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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

#111

Post by newsclues »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #53
mountainb wrote: post #35

This 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…

Who bears the blame for this though? If social programs are cut then voters freak. If the price of goods increase then voters freak. If taxes increase then voters freak. It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.

Blame is less important than who is responsible for the solution!

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#112

Post by SaintSeiya »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #53
mountainb wrote: post #35

This 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…

Who bears the blame for this though? If social programs are cut then voters freak. If the price of goods increase then voters freak. If taxes increase then voters freak. It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.

Bezos and execs, who earn billions of dollars in compensation on the shoulders of the working class like leeches. Reduce their compensation packages and redistribute it as wages in their baseline workers.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#113

Post by Tiktaalik »

If a corporation is making strong profits and its workforce is on poverty level incomes and relying on public financial support to survive, kind of feels like it makes sense for the government to claw back those profits in higher taxation.

Notion being that the corporation that is so severely under paying its work force isn't genuinely profitable and is falsely portraying itself as so.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#114

Post by _ache_ »

devd00d wrote: post #64

People should take a history lesson from France. Let them eat cake.

Can you elaborate? What did France do exactly? Apart from having a minimal (but working) welfare system.

For several decades, liberal policies have been driving down the welfare system and the minimum wage. Macron is definitively trying to put a end to the french social welfare system.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#115

Post by gruez »

notatoad wrote: post #83
gruez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 peo…

> 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.

I agree that larger companies are better capitalized and therefore can better withstand economic shocks than smaller companies, but how does that mean that foodstamps "prevents competition"? Foodstamps aren't tied to a specific employer, so it doesn't favor large companies over smaller one, because employees can continue to get benefits even after switching jobs.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#116

Post by taeric »

iancmceachern wrote: post #14
sandworm101 wrote: post #4

What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.

I dont agree. It's more about the relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO. Even if the post office has the exact same percentage of workers on food stamps, I would argue that because the postmaster general makes so much less than Amazon leadership that Amazon has the privilege and ability to do better, and still run a profitable business. It's about profit, and sharing it more equitably.

You are basically arguing that rich entities shouldn't employ low income employees, with this logic.

While you can imagine this means richer people will start to do all of their low income work, that also means there are no lower income jobs. We can hope those are simply shifted up the pay scale, but it is equally as likely that the jobs just go away. Likely not full classes of jobs, mind you, but certainly there will be fewer low payed jobs than otherwise.

Just as likely, you will get companies relationships structured such that these relationships are not direct. Which... by definition is adding middlemen to the equation. I'm not a huge fan of efficiency arguments, but this does seem needless bad in that realm.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#117

Post by p3rls »

mrweasel wrote: post #82
mountainb wrote: post #35

This 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.

This sentence sounds like semantic anarchism.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#118

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ilya_m wrote: post #97
no_wizard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The government subsidizes corporate low wage work But importantly only the lowest of the low wages There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc. Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealt…

> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the…

> The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud.

There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine.

On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

We should just let these things cancel out, using a flat tax that funds unconditional cash benefits (i.e. UBI) and delete an epic amount of unnecessarily complexity.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#119

Post by Seattle3503 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #47

Trying to balance my bleeding heart and pro capitalism free market proclivities… Let the market decide how much employees get paid and increase taxes on corporations to fund a social safety net and remove loopholes. Also make any state tax incentives that a state gives a corporation to locate there taxable on the federal level.

I agree with this. It is societies responsibility, through their elected government, to take care of people. If we need to support people more, we raise taxes and provide more support via the government.

Holding the employer as responsible leads to things like employer provided healthcare, which ties people more strongly to their employer. Weakening the ties between employee and employer makes the workforce more dynamic and mobile.

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