Amazon worker’s median pay in 2017: $28,446
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
I am a software developer for one of the larger companies and also an Army Reservist. When I go away to do Army stuff I frequently encounter people who work much harder and earn much less than I do in their civilian jobs. Is that fair? I would say, it doesn't matter.
I tell those people how being a software developer generally isn't super intense or stressful and you make all this money, but yet the people I tell this to generally don't want to write software. The disparity is that a senior software development position isn't immediately free like a dinner mint at the end of dinner. You have to practice writing software really hard and really invest your time into solving hard problems. In all my experience talking about wage inequality the ultimate disparity that always arises is time spent investing in yourself without any reasonable compensation.
EDIT: I did not start programming until age 28. I was already married and had two children.
One was raising two children- an infant and a toddler- and if he wasn't actively coding, he was reading or listening to something programming related.
For now, at least, programming is a highly sought-after skill, and with determination and effort, you can get into it. There really aren't any other barriers than (1) saving up for a cheap computer, and (2) having reliable internet access.
Being a software engineer requires a particular mindset, a lot of time and exposure, and people willing to support that. I was lucky enough to have all of the above, but most folks do not.
I'm in the midst of helping a friend who is currently a welder move into software engineering. He's extremely intelligent and has the brain for it, but it's also taken literal years, finding him a capable dev machine (a used macbook air, donated from another engineer), tutoring him (me and another engineer, going on for two years now), and now he's going to a bootcamp (which cost thousands of dollars he didn't have in his pocket).
He is still going to have to find an actual job and make the move from bootcamp to real life. That's another involved process that will require multiple people helping him.
And again, this is a young white male who has a very high aptitude for this.
It's a bit more work than "just invest in yourself!". The average computer user has difficulty searching their own email or resetting a password. Even those with natural aptitude require help - and not a trivial amount either.
There are 2 sides to this. And the positive side of having something to work towards is usually not mentioned.
I can give you an example from Europe, in a country which is homogeneous ethnically. We all went to the same public schools and we had the same opportunities. At 30 - some of us make more than 10 times than others. There is no system of oppression which caused this. It was simply the market which has imposed this difference. And the market is at an equilibrium - because the people who earn higher wages, pay a LOT of money for healthcare, the social pension system and other social security things. If the gov would increase this further in order to close the "gap" between high earners and the have-nots/less, the high earners would just leave the country (they already do this to a degree).
Why not let the market decide? This is not about privilege and oppression and I am surprised that over the pond people have not learned from Europe's history.
There is also the side that by having a system in place that rewards effort - people strive for more everyday and this leads to prosperity. This country has been under communism and during those times no one was struggling for anything, because they were paid just the same.
He doesn't have to breathe toxic fumes that screw up his health. That's kind of a big plus.
He can likely continue programming to a far older age. That might be a big plus.
I can continue.
How should they move into software engineering?
Marketable skills should be better paid? Of course. Should it pay 10~15x more to be writing scripts at Google than to be frying burgers at some place? I don't think so.
If you care about people you should care that everyone has a minimum liveable wage, not that some should suffer because they can't/won't learn a high paying skill. What if instead of 10 to 15x a job at Google paid 5x what a burger flipper earns? It's still a quite good salary, incentive enough to not stop people from trying to learn better paying skills and would make the lives of people who aren't at that level a bit more comfortable.
Remember the human.
What is this "should" you speak of?
I sincerely don't understand if this was a jab towards me on some kind of "invisible hand of the market" argument or the complete opposite.
Between those two, it was the former. What I mean is that I don't see that people are obliged (_i.e._ should) trade with each other at all. If they nevertheless choose to do so, I don't see that every good or service should cost the same, or have a maximum difference in price.
"130% of the poverty line for a three-person family is $2,213 a month, or about $26,600 a year." https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-quick-guide-...
It's above minimum wage. If we say that's not enough, we should raise minimum wage. Or we should create a society where it's possible for the people currently working for $26k/yr to have a stable roadmap to much higher earnings. But I don't think Amazon alone is to blame for the problem.
Edit: Here's an article claiming it's more than 10% in Ohio that are on SNAP: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2018/01/08/amazon-e...
In, to quote Ken White, "pluck-my-banjo" Texas, that's a perfectly fine and livable sum. A dollar or two raise and you can probably start saving up for a house realistically. $14/hr is kingly.
Amazon warehouses are usually not in banjo-playing rural areas, but rather as close to major towns as is economically feasible for Amazon's rent bill.
