Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 487 posts

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

#121

Post by massysett »

massysett wrote: post #23
iancmceachern wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont agree. It's more about the relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO. Even if the post office has the exact same percentage of workers on food stamps, I would argue that because the postmaster general makes so much less than Amazon leadership that Amazon has the privilege and ability to do better, and still run a profitable business. It's about profit, and sharing it more equitably.

If Amazon took the CEO’s salary and reduced it to zero and distributed the savings to every line employee, how much money would each line employee get?

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.

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

#123

Post by readyman »

astrange wrote: post #98
readyman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalists (large business owners) You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you. Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right, the aggregate effect is the same. Productivity goes up and wages don't. > But also, wages generally go up Just utter nonsense. Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.

> You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you. Are you going to provide a definition? I think it's people who own and trade capital. > Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right You're agreeing with me and then doing "even if you were right"? Also, this is pretty much out of Marx - capitalism was better for workers than the preceding stage. Small business…

a capitalist is an owner of capital

>Also, this is pretty much out of Marx - capitalism was better for workers than the preceding stage.

Marx also showed that workers didn't choose capitalism, and why it was not an option but a force of history.

I'm gonna need a wage to continue this conversation. It's too boring and unfruitful for my interest.

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

#124

Post by RIMR »

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…

I think that government assistance should come universally. We should establish a minimum standard of living.

Everyone should get food stamps - enough to survive. If you want, you can eat cheap store brand food for free year-round, or you can spend your entire balance at the beginning of each month at restaurants and artisan grocers because you make enough to afford to buy what you want with your own money when it's gone.

Everyone should get healthcare, full stop. Going to the doctor should be free. Public health is massively important to a healthy society, we should treat that as core investment in the future of our nation.

Everyone should get some form of housing. If you want, you can use a voucher to get a tiny studio for free, or you can apply the voucher to a larger rental that you can afford with the money you make. If you own a real estate, you can forfeit the rental voucher for a tax credit.

Everyone should get some sort of universal basic income. With food, healthcare, and housing covered, it would just need to be enough to fill in the gaps for everything else. Enough to put gas in your car every once in a while, or to buy clothes, or anything else you might need.

At this rate, you could just sit at home eating Great Value brand canned food and wearing clothes from Goodwill indefinitely, but it would be a boring life. The majority of people would seek something profitable to do with their lives, and the "profit motive" of capitalism would finally be realized for every American when people actually work for a better quality of life, rather than for survival.

We could finally be free to pursue our careers or the sake of contributing to the world, rather than for the sake of "making a living". We could dedicate ourselves to noble yet unprofitable causes without relegating ourselves to poverty.

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

#125

Post by gruez »

no_wizard wrote: post #73
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…

>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…

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

The point of means testing isn't to fight fraud, it's to better divert a limited pool of resources to the neediest people. If you have a pool of money to distribute, only giving it to the poorest 25% (ie. means testing) means the recipients can get 4x the money compared to giving it to everyone. Sure, there are ways this can be done badly through onerous requirements or whatever, but the cost of means testing vs the fraud rate is a completely irrelevant metric.

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

#127

Post by gruez »

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…

>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 other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

Isn't this already the case? It's true that you need to means testing to get access to additional benefits, but the tax rate itself is already progressive even if you don't any means testing.

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

#128

Post by ilya_m »

bombcar wrote: post #39
llsf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the number that a friend working for SNAP told... 1 out 8 Americans is on food stamps.

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…

> It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children.

SNAP also require asset limits, which is $2,750 per _household_. Given that rent for a large family may easily be in the ~$1,500-2,500 range, it leaves pretty much no money in the bank for any other expenses.

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

#129

Post by atleastoptimal »

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 or implement UBI. There is no magical future where AI serves as a democratizing "labor enhancer" for the masses. The value-add of some random person will be 0 in nearly all cases.

We will have to decouple our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value.

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

#130

Post by r00fus »

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…

> Should the companies shoulder more of the burden?

Note: this only works for large corporations. Small corporations don't get this benefit.

To make it more fair and increase competition and reduce corporate corruption, the system should increase support for everyone on a fair basis, not just these particular wage slaves.

Post reply on HN