valley bubble. They talk as if $1,000,000 for a 1500 sq ft house is normal, as if $150k is decent entry-level wage, and...you get the idea. $200-500k is middle class for Sil…

the SEC uses income thresholds of 200k for an individual and 300k for joint (two years in a row). Should people in the middle class be able to invest? https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967...

Certainly, but they'll be working in trades of a couple thousand or tens of thousands.

If you have an investment account (That isn't a 401(k), 403(b), Roth IRA etc.) with hundreds of thousands that didn't happen from a single lucky investment (Like buying Apple or Amazon 10+ years ago), then you're probably more upper class.

Myself, outside my 401(k), I don't have any investments, mainly because I'm more concerned with eliminating my debts than taking on risks beyond my retirement account. But my wife and I make "only" $150k. If we made 300k, I might have some investments.

Again, though, we need to stop focusing on specific dollar amounts, since cost of living varies so wildly around the country. Get out of the SF Bay bubble.

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

#815

Post by ericd » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

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…

What taxes are they avoiding? Are you referring to sales tax or something else?

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

#816

Post by ericd » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

radicaldreamer wrote: post #774

pm90 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that corporations are evading taxes on a massive scale, but can we also applaud them for taking steps in the right direction when they do?

You can applaud them for what they actually do without delving into apologism (“who says Amazon doesn’t pay taxes”)

Why not specifically enumerate the taxes that Amazon is avoiding? Sales tax is the only one I'm aware of, and that seems to be dramatically lessened nowadays as they build out more warehouses for faster shipping.

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

#817

Post by ericd » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #790

genericone wrote: post #327

I suppose there has been some 'breakthrough' in their warehouse automation stack? I suppose in the rest of the USA a doubling of wages will definitely get them through an awkward longshoreman period, "well I'm being paid more unexpectedly, I suppose I can't complain about the robots". Once the robots are well established in operations, they can start to cut labor back some more.

I think there's a much more simple, and clever, explanation. We're looking in the wrong direction. Bloomberg recently ran a story [1] that Amazon is planning on opening up to 3,000 more cashierless 'grab and go' stores by 2021. They are clearly planning on trying to take over physical retail, and this is quite a nasty attack on current players such as WalMart or convenient store type locations. These companies will n…

Nice analysis, this makes a lot of sense. Higher market wages benefit companies with labor-lite models by harming their labor-dependent competitors.

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

#818

Post by m_ke » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

shimon wrote: post #792

toomuchtodo wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Trump is already going after Bezos because of Washington Post and is still pushing a populist platform so there's no reason to believe that he would get in a way of a bill that targets Amazon.

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

#819

Post by ericd » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 10:00 PM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #537

shimon wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I appreciate your evaluation of waiting tables as being a job that involves physical work (hot plates, standing, walking, carrying) and artful work (verbal skills, kindness, presentation etc). 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 ital…

>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.

That's the flipside of it being more stable. To make a jump, you need something that's higher variance, which IT sales certainly is.

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

#820

Post by prolikewh0a » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #802

prolikewh0a wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't hear anything about improving working conditions. The employees in Seattle making $15/hr already are still being treated like shit.

That isn't an Amazon specific thing though, it is an American workplace thing that is more like a dictatorship/feudal empire than anything with rights. In the US, we live in 'freedom' but then go work on a feudal/sharecropper mini states that act like fiefdoms for corporate overlords. Labor rights are not even along for the ride anymore, they got left at the station somewhere in the early 80s. Look at how companies e…

I agree with all of your points. Noam Chomsky recently points out that when you walk into work in USA now, you're really walking into something akin to a communist dictatorship [1]. Private Governments.

[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...