This is neither a basic income nor a federal minimum wage problem. This is a lack of competing opportunities for minimally skilled workers problem. If these same workers had realistic job opportunities that paid well, then Amazon would have to raise wages (and pass some of that onto the consumers, but, that's relatively nothing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_locations#Fulfi...
Can you leave the mock disgust behind? You probably live in an urban/suburban area just like the rest of us, yet your lecturing us.
$14 an hour is not as bad as you think. Median nursing salary in England = 23000 pounds = 32300 usd. So the median amazon warehouse worker makes 82.5% of what the median nurse makes in the U.K. Is that really so bad?
A lot of people here have preconceived notions about the living conditions of non-coastal areas and, to be frank, it gets old. OP is correct to lecture people because they are completely fucking correct in most cases.
I made that amount when I was in college, in the DC area, and most certainly survived just fine. Had I lived more rural in an area where entry level homes are <200k and not 600k+, that would of gone much farther.
And the banjo-playing is mostly a joke, especially in Texas. That being said, as an avid hiker, I spend a significant chunk of my time in places best labeled as "Nowhere, really".
Show me one person in this country with two kids who makes $14/hr and doesn't feel like they're struggling. College is easy, I survived on <$9/hr in college but you don't see me pretending that what is supportive of a college lifestyle and what is supportive of normal people with normal lives are the same thing.
>Had I lived more rural in an area where entry level homes are <200k and not 600k+, that would of gone much farther.
It would've gone a bit further but certainly not 'much.'
>That being said, as an avid hiker, I spend a significant chunk of my time in places best labeled as "Nowhere, really".
Somehow I think even you realize that using 'I hike' as a proxy for 'I have familiarity with rural areas' is pretty lame.
Of course, a decent house in that area runs $80-100k, whereas the same house in the area I live outside of Boston would cost $400k, and you couldn't buy a property with an equivalent amount of land attached at any price in the Bay area.
My son is making about $30K a year ($2000 a month) and I helped him do his budget so I know what his expenses are:
Rent - $600
Car note - $300
Car Insurance - $250
Utilities - $350
That leaves him about $500 a month for "everything else".
Yes that puts him on the edge and thanks to the ACA he's still covered under our insurance until he turns 26 and if he needs a car repair we help him.
Two conclusions:
I think we should have universal health care as a nation.
If we had better mass transit, people wouldn't need cars and it would make finding a job easier.
According to the gross up calculator at psycheckcity.com he would need to make around $16.50/hour or $34000 a year to have enough cushion for things that happen. Strangely enough, that was also the salary I needed 20 years ago before I could make it on my own without asking my parents for help. I made that my first year out of college as a computer operator.
This is in metro Atlanta not podunk nowhere USA.
And if you want good versions of these things, you're more likely to find them in coastal urban cities, where basic cost of living (food and housing) is extremely high.
Remarking that "oh they'll be fine over there" when people are fleeing there for better resources is consigning a segment of our population to a permanent underclass status.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-s...
You've got to get somewhere around 30-40 miles out of the city to buy a house on $14 an hour (assuming the 20% of income rule of thumb).
Kivas are nice and all, but they can't pick and they definitely can't stow. They could probably move pallets, but couldn't palletize, and having them run around the facilities at the necessary speed dragging a train of pallets would be a safety hazard.
They are really good at reading QR codes and turning at 90 degree angles, though.
There are places in India where they pay 100 men pennies to dig a trench. Sure, they could buy a machine so 1 person could do the work of 100, but if the machine costs 100k and the guy who is trained to operate it makes 10 an hour, the payoff time is too long to justify. If the guys digging the trench demand 5 an hour, the barrier to the investment goes down significantly.
This is why, if a 15 dollar minimum wage is passed nation wide, you will never order from a person at McDonald's again... and any niche restaurant that does use people will cost significantly more. A large business like McDonalds benefits from this because they can absorb the cost. A small business can't, so big corporation's have less competition and can make even larger profits because they have less downward pressure on their prices.
With enough money, they could probably reduce the amount of warehouse workers needed.
Other facility jobs, like picking and stowing, run up against vision and fine motor skill problems that turn out to be really difficult for AI and robotics to solve. They'll be automated eventually, but I don't think it will be soon. I might be wrong, though.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-robots-ikea/fla...
Every-time I pay them, I feel a sense of guilt/discomfort. 2k / month is really hard to live on in the bay area, especially when you have kids. I want to pay them more, but its all I can afford with my current salary.
