Why Some Amazon Workers Aren’t Happy About Their Raise
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
However... as a full time employee who has his two shares of AMZN, I honestly would rather have had the extra income over the last two years. Maybe I could have put a significant dent into my student loans, or could have actually afforded my own place. As it was, too much of the extra "income" provided by benefits required gambles that low income people really should be required to depend on to make ends meet. Productivity bonuses aren't guaranteed, overtime isn't guaranteed, remaining employed for two years isn't guaranteed.
I see it as the ceiling having come down a bit, but the floor also having come up. And let's be honest... the second it becomes feasible to fully automate picking, stowing and counting, those employees are getting fired on the spot. There is no long term career prospect for the vast majority of Amazon warehouse workers, and they should consider the value of stability of income in the face of an uncertain future.
...just like every single campaign for minimum wage.
No, but there's such a thing as making trillions of the backs of hard working peasants. No shocker either.
How about having regular wages for regular work AND performance bonuses to reward great performance (what they're meant to be)?
As opposed to low wages for regular work, thus making performance "bonuses" a necessity (and thus using them to force people to overworking) OR having regular wages and not compensating those working more.
If I pay you $8/hour, and have "performance bonus" of $16 for those who work their asses off, people will be forced to work 2-3 hours more per day to get those just to get by.
If I then start paying you $10/hour and drop the bonuses, those working regular hours would be ok, but others who are still made to work overtime would still like to be compensated extra for what they do. They might still make the same as before, but now their colleagues who go off a 8 hours or have lower performance get the same too. So what's to compensate for their extra effort?
That's what performance bonuses are about, to compensate for extra effort.
OK, so the complaint is a little more legitimate than that. But whenever you overhaul a system, some people gain, some people lose. Could amazon afford to raise wages and keep legacy programs around? Probably. Do they have to? No. And if Amazon is crippled by an exodus of workers then we'll learn something. And the way I hear it, unemployment is really low, seems like a workers job market to me.
The people who pulled this PR stunt off probably are laughing at the fact that they get to pander to liberals whining about minimum wage while cutting overall labor costs at the same time.
When did the New York Times become so conservative?
It's seems pretty factual to me.