I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.
When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.
Therefore, making lower-paying jobs illegal just because their salary falls below an arbitrary threshold only stops or hinders those jobs from being created, at the expense of higher unemployment rates.
I'm sure people working on shitty minimum wage jobs would not stay in the same minimum wage job if there were better higher-paying alternatives available to them. If they have no better alternatives than those jobs I don't understand how eliminating them by arbitrarily raising the minimum legal salary limit would leave them better off.
Many of their candidates lost to moderate dems because most dems are not so different from moderate repubs on most issues, save a few. In any case, they are not willing to go too far from orthodoxy.
Now, in general i agree these cos. should pay their contract and temps better, but I’d rather he use other tactics.
I’m sure Trump isn’t keen on any government agency regulating amazon.
Besides, it’s just a political stunt. This bill will never be passed, it’s just calling attention to the problem.
>When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.
Except that the content of the bill is quite broad and definitely doesn't "torture a combination of such factors" to target Amazon. It will impact Amazon but it will also impact all of Amazon's competitors too, and companies completely outside of the sector. The dubiousness of your 'path of light and reason' aside, it seems quite irrational to decry a bill for its name and not its content.
Of course, that's purely hypothetical. There's no way this bill is going to pass, not with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress.
Wal-mart would actually be impacted much more than Amazon as they employ 5x the workforce, and has arguably been the larger target of such legislation considering the majority of their workforce relies on government subsides to make ends meet.
Sorry, but what you're advocating for a is a barrier towards fixing these problems.
If the legislature only talks in terms of abstract situations, all of it will feel theoretical and will be far less likely to spur real action. On the other hand, if you have concrete examples of problems, that makes the problems feel real. Real problems motivate real action.
Rest assured, whatever bill Sanders writes will target the broad problem at all companies, because he's forbidden from writing a law that would only target Amazon explicitly.
In the next Census, Madison, WI (and/or Dane County) is expected to hit some of those same limits. All sorts of things that were never intended will start applying.
I don't agree. It's been done before, many times, and to the benefit of the people. Look at what was done with JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Rockefeller as an individual person, multiple Railroad companies and trusts to start.
I personally would like to work toward a culture that doesn't require law and, barring that, law that peacefully respects a person's decision to revoke consent to be governed at any moment's notice.
Blanket consent for government isn't realistic or sustainable. And even if it were, it isn't consent without being free to revoke it.
Even anarchy is itself a rule about how people interact; even an anarchist group will have expected processes -- maybe they're ad-hoc, but rules nonetheless.
And I expect you think you should still be privileged to the benefits of the governed society although you refuse the agreement: easy access to goods/services, and a market for your own. Again, why should the other people make that allowance for you when you reject the group?
Also, AMZN built their empire by exploiting interstate sales tax loopholes to undercut brick and mortar competitors. Why shouldn't their representation under the "rule of law" be proportionately undercut?
This seems like a rather blatant false dichotomy.
Antitrust law applies to the entire economy (except Major League Baseball and a few other bad cases).
Even good bills need public support and public support needs good marketing. Don’t confuse what’s on the label with what’s inside the tin.
In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is unconstitutional.
Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn’t exactly sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon there is a problem, but that isn’t likely.
Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem. Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.
Shouldn’t lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen loopholes? I don’t think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re-evaluated.
I'm not sure how that makes Walmart a villain in the current discussion. Target takes in about $5B revenue from sales under SNAP, Aldi about $4.5B, and Kroger just under $4B. Companies who serve SNAP recipients should be lauded not vilified, IMO. They're serving a generally underserved constituency.
Trying to pretend this is about Wal-Mart selling food, and not the wages they pay is incredibly dishonest.
Literally the post to which I replied complained about "simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem". It seems that someone is upset about that.
Again, pretending the reason people are upset is because they're selling food, and not because Wal-Mart is requiring you and I to subsidize their labor costs, is incredibly dishonest.
That's not a labor subsidy, and if it was the simple fix would be to make employed people categorically ineligible for federal benefits—we don't do that, because we know it's not a wage subsidy, and all the hyperventilating about it being a wage subsidy is (at least on the part of public officials and other people that know anything about policy) dishonest grandstanding.