By "Work" they are learning and teaching each other JavaScript (Node, React, ReactNative, Vue, Redux, GraphQL) and building out some of my ideas. Hopefully they can find a job as a software engineer soon, it would change their lives permanently for the better!
You're doing incredible work though. You're allowing them to essentially apprenticeship with you to learn software development. Bravo sir
How is it manipulative to report on median pay for a company? This is as straightforwardly reported as possible, and not at all click-baity or manipulative. We shouldn't be afraid of basic facts that actually capture important information in an objective way. It's not a misleading number, it provides real insights into Amazon.
Amazon, right along with other big players are not paying people well enough to make it.
Increasing numbers of them don't, and that costs all of us while eroding demand needed for the economy to grow and perform for all of us.
In a very real sense, failure to fund a better, more equitable, just standard of living means it won't exist at all.
Flat out, it is unacceptable to make billions while a majority are on public assistance.
There are two kinds of demand:
The kind I wrote to here is backed by available, liquid dollars. Amazon, and others, paying people effectively less than it costs them to exist and work, very sharply impacts this kind of demand. An easy example can be seen with entertainment. For most people, entertainment dollars are largely fixed. That fixed amount is very low, when few dollars are available, not dedicated to basic needs.
The other kind of demand is not backed by liquid dollars, and it's out there, growing, but not a meaningful part of any markets available to service it. That kind of demand is growing in the USA, with a clear majority of people now experiencing it.
There aren't any free lunches here. When we don't pay people enough to fund reasonable, modest lives, we are basically requiring everyone else to subsidize their labor, and that cost gets distributed nationwide.
If those people were businesses, they would have shut down by now. Since they are people, that would mean dying basically, and we prevent that with some safety net type spending and assistance.
Should those programs be a part of Amazon and others business model?
I feel they should not as that was never the intent. Those using them that way are doing all of us more harm than good too.
says E1-E3 are for basic training and first assignment, and E4 is $25k/yr. Plus I suppose (not sure) that military has much better health insurance (and other benefits, like food and maybe housing?) than Amazon warehouse employees
Who thinks this? I don't know any adult who is that naive.
> People are paid what the market will bear.
In many industries, the employer side of the market is vastly more powerful than the employee. The employer can just pass on an employee asking for too much money; an employee may be facing weeks without a job, which is difficult for most people to afford.
In those situations, the market can bear quite a bit more than it has to, which is the reason minimum-wage requirements don't kill most industries.
> For places like East TN this is not a horrible wage, and you can live on it.
That's true if the government is protecting the employee with a safety nets, like welfare and ACA, and laws, like COBRA. A better-paid employee could save more money and provide their own safety net, as many high earners do with rainy-day accounts, investments, passive income, etc.
Because Amazon employees aren't necessarily saving enough to afford to build their own safety nets, taxpayers are effectively subsidizing Amazon.
> As a comparison, an entry-level position in the military, E1, makes less even when you account for allowances.
I'm not sure this is apples-to-apples because military benefits are substantial, and the most major downside to military service (the risk of being sent into armed combat) is very difficult to put into monetary terms.
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
If you have an argument against anything I've said (rather than condescension and a veiled insult), I'd be genuinely interested to know what it is.
I personally would advocate taking away the safety net for able individuals and instituting a basic income. I think I would solve some of the market issues we are seeing with low wages. This will become more prevalent as automating gets cheaper.
It's true that under capitalism, a laborer is only valued to the extent that their labor can be exploited to further the interest of capital, but it is incorrect to believe that this is the only possible system (it is not), or that it is somehow natural and correct (it is neither), or that the inherent value of Amazon's serfs is truly set by market forces (it is not) rather than the value of their own humanity.
Applauding Amazon or any multinational corporation for squeezing the maximum value out of workers is rather disgusting.
Most people do not define worth based on monetary cost; you are using a very narrow economic definition. If you can't get past that word, then please substitute "value", or "usefulness", or some other equivalent above.
Now, it should be noted that this only works when there are a multitude of buyers and sellers, but that problem is a different problem and should be recognized as such, instead of suggesting employers pay more than market rate, maybe we should be focusing our efforts on the real problem of monopsonies. Or if people are inherently "worth" something just for being, then I think it's more accurate to refer to that as "What are people entitled to" rather than "what are people worth" to avoid muddying up definitions.
If you ask someone if it was worth it to have a plumber fix a pipe, and they say 'no', what they're telling you is whether or not their time is worth more than the price of paying a plumber. If it's possible for someone to believe they are getting more value out of a transaction then they are paying into it, than how can value be defined by what they pay?
