Walmart is another such employer.
Very true. Companies like McDonald's and Walmart (the two employers with the most employees that qualify for food stamps) have a lot of part-time employees. Do Amazon Warehouses?
One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
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Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#82This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would other…
When you put it that way it sounds a little like communism.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#83This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would other…
>It prevents competition How does food stamps/medicaid prevent competition?
because small companies can't get away with paying poverty wages. amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring.
companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for people and have to offer wages that are high enough to actually attract employees.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#84Don't forget that Amazon (and any other employer that applies for it) gets a $9,600 WOTC tax credit for employing a SNAP recipient (as well as veterans etc)
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.
It's not the government assistance that's the problem (that shouldn't carry a stigma per se) - it's the fact that Amazon doesn't pay for it's own externalities (if you can call workforce exploitation an "externality") Imagine a scenario where "assistance" wasn't stigmatized and Amazon had to pay higher taxes fully proportionate with the cost of paying it's employees properly? I mean - at that point they might as well…
Amazon is in Washington state, which doesn't have an income tax. In my opinion, if they need Amazon to pay more they should try having one of those.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#86What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.
No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.
> No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive.
The outcome of absolutes like these is that we would remove government assistance to those who are employed (excluding those who are handicapped, etc). You could fix it by raising the minimum wage higher - up to a point where government assistance is unnecessary. And it's on the government and the voters that they don't do that, not on Amazon.
Absolutes come with hard boundaries, and collectively, we've decided that those hard boundaries are suboptimal. Hence the status quo.
Companies exist by paying market wages. The whole point of the minimum wage is to eliminate jobs whose market pay would be below the minimum wage.
Lots of anti-Amazon ranting in the comments, but no one's outlining a clear solution beyond raising the minimum wage. (Yes, it's hopelessly naive to expect a large, powerful company to pay above market wages just out of principle - when their competitors don't need to).
Anti-disclaimers: I dislike Amazon. I avoid shopping there. I avoid working there. Yet, my biases aren't going to let me discount the fact that I personally know two people who've worked for Amazon - one also at other warehouses - and they liked the job more than the other places they've worked at.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the number that a friend working for SNAP told... 1 out 8 Americans is on food stamps.
You'd be surprised, many people qualify for SNAP and may not realize it. It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children. Some states you can get it if you're pregnant no matter what . (It can often be a strategic thing to get if you can, because large numbers of other programs that require applications will declare you automatically qualify if you get SNAP.) M…
I was amazed when an ex told me she was on food stamps as a part of the financial aid package for the Oregon university she was attending. Don't even believe she was an Oregon resident at the time (or ever), if you reside in a California county bordering a different state they let you attend university in the other state (or the other way around) without paying out-of-state tuition.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#88Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#89TAX AMAZON! TAX BEZOS! That is all.
Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The politicians are paid by the capitalists to keep minimum wages low.
Capitalists (large business owners) generally pay higher wages than the alternative, small/family business owners. Eg Walmart/Amazon have better benefits than an equivalent small business, unless you're the owner of that small business. But also, wages generally go up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N (This is "income", which is a superset of wages. I didn't link wages because those are confusing, ave…
>Capitalists (large business owners)
You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you. Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right, the aggregate effect is the same. Productivity goes up and wages don't.
>But also, wages generally go up
Just utter nonsense. Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.