Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#121

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #101

dboreham wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you compare the UX at Walmart vs, say, Costco (which pays higher wages) I'm not so sure that paying the lowest is good business. i.e. is 1 Costco employee equal in productivity to 1 Walmart employee? I suspect not.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-08-27/why-walma... Walmart pays less because it has much lower profit margins. It serves far more customers and the average employee is a great deal less skilled. And it’s cheaper, with greater product choice. The average Walmart employee is definitely worse than the average Costco employee but Walmart is clearly the better business. It has higher gross profits, employs mo…

That article is paywalled for me, so I did some quick research. It looks like Walmart's gross profit of 25% is almost double that of Costco's 13%. Am I doing the math correctly?

>> Walmart [1]

Total Revenue (TR) = 500,343,000,000

Gross Profit (GP) = 373,396,000,000

Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~25%

>> Costco [2]

Total Revenue (TR) = 129,025,000,000

Gross Profit (GP) = 17,143,000,000

Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~13%

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?p=WMT

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COST/financials?p=COST

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#122

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #100

cortesoft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide. We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think t…

If you look at a graph of historical workplace deaths you can’t tell where OSHA was enacted. There’s no change in the rate of decrease of workplace deaths. As far as minimum wage laws go less than 5% of the US workforce gets paid minimum wage, and unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit. Minimum wage laws are a great way to reduce workfo…

Perhaps it would be helpful to share said graph?

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#123

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #96

manigandham wrote: post #78

This is a direct attack on competitors, designed to enlist the help of the federal government to raise payroll and put pressure on arch nemesis Walmart and any other company that has lots of retail other jobs that are not conducive to automation. Remember that Amazon thinks 5 years ahead, and they waited for the perfect PR and political threshold to announce these changes and capitalize on the news.

If you compare the UX at Walmart vs, say, Costco (which pays higher wages) I'm not so sure that paying the lowest is good business. i.e. is 1 Costco employee equal in productivity to 1 Walmart employee? I suspect not.

I'm not sure why they have to be 1 to 1 in worker productivity. They fill the specific roles they're looking for, and the companies aren't very interchangeable in either products or scale so it's hard to compare UX in any standard metric other than marketshare and goods throughput, in which case Walmart is bigger and better.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#124

Post by drakenot » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:31 AM UTC

kmkemp wrote: post #38

whoisjuan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything to judge here. Amazon said multiple times that with bonuses and stock awards their average compensation was well above any compensation for fulfillment workers in the sector. People thought this was bullshit/paper money and kept demanding for a higher hourly wage. So Amazon did the logical thing. It increased the hourly wage, removed a highly unappreciated and misunderstood form of sala…

Saying that their compensation is higher than competitors in the sector says nothing about whether they will be paying out more total dollars after the changes than before.

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 Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#125

Post by jostmey » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

xt00 wrote: post #5

This will help with recruitment, but the sentiment that new workers will essentially get paid the same as older workers is going to immediately be a big sticking point. From watching the Boeing union strikes over many years, I get the sense that once a labor force unionizes they setup their own structure for pay and get that signed off -- where they have seniority and things like that. But it also means the company b…

Unions are probably a good thing in general. But unions can become monopolies and perhaps such unions need to be busted up

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#126

Post by ip26 » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

techsupporter wrote: post #18

andrestan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?

In every thread like this, there's an argument like yours, taking the absolutist view that individual workers should have unlimited freedom ("completely and totally incapable," as you wrote) to sacrifice themselves for money. In the micro sense, you are possibly correct. However, as a society, we have decided at the macro level that no, workers are not free to make that decision because to do so would inherently driv…

because to do so would inherently drive the collective working environment to the bottom

Also the part where the cost burdens of bad health outcomes are generally socialized.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#127

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:34 AM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #120

manigandham wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about penalizing them. The point is that it's a shrewd business move planned out years ago. It wasn't done out of purely good intentions and may not have the desired effect, and many people seem to miss that.

Who cares? If it benefits more people then what difference does it make as to why it was done?

Because it might not actually benefit more people? The posted article is about warehouse workers losing bonuses and stock, which would negatively affect anyone already over $15/hour (which happens to be quite a few who have multi-year tenures).

This change has long-term repercussions in total current and future jobs offered, within Amazon, its competitors, and the wider labor market with govt influence. Is is not worth caring about such wide-reaching externalities of a $1 trillion company?

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#128

Post by ip26 » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #90

ComputerGuru wrote: post #51

I’ve always thought the answer to the union “problem” was easy: multiple unions. Mandate that no more than, say, 30% of the workforce may be part of a single union, then let them fight it out. Monopolies suck both when it comes to corporations and the workforce. In my experience corruption sinks in on both sides when people can get away with putting in place policies to protect the status quo. When there are multiple…

Also known as "I support Unions, but only when they don't actually have any power".

So how do you create a union that has the right amount of power? When unions are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#129

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #49

irrational wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are unions anti universal healthcare? It seems like they would be since it would be one less thing they could negotiate about.

They were in the Obamacare debate. Unions fought like hell against the Cadillac care provisions because it did in fact limit health care.

"Cadillac care" provisions are in no way related to universal healthcare. They are a tax on healthcare plans that are more expensive than some threshold, intended to drive down the cost of healthcare plans by steering companies away from the really high-end plans.

Re: Amazon Warehouse Workers Lose Bonuses, Stock Awards for Raises

#130

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #24

bsder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it also means the company becomes very adversarial with their work-force This is due to a combination of lack of social safety net and lack of worker representation. In the places where unions are noted for being "good", the government covers the social safety net and workers unions are given board seats as well as stock. This keeps everybody's goals aligned.

Public sector unions are notoriously bad.

For real or according to anti-union propaganda?