Bernie out-marketing AMZN is pretty funny.
I don't think anyone deserves to be made fun of, full stop.
Grown-up criticism is fine.
Jeff Bezos has to respect the law or face a series of consequences up to imprisonment. We all know he is going to respect the law like we all do. It is mean spirited to write a (potential) law that disrespects him directly. He can't really respond to that.
Sanders should have stuck to calling him names in a speech, or informally calling it the Bezos' Act. That is just discussion and fair game. This type of formal embedding is unpleasant at a deeper level to no-one's benefit. We can do without that in politics, thankyouverymuch.
do you disagree with my understanding of the definition, or are you implying that jeff bezos is more powerful than a US senator who made a decent run for the presidency and is acting in his official capacity as such?
In a world where wealth distribution was flatter, and the richest person alive had access to like $100 million (a lot of money!), that would be one thing. The distribution is not so flat in our world, to put it mildly. Not to be pat, but money is power, and I think it's important to grasp the orders of magnitude at play here.
Mocking rich people for how they spend their money is a pleasant past time for humanity, not anything deplorable.
...then you're paying the wage your employees are willing to work for. Basic economics in action.
If you're making fun of this you need to take an econ 101 class.
More like have to work for. People working for minimum wage will work for whatever you pay them, because their choices are that or homelessness/dying of starvation which is no choice at all. Case in point, illegal immigrants work for less than minimum wage.
Adam Smith (writer of The Wealth of Nations, you might have heard of it) pointed out that forcing individuals to perform mundane and repetitious tasks would lead to an ignorant, dissatisfied work force. For this reason he advanced the revolutionary belief that governments had an obligation to provide education to workers.
I think that when you get payed $7.25 an hour you have to work so many hours that there's no way you have spare time to educate yourself to get out of that situation.
Amazon is an example of capitalism gone a tad bit too far. The market is only self correcting to a certain point.
It's great that Amazon (not only Bezos, but all the stakeholders that agreed with this step) is acknowledging that people deserve a decent pay.
Which is both a good thing for workers and something that makes sense for Amazon to provide. Amazon, believe it or not, doesn't actually want to hire and deal with workers who perceive themselves as perpetually and inevitably poor. They want to hire hardworking, ambitious people who want to move on to bigger and better things. Positioning themselves as a way up for hardworking, ambitious people who haven't developed marketable skills yet puts them in a position to benefit from the labor of hardworking, ambitious people, who are generally the most valuable people to employ.
The notion of minimum wage jobs as a stopgap that allows people to support themselves just long enough to improve their future earning prospects, as you point out, doesn't make sense--unless those people have the ability to improve their future earning prospects. Amazon is one of the very few employers, then, for whom it does make sense.
Ironically, Sanders and Amazon's other critics would probably much rather that Amazon pay people just enough money to spend their entire lives working in a warehouse for minimum wage than for Amazon to provide this education benefit. That's because someone who spends a year or two working at an Amazon warehouse, takes advantage of the education benefit, and transitions into a higher earning job is not going to believe Sanders' demagoguery.
Apart from that: do not think that I care about the party you're on and which political person you're against. I live thousands of miles away from your country. I only care about the idea. And the idea of getting payed $7.25 in the US seems like a preposterous way of life.
But I don't have the illusion I'm able to change your mind overhere, so I'll stop wasting my time with it. I believe in the free market, but without certain rules (like a reasonable minimum income) people and organisations are able to take advantage in a way that gets out of balance which the free market won't ever get the chance to ever fix.
Almost nobody who goes to work for a minimum wage job can afford to say "it's okay, I will find a better, high paying job later".
"Basic economy" is not an argument.
But I don't think it is in anyway moral that a company pay their employee so less that they need public benefit to be able to survive.
People are willing to work for pennies. Just look at India. If you want to turn USA into a third word country with high levels of income inequality that’s how you do it.
Have some empathy. Otherwise the peasants will revolt, and they have guns.
Wal-Mart is the company that would be impacted the most by this legislation.
"I've got a bill with your name on it."
It is literally named after the founder of Amazon.
CEOs of large public companies have to take public heat, by name, quite often. It's a huge part of their job; otherwise they'd be COOs.
I wasn't aware staying with a particular employer was compulsory.
And if you get sick, or you get in a car accident, or there's a fire in your apartment, or anything happens, and it's all over. the house of cards all falls down and you are left with nothing, but you can't think of that, because you are too busy trying to spend every waking moment to find a way out of the miserable job that is literally breaking your body in ways that will impact you for the rest of your life. And the real kicker? You consider yourself lucky. Because you had a friend a few months ago that got fired because of his drinking problem and now is homeless and has literally nothing, and you are so happy that you at least don't have that to deal with.
