211–220 of 403 posts
If you really cared, cancel your amazon accounts. 148 Prime users upvoted this article.
Until Amazon can start treating workers well, it seems to me the best move is not to pay them to abuse people.
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Perhaps you should consider that maybe some of those shareholders are your parents whose retirement future depends on those investments?
Perhaps your parents shouldn’t have built their retirement future on the ongoing exploitation of lower class people? Might there be a systemic issue here?
More subtly, in the current economy there are basically only two pots that higher real-terms wages for workers can come from: taking from other workers, and taking from the retired. That's because the whole economy has a supply-side crisis in basically everything and does not have the capacity to supply people overall with any more than they already have. All the usual scapegoats, like the super-wealthy, just don't consume enough as a proportion of the global economy that redistributing from them would have an impact on ordinary people. (Often articles attempt to confuse people about this by using definitions of wealthy that include like a third of the US population, or by comparing net worth instead and tricking people into thinking it means consumption by ordinary people could be increased by that amount if it was redistributed.)
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> your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.
But... aren't wages in Switzerland also higher than their close neighbours? It's the same thing in Norway - everything seems expensive for visitors, but wages are much higher too.
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>Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help Can you show your work here? Assume Amazon executives cut their salaries to 0, how much extra would they be able to pay workers?
Everyone would get 213 dollars a year extra if just their CEO didn't receive any compensation. Amazon employs approximately 1 million people in the United States and Andy Jassy received 213 million total comp in 2021.
Wow, then they can buy an extra starbucks coffee now and then. That would surely change their life.
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> It seems like most of the times, the result is a higher price for the customer, at least when things go well. Can you substantiate this claim? With the vast majority of goods the price is set by the market, i.e. higher wages would indeed result in a smaller profit margin and not in a higher price.
It could be either. In most cases it is likely both (shrinking margins, higher prices). The price is determined by the market. But there’s a demand curve. There are many prices that an item could sell at, with varying numbers of buyers at each price. In a highly competitive market, the price should be driven down close to the cost of production. This allows the most people to buy at the lowest possible price, at the…
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obviously amazon doesn't have a real case against unions, but they can try to use scary language to confuse people
"This will go down on your permanent record..." -- Bezos in helium voice I remember quitting from Krogers bagging groceries when I was a kid. I forget why, but I did give less than 2 weeks notice. Mr. Manager gravely conveyed that if I did this, I'd be barred from working for them again forever. Pretty sure my poker face then was not what it is now, but in any case I did not find that to be anywhere nearly as distres…
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> What employment contract? They’re at will Despite the colloquial use of the word "contract," there is generally always going to be an employment contract (agreement) in place. Similarly, people colloquially talk about having a "contract" for things like cellphones meaning a fixed term, but there is always an actual "contract" (agreement) with the terms of the service regardless of whether the plan has a fixed term…
Contract and agreement are not synonyms. Contracts require consideration.
I don't think this is a controversial definition of the word contract (for example Wikipedia's entry for "contract" states, "A contract is a legally enforceable agreement...").
I did not say that contract and agreement are synonyms that can be replaced with each other in all circumstances, so I'm not really sure that your comment is relevant to what I wrote.
I was also trying to clarify that the employment contract might be titled "Employment Agreement" or something like that but is still a "contract."
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They are incentivized to hide investments as operating expenses for tax reasons, which muddles the picture.
Source? What are the incentives? Why do the most highly valued companies in the world report much higher profit margins? I would need a good reason to believe the executives and owners of retail businesses do not want to report higher profit margins.
To simplify, if you want to say develop new software you can call it a capital investment and pay for it with after tax money or call it operating expense and pay for it in pretax money. Guess which one is a better deal.
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If the costs of labor go up fast, they have much more incentive to automate. When right now they may think it's cheaper to hire humans.
This would only be true if there was a technology to automate and it was just too expensive. For jobs that Amazon hires people there isn’t a technology to automate right now. Such technology is being developed (better AI and better robotics), but increasing the budget wouldn’t necessarily speed things up.