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Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

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Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#601

Post by joh6nn »

ttoinou wrote: post #400
joh6nn wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kraft-Heinz had $26.2B in sales in 2017, of which $9B was profit. They had 39K employees. If we naively assume that all 39K are minimum wage employees working full time all year, that comes out to a payroll cost of $1.2B. that's approximately 5% of their total revenues, meaning if it had to be paid for exclusively through new sales, the price increase per item sold would likely be 5%. In reality, it would be much low…

provably false False because you take a "real world" example and twist it to fit your beliefs ? A good amount of the cost of what is produced comes from work. Hence the cost of inputs is also dependent on the cost of work (does the company you refer to contracts with suppliers ?) If you force work to be paid 1 million USD / month, what happens ?

I didn't twist it to fit my beliefs: i presented a scenario that is actually more expensive than what it would be in reality and showed how even that would not be a substantial increase in cost, even if it was paid for exclusively by increasing the price of products sold.

A $1M/mo additional increase in supply costs would be less than .1% of their revenue. It just manages to be .1% at $10M/mo. Given that the $1.2B/yr payroll cost I cited above is actually only 4.5% of Kraft's yearly revenue (I rounded up to 5% for simplicity), the additional supply chain cost you present would actually be covered by the 5% price increase I initially mentioned. It would in fact be covered by that 5% even at $10M/mo.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#602

Post by eximius »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #347
specialp wrote: post #245

Median amazon warehouse employee pay is 24k a year. Amazon has around 300k warehouse employees. Jeff Bezos's wealth alone is equivalent to all 300k of them working 22 years at their current rate.

Why are warehouse workers entitled to anywhere near the share the creator and owner makes?

The natural counterpoint is, well, why aren't they? But that conversation is mostly opinions and hand waving on what is 'fair'.

Assuming they aren't entitled to equal or near equal shares though, we can certainly ask how much is too unequal? A single man having more wealth than 300k people earning in nearly a lifetime seems like it is probably too much.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#603

Post by microcolonel »

_khau wrote: post #359
swebs wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None that I know of at least. If you can think of any, feel free to list them.

My point being that Capitalism has only been a thing for less 300 years, and what we have now isn't even capitalism. It's a warped perversion of it thanks to the inflated influence of ideologues like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and the politicians that bought into their narrow-minded dogma hook, line and sinker. The worst damage they and their ilk did was to convince the entire political spectrum from the ce…

So much said, and still no alternatives suggested. The reason we are convinced that there is no better alternative to moderately-regulated free markets is that this belief is so well supported, and so poorly refuted.

I have to conclude, after listening to thousands of thoroughly convincing accounts and arguments favouring moderately-regulated free markets; and not being presented with any alternatives in practice or theory which appear to be capable of replicating the incentives which have taken us from 95% living in extreme poverty about 150 years ago, to ~5% today (it's actually getting hard to measure); that, in practice, moderately-regulated free markets tend to produce what can be described as miracles, while high-ratio or total redistribution tends to bring great societies to their knees, and divide people into people whose job it is to suffer unimaginable horrors, and people whose job it is to enjoy the fruits of those victims' remaining breaths of productivity.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#604

Post by dollar »

fixermark wrote: post #582
askmike wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. That's because they treat their workers terrible. They're a huge company with a lot of profit and how people at the bottom of the chain are treated is maddening. They're seen as an example of how not to treat workers (and for good reason). They definitely should not be lauded for this: They did some calculations a…

Possibly worth observing: they bring in a ton of gross cash, but their revenue is smaller than a lot of Internet operations because their out-lay is high: physical storage, transportation, etc. are all expenses that Internet companies with similar profits don't have to shoulder. In 2016, they made a profit of $857 million on a revenue of $30.1 billion--- i.e. profit margin of 2%, compared to Alphabet's 9.7% or Facebo…

Amazon has never cared about net profit, they care about compounded growth through reinvestment of profits. It took Wall Street about 15 years to figure out they should leave Bezos alone.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#605

Post by matt4077 »

swebs wrote: post #54
School-Cotton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Amazon actually pay any worse or have worse working conditions than any other unskilled warehouse job? If so, why didn’t the employees change jobs? If not, why is so much criticism directed at Amazon specifically, rather than at capitalism itself?

>If not, why is so much criticism directed at Amazon specifically, rather than at capitalism itself? What's the point of criticizing capitalism if there are no viable alternatives?

The rather obvious reason (which I suspect you know full well), is that "capitalism" just isn't very specific.

Even believing that it is the best of all systems we've thought of (which I do) does not preclude one from optimising its specifics.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#606

Post by hannasanarion »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #539
specialp wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't saying they were. This is far from anywhere near. Bezos was not able to make all his money due solely to his hard work, it was off the backs of others including all of us whom have to subsidize the workers that he is making 300k X their near lifetime earnings.

The whole reason why warehouse workers are paid so little is because just about anyone can be trained to do it. It's simple economics. You are kind of right about subsidizing workers, but that's more of the government's fault for how our social services benefits work. It's not Amazon's fault the going rate for labor is below the rate that the government will provide benefits for.

Since when is "economical" equivalent to "good"?

The whole reason children work in coal mines is that others can't fit down the holes, it's simple economics.

The reason black slaves work the fields is because white folks don't want to do the work for the going rate, it's simple economics.

Economic forces are not guaranteed to produce a just society.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#607

Post by dang »

kork__ wrote: post #88

Socialism has only been tried in third world hell holes like Russia and succeeded so far beyond expectations it ended up being called the second world. A first world country going socialist would be the equivalent of increasing GDP by between 50 to 500%.

We've banned this account for using HN for ideological flamewar, which is against the site guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?

I'm not banning your other account, but if you'd please stop the incivility that appears in your comments there, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121239.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#609

Post by drak0n1c »

conanbatt wrote: post #450
wlll wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's how employment pools work. Sure, there's an element of "this job is only worth $7.5/hour, so if we have to pay someone $15/hour we won't do it", but I'd suggest that those jobs are actually not that common. I'd instead suggest that most jobs need doing, and they will just cost more. Ditches still need digging, burgers still need flipping, and it will just cost a bit more now.

Lots of interesting things happen when you play with price. Sometimes its higher-paying workers that benefit the most: if you can handle data management manually at 7.5U$S you hire cheap labor. If it costs 15U$S you hire an engineer to make a permanent and scalable solution. I am not enamored by the concept of minimum wage, and to this day its a fight among economists.

The minimum wage has exactly the same effect on labor as the carbon tax has on the energy industry. There are winners and there are losers. But generally, when the government decides, there is deadweight loss in efficiency.

Re: Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

#610

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

askmike wrote: post #30
nebulous1 wrote: post #4

I mean, they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. Good move. They have more to do though. I've went through a few articles on this but I didn't see any of them mention what Amazon's minimum actual pay was before this, just the federal minimum wage. Anybody know?

> they get such bad press for the way they treat their workers it only seems fair to laud them for this. That's because they treat their workers terrible. They're a huge company with a lot of profit and how people at the bottom of the chain are treated is maddening. They're seen as an example of how not to treat workers (and for good reason). They definitely should not be lauded for this: They did some calculations a…

Why is it so shitty to congratulate someone for making a good change even if that change may have been in their best interest?
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