Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay

#131

Post by WilliamEdward » Sun, May 17, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #79

WilliamEdward wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is ridiculous that you've boiled it down to those two options. The 3rd is cutting executive salary and paying low wage workers. Also amazon is not cheap compared to my local competitor and aliexpress, people buy from amazon because of convenience. And amazon makes profit on non-AWS products as well, don't be silly. I can literally google their financial statements to prove this.

The fundamental problem with this solution is a simple, numeric one: there are very few executives and a lot of low-wage workers, so large-sounding pay decreases for the former can only fund tiny pay increases for the latter.

If your execs earn a billion dollars a year collectively, and you have 200000 employees, you can distribute 2500 dollars to them all and the execs would still earn more than the low wage workers. So if simple arithmetic is your thing, there you go.

Amazon has around 570000 employees, and 22 executives. One of those executives actually earns a lot more than 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, with just 2 billion dollars you can give a decent pay raise to every single one of those employees. Some don't need it as much as others, but whatever.

Re: Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay

#132

Post by pietrovismara » Sun, May 17, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

deadgunslinger wrote: post #125

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Rise all wages to the point where everyone can at least fully support a family with it. You know, like during the good times when capitalism was still generating prosperity beside the usual death and destruction.

What an overstatement. We live in the most prosperous era of humanity. People have never had it better than today.

It doesn't feel like that at all. More like we're on a sinking luxury cruise ship.

Re: Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay

#133

Post by deadgunslinger » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #130

deadgunslinger wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Aside from the fact that if you give everybody more money you're just raising the supply of money in the market so people essentially have the same purchasing power as before, except now their integer in a database is bigger.

This isn't how the economy works. If thst was the case nobody would ever earn more, which of course isn't true. Wages are only a small part of a products price, and there also is enough evidence that for example raising the minimum wage does actually help people. For why it works, its simple: non-rich people spend any extra money, rich people don't do anything useful with their extra money. Which is also why trickle-…

This is exactly how the economy works. If you raise the supply of money, prices are going to rise. Does not matter whether you print it or you just extract it from someone's bank account and redistribute it. That's Econ101. You're equating SOME people getting to earn more, with your original statement that EVERYBODY should be earning more. Well that doesn't work.

Also, rich people don't do anything with their extra money? The exact opposite is true. Most of rich people's wealth is not in cash, it's in investments - while the average folk's extra money is "invested" in products that they can't afford, like the latest iPhone or a fancy house/car. No rich person that didn't just inherit their wealth lets their money sit in a bank except for a small percentage of their wealth, because they know it's a bad deal. How does trickle down economics transfer wealth from the poor to the rich? The poor should have wealth to begin with, in order for it to be transferred.

Re: Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay

#134

Post by deadgunslinger » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

pietrovismara wrote: post #132

deadgunslinger wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an overstatement. We live in the most prosperous era of humanity. People have never had it better than today.

It doesn't feel like that at all. More like we're on a sinking luxury cruise ship.

Well, every single point of data we have disagrees with you, but someone is entitled to be pessimistic if they want to.

Re: Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay

#135

Post by dean177 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

deadgunslinger wrote: post #127

dean177 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) This is just utter nonsense. The average UK salary is around £30,000. Nurses can expect to earn anywhere between £22,000 and £30,000. Junior doctors (which a new doctor can expect to be for somewhere around 5 years) starts at £23,000 increasing to somewhere between £30,000 to £45,000. GP…

Where do you get your numbers from? Judging for how off your data is for GPs[0] I don't want to imagine about the others. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/29/average-gp-now-e...

From the NHS website, not a newspaper article.

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...