(Now, work requirements in benefit programs do make them wage subsidies, because then the threat is “work at whatever job will have you or lose public benefits in addition to the marginal benefit of pay”; that's easily solved by removing such requirements.)
No, it's not, it's an anti-subsidy, because money is taken away from workers for getting paid by an employer, increasing the amount an employer needs to pay.
> because Wal-Mart is not having to pay their workers a living wage
WalMart wouldn't have to pay a living wage without it, either. Public assistance programs (aside from work requirements and the cost of lost benefits from failure to comply) actually increase market clearing wages, they don't decrease them.
> because they can simply tell their workers to sign up for public assistance
The people involved can sign up for public assistance with or without working for WalMart; further, they lose benefits due to mean testing based on outside income, which means WalMart has to give them >$1 of take home pay to get labor they would be willing to trade for $1 of net income increase.
If that's the case then I fail to see how a particular employer is responsible for that problem. I mean, if the economy is so depressed in a region that the absolute best some job seekers are able to get is a job that requires them to remain on public assistance then obviously the employer isn't to blame for the region's economy. In fact, that employer is already offering the very best jobs available in that region. Where does it make any sense to go after them instead of doing something to fix the economy and improve the lives and conditions available to those workers?
Again consider the fact that Walmart as a national grocer is able to milk the SNAP program on a national level to the tune of $14B/year.
That enables them to move into a depressed area and set up shop, even at a loss, which in turn allows them to shutter the existing market incumbent(s).
With the mom & pops gone and/or employee owned grocer now gone only Walmart is left.
It’s using tax payer funds to out compete competition, which allows Walmart to further depress wages.
It’s not like this behavior is all theoretical. In practice Walmart takes taxpayer money and turns around and lobbies congress to increase SNAP benefits so they can keep lining their pockets. Walmart takes losses in certain regions to put others out of business to become sole grocer. These losses are in part balanced and paid for by tax payer dollars at the national level.
In many ways Walmart is directly responsible for lack of competition and closed stores, and despite the desperate attempt to say that is free market...it’s not free market when 1 company is subsidized by taxpayer money and the loser isn’t.
You are right effort should be made into improving/fixing the economy and lives of workers...getting rid of corporate welfare for certain businesses is part of that.
Others in this thread have pointed out that "milk the SNAP" program is a very disingenuous and deceitful statement. SNAP is a wellfare program that subsidizes food purchases and both wallmart and amazon sell groceries, and somehow people like you spin the fact that supermarkets sell groceries to sound like these companies are stealing money from the government at the expense of poor people.
And even then what's your point? Either supermakets sell food to underpriviledged people or they don't, and I really doubt that anyone would advocate that poor people should be barred from supermarkets where regular people shop.
Walmart is stealing...it’s not like Walmart happens on $14B in SNAP benefits a year. It not a coincidence Walmart has more employees receiving SNAP benefits than any other employer.
Is it not disengenious and deceitful that you are pretending Walmart just so happens to sell groceries and benefit from SNAP in the amount of $14B/year vs acknowledge walmart are one of the largest drivers of the SNAP program?
Nothing about having Walmart reimburse taxpayers for their employees that receive SNAP Bars SNAP recipients from shopping at Walmart, so the point you are making is disengenious and deceitful...as if Walmart had to payback taxpayer funds their employees receive that has anything to do with Walmart revenue from SNAP benefits.
Let’s say there was a major arms dealer who was making $14B/year in government contracts so long as the US War of Terror continued...is there a problem in your mind if that same company successfully lobbied every year to keep the war on terror going and maybe even paid a little of the revenue from US contracts to fund terror groups? You know like a corporation who is benefiting from suppressed wages with corporate welfare, and then lobbying for said corporate welfare and using its power as an employer to surpress wages giving rise to the need for said welfare
1. Walmart sells things to SNAP recipients. This is something that is perfectly fine, as I downloaded the MA.csv listing of food vendors who accept SNAP and it seems like it's damn near everyone, including tiny little convenience stores. That's a level playing field, and the fact that Walmart gets money from SNAP is no more interesting than the fact that they get money from American Express. In particular, this is not stealing; this is selling.
