Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by daveheq » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

Finally, it only took news reports of the abuse workers take and the insane money Bezos makes to make this happen.

I only wonder why the workers took such abuse... was it really better work than anything else around? Is the local economy around those places so bad that these jobs were highly desirable, or did the workers just not understand there were better things?

With a minimum-wage increase comes a higher amount of spending by these workers since the lower the income the higher percentage of spending happens, so that's more money going into the economy and spurning growth and hopefully more competition, school/health/retirement spending, and job opportunities.

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

#622

Post by munificent » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

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…

> They did some calculations and projections which showed that raising the minimum wage brings more benefits (PR stunt, not being the target of new legislation anymore, etc) than downsides (now having to pay X more to some people).

This may be true, but it doesn't nullify the fact that the workers are actually receiving a benefit from this, and it's a good thing that's worth pointing out.

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

#623

Post by CodeM0nkey » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #12

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?

For what it's worth, someone on reddit says $12 https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/9kpeal/amazon_raises_...

It's lower than $12. This job posting lists $10.50 and up for a warehouse position: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/881584480

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

#624

Post by leetcrew » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #263

mlevental wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>$15/hour is still not much in the international market where Amazon sells its goods. In large parts of Europe it's less than what a warehouse worker makes. i don't understand this comment. while i'm all for warehouse workers getting a fair wage i don't understand the point of comparing a us wage, being paid in the us, to us workers, to foreign workers in foreign economies? yes USD 15 is not enough to survive in Oslo…

It’s not 30k/year for many of these employees. They are temporary workers that never know when they have work and when they don’t. It’s 15/hour. Also, 30k is a decent wage for a young person with no dependants. It’s not enough if you have kids, not even in the midwest or deep south. Comparing wages to the markets where Amazon sells its goods is interesting when talking competition.

> Also, 30k is a decent wage for a young person with no dependants. It’s not enough if you have kids, not even in the midwest or deep south

a single person working full-time should be paid enough to support themselves, I can agree that companies and society have an obligation to make this happen. but why is it reasonable that the minimum allowable wage now has to support the worker and some arbitrary number of dependents?

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

#625

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

daveheq wrote: post #621

Finally, it only took news reports of the abuse workers take and the insane money Bezos makes to make this happen. I only wonder why the workers took such abuse... was it really better work than anything else around? Is the local economy around those places so bad that these jobs were highly desirable, or did the workers just not understand there were better things? With a minimum-wage increase comes a higher amount…

> Finally, it only took news reports of the abuse workers take and the insane money Bezos makes to make this happen.

A low wage and abuse on the job aren't the same thing. Hopefully they're addressing the abuse claims, but this is more or less irrelevant to those and the coverage they received.

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

#626

Post by t0mbstone » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

Profits don't tell the whole story though.

Imagine if you are Amazon. Do you take the extra billion dollars you earned this month and throw it into another warehouse and more growth opportunities? Or do you keep your size the same and use that money to raise wages?

It's more of question of how they are allocating funds. Either way, the "profit" stays the same.

Amazon has been focused on growth at all costs, and that meant keeping wages razor slim and reinvesting every spare penny.

The real question is: Will slowing their growth investments and paying their employees a fair wage actually help their growth in the long run?

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

#627

Post by shimon » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #550

shimon wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick back-of-the-envelope math: Let's assume this raise will affect 250k workers this coming holiday season, bumping their pay from $12 to $15 (+$3). Over 12 weeks at 40h/week, this represents an additional $360M in labor cost. Using AMZN's 2017 revenue of 177.9B, this equates to 17.7 revenue-hours.

Why are you comparing 12 weeks with the entire 2017 revenue? You'd have a better argument that this is peanuts for them if you'd make a fair and clear comparison.

I'm not making the argument that this is peanuts. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm just trying to get some perspective on the scale here, relative to other things vying for the time and attention of Amazon's management.

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

#628

Post by munificent » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #84

czep wrote: post #47

Opponents of the minimum wage argue that it reduces employment by creating an artificial floor on wages, that jobs are lost because employers can't afford to pay the minimum. But if you can't pay the minimum, then you didn't really have a job to offer in the first place! By extension of this logic, employers could argue that they are losing jobs because they can only afford to pay someone who will work 12 hours a day…

> If you can't pay a basic living wage, for fair hours, in safe conditions, with necessary medical benefits, then you don't have a job to offer. Why not let the employees decide if the job is worth taking? If there exists people willing to voluntarily take a job given its wage/conditions, you have a job to offer.

Because jobs are nowhere near a perfect market.

* The switching cost for jobs is very high. You lose the social network of people you know at the old job, all of the knowledge and skill that's specific to that company goes out the window, you may have to uproot and move.

* Jobs are not transparent. It is fantastically hard to tell if a new job is going to be better than your current job. You know the base numbers like pay, but you have little way to accurately evaluate the culture, office politics, other people, management, company direction, etc.

* In many areas, there are few jobs to choose between. Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example because they hire many people in a areas with few other jobs to choose from. (This is also, I think, a big reason for the demographic changes towards cities in the US today: they give employees access to a more diverse job market.)

* Jobs are not homogeneous and interchangeable. One job might have better hours or a shorter commute but worse coworkers. One may pay more but have worse health insurance. There is so much variance that it's impossible to define an "optimal" job or even precisely compare two jobs.

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

#629

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

DataWorker wrote: post #177

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%.

By up to 500%? Surely you can provide some external sources of information to corroborate that claim?

I don't know what they have in mind, but that sounds like something you could do by improving income inequality. The top decile gets half the income. If you redistribute half of that, you can double the income of the bottom 60%. If you allocate that new money on a flat per-household basis, the high end gets something like a 50% boost, and at the low end you have millions of people in deep poverty getting more than a 500% boost.

Obviously that exact distribution is flawed, but I think it gets the point across.

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

#630

Post by Broken_Hippo » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

prolikewh0a wrote: post #219

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Amazon actually pay any worse or have worse working conditions than any other unskilled warehouse job? I'm not sure, but I think most places are OK with bathroom breaks. I could be wrong, though. If so, why didn't the employees change jobs? See, this is much more difficult. If the Amazon warehouse pays more than other jobs around - even if the pay is still low - it makes it much more difficult to leave the job. Y…

>I'm not sure it is fully capitalism's fault, but more of lack of laws protecting folks from capitalism alongside adequate enforcement of those laws. So what you're saying is...it's capitalism's fault?

Any government or economic system is bad when it is able to be abused by some of the players. Lots of these things are good in theory.

It is Ok to say that unrestrained capitalism is at fault, because that has led to this. Or capitalism that hasn't adjusted for the modern standards, perhaps.

Abuse is what is happening now, and the proper solution is laws to hinder such things. If it were up to me, a lot more places would be a socialist democracy with a thriving capitalistic sector.