What would it effect Bezos Net Worth to double the warehouse operatives hourly rate to $22?
Normally I'd suggest analyzing that 13.2B in terms of the profits of the company, which for instance last Jan 2019 was ~$3 billion, which if projected out for the year means you'd be proposing a pay raise larger than the profit margin for the company, which is definitely going to affect the stock price. But Amazon is a weird case where most people think that they can just turn on the spigots anytime they really want to just make money, so it's maybe not the easiest analysis.
But for most companies, they make less profit than people think, especially if they're looking at revenue numbers, and a lot of people tend to suggest things that would make a 6% profitable company (not a terribly uncommon number) become a -25% profitable company or something. Even if you tip all executive compensation back into profit, that doesn't usually do much for these large companies.
People keep turning up to work on third world garbage dumps for cents/day earnings, so...
Or rather, it’s cheaper to hire EMTs than it is to climate-control fulfillment centers. Frankly, that seems like the strongest indictment of profit-as-sole-motive I’ve heard, but of course the HN thread can’t handle much in the way of criticizing capitalism or FAANG.
Comments spreading FUD that some sort of deep tech attach of google is responsible for all the negative press get upvoted to the top when the simplest explanation is maybe tech isn’t the perfect good thing everybody wants to believe it is?
Either way, Amazon profits would not be hit by the full $13B increase - more likely profits would remain unchanged, while capex and other investments would go down by that amount.
First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.
When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.
However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.
If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.
I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.
I forget where it was, but I also recently read an article musing on the idea that in the modern era we seem to have a new threat emerging where companies establish very, very firm footholds in some particular industry, and then use that to leverage their way into other industries because they can literally out-resource the entire competitor base of that industry. In some sense, in theory this has been possible for a long time, and we've had things like Samsung which are massive conglomerates, so it's not a new problem in quality, but the quantity of money that can be brought to bear this way in the 21st century may still make this a new sort of problem for trust busters to keep their eyes on.
So the real question is: Who is going to pay the bill?
And the problem I see here is, whoever you ask this, the answer is always “not me!” Everyone wants to reap the benefits of cheap labor (e.g. cheap, fast shipping), while proclaiming they want to treat the labor force well, but without a willingness to actually “put their money where their mouth is” and pay for it when it actually comes down to it.
For example: If you could willingly add 50% to the cost of every Amazon purchase if it gave workers better conditions, would you? If your first reaction to that is “Hey, that’s not my problem! The [government/market/unions/etc.] should have to solve that!” ... then yeah, we’ll the thing is that’s what everybody says when asked these sorts of problems.
Yea they can decide to move to the next low-pay job, zero-hour contract, no benefits, wages barely pays the rent, on food stamps ..
If the free market is a fair market, unionising wouldn't make any difference as the negotiated rates would already be fair and couldn't be any more fair. Amazon wouldn't be spending money to block union efforts, because that would be wasted money. Therefore either this isn't free market, and your comment is wrong (not free market), or this is free market but it isn't fair so your comment is wrong (free market, yet still relevant).