2. Walmart employees being recipients of government support programs. It's fine to object to this, but I don't see it in any way as related to #1. Presumably, you would object to any other employer who doesn't sell food (and therefore doesn't take SNAP) paying their full-time employees at a level that permits them to qualify for and accept SNAP benefits. Could you confirm/deny that?
3. Walmart lobbying for the preservation / expansion of SNAP program. It's also fine to object to this, though I see the case for their lobbying to be much more strongly to preserve the #1 status quo than the #2 status quo.
2. We agree there is a difference between accepting SNAP and having employees on SNAP, but in Walmart’s case they are in fact related and part of the whole picture. After all Walmart leads both categories they make more money directly from SNAP than any other business and they have more employees on SNAP than any other business.
3. Again lobbying for SNAP isn’t a problem, except it is part of the overall picture.
Not sure I can highlight, what is bad corporate behavior anymore than this: Walmart with the left had takes $14B in SNAP annually, with the right hand they push more employees onto SNAP than any other employer, and instead of taking any of the $14B in SNAP revenue and increasing wages to get employees off SNAP or through legislation having to reimburse taxpayers, Almaty is taking those funds to lobby Washington to increase the overall budget of SNAP to increase their taxpayer profits and lower the SNAP eligibility to get more employees on SNAP.
But again you equate Walmart taking SNAP to Walmart taking AmEx, you also believe Walmart should be championed for catering to an underserved segment of society. This conversation can’t really go any further in good faith.
I fail to see how they're not. Wal-Mart is entirely, 10,000% responsible for how much they pay their workers.
"I mean, if the economy is so depressed in a region that the absolute best some job seekers are able to get is a job that requires them to remain on public assistance then obviously the employer isn't to blame for the region's economy."
That employer, especially when they are one of the largest companies in the nation, is entirely to blame for how much they pay their workers.
"Where does it make any sense to go after them instead of doing something to fix the economy and improve the lives and conditions available to those workers?"
Who says you can't do both? But why on earth does it seem acceptable that the job conditions are based on how good the economy is? Why is it suddenly acceptable to treat your workers like crap if some GDP number goes down by a quarter of a point?
Yes, but the public is largely responsible for how little of what they allocate to pay gets to employees, by way of the fact that wages are taxed higher than regular income (because payroll taxes) which in turn is taxed higher than capital gains, which in turn are taxed higher than most unearned generational wealth transfer (thanks to the generous nontaxed allowances for gifts and inheritances.)
Tax income as income and at the same overall tax level, very few WalMart employees would need public assistance and employers would have a lot less incentive to replace employees that must be purchased with supertaxed wages with minimally-tax-burdened capital investments.
Right now, the tax rate on any kind of income varies inversely with the wealth of the people who tend to have that kind of income.
That's highly debatable. Does "attainder" as used in the constitution apply to corporations? To a large extent that depends on whether corporations are persons in the context of that prohibition, but there are other concerns as well. You're assuming that the answer to all such questions can be answered in favor of corporations, but that's hardly settled.
Imagine a single mom who wants to be home when her kids get home from school. She's working part time, and not making enough to feed her family. Who is responsible for her shortfall?
In a community where Walmart is a big employer, many people may work part time and one consequence of that is that more people have jobs. Walmart benefits from that but so do those employees, even when they don't make enough to eat well.
Sure, the system can obviously be manipulated. Yes, people (and company leaders) make bad choices. Who decides who pays?
In the short term elected representatives. In the long-term their voters as they re-elect them, or not, to office.
On the broader point, I think it's highly debatable whether bills should target individual companies. Certainly the arguments against bills of attainder do not apply, because corporations are not people and any doctrine to the contrary is loathsome. They are already given every right that people have, in addition to being immortal and shielded from full liability. The bargain under which they are even allowed to exist has become very one-sided since the abandonment of specific time-limited charters, so allowing them to be regulated individually seems like the least we could do to even the scales.
Much easier solution is to simply increase minimum wage as required, and probably set it at the locale level (more in the urban/high-cost areas and less in the rural/low-cost areas).
Such specific targeting simply invites companies to game the system.
That's exactly what the STOP BEZOS bill does, Amazon isn't uniquely effected by it.
Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.
The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people.
Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and that's what's happening here.
Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to maximize profits.
If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected.
which is why taxation needs to be progressive. The rich who have their wealth created by using other people needs to pay a larger proportion of the tax burden to make society more comfortable for everybody. The idea is that with added infrastructure and education and healthcare paid for by the higher taxes, the poor will eventually not be forced into the position of having to slave away.
I see so many discussions in US politics that go around and around and bend over backwards to never, ever propose the extremely simple and obvious solution....
(...drum roll...)
Companies simply lower profits.
Conditions for the workers go up with better conditions & higher pay. The prices of products and services need not change, so consumers are not worse off.
It appears that what I'm saying is tantamount to blasphemy in the US, nobody is even willing to suggest lowering corporate profits as one possible option with associated pros and cons.
I don't know all the ins and outs, but I believe public trading and shareholders are to blame here.
And again - the middle to upper middle class people who rely on returns from their investments in companies to support their standard of living think the company-shareholder relationship is entirely healthy.
A shareholder provides no value to the good or service being delivered, they exist only to make profit off a transaction they have no stake in.
My views here could be totally off. I welcome discussion on the topic.
As it is applied in modern practice, a corporate officer merely has to articulate a rationale of why his/her actions benefit the shareholders. For example, deciding to double every worker's salary, on the basis that it would improve morale and productivity, could be seen as ultimately benefiting shareholders, even if it tanks profits and dividends in the short-term.
Pretty much the only way you could actually get the Dodge v Ford case invoked in precedent is to have someone on the stand admit that he/she was trying to screw over shareholders (which is basically what Henry Ford did, and why he lost the case), which should be impossible if that person has competent representation.
Ultimately, it's pro-business elite politics that have created that situation. IIRC, corporations, like copyrights, exist to serve the public good. If rapacious exploitation to achieve maximum profit is against the public good, the corporations that engage in such behavior should be either reigned in or destroyed using the legal system.
Unfortunately, like copyrights, corporate law has been twisted an corrupted into something that doesn't serve the public good anymore.
To short sellers of Tesla stock, maximum value would be?
> As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years.
There was no society-level decision made to endorse this kind of treatment.
The operations of the market, with its vast information asymmetries, does not amount to a "decision" to endorse the particular behaviors of its participants. And even if Amazon's labor practices have been reported somewhere, they haven't been reported everywhere, and it's not like Amazon is up front with its customers about its shoddy treatment of its workers.
I have a lot of confidence that many of Amazon's labor practices would be banned if they were put up for a straight-up national referendum.
Rather than passively supporting Amazon because it's the most convenient or cheapest option, investigate why they might be able to offer their service at a rate other companies in their space can't.
I don't believe it's right to assume or enforce that companies disclose all of their business practices to their customers. Those practices should be audited by a regulatory body to assess whether they're humane or ethical.
> I have a lot of confidence that many of Amazon's labor practices would be banned if they were put up for a straight-up national referendum.
On this, I'm sure you're right. Which leads me to an interesting question:
Assuming: 1) There are companies engaging in activity the majority of their potential customers would find immoral 2) One of these companies is able to provide a superior product or service at a reduced rate to their competitors 3) Information about these immoral practices is available to those customers (though they have to seek it out)
Why do people still support the company? Shouldn't people suspect something is fishy with that company's offering?
My assumption to begin with is that consumers were turning a blind eye in order to keep using the service. That may not be the case.
Maybe it's that they don't have the time or capacity to evaluate this for themselves (especially for the number of businesses we all depend on daily). Maybe it's a tragedy of the commons.
How can we fix this?
> My assumption to begin with is that consumers were turning a blind eye in order to keep using the service. That may not be the case.
I think a lot of people do not have the kind of personalities that drive them to get to the bottom of things. They didn't turn a blind eye, they just never looked beyond the surface in the first place. If pressed to explain how Amazon does what it does, they'll probably hand-wave that they're a tech company that uses magic computer innovation to out-compete old-fashioned dinosaurs.
> How can we fix this?
I don't know, but probably the first step is a lot of awareness-raising in ways that can emotionally grab the attention of the common man. Closely related is to also raise awareness of more ethical competitors, like Costco and others.
