This makes me so sad. This shouldn’t be doing something special for your employees that you get to boast about: it should be a basic human right. Talk about setting the bar low...
I think a lot of white collar workers (ie. journalists and people reading certain papers) are shocked to find out that warehouse/blue collar jobs are hard and not paid great. It says more about the reader than anything else.. I'd wager that conditions are a lot better at Amazon than at some random warehouse where people are working out of the media spotlight.
Also, if you have over 1 million employees, you can always find plenty of stories of things that went wrong, kind of like in a 1-million population city there's always plenty of stuff going on.
1st world countries should not boast about basic human rights.That should be the standard.
It is encouraging though that at least they are acknowledging that these are stuff employees should have.
Even if we assume everything written here is true, like you say, it's nothing to be proud of.
I assume you are saying that his work was easier in some sense, but what about the benefits that accrued from that work and the life environment in general?
This is apartment rental income, not ownership class income.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive...
It's certainly not true that a $15/hr wage at an Amazon warehouse alone can "very much" support the "extremely high standard of living in the US" mentioned upthread as a general statement of fact.
In short, you are going to need your spouse to work as well. Then things look up, so long as both of you work. Good luck if you aren't dual income, though.
Folks in the US die preventable deaths, by the way. And a lot of "third world countries" have health care in place, sometimes more fairly widespread than the US.
/sarcasm
Median family income is ~86k. [0]
Median household income, which is likely what you wanted to cite and is the more common measure, is still much more than 50k, at ~68k. [1]
Median personal income is about 36k. [2]
Median hourly wage is $20.17. [3]
So, no, a $15/hr Amazon worker isn’t making above-median wage and, even if they work 40hr weeks for a full year, isn’t making above-median income.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA646N (nb: “family” for this purpose is defined basically as a household of two or more related by blood, marriage, and/or adoption.)
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=249&eid=25956...
$31.5k is a middle class income there and certainly not poverty level.
House prices aren't telling you anything: Poor folks have trouble saving up for a down payment and have more issues keeping credit good enough for a house, due to lack of funds to pay things. House prices matter little if you can't actually qualify to buy them.
This is also pretty much at the poverty line if relative poverty is calculated like in most other OECD countries - as 60% of median income. That would be about $3100/month for two adults.
That’s Amazon’s minimum, not average. That is, every Amazon worker makes more than that.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-Worker....
What you're seeing here is a large section of the population that likes the idea of coal mining, and willing to spend a lot of tax money to keep that idea alive.
The only reason we hear so much about it is because the states with coal industry hold some swing Senate and Electoral College votes.
But there's a catch... the social mobility you get here in the US comes with a higher reward but also a higher risk. If you play your cards well, you'll skip quite a few levels and can go from a poor immigrant to a decamillionaire within a single generation. But if you play them poorly, you might not only be left with nothing and become homeless, but you might literally get killed by disease or the police (yes, that happens elsewhere as well, but not within the runner up countries).
So there you have it - what kind of a risk-to-reward ratio do you want? If you're shooting for the moon, come to the US, get a shitty laptop, start learning to code, and get a job in tech (no, you don't have to go to Harvard to get a 6-digit job as a developer). If you'd rather make sure that the chances of the worst case scenario are as low as possible, I'd recommend a socialist democracy like Austria where the government will never let you to drop below a certain level of comfort.
> I'd recommend a socialist democracy like Austria
The vast majority of people can't just "chose" to live where you recommend them to go.
You're basically describing the proverbial american dream, it concerns an unbelievably small portion of the people living in the US, imho it's not too far from straight up propaganda to keep the gears turning, ie "I might have to work 2 full time jobs now but I'll work harder and in 5 years I'll make it". It even is a double edged sword, companies like Amazon or Uber made it _because_ they're allowed to stomp on bottom feeders, it's a game with a minority of extreme winner and a majority of losers.
People don't want "social mobility", they want a decent life and access to basic things like medicine, affordable housing, toilet breaks no matter where they are on the social ladder... for every sociopathic wantrepreneur who wants to make it big you have thousands of family who just want to not be treated like cattle
> If we were able to make those decisions, why is it that other people can’t?
Because we all come from widely different backgrounds, families, education, get different opportunities, make different choices, &c. It's easy to compare people's lives to our own stories but you can't sum up everything with "if I made it everyone can make it", there are so many variables, the majority of which we can't understand before going through them ourselves.
Regardless of that, if I was part of the 10% or 15% of American below the poverty threshold and you told me "just move to Austria, anyone can make it" I don't think I would take it well
Of course you'll always find people who manage to drastically change their lives, but I'm personally not really interested in the edge case. Btw I started searching about social mobility and found this, which supports social mobility in the US is pretty poor https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
Society is meant to be hierarchical, bottom feeders are supposed to serve the small percentile of elites.
This is the natural order of things.
Social support systems for the bottom feeders makes the bottom feeders entitled. Democratic government focus inevitably moves towards social programs which must be pushed back hard by the elite.
Most elites inherit their elite status. We must ignore this and talk about anecdotes of how some software engineer made a lot of money in Silicon valley. Buying bitcoin and TSLA a few years ago is also an undeniable marker of extraordinarily elite thinking, which society must reward.
We must never bluntly state our beliefs but cloak it in other acceptable words, so you don't get canceled by the SJWs and bottom feeders.
The naturally superior and their offspring will and must be allowed to ascend the social hierarchy.
BTW, conservatives have larger amygdala. Anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals.