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Comment by sellyme | Hacker News Reader

> an Amazon FC job @$15/hr + healthcare is a "holy shit amazing" job. This is true tons of places. It's double minimum wage! Affordable healthcare!

I don't disbelieve you, but the fact that this "holy shit amazing" job in a highly-skilled and in-demand field pays less than I was earning at McDonald's when I was 14 makes me extremely concerned about what Americans have been convinced is normal.

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> the fact that this "holy shit amazing" job in a highly-skilled and in-demand field pays less than I was earning at McDonald's when I was 14 makes me extremely concerned about what Americans have been convinced is normal.

“Amazon Can Only Claim Their Jobs Are Decent Because American Work Has Gotten So Miserable

Amazon maims its workers and drives wages down, yet the company still attracts job applicants and claims to provide “good jobs.” Those claims were strong enough to play a role in the defeat of a union effort in Bessemer, Alabama — but that says less about Amazon than it does about the miserable state of the labor market.“

Source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/amazon-bessemer-alabama-u...

thanks for that link. "More than 53 million people— 44 percent of all workers ages 18–64 in the United States— earn low hourly wages", which is defined as earning 2/3 of the median male worker. The median hourly wage for those 53 million people is $10.22. One might argue about semantics but these stats are devastating nonetheless.

Forty four percent of the workforce earns less than two thirds of the median male wage is devastating? There are hundreds of millions of people who live on less than $2 a day. The US has the highest average household consumption in the world by a very large margin. If you think US living standards are inadequate the rest of the world is much, much worse.

if the US starts to orient itself after third world countries, then you're correct: It's really going good. It's all relative. I thought the US would rather compare itself to Europe, Japan, etc. but okay.

To be clear, when using something like household consumption expenditure, Japan and the subset of European countries that match up end up looking quite “poor” and have been for some time, with the gap IIRC increasing.

That e.g. personal health costs are included in there obviously, uh, muddies things.

A quick search tells me that the median is 35k per year, the mean time off is 10 days and there are 13 national holidays.

So that would put it at roughly $15 * 48 hours * 48 weeks. For 35k. I agree, that's devastating.

I don't know if you are in the US:

US national holidays mean nothing in the context of employment. The US does not require private employers to close, pay extra, or provide paid time off for those holidays.

Nope, I'm not. Fair enough: 46.6 hours per week at 50 weeks then, not 48 hours at 48 weeks.

What a weird stat. I've never seen anyone take a fraction of a median like that. I can't think of any reason to create such a strange figure besides being dishonest.

There’s nothing to believe, he’s saying that when you live in an area with $8/hr jobs getting a $15/hr one is a boon. Thus it’s clearly not a reference to the area you lived in?

FC is fulfillment centre, as in warehouse worker. Amazon programmers get paid better than that. Even in Ireland SDE1s make €82,000 a year, very roughly €40 an hour. In the US it is no doubt much higher.

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Dublin-Ire...

Amazon's secret recipe for FCs is that they managed to remove almost all onboarding costs. Training literally takes an hour. So they don't care about turnover; all they need is to keep attracting enough folks that they can run at full capacity.

I guess the 15$/h figure is the equilibrium point for that. It's probably a little bit below the costs to completely automate these jobs.

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