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Comment by _ptgt | Hacker News Reader

This is misguided. Your tax dollars aren't subsidizing Amazon -- they're subsidizing everyone who pays Amazon's wages or lower.

If the market value of labor has fallen below the threshold needed to live an acceptable (as judged by society) lifestyle, the burden of making up the difference should fall on society -- not arbitrarily on the companies which happen to do business in industries whose jobs require essentially no skills to perform.

Hypothetically speaking, if Google automated away 50M tedious and repetitive "white collar" jobs and those 50M workers are now competing for warehouse jobs, why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage while Google pays nothing for putting 50M workers out on the street?

The burden of caring for society's poor must fall on society. As it was society's technological innovation and policy decisions (i.e. globalization of labor markets) that has led to the destruction of unskilled labor's market value.

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Which market value of labor are you speaking of?

This seems to be a common fallacy, because people call it the 'labor market'. However I would claim that there is no labor market in the classical econ 101 sense.

A market needs to be transparent, have low transaction costs, be voluntary and have a sufficient number of buyers and sellers.

Otherwise you might still call it a market but it will not have any magical properties that the government shouldn't mess with.

Which of those isn't present in the labor market?

Being voluntary.

For the most part, having a job is a requirement to have a place to live and eat.

The problem is that there's no floor when it comes to the "market value" of low-skill work. Without a reasonable minimum wage, you'd have people living in terrible conditions because their choices of work are either no work at all, or a low-skill job that pays 50 cents per hour. People with no skills have zero leverage and the wages become a race to the bottom as people get more and more desperate.

> Hypothetically speaking, if Google automated away 50M tedious and repetitive "white collar" jobs and those 50M workers are now competing for warehouse jobs, why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage while Google pays nothing for putting 50M workers out on the street? [...] The burden of caring for society's poor must fall on society.

Society should assist the unemployed. I am in favor of UBI.

But if a job pays so little that you still need assistance to pay rent and eat, then why work?

In other words, if I had no skills, and "society" was giving me $25k/year to live off of, and some company is only willing to pay me $20k/year to do a job, I'd have zero incentive to take that job.

This of course assumes that you would lose the $25k/year assistance once you begin working.

A good point.

Another counter-point I thought of is that if the assistance does go away, and so people wouldn't have incentive to work for less than what UBI provides, it would incentivize companies to pay more.

It’s somewhat disconcerting when Amazon or its employees suggest the solution is regulation, when Amazon fights that very same regulation. It would lead me to believe that regulation might be a partial solution, but taking Amazon on directly is also necessary.

What social programs are Amazon (or any other employer of low-wage laborers for that matter) fighting against?

I stated regulations, not social programs. The citation below is for the Seattle "Amazon" tax to mitigate homelessness. In general, Amazon hasn't had to fight labor law regulations because they're aligned with employee abuse or avoiding taxes (employee misclassification, wage theft of fulfillment staff, etc) but efforts to change that are in progress.

https://www.thenation.com/article/lessons-death-seattles-ama...

The value of labour has fallen because of a systematic dismantling of any sort of apparatus for preserving it's value. Amazon can fire 1, 10, 50, 1000 workers. They can't fire a union of every FC worker in the country. The value is only low because the field is so tilted in favour of capital.

> why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage

because if they don't then their warehouses get shutdown and anyone they try to bring in faces large men with bats.

and if you don't like that future, then start protecting unions before it turns into riots again.

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