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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

#161

Post by gruez »

cardy31 wrote: post #104
Seattle3503 wrote: post #100

A lot of comments have the assumption that it is corporations responsibility to look after people. That philosophy is how we get healthcare tied to one's employer. That approach attaches workers to their employer and makes switching jobs harder. I think it is better to see it as the government's responsibility to take care of it citizens. Medicaid, food stamps, and the negative income tax represents this approach. We…

Setting reasonable minimum wages would take care of citizens without a patchwork of programs being needed.

If you want the government to "take care of it citizens", what we actually need is a floor on income (eg. welfare/UBI), not a floor on wages (ie. minimum wage). Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate.

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

#162

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

UncleEntity wrote: post #87
bombcar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

It's Oregon. In southern states, SNAP commonly isn't available to individuals/couples with zero income - and to many families with minor children.

This is irrespective of federal guidelines and sometimes counter what states themselves advertise. I was just saw a FL state site parroting federal guidelines as if they reflected reality for FL residents. They don't.

Why the disconnect between advertised and reality? I don't know.

Individual Floridians and couples (18?)21-63 with zero income and no other overriding factors (eg:SS Disability) are denied. I've seen a few exceptions.

Families with minor children are commonly denied or receive a few tens of dollars. For each needy family I knew received SNAP, I knew many more who didn't.

This is based on (20+yrs) my personal experience, interactions with the local homeless community, church based social work, discussions with other parents and years of feedback from a DCF case-worker friend.

I had 5 kids. They ate at school. Home was often white rice and nothing else. Sometimes there wasn't rice. My wife was disabled (per SS) but that didn't help in our case.

My relatives in VA tell the same story. Income is low, hunger isn't rare and SNAP is impossible to negligible.

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

#163

Post by Rinzler89 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #129

Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve…

>At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.

It's not just automation that made low-skill labor worth shit, it's also the next to zero import tariffs on cheap textile and e-waste from overseas.

We traded the cost of our labor for cheap mass produced junk.

Put tariffs on imports proportional to the lack of environmental and human rights regulations the source country has or doesn't have, and boom, problem solved.

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

#164

Post by Nasrudith »

SaintSeiya wrote: post #112
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the math instead of just seeing red at large numbers. Jassy earns about 29.2 M$. Lets round it to 30M$ for the sake of convenience and assume all 17 of the board members get paid the same. Amazon has about ~1.5M employees. Which means that if the entirety of their earnings were redistributed they would get a whopping ~$340 per person. An insult for a yearly bonus and certainly not enough to get people off of food stamps.

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

#165

Post by Fauntleroy »

Noble6 wrote: post #155
Tiktaalik wrote: post #113

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.

Amazon Warehouse positions all pay well above minimum wage, in every state. They also offer benefits. Concluding Amazon isn’t paying enough, because a large portion of their workforce qualifies for food stamps, is the wrong conclusion.

If you knew someone working at an Amazon Warehouse position who needed to use government benefits to get by, would you consider them "well" or even "fairly" paid?

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

#166

Post by simonsarris »

From the actual article:

> A third of survey respondents reported using government-funded programs – primarily food stamps or Medicaid – in the last three months.

It's very hard to gauge what the real numbers are from that quote. It's also hard to gauge if Amazon made these people better or worse off. But again, from the actual article:

> Amazon’s median US employee was paid $45,613 in 2023, up from $41,762 the year before, the company said in a filing last month. The company says employees in warehousing and transportation are paid more than $20.50 an hour, on average. The survey, which was conducted between April and August 2023, excluded managers and skews a bit lower: Most respondents reported wages from $16 to $20 an hour.

> Some 65% of workers who come to Amazon earn more than they were making at their previous employer, the survey shows.

https://archive.is/J1MFq#selection-1767.0-1771.116

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

#167

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

I'll avoid the low hanging fruit but: if the government needs to supply aid to working citizens, they aren't getting much or any tax on a non-trivial portion of the population. I don't see how the government benefits from this transaction, and why they wouldn't at least (on the state level) increase minimum wage to offset this.

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

#168

Post by wkat4242 »

malfist wrote: post #158
wkat4242 wrote: post #135

Being on public healthcare is not really a shame though. It's like totally normal here in Europe :P And pretty good too. I'm glad I don't have any worry about my healthcare, the risk of insane bills, that I might lose expensive cover if I get fired (which is in itself also a lot less likely as there's no "at will" here) etc. It's just a solved problem. Yeah it costs us some taxes but it's not as insanely expensive as…

> Food stamps though, that's not cool. Why?

I view that as something that's really for people who can't take care of their basic nutritional needs. That's not normal in a civilised society. After all, food is cheap.

We subsidise and socialise healthcare because the cost between people can vary extremely (it can cost between nothing and millions per year!) and it's a basic need. Food is not like that, basic food needs cost roughly the same for everyone. Of course there's $1000 a plate restaurants but those are not a basic need, you can get just as much nutrition for $5.

Someone who has a job should be able to cover food and housing. Otherwise society is severely broken.

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

#169

Post by rlpb »

skhunted wrote: post #144
atleastoptimal wrote: post #129

Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve…

I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.

That's all very well for those lucky enough to be employed. In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? Eventually, that's going to be nearly everyone.

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

#170

Post by Nasrudith »

devd00d wrote: post #64

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

Did you read the rest of the history book? It wound up with them not only restoring the monarchy multiple times but getting a goddamned Emperor who went all proto-Hitler and tried to conquer all of Europe!
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