If market prices actually determined something's value, then you would never ask if hiring a plumber was 'worth it', because by definition the answer would be yes. After all, by definition the plumber is worth what you pay them.
But you do ask, because most people recognize that when they define 'value', they are referring to something external which the market can provide them. Winning or losing in a transaction only works if you believe the value of what you get can be different than what you pay.
I dislike tautological definitions because they're not useful and they don't provide any new information. The claim that OP was trying to make was "what most people think of as value (for example, 'how much money an employee makes a company') does not correlate to pay." That's an interesting claim because by default people who are operating under principles of fairness might assume otherwise.
To say 'everyone is payed what they're worth by definition because what they're worth is what we pay them' supplies no information to anyone and is not an interesting claim to make. It's technically self-consistent, but brings nothing new to the discussion.
But it does bother me when workers are pitted against one another, like you pitting underpaid warehouse workers against the military. We see this a lot. Fast food workers should try to negotiate for higher pay because teachers make X. Etc etc. If you think military pay is too low, then argue for higher military pay.
Average/mean is disproportionately influenced by a small number of highly paid employees.
In this case, the article is clearly demonstrating that despite Amazon's commanding market share, incredible wealth, and the largess bestowed upon their executives, some of their workforce is so poorly paid that they may not even make a living wage.
I would disagree with that. Imagine this dataset of salaries:
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10]
You have around half employees being paid like shit (1) and half being paid well (10), but the median will show a good salary (10).
>In Seattle, Amazon’s more than 45,000 employees are paid an average of more than $110,000, according to an analysis of individual worker data posted to job review site Glassdoor. The median, or midpoint, of Amazon’s 566,000 individual employee salaries worldwide stood far lower.
Granted, we are using average data from Glassdoor, whereas Amazon is self-reporting the median salary information. Plus, Amazon has part-time workers whose wages it annualizes to include the dataset. This makes me wonder though, are they counting the benefits that those workers are not receiving due to their lower number of hours?
Seattletimes.com
Don't they like Amazon out there or did the author fail an interview for Amazon or something?
Is that pretty typical for a person who is say, in the richest 5-100 people in the world to spend on security? What kind of protection does that buy?
100 * 2 * 16 * 365 = $1.16 million
Count in that they need travel, food and hotels along with Bezos, and it’s not unreasonable or excessive.
Probably includes private air travel and some bodyguards.
Source on median salary: https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Registered_Nurse_(R...
Many are not even making that much.
I got the $14 per hour figure from the annual income reported as the median assuming 2080 work hours per year.
No idea if they operate in Brazil, but using it as an example, USD $28,446 in Brazil is a great salary.
If they pay, say, R$ 30,000.00/year, I doubt they'd report anything other than the direct conversion to USD.
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N...
I can only imagine it shunts the median up a long way.
Full time employees, at any position, should at least be paid a living wage commensurate to the local standard of living.
I'm not saying that to congratulate Amazon, I'm pointing out that there are more people involved than Amazon shareholders and employees, people who apparently put low prices ahead of any concerns they have over compensation at Amazon.
The equality of outcome controlled by the Government -- to even think about this concept is scary. This shit will def end with totalitarianism.
On the other hand, I think the richest country in the world shouldn't have people starving on the street and without basic healthcare. We already know how to square that circle.
1. Universal Healthcare that's not tied to the employer.
2. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, make more people eligible, and make it easier for people to get it during the year to supplement their wages instead of at tax refund time. why go through the circuitous route of forcing companies to pay above market rates and raising prices on everyone? Just give working people money.
3. Better mass transportation to make getting to a job easier without having to have a car.
4. Subsidize child care. If conservatives truly believe in protecting life, caring about children means caring about the born - not just the unborn.
Richest country in the world? That’s quite arguable and very common mistake. It’s not fair to compare US to countries with negative GPD (this sentence is sarcastic, not literal).
I have been unfortunate enough to to leave in a state built on top of socialist agenda. Where the concept is extremely fragile. Once you increase the government’s role in lives of ordinary people (which sounds great in theory! As per Marx’s and Lenin’s paperwork) you are risking of turning the whole country into the ordinary DMV Office (one we all hate an avoid) wherever you go. That’s a nightmare that’s not that far from reality if we jump collectively on this socialist bandwagon.
As far as the DMV office that seems like one of the better run places. You go in, fill out paperwork, they give you a ticket, and you sit in the waiting room and when your number is called, you do an eye test, take a picture, swipe your card and you are in an out.