One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by simonsarris » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

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.

That is nonsense. In the highly automated USA labor commands an extremely high wage relative to highly non-automated countries (or almost any country, for that matter). Compare low-skilled comp in the US to somewhere like India, or even Japan - which has a lot less automation in shops and offices than you might expect, and correspondingly lower wages.

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

#172

Post by johnnyanmac » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:58 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #142

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…

This is exactly what Mitt Romney was referring to during the 2012 election when he said he wasn't worried about the very rich, and he wasn't worried about the very poor. The truth is if you are making $20k/yr in income you're likely in a better position day-to-day than someone making $40k/yr, especially if you're raising a family and especially if you live in a city with functioning social services. He was excoriated…

>especially if you live in a city with functioning social services.

that may make sense in 2012. In 2024 I am much less optimistic that this is the case.

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

#173

Post by Rinzler89 » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:58 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #169

skhunted wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed?

A lot of work that's absolutely needed for our survival is still paid dogshit: think construction, cleaning, waste disposal, agriculture, fruit picking, etc. Even in developed countries with human rights, most of this work is done by what are basically modern slave workers usually from abroad on dinghy visas.

Those are the jobs getting the least amount of automation. Robotics is insanely far away from reaching the speed, dexterity, cognition, perception, adaptability and cost for that to be automated at the same rock bottom prices as human slaves.

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

#174

Post by undersuit » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #145

_ache_ wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's suggesting that we break out the guillotines and murder the rich. That worked out great for the French, after all.

But if you say "Let them eat cake"... you're not on the right side of the situation being proposed.

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

#175

Post by ketzo » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

Rinzler89 wrote: post #163

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 th…

And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country"

Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.

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

#176

Post by skhunted » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #169

skhunted wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Currently we live in a society in which a few people have more wealth than tens of millions. The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and there needs to be an evening out of this distribution. Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.

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

#177

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

undersuit wrote: post #157

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

I would argue progressive taxes are less complex than your proposed flat tax because you can load all the expenses on the high brackets who won't miss a meal if you set the value too high instead of trying to pick a single value that works for everyone.

To begin with, that isn't what "complex" means. Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that. We nominally do it so people who make more money pay higher effective tax rates -- but a flat tax with a UBI does the same thing. If everybody paid a 30% marginal rate and everybody got a $12,000 UBI then the effective tax rate on someone with $30,000 in income would be -10%, at $60,000 it would be 10% and at $200,000 it would be 24%. That's a progressive tax system.

Meanwhile you don't really want low marginal rates when you're providing benefits, because then the benefits phase out too slowly. Suppose you were providing $12,000 in benefits and the phase out rate was only 10%. Then someone making $100,000/year would still be a net recipient of benefits, which would bankrupt the government. In practice the phase out rates we currently impose on the poor are higher than the marginal rates in the highest formal tax brackets, which is probably bad, but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.

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

#178

Post by Rinzler89 » Wed, May 22, 2024, 8:01 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #175

Rinzler89 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country" Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.

Yeah, there's definitely downsides to that since there's no free lunch, but maybe our society should focus on providing affordable essentials for most (education, housing, healthcare, etc), instead of gleiing at the though of getting a new games console for only $199 and that GDP went up by 2%, while food, rent and medical went up by 10%.

Optimizing our society for excessive consumerism and the eternal "line must go up" race, just to plow the wealth in the hands of a few billionaires, at the expense of workers and the environment, doesn't seem like the best long term.

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

#179

Post by Nasrudith » Wed, May 22, 2024, 8:02 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #27

dangus wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Smartass question: how is it Amazon's externality when they would have been on food stamps without Amazon's job? It is clear that ideally they wouldn't be on food stamps with the job, sure but crediting preexisting problems towards whomever doesn't solve them fully sounds like a recipe for just making things worse.

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

#180

Post by tryptophan » Wed, May 22, 2024, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

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