951–960 of 1001 posts
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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.
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…
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Even if it is motivated by an attempt to gain competitive advantage, it's still a good thing. If the competition can't find labor at less than $15 an hour, then they'll either go out of business or start offering competitive pay. It's an example of capitalism working both for business and employees.
So once competition is gone what happens?
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.…
"That morning, Ford would begin paying his employees $5.00 a day, over twice the average wage for automakers in 1914. In addition, he was reducing the work day from 9 hours to 8 hours, a significant drop from the 60-hour work week that was the standard in American manufacturing."
For reference $5/day in 1914 is ~$15.62 an hour in 2018 dollars. The similarities likely end there. Unlike Ford, Amazon's hike is not twice the average wage of a fulfillment center employee. A manager at an employment agency recently told me that you can't hire someone for less than $15 an hour to work in a fulfillment center in Reno, NV. Reno is a major fulfillment/shipping hub in the US.
This post should have been titled "Amazon raises pay to keep up with market rates just like every other company".
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> I think the point is that many people aren’t worth $15/hour. 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 sa…
> Saying that someone doesn't deserve to be paid a living wage is the same as saying they don't deserve to live. I’m not saying anything about what anyone deserves. I happen to know a general contractor who is incredibly charitable and willing to hire just about anyone who can swing a hammer. He mentioned that one year, he hired so many people that the per-employee costs and taxes ate all of the company’s profit. He…
I think there’s a disconnect between the phrase “what someone deserves” and “what someone is worth [to a company].” Yes, because you are human, you have intrinsic value and can even claim you deserve certain things. Whether there’s some cosmic guarantee that you will get what you deserve is beside my point.
But your value to a company as their employee can be given a measurable number. It probably has more to do with my age than with the job itself, but I actually enjoyed the minimum wage jobs that I took when I was younger. Even today, when I see a “help wanted” sign at the kind of place I would have worked as a teenager or young adult, I reminisce about those jobs. But I never apply, because my value to them has a hard limit: they aren’t going to pay me more than the market price to keep the store clean, count back change, and provide good customer service. I’m not significantly better at those jobs than the average teenager. My knowledge of C++, C#, web services, databases, UI design, etc. has no value to them, although it has value to many other companies. I would never expect them to pay me more than my value to them.
I’m happy that Amazon has changed its pay scales. But this change will involve laying off people who are profitable at, say, $8/hour or $10/hour but not $15/hour. That’s how the world works. Today, those employees can find other jobs at $8/hour or $10/hour. They may even get a raise. But if minimum wage is increased to $15/hour, they could find themselves priced out of the market.
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So once competition is gone what happens?
Regulate or break up the monopoly if they abuse their monopoly power.
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.…
If anything this was a concession from Amazon, because Amazon workers were supporting a bill against Amazon, which probably had more in store for the company than just a minimum wage raise.
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Individual companies raising their minimum wage is perfectly reasonable. They know what their bottom line can handle, and any consequences are fairly limited to the company itself and its competitors, for good or ill. An entire national economy raising a minimum wage is pulling yourself into the air by tugging on your bootstraps - futile, and likely to make you keel over instead. There's no alternatives if it fails o…
It has been pretty plain to see that relying on individual companies to raise minimum wages has failed and that companies see no need to increase wages from their myopic perspective. A country knows what their bottom line can make good decisions as well. They employ economists and other experts who can assess the effects of raising a minimum wage in a way that an individual company cannot assess. Countries can also e…
Also, I'm not sure if you're reading the same article as I am; this is a private company raising its own minimum wage, from its own myopic perspective.
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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…