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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

#61
post #8

What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.

No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.

So you'd prefer they'd be fired if they can generate more value than they cost?

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

#62
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's essentially just a subsidy to large employers? So they can not pay their employees enough? Is this what these programs are intended for? I didn't understand it that way but maybe I'm wrong.

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

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to apply marginal thinking here. They are better off with welfare benefits, which means it's a good thing that they have them. If you gave them more benefits, they would have more negotiating power and be able to become even more employed[0], and then would you complain more? [0] assuming that's what they want to do

Giving benefits to employees, instead of forcing the company to pay a living wage, is effectively a subsidy for corporate profits.

No, giving money to employers is a subsidy for employers. Giving money to employees is a subsidy /against/ employers.

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

#65
post #50

If workers need government aid to make basic ends meet, it is the employer, not the employee, that is on welfare, subsidized by taxpayers and government borrowing.

That is not correct - a person with no skills who has 10 kids will never be able to support themselves via a job. It is welfare for them.

In that case the welfare is for the kids, not for the parent. i.e. the number of kids is more important than what their head of household is earning.

Welfare is mainly intended for children and the elderly because we don't want child laborers.

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

#66
Ultimately, the goal is to maximize worker exploitation. And to maximize exploitation, you need just enough welfare for people to survive, but not enough welfare for them to choose better jobs.

For example; in this scenario if we offered individuals far stronger welfare benefits (schooling benefits, UBI etc) the odds are that very few people would be warehouse workers for Amazon. Alternatively, if we we forced companies to pay for this welfare (such as with progressive taxation based on # of individuals working and on welfare), then they would offer higher wages and with higher wages gives greater mobility.

Make no mistake, this is a feature not a bug of our system. It is designed to keep the poor working in jobs that maintain their poverty.

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

#67

I would like to see negative income tax. You have to insert the fresh printed money into the economy some place. Why not have people work for it?

We have that in the form of EITC and child tax credits. They should be better though.

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

#68

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…

Supposing that fulfillment industry in general went without these labor subsidies - the industry would pass the costs on in some proportion p and 1-p to dividends and customer prices, resulting in lower investment and smaller sales volumes.

Sounds alright, but then you have noticeably less unskilled and semi-skilled labor demand (possibly as much as 1-4%) in an environment where:

* the long struggle of delegitimising explicit political violence is waning,

* nobody outside of the Club of Rome wants to so much as touch the application of the framing of subsidies and overbuild to the topic of population

* and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable.

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

#69

What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.

~12.6% per: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/food-stamp-... >More than 42 million Americans receive a federal stipend for food through the program formerly known as food stamps.

The question was about warehouse workers, not all workers.

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

#70
post #7
post #6

... Just like Walmart. It's a shame.

It's not, it's mostly a sign that benefits are working. Giving workers benefits /increases/ their compensation because it increases their negotiating power. This means they're earning more than they otherwise would. Not less. If it was less, that would mean benefits are bad and we should take them away!

You seem to think that healthcare is just like any other fringe benefit that employers and employees may mutually agree to in the employment market. But the US has a (deeply flawed) form of “universal healthcare” where the employer is required to provide the benefit. This mandate goes back to the New Deal era when capitalists were willing to accept such provisions if it allowed them to avoid a communist revolution, which was in fashion at the time. The mandate has been reaffirmed more recently with the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. So the story is not a sign that benefits are working, but that there are loopholes being exploited.
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