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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

#401

Post by always2slow »

galdosdi wrote: post #393
always2slow wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so weird.. my experience doesn't match with this data at all.

Because money doesn't buy happiness, and a lot of the increase in purchasing power is pointless stuff like the fact that you can buy an iPad that's twice as powerful for half the cost, or get YouTube for free instead of paying $50 for cable, while the things that really matter like housing go up in price relative to wages. If you want to feel richer, look on Amazon/AliExpress and try to remember what stuff like that…

Well mostly I was fixating on the health insurance, and how health insurance's growth rate has slowed, but healthcare costs have gone way up in general and health insurance covers almost nothing anymore while deductibles have also gone up (for me). But again it's about rates, and I guess when I look at Figure 3 again it just seems deceptive.. a personal computer purchase for me includes a GPU and those prices did not decline (the total cost of a gaming PC like tripled over that time period). Overall this just seems like it's cheer-leading industries that are shrink-flating: health insurance that covers nothing, shit tvs, cheap crappy PCs, airline fares (ever shrinking leg room?).

Edit: Also probably because I remember when the dollar had WAY more purchasing power, so my baseline is skewed already. But this "increase" in purchasing power is just a return to more normal levels. This data feels more relatable.. slightly less purchasing power since 2019 https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/purchasing-power-constant...

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

#402

Post by galdosdi »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #220
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.

The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to. America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going t…

third option is dispose of them by letting whoever can't find a job fall into (if they're lucky) being NEETs at a relative's house, or (if unlucky) meth and fentanyl addiction in encampments, scrounging off scraps, essentially in a waiting room for a quick death, while the masses are distracted by mass media with one unrelated distraction after another

in the meantime, the defeated homeless addicts serve as a "reserve army of labor" or as george carlin put it to "scare the hell out of the middle class" in other words, keep wages down and enforce docility for those who are still lucky enough to have jobs

The third option is what is happening right now. It's pathetic. The ruling class has perfected its use of media technology to influence the masses so well that we can even analyze, discuss, and reveal their methods without fear, because even if we announce it from the rooftops the masses will still turn back to their TVs and tiktoks and forget they heard anything, dividing their attention among 100 distractions to keep them from ever banding together.

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

#403

Post by galdosdi »

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…

This has been going on since the 1700s, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

And was criticized as indirect corporate welfare then too

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

#404

Post by galdosdi »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #400
galdosdi wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like asking why would anyone go to college anywhere but Harvard. They would, but Harvard has limited slots, so you do the best you can. Also, it's weird you pose this as some kind of counterfactual proof by contradiction, it already happened, because "locking up the labor market" the way you describe is kind of what FAANG did, in at least a mild way, to software engineering, during what we now have to sadly ca…

So who gets to work for the richest company? The luckiest, the most connected or the hardest working? Is it better being a warehouse worker for Amazon rather than a ML engineer for a poor startup?

You're asking how it should be or how it actually is? If the latter, have you like, actually been in the workforce?

Yeah, it's a combination of luckiest, most connected, and/or hardest working, depending on the company, depending on the situation. You should know this if you've interviewed for jobs a few times. I'm really confused by your train of thought. Are you a college student?

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

#405

Post by galdosdi »

always2slow wrote: post #401
galdosdi wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money doesn't buy happiness, and a lot of the increase in purchasing power is pointless stuff like the fact that you can buy an iPad that's twice as powerful for half the cost, or get YouTube for free instead of paying $50 for cable, while the things that really matter like housing go up in price relative to wages. If you want to feel richer, look on Amazon/AliExpress and try to remember what stuff like that…

Well mostly I was fixating on the health insurance, and how health insurance's growth rate has slowed, but healthcare costs have gone way up in general and health insurance covers almost nothing anymore while deductibles have also gone up (for me). But again it's about rates, and I guess when I look at Figure 3 again it just seems deceptive.. a personal computer purchase for me includes a GPU and those prices did not…

Yes, agreed, healthcare is another great example alongside housing. Healthcare, housing, and education have famously gone up far faster than wages for decades, while gadgets and knickknacks and furniture, etc, have gone down. Hindsight is 20/20 but most people would rather have more security (which is what healthcare, housing, education give) and less luxury (knickknacks, gadgets) than the other way around

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

#406

Post by gruez »

FireBeyond wrote: post #386
gruez wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate. Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs". Minimum wage has always trailed living wage. Often by a decade plus. It's always in arrears that it is updated (and several of the last updates have been further and further apart). Businesses have been able to pay people less than liveable wages, and then when th…

>Minimum wage has always trailed living wage

Hidden in this is an assumption is that everyone is more than more productive than the "living wage" (whatever that is). In a country that has high living costs and is facing competition from developing countries with far less living costs, I think it's fairly reasonable to say there's a non-negligible population where this assumption doesn't hold. What about those people? For them, raising the minimum wage to the living wage won't increase their income, it'd make it $0 because there's no point in hiring them.

>Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".

You realize I explicitly mentioned "welfare/UBI" in my previous comment? Or do you somehow think it's bad for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by taxing people/companies and then distributing through welfare/UBI, but it's somehow okay for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by mandating that companies pay their workers more?

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

#407

Post by adolph »

porksoda wrote: post #399
adolph wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. False dilemma. There are other methods to implement tax and redistribute. Additionally some countries like Canada and Switzerland are taking the lead in offering legal frameworks for life management solutions.

Please say more about "legal frameworks for life management solutions". You can't just drop those words in that order with no further context and walk away.

What is there to add? People have a growing need to make and express choices about hastening unavoidable eventualities. Willing service providers need legal protections and the ability to document a person’s choices. In Switzerland this has grown into a minor tourist industry.

https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47

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

#408

Post by abigail95 »

not2b wrote: post #50

If workers need government aid to make basic ends meet, it is the employer, not the employee, that is on welfare, subsidized by taxpayers and government borrowing.

why are you blaming amazon for this and not everyone else, including you, for not hiring these workers for a higher wage?

if you or anyone else can get marginal productivity from these workers for more than amazon is paying then just go and do it, or do you have some bias against hiring people on welfare?

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

#409

Post by abigail95 »

imgabe wrote: post #316

Instead of pumping in ever more money to feed inflation, why don’t we ask how we can make food and healthcare cheaper? Why is it “Amazon doesn’t pay enough for workers to afford healthcare” instead of “Healthcare is so exorbitantly expensive even people with relatively well paying jobs can’t afford it without government assistance”?

It's not amazon doesn't pay enough, amazon is the one paying these workers the most - else they would work somewhere else.

Everyone else except amazon is to blame for not paying them enough.

Why are people framing this like amazon is doing something wrong? They are the highest bidder for these low wage workers, not the lowest bidder?

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

#410

Post by Jerrrrry »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #382
Pet_Ant wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker. You are wrong, but so very close that it's understandable. What can be done with an hour of labour has gone up so very high. That it is true. But what has increased in v…

Infrastructure is not sentient. Remember that and the causes of French Revolution my friend. With no one to run the tools or tools workers chained to tools what good are the tools? They decay and many cannot be moved effectively. Thanks to the fact that criminals won the war on drugs - a destitute life on the streets perpetually high on meth or heroin and alcohol appears to remain within reach for the foreseeable fut…

  >criminals won the war on drugs - a destitute life on the streets perpetually high on meth or heroin and alcohol appears to remain within reach for the foreseeable future posing an attractive alternative lifestyle for those dispossessed of abusive labor conditions. Funding social welfare programs would rebalance the calculus but that fact is angrily denied by ....
reality?
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