Cutting Health Benefits of 1,900 Workers Saved Bezos What He Makes in Six Hours
commondreams.org
commondreams.org
Using this metric, Bezos currently makes negative money per hour.
Appropriate compensation is an important discussion. But bad and/or misleading math to prove a point undermines the argument. If the person making the point is clearly wrong about this simple matter of economics, it should make you wonder what else they don't understand or are misleading you about.
And will workers start paying him when Amazon stock happens to run into bad luck and he loses billions one year?
Taking the European model, everybody will have to pay for it, on the order of 15% of income.
But the actual numbers don't lie, Europeans on average pay less for healthcare (combined taxes + paid procedures), than Americans, yet we have an access to public healthcare and Americans need to buy priv insurance.
I'd rather pay my taxes, then hear stories of people who are afraid to call an ambulance in case they are actually not going through a heart attack.
Oh the wonders of different systems and economies.
I don't know where you got that fact,
according to OECD for 2016 Korea spends as much as Ireland on healthcare (GDP share).
That's also the first time I heard it.
That's besides my point, which is that you can't just tax the rich to pay for universal healthcare. It has to come out of everyone's paycheck.
The other side of the coin is that Europeans earn less and that healthcare workers especially earn less. Yet, systems such as the NHS are at the brink of financial collapse.
You couldn't achieve the same "savings" in the US without massive forced wage cuts to health care workers.
> I'd rather pay my taxes...
That's a fair opinion to have. Saying that you'd rather "tax the rich" isn't, it's dishonest (or uninformed).
The reason for this is the Tories are defunding it and taking stabs at it. So that NHS becomes unpopular with public and could be privatized into US style healthcare.
Its straight out of neo-liberal playbook, de-fund/cripple public institution, replace management with 'your' people who further japerdise the institution. Start PR campaign against institution to ridicule it and when people buy the PR, cut it up and sell it off.
McDonalds, Amazon, WalMart, etc. These companies make billions in revenue, and plenty of profit, yet they keep paying their employees worse and worse compensation packages - packages that are completely illegal in every other developed country.
Why do Americans let this happen?
How bad does it have to get before something changes?
What's interesting is the more corrupt our economy grows, the less money itself becomes a reasonable abstraction people accept and believe in. When common acceptance in critical systems that require common acceptance fails, we have a complete mess on our hands.
The good (or bad depending on how you look at it) news is that people will need to be starving and miserable before that happens. We're entering a full paced modern form of servitude gung-ho. Maybe when it starts to approach slavery people will resist. Why people don't resist now will always puzzle me
That's the quid pro quo.
But you won’t find that small profitable businesses automatically have better compensation packages either, nor even those rising star hipster burger, coffee and grilled cheese joints that are smaller than the big players but still you know, corporate chains. If you want some modicum of independence from modern American consumerism, to take a fully principled stand against the way we do business in this country, take out a loan with your morally scrupulous bank and/or credit union and start a farm with the goal of feeding yourself and your family first and foremost. Or start a small business, but then see what you can afford to pay your workers when it turns out that what you would need to charge to pay them a living wage will drive people away from your business. $15 sandwiches or whatever might be delicious, but short of some very expensive areas with very expensive leases, they won’t sell in the quantities you need them to because it turns out, Americans do take a stand when it is their dollar or even just their time on the line. Which is why many of them shop at either Walmart or Amazon or even both.
They made themselves appealing by being cheaper and/or getting stuff to your door quicker than the competition. The market selected for these types of companies, and as a result they are incredibly profitable enterprises!
Their fortunes don't actually continue to rise. They keep making the same ~5% profit on average. That's what keeps them in business.
Stock prices may have risen in the past, but that's due to macroeconomic factors such as low interest rates. They can fall just as easily and rapidly if the wind changes.
> How bad does it have to get before something changes?
It's actually not bad at all - Amazon, Wal-Mart and McDonalds are some of the few major companies employing significant amounts of people at the bottom end of employability, at better rates than what smaller businesses can offer.
After reading this I am literally feeling a nausea like I want to throw up! I've never had this kind of reaction to the written word before.
For most of 2018, that rate of change was negative. Yet, we don't see a headline like "Jeff Bezos lost 19 million in the past six hours".
People shouldn't automatically be expected to pay different prices for the same thing because they have more money.
The back-of-the-napkin calculation from BI they cite to arrive at what Jeff Bezos' "makes" in an hour is tied largely to Jeff's equity in Amazon, which is not really liquid.
You can make all sorts of comparisons of this or that number to another, what matters to me is the principle of it.
If Jeff is being treated to some ill-gotten advantage, let me be the first to criticize it, but the price of part-time retail labour is up to those involved in that transaction, and to a certain extent, up to the law; and both seem to agree with the state of things.
By the same token, we are all entitled to our fair say in what the law has to say about that transaction, and if you believe the minimum price of labour should be arbitrarily increased, that's something you can argue just the same as anyone else. I just won't buy it if the argument is "Jeff's rich, so any company he operates should pay more for labour."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-bezos/amazon-chief-bezos-cashes-in-1-8-billion-of-share-pile-idUSKCN1UR4ZR