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Comment by LordDragonfang | Hacker News Reader

You know what else comes out of the pocket of the consumer? Paying for government assistance for people employed full time by a company.

>more than 4,000 employees are on food stamps in nine states studied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Only Walmart, McDonald’s and two dollar-store chains have more workers requiring such assistance, according to the report, which said 70% of recipients work full-time.

In other words, Amazon is costing you, the taxpayer, money by not paying their workers a living wage.

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I see this sentiment on reddit often. However, the logic only works if the worker in question had a higher paying job prior to getting the job at amazon. If the worker got paid less, or was previous unemployed, then the the act of amazon hiring him reduced the government's burden. Also, let's say amazon replaced his job with a robot. Now the worker won't be on amazon's payroll and he's no longer amazon's problem, but now there's one more unemployed person and less money being paid out to workers. Is that much better?

Another angle still, is why does Amazon get to have the benefit of workers who eat and have homes when they do not pay enough to enable their workers to eat and have homes?

If we could set aside the suffering of the individual (which we cannot) one solution would be to let these companies devolve until they are entirely staffed by starving homeless people and see how that effects the productivity of their workforce.

> Another angle still, is why does Amazon get to have the benefit of workers who eat and have homes when they do not pay enough to enable their workers to eat and have homes?

Because the workers do not have any better option, and working for amazon while making 80% of your required expenses, is better than making 0%. It's the same reason why workers in developing countries work in sweatshops. The working conditions might be terrible, but starving in your village is worse.

>If we could set aside the suffering of the individual (which we cannot) one solution would be to let these companies devolve until they are entirely staffed by starving homeless people and see how that effects the productivity of their workforce.

This doesn't make any sense. Just because someone's homeless doesn't mean they're unproductive workers. eg. if they were living paycheck to paycheck and they were laid off. Besides, if the applicant pool is big enough and there are more job seekers than positions available they can have their pick of workers. For your scenario to work you'd need need enough people willing to boycott amazon as an employer, and given the history of consumer boycotts I doubt it will work. I'm sure amazon raising their wages a few dollars will convince enough workers to break rank.

If you think of the government as a union for the country's workers this explains why the minimum wage exists. It avoids prevents the wage race to the bottom that creates sweatshops. It also explains why some people see the minimum wage as the best method of "negotiating" with employers.

That makes sense because unions are a way of exploiting companies so that the existing employees capture as much of the surplus as possible from the customers and owners and one of the ways they do this is by preventing competitors from entering the field and competing to offer services; and minimum wage ensures that if someone's labor is not marginally more valuable than the minimum wage, they won't be hired.

This actually makes a lot of sense and is a new paradigm for analysis, thank you.

Don't give them ideas.

If Amazon could staff their warehouses with homeless people, let them sleep on-site and only pay them in expired goods, they probably would.

There's a very good (IMHO) recent novel called "The Warehouse" where an Amazon analog ("Cloud") actually has workers living at their logistics facility, eating at their cafeterias and being paid in company scrip.

It feels way too close to a probable future for my tastes...

All low paying jobs should be automated. I say this coming from the Ag side because farm labour is grossly underpaid and exploitative. But we can’t raise the cost of food because raising cost of food to pay for labour means more people will find food dear.

It’s wages chasing price chasing wages. And we need more and more food for exponentially increasing population with a smaller work force and lesser land. Only solution is to eliminate such jobs and automate field Ag.

And grow indoors as much as possible. Indoor Ag can increase productivity, use less land and water and also can employ workers from an educated pool because automation requires some skill. So we are also tackling unemployment instead of exploiting poor undocumented immigrants and paying them slave wages.

I see amazon warehouse jobs with low pay the same as farm workers doing repetitive manual work. Automate. Automate. Automate.

> You know what else comes out of the pocket of the consumer? Paying for government assistance for people employed full time by a company.

I think you mean "taxpayer"

> In other words, Amazon is costing you, the taxpayer, money by not paying their workers a living wage.

Imagine how much assistance they would need if they didn't have jobs.

> living wage.

what constitutes a "living wage" is dependent on the cost of consumer goods which is in turn dependent on the cost of labor. You're not going to escape the fact that some people's labor isn't worth enough to earn them the standard of living that you or they would prefer by wishful thinking or statutory fiat. You can, however, limit their options and distort the market in a vicious circle of economically ignorant mandates.

"Imagine how much assistance they would need if they didn't have jobs."

That would be better.

I would MUCH rather pay for them to be in school instead of just paying part of Bezos' and other Amazon investors operating costs.

Shit I wish I could have a buch of employees and get someone else to pay for them. What a great idea! Why doesn't everyone do that? I mean except for the employees of course. They can't have companies staffed by employees they don't pay for. Duh. Only Amazon and Walmart can have that, obvs. I mean who would be their employees? You? Not me. I guess we need something like a seperate class or group of people who have to be the underpaid employees so that the rest of us can enjoy being the employers without paying for it. We used to have that back in the good old days...

It's almost like this is a stupid argument that there is no way to excuse, and no amount of indirect smoke & mirrors or denial gets around that, and anyone even trying deserves to be among the first people rounded up for the new press gangs they think are so fair a great.

> "Imagine how much assistance they would need if they didn't have jobs." That would be better.

Not for them or for the economy at large. It would be good for people who own capital goods, as they would spend their assistance checks on consumer goods without competing to provide them. The profit would accrue to the few who hold capital and those capitalists would have an enormous supply of reserve labor available, driving down the marginal cost of labor (so the people who did have jobs would have less bargaining power).

> I would MUCH rather pay for them to be in school instead of just paying part of Bezos' and other Amazon investors operating costs.

Thats interesting, how many people can you currently afford to feed, house, and pay tuition for?

> It's almost like this is a stupid argument that there is no way to excuse, and no amount of indirect smoke & mirrors or denial gets around that, and anyone even trying deserves to be among the first people rounded up for the new press gangs they think are so fair a great.

It may seem that way to you. Actually what we have is a bunch of people who are ignorant of economics but still have opinions about how the economy should be run, and a class of politicians who appeal to their ignorance by selling them fairy tales that ignore scarcity and appeal to wishful thinking.

Amazon’s minimum wage is higher than the wage of 1/3rd of the workforce.

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