The second step is to somehow defeat the layers of pro-business propaganda and political polarization it's associated with in order to motivate real legislative action. That's a problem I have no idea how to solve.
Few want to consider the more likely harsh truth: The overall value produced by some low-skilled workers may be insufficient to justify even minimum wage.
If that's the case, then no amount of legislation around working conditions will help since it makes more economic sense for companies to invest in automation than human capital.
Because we live in this fantasy land of the [dead] 'American Dream', where if you work hard, absolutely bust your ass and kill yourself for 70 years, you'll get to be Jeff Bezos too. If you're complaining about your job, just get a new one, or pull your boot straps up and accept it, it's that easy. We're constantly told to suck it up and accept it. We're constantly told that these businesses are job creators and should be praised for it and when we criticize them, it's not their fault, it's the workers. We don't criticize because we can lose our job and it's extremely easy to get into homelessness now, or default on the enormous amounts of credit everyone has. The propaganda and indoctrination start from birth and is built into society. The atmosphere changed from workers having control, to businesses having full control. Businesses can't exist without workers, so workers should have control. Anyone who says workers shouldn't have control is a shareholder or business owner.
To change things will take a lot of work, and possibly a major fast economic decline. People have ignored the economic decline of the working class since the late 60's, early 70's. Mainstream media and newspapers work to suppress any workers movements and tell you how great everything is (Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent goes over how this works).
This never has and never will be the American Dream. The American Dream isn't a rags to riches fairy tale. The American Dream is about inter-generational class mobility. If you bust your tail all your life, you can raise your children's quality of life to a higher standard than your own.
That's all its ever been and its alive and well today.
Nope. You're just proving my point too. Thanks.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...
> An American born to a household in the bottom 20% of earnings, for instance, only has a 7.8% chance of reaching the top 20% when they grow up.
Again, this article is about intra-generational mobility. The American Dream is about inter-generational mobility.
If you need another source that social mobility is 'poor' in the USA [1]
[1] http://www.poverty.ac.uk/report-usa-inequality-social-mobili...
You're making that claim without any evidence to back it up.
When you reduce people to numbers and abstract ideas, you can treat them pretty poorly and still sleep at night.
I have an online friend who used to work for an Amazon fulfillment center. I say "used to", because she got fired. For being sick. She got food poisoning one day and had to take a week off. When she got sick, she put in a request via MyLeave. Two or three months later, Amazon retroactively denied her request and fired her because she went negative on UPT. That's right, months. As far as she knew, everything was going well, and all of a sudden she was called into HR and unceremoniously dumped because Amazon decided months after the fact to deny her sick leave.
This is also a missing piece for many, many people in the U.S.
Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?
Your mistake was assuming that this is something that could be understood solely with "basic economics."
"Basic economics" is a horribly limited intellectual tool-set that will mislead you if you rely on it too heavily.
Yeah never understood that one either if i'm honest.
It's pretty depressing to see the same lack of empathy and critical thinking on hn.
No.
Abusers create an environment of fear where abused believe they have no choices. They separate people from their friends so they think no one cares about them. They convince their victim that no one else will want them.
They create an artificial sense that there is no way out. It’s absolutely not the case that abused people are abused because they have no other option.
Promoting the idea these people have no choices plays right into the abusers plans.
If Amazon is offering the very best jobs available to those workers, and Amazon actually complies with all laws and regulations, then I fail to see how is Amazon responsible for the worker's problems. It seems to me that the problem lies elsewhere, like how a regional economy managed to get so depressed to the point that no alternative job is available.
If the only job that's availanle to you is working in a sweatshop, does shutting the sweatshop down fixes anything?
In the media fantasy:
1. Amazon workers are so desperate for jobs they have no choice but to work for Amazon under prison-like conditions.
2. Amazon warehouse jobs are targeted at "left behind" workers who have no other options.
3. Amazon doesn't pay a living wage. Bezos' luxurious lifestyle is subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
In the real world:
1. US unemployment is so low right now that even employers of unskilled labor are looking at severe shortages. See the severe labor shortage in retail but also the real wage pressure across the board.
2. Amazon warehouse jobs are highly sought after. Amazon is unusually generous towards its warehouse associates offering them full benefits including healthcare, retirement, and even equity. Many investors really, really want Amazon to offer benefits comparable to their warehouse competitors (ie no benefits) but Bezos refuses to cut benefits for his unskilled employees every year.