It may not be "compulsory" in that someone is holding a literal gun to their head, but it's compulsory in a lot of cases by the fact that the workers have literally no other choice. They can either stay at their job that is barely keeping them alive, or they can quit and lose what little they have (a roof over their heads, and food).
I was in that position, I ended up getting fired from that minimum wage job, and by sheer luck it was the same day I had gotten another job, i was going to start working 1st shift (overnights), and luckily they were okay with bumping up my hours to 30 so I could spend my now free days to look for a second job again. I eventually stumbled into a job that paid me $10 an hour to write html and style emails to match what a designer made, and I worked on that during my overnight job until I saved up enough money and vacation days to pivot from there into a job where I was paid about $15 an hour, and from there I was finally able to save a little and get out of the hell I was in.
I have my feelings about amazon, but I will say that for a lot of people I'm sure this raise is literally their savior. And anyone that is against this, especially because they feel amazon is doing it for the "wrong reasons", need to look at the positive impact this is going to have in these peoples lives. Because this is going to get a significant number of people back on their feet, and turn them from slaves just trying to survive, to productive members of society.
Nope. This idea gets bandied about all the time. How is missing a paycheck for 1 week going to result in homelessness?
* having to ration your food out, or just go hungry. After all, they say humans can go something like a week without food right? You can handle that.
* not being able to travel because you don't have money to pay for gas or any other kind of transportation. And it's not like you have the time to walk to the store between your 2 jobs since it's almost 30 minutes away walking, which is better than the bank which can be an hour away. And that's assuming the hours of operation let you go outside of your day or night job.
* losing your phone plan, which cuts you off from the internet and the world in a lot of ways, which in turn makes it much more expensive to apply for jobs (you have to go to a local library for internet, because all applications require online access now), manage what little money you have (no online banking, no paying bills online, no ability to cash checks from your phone, now you are going into the bank), and more.
* resorting to theft to get enough money to pay for the above things, which then does risk you getting caught and losing everything.
And every day you don't pay your rent or your bills brings you one day closer to being kicked out, and if you do get kicked out it's all over, because without a few thousand dollars and a lot of luck you aren't ever going to get another apartment, and will have to resort to living in shitty motels which is much more expensive.
So yeah, you most likely won't lose your house or apartment from one missed payment, but you can absolutely lose your ability to get to any job, which means that you then lose all of your income, which means that you are now not just missing one month's rent, but the next few as well, and you can't move at that point because nobody will rent out a place to someone that doesn't pay their bills. Meanwhile you are getting those fun yellow pieces of paper taped to your door telling you just how deep in the hole you are, and how long you have to fix everything before it's really over.
How does that work, exactly? To produce this post I googled up the actual data for the state I live in, civilized area far from the coasts (near Chicago but not too close thankfully).
Hopefully this isn't too docs droppy but where I live any single adult making $1011.67 or less per month, or any pregnant woman or any under 18 year homeless kid making $3035.01 or less per month qualifies for the totally free medicaid. Its not like they cut you off at a penny over, there's a sliding scale.
Its actually much more complicated and for my 4 person household, we would get medical coverage totally for free if we make less than $2091.67 per month and my kids are completely free until we make more than $6275.01 per month, and if my wife got pregnant again she'd also be covered to the $6275 per month limit.
So... what kind of unemployment bennies do you guys get such that an unemployed soon to be homeless dude is making that much money? Actually, if you have that much income while you're unemployed (trust fund baby or whatever) how can you be homeless without a very expensive drug addiction or similar problem, if the average single apartment rent is about $700 around here?
I'm very sad to say that medicaid coverage in my state is not very good, but vastly better than my current corporate insurer; the copays and deductibles are so insane I'm considering signing up for medicaid and not working too hard on contract work next year. My kids would get better medical care, I'd get more time off, I have enough investments that I already make too much money for completely free medicaid without working at all...
I didn't actually even have any medical coverage at all at that point in my life. There was no reason to. If I got sick or injured to the point that I couldn't work, i'd lose everything anyway, so the worry of some extra medical bills didn't enter my mind, and I didn't exactly have a ton of free time, so I just never bothered to look into medicaid.
I also didn't look into unemployment, so I don't know what my options there were either, since I wasn't really ever unemployed at any point (luckily!)
