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Comment by jonfw | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this argument lacks a full understanding of what 'net worth' even means.

Bezos is not taking enough cash from Amazon to be even remotely relevant to what they pay their warehouse workers. His cash compensation in 2019 was 1.6 million. Not sure how that reflects in 2020, 2021, but the point is that Bezos is only absurdly rich in theory He is theoretically worth hundreds of billions- but his actual consumption of goods, services, resources is a tiny percentage of that.

There is no direct link between Bezos net worth and allocation of resources to laborers, and attempts to paint that picture are misguided.

You criticize Amazon for their 'low paying' jobs- do you really understand the space these jobs exist in? I've worked warehouse gigs in college. I'm sure the Amazon jobs suck- but their minimum wage is what my supervisor got paid at a small building supply company. Amazon is actually considered a high paying gig in that arena.

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> There is no direct link between Bezos net worth and allocation of resources to laborers, and attempts to paint that picture are misguided.

If they raised wages of factory workers, profits go down, stock goes down, Bezos net worth go down. no?

More likely if factory workers got better wages then prices of goods would go up, demand would go down, and some factory workers would no longer be needed. Amazon doesn't have the luxury of deciding it doesn't want to create value for it's shareholders, and I'm speculating widely, but I'm guessing the marketplace (B2C) aspect of the business is probably operating on much slimmer margins than the cloud aspect (B2B). If they were to subsidize the marketplace with cloud profits, it would be anti-competitive. They would be operating at a loss which would prevent competitors from being profitable and competitive.

>If they raised wages of factory workers

They then also can hire a better class of workers, leaving some working there now no longer working there. And as prices go up, everyone loses some value to buying these goods, which is then less to spend on other things.

When a worker is willing to work for some wage and an employer is willing to pay it, both sides benefit, and society as a whole is not paying extra.

> ... profits go down

As does innovation which is paid for from those profits. And outside places, such as teacher pensions, 401ks, union pensions, state pensions, all lose money too. Taking this money from those who funded Amazon via stock purchases and secondary markets would ensure that later there is less investment available for new companies, now jobs, new industries.

Stock markets lets companies get capital to grow and usually employ more people. Taking out these incentives means less companies and less jobs, which means less competition among employers to hire people, which means less wages.

Doing things inefficiently, such as paying lots more than needed to clear wage floors, or paying a worker to do one task instead of two, or similar, means less value in society overall than if the things were done efficiently.

A CEO getting many times richer, even minus his worth in shares, is still the truth.

No "normal"employee/worker is achieving that. And he's working equally hard.

I think saying that other jobs are worse and amazons are so great so people should shut up and be happy is the wrong idea.

Instead we should strive to make all jobs better and when jobs are shit no one should be forced to do them. That's a goal humanity should achieve.

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