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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it.

The median US based pay at Amazon is $36,640. That is not a poverty level wage except in a few urban centres.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-disclose...

I have a mother making more than that in an incredibly cheap and rural town. $36k might not officially meet the united states level for "poverty", but it sure means a stressful financial situation if you didn't buy your house in the 80s or some other cheap housing time

The inflation-adjusted price per square foot of a house in the United States (on average) has remained constant since the 1970s. House prices have not changed, on an inflation adjusted $/sqft basis in over 50 years. [1]

The reason houses are more expensive on average now is they're twice as big. People's expectations have changed.

I mention this because there were no cheap housing periods.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...

> People's expectations have changed.

Often low-income families would live in smaller houses for less money if they had the choice, but building smaller and more dense housing has since been restricted by planning codes, often with the intent of excluding poor people.

You don't even need intent to squeeze out poor people. Why would a contractor build an 800 sq/ft house to sell to low income people when you can make over 2x the profit on a McMansion?

You would theoretically use proportionally less land, so stick three 800 sqft homes on it.

Because you can put more units on the land and make less money per unit, but more money overall. We don't have to guess about this. We used to allow developers to build and this is exactly what happened. (We already have places like Queens, for example. It's not hypothetical.) Then we made it more or less illegal to build and that's why it doesn't happen anymore.

>Often low-income families would live in smaller houses for less money if they had the choice, but building smaller and more dense housing has since been restricted by planning codes, often with the intent of excluding poor people.

I'm conservative-minded on regulation for exactly this reason; my parents and grandparents were allowed to live poor yet we're obligated to pay substantially more in housing because of restrictions and requirements that purportedly address safety concerns that I'm willing to risk.

> “On a per square foot basis using median house sales prices and median square footage“

This seems to simplistic an analyze. It does not consider different areas of the country changing at different rates. And to compare two different medians seems fishy: they are not even the same house.

Not only that, the warehouse workers in the US are part of the same group health insurance policy as their software engineers and executives. It's one of the most generous health insurance plans available in an entry-level job that requires no college education, and the dollar-amount value of the total compensation (even for the median Amazon worker) is way above $36,640.

> It's one of the most generous health insurance plans available in an entry-level job that requires no college education...

Or as every other first-world country calls it, "the minimum standard we provide for our citizens."

The problem is the bottom line isn't good enough. The truth is every single one of those workers would be better off in practically any other OECD country. Anywhere in Europe, anywhere in Canada, they'd be better off. That's not okay for the greatest country in the world. America can do better.

Well first of all, this is in response to the idea that "Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it.", which we KNOW to be untrue.

But even with the new goalposts: comparing Amazon workers to the median worker in other OECD nations, it is objectively untrue that Amazon's group health insurance plan is worse than that of public health insurance in other developed countries. America's problem isn't that workers of rich corporations have inadequate healthcare, it's that you have to work for a rich corporation to have adequate healthcare.

You have to keep in mind that healthcare isn't 100% free in most of the world, there's still co-insurance, co-pays, etc. With that in mind, I work in insurance, and I can tell you right now that the health insurance plans afforded to software engineers of most of the big tech companies are on average more generous than those of most European countries in terms of total out-of-pocket expenditure. At Amazon, the US warehouse workers are given the same health insurance as their company-mates sitting in the cubicles.

$36,640 is actually more than the median individual income in the US, which is $33,706.

You could have basically just bezos and then thousands of workers working for free and the average wage would still look pretty good.

Just because the elites are paid insane sums, doesn't mean the majority are making anything reasonable.

Edit: I miss read and you have median. Fair enough. 35k usd is still terrible pay though, and I'd rather work somewhere that doesn't have 12 hour shifts for that semi ok pay. Can work elsewhere half as hard for the same money or better. Won't pass out from heat exhaustion, won't he fired for trying to unionize, won't have covid pay taken back, won't be denied safe working conditions in a pandemic, etc.

He used median, not average. The median is significantly less affected by the highest wages. That's basic math.

just to make your point even stronger, the median is not affected by the highest wages _at all_.

There is a reason I used "median."

That's why parent comment uses the median rather than the mean, it isn't affected by enormous outliers.

Unless more than half of Amazon's employees are highly paid developers and executives, that number represents a normal employee.

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