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Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

theregister.com

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Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#141

Post by ciabattabread »

evandale wrote: post #115
ciabattabread wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What aspect of “private company” do you not understand? No shit they have the power to censor on the platforms they control.

>What aspect of “private company” do you not understand? The part where they're given more power than we give the government.

So… you want the government to interfere with the operation of private companies so they are forced to give a platform to people they don’t want to do business with…

Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#142

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

Auracle wrote: post #118
Kerrick wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $212 million was starkly contrasted by the next point in the article, that Warehouse workers typically make $15/hr. It would take about 7,000 years working that wage (full-time) to make the same $212,000,000. It's still a _huge_ gulf, whether the CEO's compensation is in one year or one decade.

Right, but if you were to take all $212 million and divvy it up to the nearly 1 million US Amazon employees it wouldn’t go very far.

I see this theme a lot when this topic comes up, and I feel it misses the point.

Does the CEO provide 700x the value (based on $21.2M / 2000 hrs = $10600 "hourly rate") of a warehouse worker earning $15/hr? They absolutely provide critical input and decisions at the helm of a large ship, but if you break down their input versus the input of everyone under them...is it actually such a huge disparity of mental and physical effort to warrant a 700x difference in pay?

Secondly, if the company wasn't spending that much on CEO compensation, the money could go plenty of places beyond sprinkling pennies at warehouse workers. Infrastructure investment, product development, or other ways to grow the business. Employee wellness programs, crisis/hardship assistance, etc to support the workforce.

Looking at it as only CEO salary divided by employee count is a very limiting perspective that ignores a lot of potential ways that pile of money can be used besides making a very rich person a bit richer.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#143

Post by falcolas »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
falcolas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing. The purpose of a company was originally exactly that: to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in. I mean, this is still the exact reason politicians cite when providing incentives to companies - bringing jobs to their cities/states. I'm pretty sure I don't like this new definition; it feels like it's based on greed, not value.

> purpose of a company was originally exactly that: to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in This describes charities, trusts and local governments. Maybe artisans. The East India companies weren’t trying to “provide services and value” to anyone but their owners. Even going back to Roman times, civic duty and commercial interests were distinct parts of peoples’ work. You were…

Shareholders are not the only stakeholders who should be considered in a company.

"The purpose of a corporation is to ... create value over the long-term, which requires consideration of the stakeholders ... (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors and communities) ..."

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/27/on-the-purpose-of...

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#144

Post by mehphp »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #116
vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money has Tom Brady or Jassy made for the patriots/Amazon due to their leadership? If they brought 500M then 25M seems fair.

Tom Brady did actual work for his team, a CEO does not do $500M worth of work. If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.

He isn't being paid for his work (which I assume you are conflating with labor); he is being paid for the perceived value he can bring to the company.

His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.

Now, I'm not saying that warehouse workers are worthless or should be treated like shit, far from it, but if Amazon doesn't pay him this much, some other corporation will. That's the free market.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#145

Post by Krasnol »

justapassenger wrote: post #117
bluetidepro wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged. Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think th…

> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring. > How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food. Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession.…

> Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.

I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.

So what is the value there? It's almost like with a piece of art. Only because people are ready to pay a price for it, it's valued at that price.

On the other hand you have thousands of slaves working for the same company, generating value you can actually touch and they earn unbelievably less that the artistic head of this monster.

So sure...nice try but you have to be really far away from the bottom to actually believe it.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#146

Post by formerkrogemp »

weezin wrote: post #119
bluetidepro wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged. Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think th…

I'm more pointing out that people don't rage against the machine like you are doing when an athlete signs a new contract.

There are dozens of us upset with athlete pay! Dozens!

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#147

Post by cato_the_elder »

joecot wrote: post #35
jaywalk wrote: post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other…

> undocumented immigrants

"Undocumented" is mostly just a euphemism for illegal. Amazon does a significant amount of shady things, selling servers to ICE isn't one of them. Open borders are neither feasible nor popular.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#148

Post by redisman »

ctvo wrote: post #4

> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021. They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Here a…

Hah sounds like a lot of HNers have Andy Jassy beat on base salary

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#149

Post by formerkrogemp »

anonporridge wrote: post #32
jaywalk wrote: post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

I agree. It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares. Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and…

Unfortunately, our judiciary seems okay to uphold spending money as free speech. With elections increasingly expensive and individual, not corporate, liberties and rights being encroached a bit at a time, what can we do but petition the corporations for a change in laws aka corporate policies.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#150

Post by formerkrogemp »

giantg2 wrote: post #31
jaywalk wrote: post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

Like most things in corporate America, you assemble of team and give them the goal of overseeing the due diligence. They won't look too hard so they won't find anything. They're write up how some low friction "solution" that already exists addresses the issue. Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.

Hah, auditors get paid by their clients. There's a real conflict of interest there. Fines are usually a fraction of what the audit fees over years are as well. Good luck finding fraud with that kind of system.
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