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Comment by pcunite | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day

Wow, that's incredible. How much pay could each one make and the company still be profitable?

It's difficult to believe that this is FTEs. Very easy to believe it's FTEs, contractors, temps, and vendors. Including warehouse workers etc.

EDIT: I was curious, so I took a peek at their 10-K [1]. "We employed approximately 566,000 full-time and part-time employees as of December 31, 2017." I couldn't find any info on their FTE count with a quick keyword search.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec...

It's probably noteworthy that their reference date is in December. I suspect their total would be lower in April.

According to Wikipedia their profit was 3B last year. If they have 566,000 full-time employees at 2,000 hours each, that is 3 billion USD they have to distribute to 1,132,000,000 hours, so they could raise the wage of each employee evenly by around $3 an hour, and would then make $0 instead of $3B.

When a company has this many employees (compared to some other large tech companies like Facebook with only 25,000), the math isn't as nice as you might imagine. Amazon has very low margins.

I've never been a big fan of Amazon OR Jeff Bezos' libertarian nightmare - but, seeing it framed like this, in terms of a private entity providing employment for so many people and for little profit makes me question my own beliefs. It's amazing what a little profit at scale adds up to.

For the vast majority of their logistical staff, $3 an hour more would likely be a substantial raise. Or at least equal to an extra yearly raise.

That’s a hundred thousand more people than the population of Florence!

Using 2013 census data, if Amazon employed only the population of Wyoming and its entire population was in the labor force, Wyoming would have an unemployment rate < %4.

Why Florence in particular?

I live in Italy, sorry I should have picked a US city.

Meh. Not all of us here are American :) "One sixth the population of Melbourne" would have worked as well.

It’s almost .01% of the population of Earth!

Could be as much as 20% of the population of Earth back in 10,000BC. Modern society is amazing.

this is a global community! Yay Florence!

'More than 10x the population of Florence, South Carolina!'

Bear in mind that hundreds of thousands of those employees are in the fulfillment centers etc.

According to my guesstimations, engineering should be 80-60k, which is still a healthy number.

Their 2017 profit was 3B, so they could each receive a $6,000 raise with that.

I'm so use to Amazon not reporting a profit consistently, I had to check to make sure....

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