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.
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.
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
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.