3. America's minimum wage is criminally low but even still Amazon pays well above the minimum wage.
All of this obvious to anybody who does even a tiny bit of research [1] but it's not obvious to people who want to be deceived and so they buy into this baseless narrative.
Again, this is not about Amazon, or even about workers, this is about a media-political complex in which there is zero accountability. Like most things, from Iraq to China to basic scientific theories like climate change, you'll have to learn to separate the American media-political narrative (which is a fantasy that exists only to justify extreme inequality and the mass-murder of foreign brown people) from the actual facts in the real world.
[1] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2017/08/08/amazon-benefit...
I've hear several conflicting reports on this - enough to understand that there is some variation and Amazon doesn't treat all workers the same way. That's why when one person reports inhuman behavior and another calls it bullshit, they're both right.
Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here.
If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.
If by "politicians" here you mean the one politician the article is discussing, Sen Sanders, you should know that he is for increasing the minimum wage. [1] Of course he needs other politicians and/or their voters to agree.
This corporate welfare angle he is currently attacking is just an attempt to point out the problem with a different argument. An argument that some people may be more receptive to. We've already agreed that we as a society will pay to support poor people. Corporations take advantage of this to lower their payroll costs. Whether they foot the bill for the government costs via corporate taxes or just pay a living wage in the first place is worth arguing about once we fisrst decide to stop letting them take advantage of people.
... which is a very good thing for low-wage workers. Because if corporations would not benefit from these "no benefits" savings, then these corporations will be more likely to fire these low-wage workers.
Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them?
This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.
Revised:
Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food stamps without housing.
In order for the not working stipulation to work, the social safety net would actually have to be expanded to cover housing as well, since I would much rather have a job where I can have housing and ramen every single meal than slightly better food but homeless.
But, having lived in a few different countries, I can tell you that if a loaf of bread costs 50c then left on its own the market will tend to pay only slightly more per day for unskilled work. People can live in a cardboard box but they have to eat.
> The welfare trap (or unemployment trap or poverty trap in British English) theory asserts that taxation and welfare systems can jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance because the withdrawal of means-tested benefits that comes with entering low-paid work causes there to be no significant increase in total income. An individual sees that the opportunity cost of returning to work is too great for too little a financial return, and this can create a perverse incentive to not work.
I have a different perspective on this:
Countries want people to have children - it's good for the country. However, people expect companies to support people's lifestyles (in exchange for work). With local companies, it makes sense for the company to want to support the people working there - they at least have a stake. Large companies are often global entities. As a result, they may have no stake in the people in certain countries - or even any countries.
Shouldn't be the country's people (through paid taxes) and government (through support programs) support the lifestyles of the people?
It's already gotten really hard for high school kids to find work. Raising minimum wage will just make that worse.
JD already has these in China - see Youtube
This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of working conditions between the different countries.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...
Between that and the use of contractors, unionization is very difficult to achieve.
It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.
I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.
Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.
But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.
One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.
The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.
Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.
Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.
[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states...
[2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...
You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.
Is there anything about Amazon being a corporation that really touches on this, as opposed to their simply being an employer? I feel like an analogy like this is of limited utility anyway. It's too easy to point out all the myriad ways that the existing system is different from feudalism, and it's unclear whether the negative aspects of feudalism continue to apply after having undergone such a radical transition.
> Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the employer to whom employees are bound.
I mean, isn't the point of feudalism actually the former -- that the public authority (the feudal lords) address the basic needs? It is much easier to switch to a different employer than it is to switch to a different public authority. So it seems like what you are advocating is a return to feudalism, rather than trying to remove it.
Lordship in a feudal system is a private property right (perhaps not freely tradeable because of the terms on which it was granted, but a property right nonetheless) [0], not a public position. (It exercised powers that current and even pre-feudal systems which had a concept of public authority associated with such authority, but it was not such an authority.)
[0] and while the lord/land relationship was granted from above, the lord/tenant relationship was in many feudal systems theoretically one of voluntary formation, though frequently, especially at the lowest levels, the subject of at least economic coercion.