I'm trying to show what it's like to have to juggle that kind of stuff, while looking for another job as a way to get across what it's like. That kind of stuff is why people don't report workplace issues, it's why unions don't get started, it's why people will do anything to keep the job they have, because the alternative is much much worse in a lot of cases. Not to mention the crushing blow to your morale when you have to use the few hundred dollars you managed to save up over the last few months, it feels like you are taking 2 steps backwards and none forwards, and it really hurts.
And while there are often ways out of each problem individually, the crushing pressure of all of them all building up at once and the feeling that you won't ever get out of it is just so much to handle. And even if there are ways out of it, nobody wants to help you, nobody wants to explain the process. Even at this point in my life, I would have to google what to do to even start the process of getting medicaid. And if I were back then and my phone had just been cut off, I wouldn't know how to even do that. If i'm being completely honest, at the time I thought medicaid was another term for medicare, but different (and in my mind, medicare was for old people, and still didn't cover everything). I knew there was something for poor people, but I had no idea if I would qualify, what i'd have to do to get it, and even what to look up.
For example taking your diagnostic testing example, I can pay cash on the barrel for an awful lot of testing before I reach my corporate deductible and copay levels which are also cash on the barrel just different form of accounting swindling.
Culturally "I'm gonna go medicaid" is very much like cord cutting, right now very few people are doing it, but in a couple years I think its going to be the majority.
Congrats to Senator Sanders for forcing Amazon’s hand (and forcing Amazon itself to advocate for a $15 minimum wage increase). This is how you deliver positive policy change.
Working for low wages is better than no wages, but I don't believe dollars that I pay in taxes should go towards compensating underpaid Amazon employees (or Walmart, or whatever). The multi-billionaires should be the ones paying the people who work for them, not me.
And, this might astound you, but sometimes the choice is between several employers paying low wages. And regardless, the work still needs to get done; so someone has to have that job. That person should be paid appropriately.
Edit: error while editing
Salaried people sometimes forget that this is a luxury that's afforded only to them.
This gets floated around a lot. At least in the US I can't imagine a scenario where not paying bills for 1 or 2 months results in homelessness and a repo'd car.
Being both a homeowner and a landlord, I could not pay my mortgage for a year before legal processes kick in, and if my tenants don't pay rent for a month or two there isn't much I can do about it. I most assuredly can't kick them out.
>Being both a homeowner and a landlord
You're in a totally different economic situation, and probably have little to no economic struggles at all. I'll call this out of touch as well.
The real problem though is that "just get a new job" may or may not be possible, but if it is possible, the mechanics of how to do that are not available to low-wage workers. It doesn't really matter that there are plenty of jobs out there if the people who could work at them are not aware they exist, or how to apply for them.
Education, as per usual, ends up being a barrier.
I'd wager that the vast majority of these people are not homeowners. I'm personally not a homeowner and if I missed a rent payment, my apartment complex could start eviction proceedings against me.
Now I've personally got more than enough in savings to be able to move jobs if I so desired, but when a large percentage of this country has little to nothing in savings, they don't have the same luxuries that you and I enjoy.
That's unfortunate. But that's also not what compulsory is.
Please keep this sort of flamewar trope off HN. If you can't post civilly, please don't post.
We don't use honey to deal with poor thieves or people who emotionally abuse their spouses.
Why should we use honey to deal with a rich thief who emotionally abuses an entire labor force?
But maybe I just have a sense of humor.
Nah, it wasn't supposed to be funny. It was an explicit call out.
> I think that's unprofessional and something like bullying
Lol, so what is professional, building a business where your employees have to pee in bottles?
> Legislation should surely not target one individual by name like that
I'd usually agree, but under these circumstances, it's absolutely the right thing to do.
We have to change the climate, profiteers can't live under the impression that their "success" is a positive legacy. People need to be held accountable.
I think he'll be OK.
Second, you have literally no idea how much input he had into it. He may have come up with the name himself, or he may have directed his staff to come up with something pithy that spells out "Bezos" or he may have sat around with them spitballing ideas until they came up with something good. But in the end, he was the senator who introduced it, and he gets the credit.
In the real world so do politicians and executives...
If I referred to HRC's staff as "underlings" no one would question I was anti-HRC.
Also, he certainly had a sense of humor back when he was mayor of Burlington -- it would be surprising if it disappeared now.
Anyway, props to the unnamed Bernie staffer who came up with this. Whoever came up with it, it is just hilarious
THE Arrest The Tradition of Acrostics In the Names of Defective Erroneous Regulations ACT
THE ATTAINDER ACT