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

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

#801

Post by LordDragonfang » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #766

Smokey28 wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I've spent the last year or so studying Ford. His whole point was that if people didn't have the money to buy his product or time to use it (he reduced work hours as well) then your business will never survive. He wasn't banking on employee sales, he was looking at employees as a snapshot of a wider market. Great example is fast food as well. If you are offering the "lowest cost" food option, and provid…

For a profitable company where wages are a major expense, it seems like lower prices with higher wages can only be achieved with higher productivity. I think an economist would attribute this more to Ford's assembly line? But sure, a high-productivity business can lead the way on wage increases. Other businesses might have to raise prices to keep up. I'd like to read more about Ford's effect on wages outside Detroit.…

>For a profitable company where wages are a major expense, it seems like lower prices with higher wages can only be achieved with higher productivity. Productivity vs hourly pay has pretty famously stagnated since the 1970s[1] after being closely correlated for years before. The issue is simply that people aren't being paid enough for the value they add to companies.

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

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

#802

Post by drawkbox » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

prolikewh0a wrote: post #773

drawkbox wrote: post #639

Very smart. Amazon and Bezos is one of, if not the, best at reinvesting profits back into the company, mostly for research and development or new products. Increasing employees pay can also boost the machine and the product which many companies have forgotten, wage increases are pro-growth which increase consumer power. Many Amazon employees will probably buy more from Amazon and comparatively Amazon looks good to wo…

I didn't hear anything about improving working conditions. The employees in Seattle making $15/hr already are still being treated like shit.

That isn't an Amazon specific thing though, it is an American workplace thing that is more like a dictatorship/feudal empire than anything with rights.

In the US, we live in 'freedom' but then go work on a feudal/sharecropper mini states that act like fiefdoms for corporate overlords.

Labor rights are not even along for the ride anymore, they got left at the station somewhere in the early 80s.

Look at how companies even see raising wages when they know that is a critical part of growth and as American as apple pie, however wage increases have been efficiently metric optimized and worked out of the system.

SCOTUS just recently agreed that forced arbitration is legal [1].

> In a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses to block employees from banding together in class action suits.

Corporate overlords, who serve the next quarter earnings only, might even get non-competes to be valid with the way things are going, not looking good for labor. Amazon employees might be able to change conditions if they were weren't locked into forced arbitration.

Raises are very American and needed in a consumer economy that requires growth and new demand, those are almost gone.

Competition is very market friendly and American, non-competes are everywhere and are the most anti-American, anti-business and anti-competitive thing that currently exist, they only favor established and large corporations over investors, entrepreneurs and small/medium companies coming up. If arbitrators are allowed to determine non-competes validity, competition, entrepreneurship and innovation is over.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/business/supreme-court-up...

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

#803

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

tmd83 wrote: post #765

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon paying the taxes it can't avoid doesn't act as an excuse for avoiding the taxes that they do avoid. Blaming companies for doing something the law allows them to do is ridiculous. If you don't think they should be allowed to do that, why do you have a law that allows them to? Fix the law, e.g. by replacing corporate income tax with VAT, so they can't avoid it, and then they won't.

That's a toxic behavior not just in part of the amazon but as whole on the part of big businesses. And yes it's legal so we can't fault them except for sure collectively they lobby and influence the law making to make sure these loophole remains. A lot of the laws are bought and sold for. That's not just true for US but for most of the world I think.

> A lot of the laws are bought and sold for. That's not just true for US but for most of the world I think.

That's the point. The problem is the content of the laws. Their consequence is an inevitability that follows from their content.

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

#804

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

kidsnow wrote: post #797

refurb wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about dollars. It's about your behaviors. Behaviors of the middle class. Middle class people typically do things like own one home, work two jobs, save for their kids' college, keep their cars for a while, etc.

> work two jobs

I wouldn't consider working two jobs to be middle class unless you meant two people in the household working one job each, unless there are a lot of people working two jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle.

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

#805

Post by wpietri » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

nbardy wrote: post #534

wpietri wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fine by me. We've been automating jobs out of existence since the industrial revolution, and should continue to do so. There are very few people doing a job now that was a job in 1750, but there's still plenty for people to do. That's because we keep turning boring, lower-value work over to machines and finding more interesting, higher-value work for people to do. This does produce temporary dislocation. Onc…

I agreed its good to atomate jobs, but raising the minimum wage behind you is an anti competitive move I can't behind.

Look at it the other way. Suppose they honestly believe that $15 is the right minimum wage. If they just raise it to $15 for their workers, why should they let other companies freeload?

Look at other sorts of pro-worker laws, like safety. If Amazon were lobbying for increased OSHA oversight of warehouses because they didn't want to compete with companies who treated worker bodies as disposable, would that be bad? I don't think so.

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

#806

Post by LordDragonfang » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

carlsborg wrote: post #754

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.

Well also because they are going to automate all those warehouse jobs anyway, and brick and mortar competitors cannot automate retail workers, and this will hurt them even more in the future.

>brick and mortar competitors cannot automate retail workers

Actually, Amazon is looking to do just that with Amazon Go: smart speculation is that they plan on developing it to the point where they can license and sell it to other retailers in much the same way they did with their cloud services.

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

#807

Post by CobrastanJorji » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

rubidium wrote: post #491

There's been similar moves in the past. Most famous of which is Ford's $5 / day. http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/blogs/post-per... Ford's quote from the time is relevant today: “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers.…

It's a great thing, that motto, but creatively employed, it can also produce company towns with "company stores" that accept scrip payments.

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

#808

Post by maxlybbert » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:43 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…

> Saying that someone doesn't deserve to be paid a living wage is the same as saying they don't deserve to live.

I’m not saying anything about what anyone deserves.

I happen to know a general contractor who is incredibly charitable and willing to hire just about anyone who can swing a hammer. He mentioned that one year, he hired so many people that the per-employee costs and taxes ate all of the company’s profit. He had to live on savings that year. Obviously that isn’t sustainable, even if many independent coffee shops and bookstores try it.

Companies that pay more for labor than the value they get from that labor go out of business the same as companies that sell items at a loss and try to make it up on volume.

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

#809

Post by rschroed » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #708

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford's $5/day wage doesn't happen in a vacuum. The showmanship and publicity causes pressure on other manufacturers to pay that much. Otherwise, anybody working at a competitor will just be thinking to themselves "I'm just working here to get experience so I can have an edge on other applicants at Ford." Competitors that pay less will be dealing with high turnover unless they match Ford's wages. And it's not just car…

Okay, but I doubt this had much effect outside Detroit. Anyone know the history? This would be like claiming that high salaries in Silicon Valley are somehow going to fix inequality nationwide. There is some spillover but it only goes so far.

Maybe not 'fix inequality nationwide', but it seems reasonable that high salaries in Silicon Valley have driven salaries up in the industry across the country.

Source: tech worker in Seattle.

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

#810

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 02, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

MrStonedOne wrote: post #682

skybrian wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't take that explanation at face value because it's describing a perpetual motion machine. Sales to your own employees are only going to be a trivial amount of revenue for any reasonable business. And I'm sure he knew that. But interpreted charitably, it's showmanship. This is a way to show leadership, get a lot of publicity, and hire better workers, so what's not to like?

The point wasn't that paying employees more leads to sells. Its more of a remark about the overall world. Your employees are somebody's customers, your customers are somebody's employees, You are somebody's customer. If nobody in the world makes enough to be a consumer, nobody consumes, and thus you have no customers.

[deleted]