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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

Ahhh, the "XYZ is a billion dollar company!!1! they can afford to pay $x to their employees" argument.

Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.

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>Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.

Is this the conclusion you reached after reading Amazon's balance sheets? If so, would you mind sharing your research?

I've actually looked at it, taking all $3 billion of Amazon's 2017 profit and dividing it among its 500,000 employees adds up to 6000$.

To be fair though, they aren't making money on fulfillment really, they're cross-subsidizing it with their more profitable segments which also do not require that many workers. In that sense it isn't comparable with Wal-Mart and McDonalds.

I used to work in warehouses, years ago. Even $1000 would have meant an extra trip to the dentist that year and maybe some new clothes more than once per 2 years.

What good is a company that is not sustainable enough to pay its employees enough to live?

These fulfillment centers aren’t in Manhattan and San Francisco.

$19 is certainly enough to live (~$38k/year). This is way above poverty and one of the highest wages for unskilled labor.

A family of two making 38k a year each sounds like a very decent income.

At least it's way more than a postdoc immigrant can count on.

It can be 'good' in a very perverse sense, i.e. good enough to undermine and destroy other companies that DO choose to pay their employees enough to live.

This is unhelpful, but that's the way things work at the moment, and it's very well understood by aggregate investment capital.

So then you get a second sense: good enough to sustain huge amounts of investment capital from people who correctly perceive that it will destroy other companies that choose to pay their employees enough to live.

Still pretty unhelpful, if you're a human…

Amazon warehouse still pays better than those retail jobs it destroyed.

I was paid much less in university for TA and research work(in canada) and i was doing fine.

How was your university health insurance? Were you on your parents' plan?

I was on basic health insurance(paid by myself) and it was mandatory for immigrants. I never had to visit the doctors, so unsure of the details of coverage.

Could you have raised a child on that salary? In the long term? How would you have paid for college? Could you break the cycle of poverty in your family without saving for your child's college education?

If i were married to a working partner, then i probably would be able to do all of these.

This is called "moving the goalposts".

That works only if you assume that all of the current spending is completely necessary and cannot be reduced. Or that internal processes can never change. Neither of those are true though.

So what you're telling me is that a company that can't pay its employees has issues making money???

Good.

Then that company shouldn't exist.

It's a shame this idea has gone out of fashion. The concept once came straight from FDR's mouth: if your business cannot afford to pay a living wage to its workers, then it should not be permitted to exist. We should not consider it a viable business, and neither should the law.

1. Amazon is paying a living wage (and more) 2. FDRs politics to this effect failed

Amazon pay a living wage now because they were shamed into doing so.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines. Regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against, we ban accounts that do this, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity HN exists for.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended?

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