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

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

#781

Post by TangoTrotFox » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

shimon wrote: post #415

EpicEng wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Looking at revenue is completely meaningless. You need to look at margins to see the effect on a company. Imagine you take a loan of $1000 to buy $1000 of gizmos and then sell them to me for $1300. You don't have $1300, you have $300 after covering your overhead costs. And in the case of Amazon you have far more overhead costs than just the costs of goods. And the government also attaches significant tax increases when you pay employees more -- paying an employee $10 more is substantially more than $10 in cost to the employer.

Amazon's 2017 financials showed a final net income of $3 billion. They do reinvest aggressively in their company so a fair chunk of their costs are going to be 'voluntary', but that voluntary expenditure is the very action creating all these jobs. In any case, this is going to be a very substantial cost to them.

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

#782

Post by prolikewh0a » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

calvinbhai wrote: post #719

dheelus wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMZN is also lobbying to raise the Fed minimum wage to $15/hr

makes sense right? Amazon goes for the kill with it's mostly automated warehouses, cashierless and automated checkouts to make life hard for a lot of retail and warehouse competitors

Sounds like a monopoly that needs a little breaking up.

https://i.imgur.com/IC8Ehgh.jpg

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

#783

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #585

maxlybbert wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that many people aren’t worth $15/hour. Having a well-stocked grocery store is worth $15/hour if the person doing the job is fast. But slower stockers may lose their jobs altogether. Most companies I’ve worked at have had mailrooms. Very few have had people actually working in them. Which tells me that when the buildings were designed, the mailroom was considered valuable enough to include in the…

> I think the point is that many people aren’t worth $15/hour. Who cares? If markets are allowed to compete freely, unskilled labor rates trend towards zero. Most of the people currently working at $7.50 probably would be paid even less if the law didn't forbid it now. We live in a capitalist society where people are expected to work for a living. Saying that someone doesn't deserve to be paid a living wage is the sa…

[deleted]

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

#784

Post by samirillian » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #371

samirillian wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical isn't the right word for the problem in swebs reasoning. Of course Bezos is a villain. But if you get Amazon to do this, it's good for the country, regardless of motivation. So remain cynical but recognize that good politics can lead to bad companies doing good things.

If Bezos is a villain, his millions of customers are accomplices. Have you tipped your Amazon warehouse worker recently?

Don't think that's how villainy, accomplices, or tips work.

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

#785

Post by refurb » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #714

Drybones wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why frugality means you're middle class. I also don't understand how $200k-$500k, a very sizable income, even in the SF bay area, is magically the middle class now

$200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high. The 2 br, 1 bath, 800 sq foot apartment I live in 3 years ago for $900/month would probably be $2,500 in SV. Likewise, the 1850 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 bath house I live in now that I bought for $338k in 2015 would probably have been over $1,000,000 in SV.

No, it’s not middle class.

If you recently bought a $1M plus condo in SF, you are most certainly upper class. I don’t care if it was a 2 bedroom apartment.

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

#786

Post by Siecje » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #665

This is: - 25% PR - 25% free advertising for their openings (i.e., Amazon pays well) - 25% necessity (we're at full-employment) - and 25% ROI (they've figured less turnover and better quality employees are worth the investment) The question is: how will this effect other companies in the markets where Amazon employs a measurable number of people.

And they are preventing a union.

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

#787

Post by beders » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

What about benefits? Or is the taxpayer going to shoulder that bill? Like it does with Walmart workers?

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

#788

Post by prolikewh0a » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #264

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't contractors set their own rates?

No. The majority of "contractors" in America are really just employees of subcontracting firms who have way fewer rights, don't get benefits, and have to pay applicable employment taxes themselves instead of the company taking care of it.

It is exploitation at the highest levels.

Employer pays subcontracting company $30-$35/hr, subcontracting company pays the employee $15/hr or lower and pockets the rest. Subcontracting company offers benefits at almost 1/2 of your paycheck every month, and nothing else. Subcontracting company offers you nothing of benefit except for the job you could've gotten without them if the parent employer posted the jobs but they don't because then it would be FTE. Parent employer only provides the job openings to the subcontractor. This is all done so the parent employer can avoid paying any benefits.

It should be illegal in my opinion. A lot of lower level tech jobs and now even software development are going this direction. It's very big in Seattle and in my field it's impossible to move jobs unless you're willing to drop your salary $40k/year and wait for a potential FTE opening in which that company will hire you FTE, but you don't know how long you'll be making minimum wage.

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

#789

Post by caro_douglos » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #699

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like middle class to me

Oh yeah, absolutely. I consider myself the quintessential middle class. My point was that kidsnow said $200-500k is middle class, but it really depends on location. It often feels that the majority of people on Hacker News are living in a Silicon Valley bubble. They talk as if $1,000,000 for a 1500 sq ft house is normal, as if $150k is decent entry-level wage, and...you get the idea. $200-500k is middle class for Sil…

the SEC uses income thresholds of 200k for an individual and 300k for joint (two years in a row). Should people in the middle class be able to invest?

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967...

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

#790

Post by TangoTrotFox » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

genericone wrote: post #327

I suppose there has been some 'breakthrough' in their warehouse automation stack? I suppose in the rest of the USA a doubling of wages will definitely get them through an awkward longshoreman period, "well I'm being paid more unexpectedly, I suppose I can't complain about the robots". Once the robots are well established in operations, they can start to cut labor back some more.

I think there's a much more simple, and clever, explanation. We're looking in the wrong direction. Bloomberg recently ran a story [1] that Amazon is planning on opening up to 3,000 more cashierless 'grab and go' stores by 2021. They are clearly planning on trying to take over physical retail, and this is quite a nasty attack on current players such as WalMart or convenient store type locations.

These companies will not be able to compete with Amazon's cashierless stores. And they absolutely will not be able to compete with them at $15/hour minimum labor costs. This will require these companies to start transitioning to automated systems. But this would be a PR disaster -- firing huge numbers of people earning a hair above minimum wage to replace them with machines? Yeah that'll go over well. By contrast since Amazon is coming in with [relatively] near 0 employees from the get go, they won't face such issues. And an even better side effect here is that this would have a double feedback mechanism. Amazon improves their image of working to do more for their employees at the same time that their competitors are ruining theirs, just to be able to compete!

They just fired a huge salvo towards physical retail outlets. If Amazon does manage to successfully lobby (or create sufficient public pressure) to enact a $15 minimum wage, Amazon could practically won the physical retail game before they even meaningfully enter it.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/amazon-is...