1 - Let's target warehouses across the country for this, and raise the average cost of American production. You're right, Bernie. When we take down Amazon warehouses, as the big bogeyman, a litany of other businesses will also get dinged for this. Walmart, Target, FedEx, UPS, so-on. Shitty warehouse conditions and employee abuse is only a shock to you, and you only see Amazon as a big target for this, if you have never worked at or known someone who has worked at any low-wage factory work.
2 - Your point about food stamps is dead on. I have asked everyone I know how they feel about Amazon paying someone more just because they have 5 kids. Regardless of what work they perform or, their experience, usefulness, or quality that they do their job with. Accepting food stamps has very little do with your employer, and more to do with your job and financial obligations.
I can't see Bernie's perspective any more. The pie in the sky legislation that he proposes make me believe that he actually doesn't intend to win the presidency. He's just here to make loud noises.
This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums.
If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.
There is clear evidence that even something as simple as being black might prevent someone being rejected over a less skilled white applicant.
If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).
Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?
Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.
The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).
That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.
Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)
Who pays for the abortion?
If someone conceives children without permission multiple times, wouldn't be it cheaper just to kill them so as to prevent them from consuming resources without permission? or should we merely forcibly sterilize them?
I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount - because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people, they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people doing manual work.
The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc."
Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."
So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.
Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise.
And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.
I get what you're saying in the rest of your comment and I can confirm that it's easy to take less pay because of time constraints. Maybe "fair" isn't the right word exactly, but I will stand by it being voluntary.
No, if there was no government aid then people would be even more desperate for whatever pittance Amazon was offering; government aid increases wage demands two ways:
(1) moving people's starting income up increases wage demands because the declining marginal utility of money means that it takes more money to offset the disutility of performing servile labor.
(2) Means testing of aid programs (loss of benefits for outside income) means that it takes more than $1 of take home pay to net whatever the utility of $1 is, since some utility is lost to lost aid.
It's possible the total (not just wage) cost for labor would be higher without government aid, because the aid provides increased stability which makes it easier to hire and easier to retain workers, by enough to offset the higher wage demands. But that's, at best, a non-obvious conclusion.
Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they are "fair".
Some things are immoral and necessarily harmful, working for Amazon is not one of them.
What exactly is immoral about selling one's kidneys? Do individuals not own themselves? Are they capable of using or disposing of their own property as they see fit?
If your argument is that people who are forced into such decisions by economic necessity are not capable of making rational decisions, then what criteria do you use to determine if someone is able to make such decisions for themselves? If they fail to meet that bar... who makes those decisions for them?
Because it absolutely does not matter.
"then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain."
This makes a whole lot of assumptions about things, namely that the employee has the ability to go somewhere else, and that Amazon is entitled to treat their workers like shit.
"So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps."
And for a company of their size, with their resources, this is entirely unacceptable and pure evil.
It's as if you've willingly chosen to ignore over 100 years of collective bargaining, and the reasons for it, just to poorly make a point. If it were as facile as you make it out to be, we would have never had unions.
The article is a massive non-sequitor.
Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this.
(Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)
Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took
a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite
notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift
that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the
doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how
they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished
people for being ill. “It’s what Amazon have always done,” he
replied blandly.1. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book.
2. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc.
3. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay.
4. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me.
5. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things.
Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.)
$1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.
I grew up (and have moved back to) a very poor area. I've always been a nerd, but had some mental health issues after high school that led to the loss of my college scholarship and I spent several years afterward working traditional blue collar jobs - stocking, loading and unloading trucks, farm labor, construction, electrical, etc.
It was a rough time in my life, but I can honestly say I'm thankful for it. It played a big part in making me who I am, and it's always somewhat shocking to see how much the perception of those around me now who have never experienced such things differs from the reality of most of the country.
I can only assume that my own conception of how things are elsewhere in the world is similarly incorrect. I look forward to getting to the point in my my family and financial life where I can spend some time traveling and seeing how others live first-hand.
It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author’s book on low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so.
I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the warehouses, but it’s really hard to find a neutral source who doesn’t either have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind.
I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog-piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.
Harder to find solutions when you look at the complexity of a person’s life situation (I.e. medical bills, debt obligations, children, etc).