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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

#441

Post by soco »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #347
mrguyorama wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet those places are entirely unwilling, and sometimes literally economically unable, to increase what they are offering to fill those positions. It's not staffing issues. Companies very clearly are willing to overwork their existing staff rather than hire new. There's a store of our local grocery chain that is placed in an extremely high traffic, high income, extremely high wealth portion of the state. It pulls…

So, your theory is that they could double their payroll because grocery stores are so high-margin that this is no big deal? Or is it that you believe they wouldn't have whiny complainoids even at $40/hour, making it expensive but worth the increased cost? What happens when their competitors need to do the same thing just to stay in business... will everyone somehow magically have the top 5% of the wagie class, and ev…

I have an idea: let's try and see - although I know it's against any current business teaching. Seems easier to assume the employees are whiners, especially from a position where the hourly rate is at least an order of magnitude higher. But I digress: of course the first question will be, who's trying first this novel approach? My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worker is more than double yet the big mac price is pretty much the same. Who would have guessed...

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

#442

Post by carlosjobim »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #369
carlosjobim wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers are already at an extremely high level of productivity compared to any other time in history. The problem is what they get in exchange for their labour, and that is a question of monetary policy and how inflationary money enters the economy (it's through real estate).

Going beyond unionization to ownership, one solution is worker-owned co-ops. Making those easy to start and providing tax benefits for such would be fantastic.

Worker owned co-ops have existed for a long time and they don't solve the problem, because they still have to compete on the free market for money that is created out of thin air and distributed through real estate.

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

#443

Post by raxxorraxor »

michael9423 wrote: post #182
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…

Actually, it's the opposite. 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. So the issue is simply in how corporations are set up and how the stock market is designed. The entire system is designed to drain as much val…

Also it would be easy to completely restrict very profitable corporations using publicly funded workers. That is completely insane.

Of course no country wants to give up their capacity of cheap labor, so politics move slowly or worse, it becomes the literal race to the bottom.

It is false to believe they could do without these workers while in reality they probably could do without much of their management.

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

#444

Post by bryanlarsen »

mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #379
bryanlarsen wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poor spend a higher percentage of their income on imports than the rich do.

The poor definitionally spend a higher percentage of their income on just about everything because their income is significantly smaller

True, that is the primary effect.

But it holds even if we calculate as a percentage of expenditures rather than as a percentage of income.

The poor tend to spend more of their money on hard goods and the rich a higher percentage on services. And of course goods are a lot easier to import than services.

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

#445

Post by frumper »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #414
frumper wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I responded to the asset limit statement. 30+ states do not one have, it’s well over 50% of the country including 9/10 of the most populous states.

The number that matters in a meaningful way is the % of the people in need who can reasonably access the promised amounts. That figure excludes the millions of people who meet the guidelines discussed here but are serially denied by state agencies, across months and years. It also excludes millions more who are awarded aid (and categorized as such) but whose benefits total a few tens of dollars. Florida can represent…

You're hallucinating a conversation with me. Someone brought up asset limits as a problem. I provided contrary information, and now you're arguing with yourself about something else. You are saying something, I comment that I wasn't suggesting what you're saying, and now you're doubling down and making up what you're responding too. You're obviously passionate about it, but maybe you should take a break from this thread. The way people get treated by some states is appalling and I'm sorry you and others have trouble receiving the help they should be getting.

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

#447

Post by carlosjobim »

vkou wrote: post #364
carlosjobim wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. Or are you going to stockpile them?

> It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. It's fundamental logic that unless your company provides something close to 100% of the employment market (as in, you are a complete monopolist on all economic activity), you are better off paying your workers as little as possible. Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other…

> Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base.

But they are the best representation of your customer base possible, if you're an industrialist selling mass market goods for civilan use. If they can't afford your stuff, then the rest of the masses can not either. Because among the masses of the population that you can draw your workforce from, the factory worker will be the best paid. They wouldn't work in a factory otherwise.

The dilemma of the industrialist has always been that it's easy to crank up production enormously and the problem is to find enough customers to sell your product to that can afford it and keep the wheels running. Before industrialisation you only produced to demand and did bespoke stuff. So affordability and finding customers that can afford your product was always on top of the mind of any industrialist.

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

#448

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

soco wrote: post #441
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your theory is that they could double their payroll because grocery stores are so high-margin that this is no big deal? Or is it that you believe they wouldn't have whiny complainoids even at $40/hour, making it expensive but worth the increased cost? What happens when their competitors need to do the same thing just to stay in business... will everyone somehow magically have the top 5% of the wagie class, and ev…

I have an idea: let's try and see - although I know it's against any current business teaching. Seems easier to assume the employees are whiners, especially from a position where the hourly rate is at least an order of magnitude higher. But I digress: of course the first question will be, who's trying first this novel approach? My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worke…

> I have an idea: let's try and see

While I encourage and am delighted by your attitude that you want to see experimental results, there are some insurmountable issues:

1. I don't have any friends who want to run their multi-million-dollar-or-billion-dollar grocery businesses into the ground. 2. People of leftist bent, when seeing results they don't like tend to blame it on non-leftists and double down. 3. This is such bad budgeting that there's no need to jump off the cliff just to prove we'll splat. You're doubling payroll in an industry where profit margins are razor thin.

> My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worker is more than double yet the big mac price is pretty much the same

Do the Danish customers trash the place like they do in every McDonald's I've ever been to in any large city in the US? Do they deal with hobos coming in with their own cups and just filling those up without purchasing anything? Or any of a thousand other issues (I guess you'd call them "social") that make operating a franchise so much more difficult and expensive in the US? Do they have to hire twice as many employees just to get 80% of the labor (oh wait, that one's rhetorical, we already know the answer). Has a Danish McDonald's employee ever had to hose down the restroom because someone projectile-diarrheaed every surface within that room, includin 8ft up the walls and so forth?

We can't have that, unless you can get everyone in the United States to behave like Danes. But then they'd also eat better (and be taxed like Danes), like Danes, and so sales would fall. And where Denmark has fewer than 100 stores, the US has 14,000... how many of those will close? Of the ones that remain open, how many would they lay off? Are the stores in Denmark franchises, or corporate and just there as loss leaders or something like that?

So some are paid more, the rest just become unemployed. Forgive me if I think that the Danish model doesn't work here.

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

#449

Post by itslennysfault »

plutaniano wrote: post #446

Doesn't Amazon have to compete with welfare for workers, instead of benefiting from it? The more welfare pays, the worse a job at Amazon is in comparison, is it not? How does Amazon benefit from this?

The point is that they pay such low wages that their workers are still eligible for welfare when working there (despite being hugely profitable). This essentially means that tax dollars are subsidizing their profits.

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

#450

Post by sethammons »

tgv wrote: post #433
sethammons wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sorry, but: first, the usual criticism is that the one who claims has to show some proof, unless it's commonly accepted. The parent comment didn't. It just says "it's A or B", excluding the viability of every other option. Your criticism is better directed at that comment. Second, look at Western/Northern Europe, or if you really insist on making this a US-only discussion: look at the period following WW2. It is poss…

I'm not talking about anything other than your comment which was downvoted when I saw it (and check, yup, still downvoted). That comment just says, "nope" -- and doesn't add anything to the discussion, just "nope." Since that comment was saying that the option is not just a binary A or B, you can change the value of the comment from negative (as evidenced by negative votes) to positive simply by engaging slightly further and saying "It is not just A or B, for example C". I'd be surprised if the comment was downvoted then.

I think you are maybe reading more into my reply than I ever intended to put into it. It is a meta comment about a comment.

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