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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

#421

Post by devmor »

astrange wrote: post #62
devmor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is in effect a subsidy to employers, while still being a benefit to employees. As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to. As such, the only real solution to the issue that does not make the economic situation worse for employees is to punish corporations for paying so little that their employees need benefits from the government. Anything else only hurts the employe…

> As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to. Such people are not particularly easy to find right now. The employment situation in the US is the best for workers it has been in decades. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

These datapoints strengthen my argument. More Americans are in the workforce than ever before, because every household requires more laborers to do work for less compensation.

Federal employment data also does not paint a cohesive picture of the situation.

For one, it does not include undocumented labor - the labor that makes up the vast majority of incredibly low paid positions. Secondly, it is inflated by the fact that so many people are forced to work part-time positions - usually multiple at once.

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

#422

Post by sangnoir »

porksoda wrote: post #395
sangnoir wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well. Other companies notice your "brilliant" strategy and start adopting it, and now your sales are in terminal decline as your customer base is impoverished. Short-term thinking is the Achilles heel of modern capitalism. Unless of course the new economy is automated companies trading with other automated companies; maximizing sha…

I think they're talking about one of the short stories in The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks What a great read.

I was - thank you! I should have realized the story belongs to the Culture universe.

Is there a story where non-sentient automation takes over society and leaves humanity by the wayside? Not malicious, sentient AI subjugating humanity (like Terminator or Matrix), but apathetic automated corporations maximizing profits trading with other automated corporations as humanity withers. I'd read/watch that

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

#423

Post by raxxorraxor »

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.

Almost every form of production uses low skilled labor and there is no technological solution yet. If it were possible, there would be a solution. The same is applicable for health care.

The truth is that these companies could easily pay enough but there is a competition to suppress labor wages, the famous race to the bottom.

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

#424

Post by sethammons »

tgv wrote: post #199
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…

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. That's pertinently false.

All it takes in one example to change your comment into something that provides additional value to the thread

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

#425

Post by akvadrako »

ihumanable wrote: post #373
paxys wrote: post #137

This is a nuanced discussion that is always derailed by the usual "down with evil corporations!!" rhetoric. Let's say there are a thousand people on food stamps, getting $2000/mo from the government. A company comes along and says "we will employ all thousand people part-time for $1000/mo, and so the government now only has to pay them $1000/mo in assistance". Did the company do a good thing for society? What if the…

It's an interesting question. Employees have to generate more value for the employer than the employer pays the employee, otherwise the employer won't employ the employee, or they will go bankrupt. So let's say you have someone that's getting the $2000/mo from the government for assistance. Amazon hires them and pays them $1000/mo, the only way this makes sense for Amazon is if they can extract more than $1000/mo of…

You don't need to wonder or make changes to "fix" this problem. If Amazon or anyone was making $5000 off employees they paid $1000, they would hire more and wages would go up.

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

#426

Post by sethammons »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #195
tryptophan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, all the illegals will need to do is sign up with their government ID and then they - hey, wait a second.

An ID is made exactly for that in California:

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...

I believe it is this law that drove the need for "real ids" with a star on them. Bonus points for creating a new "revenue stream" of those needing the star.

The goal seems to be to grow the voter base on the left.

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

#427

Post by sethammons »

hoosieree wrote: post #138
massysett wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to come up with a ballpark, I pulled some numbers from Google. Perhaps Amazon has 700,000 warehouse workers in the United States. CEO Andy Jassy's total compensation package in 2021 was about $212 million, though it dropped to $1.3 million the next year. So $212 million divided by 700,000 is about $303 for a warehouse employee for one year. Not close to enough to get anyone off food stamps.

Headline says 1/3 of those 700k are on food stamps. Would an extra $900/year be enough?

That's $40/wk - when we were that poor, that would have helped but not solved our food needs

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

#428

Post by sethammons »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118
ilya_m wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

A flat tax disproportionately favors the rich and hurts the poor; a progressive tax is much, much more fair. A poor person making $2k a month can make more use of $200 to improve their lot vs what the person making $2M can do with $200k to improve theirs

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

#429

Post by ptsneves »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #249
ptsneves wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare that calibre with this year’s roster and it makes me cry. Why didn’t he run a term later?

Let's be honest, no matter who the Republicans run, the candidate will be demonized. Only years later, when the person is not a threat to Democrat dominance will people judge them more positively on their actual value like is happening here (and has happened to McCain, and to Bush...). If you don't get points for running a good candidate, there's no incentive to run a good candidate, only one who can win.

Heh dont get me wrong. I think Obama is a philosopher king but by giving such emotional speeches and rhetorics he set the stage for very strong reactions. Reactions that bloomed into the awful culture wars of today. At the time I saw Obama as a good politician but the wrong time for it. Mitt Romney was a good candidate that would likely have normalised the tensions post 9/11. Alas it did not happen so.

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

#430

Post by dave333 »

Have govt mandated living standards - medicare for all, minimum wage.

Make corps revenue neutral - they fund all the services for their employees.

Govt fund unemployed including UBI.

Make corp tax rate = base + misery index = base + inflation + unemployment

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