Amazon’s wage increase to $15 an hour also upped pay for non-Amazon workers
aboutamazon.com
aboutamazon.com
Amazon paints their $15 as a benevolent community service but given all that we know about the expectations and requirements of an Amazon warehouse worker it seems to me that Amazon’s wage increase was necessary in order to compete in the labor market. If you could work in an Amazon warehouse for $X/hour or work stocking shelves at Target for $X/hour very few people are going to choose Amazon. And this is evidenced in the referenced/linked economics paper. Amazon’s 2018 wage increase from $11/hour to $15/hour resulted in an average local unskilled low-wage increase of 4.7% suggesting those local markets didn’t need to meet Amazon’s wages in order to compete with them.
The $15 is enough to lure some people to work at Amazon but it seems there are others for which slightly lower pay and the benefit of bathroom breaks is a trade-off they’re willing to make in the labor market.
[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3793677
I wish everyone could get a great salary and mostly that work conditions provide a safe environment for all workers, but I don't understand your argument unless I see it under the light of "foreigners = bad"
If the Mexicans and Somalians are given safe US citizenship with the rights and leverage that entails, it's great for them to do the same now. They wouldn't, because the reason companies want to employ them is their weakness, and the stability of citizenship would entitle them to make demands about pay and conditions.
Employing precarious immigrants isn't charity work.
Open borders without equal rights is woke apartheid :P
No one is arguing that Mexicans and Somalians don't have a right to leave their current employer and find a better employer. Oh, but you are talking about illegally entering another country they have no legal right to enter, which is a very different situation. Forcing yourself on a country where the citizens have decided to not allow you to enter is not the same thing as just looking for a higher paying employer.
If you want open borders and believe that borders are immoral and citizens of a nation do not have the right to decide who is and is not allowed to be a fellow citizen, then argue for open borders and a one world government in which no nation has the ability to control who crosses their border and who can participate in their legal, production, electoral, and social insurance system. That is an intellectual position that a small minority holds, but make the case for denying citizens of a nation this right of self-determination and autonomy clearly and directly, don't couch it in the language of someone looking to switch employers. And then don't wring your hands that a nation has deteriorating solidarity and social insurance when you simultaneously advocate for citizenship having no meaning.
Despite all the money spent on ICE and border patrol, deportations, etc. there are still a lot of undocumented workers, who are in turn exploited, which in turn pushes wages down.
It would be much much much easier to let people go in the legal route. It would also help a bit with the war against cartels.
Obviously the self-determination of the US population is at least as important as the humanitarian/altruistic principle of allowing people to seek a better future for themselves by moving to a better place. That said - as far as I know - economists are very much in consensus that legal immigration does not suppress wages.
No matter what laws you pass, there will be people excluded, so if your position is that you have a right to live in any nation where your income is expected to be higher, then this does require outlawing border controls entirely, and doing that against the will of the citizens in those nations requires some supra-national authority that can override the will of the population.
And this must be a universal right otherwise the right-based logic does not apply. Thus it applies also to Mexico and most other nations where there are some countries somewhere in which wages are lower. Especially in Mexico, that would be a problem given they have a constitutional ban on immigration changing the demographics of Mexico, and even a border "barrier" at the south. Somalia, while mostly in anarchy, also would not allow uncontrolled migration to it if it ever obtains a functional government. Ethiopia, a rising star in Africa, has strict border controls in place. As does basically every nation on earth.
The common consensus is that no one has a right to force themselves on a nation just because it would benefit them financially. That truth is not incompatible with immigration as a policy. The debate is about who gets to set the policy -- the people whose nation is being entered or those who want to enter.
So while my arguments are extreme in force, they are not hyperbole, as the comment I was replying to was staking out some very radical and anti-democratic positions, but couching them in the mild language of changing employers. I was merely pointing out the extreme nature of these claims, and was not engaging in hyperbole. Claiming you have a right to violate a nation's border controls is a very big deal, and has nothing to do with wanting to increase or decrease immmigration policies, just as claiming a buyer (rather than the seller) has right to decide how much a product should cost is a radical claim, even if it's couched in the mild language of affordability and seeking discounts.
Enforcement of immigration laws at the employer level is practically nonexistent - business impacting fines are almost unheard of. The I9 verification system is a complete joke, unless you're actually here legally and you slip through the cracks because under-trained reviewers don't actually know the rules. Some employers benefiting from the cheap labor even teach immigrants how to circumvent it and the decision makers almost never face anything close to deportation or criminal charges.
About half of undocumented immigrants are here "illegally" because they overstayed their Visa. Tracking those Visa recipients and checking in on them at least once after expiration would be the easiest and cheapest way to reduce the undocumented immigrant population but, again, nonexistent.
I'll stop there before I write a three page rant about all the shit I've experienced immigrating to the US legally. It's a farce and has only gotten more ridiculous over the last four years with ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review going out of control.
The sad part is, I actually agree that illegal immigration is a threat to national security and stability. The second order economic effects are unpredictable, it creates a shadow economy that makes circumventing labor, environmental, safety, etc laws much easier, and despite diversity being America's strength, there is a lot of value in having some control over population growth and giving cultures time to acclimate. However, the crime isn't the illegal immigration, it's the total abdication of our legislators in their duty to protect our sovereignty and allowing an exploitative shadow economy to exist. There's no reason to punish the people stuck in the crossfire, especially when it makes defending sovereignty against actual criminals and enemies that much harder.
Yup, two years ago, seven factories owned by the same company. 680 individuals arrested for being undocumented.
Not one supervisor, manager, or executive has been charged with anything in relation to these raids. And ICE has announced no plans to do so.
Implicit assumption: that people everywhere aren't just going to eventually all change their minds and be majority-for open borders in every country.
Y'know, like with slavery. We didn't need a supra-national authority to get rid of that globally. Some countries just set an example by deciding to get rid of it; and then other countries' populations who interacted with those countries felt shamed into changing their own minds as well, which led to their own laws changing. It spread globally as a virulent meme. (Yes, we also established international bodies that crack down on slavery — but 1. we did that after slavery was mostly abolished; and 2. treaty bodies like that are toothless unless almost every country already agrees on the principle.)
I'm not arguing that this is what will happen with open borders; only that it's not impossible for it to happen, and that that has to be accounted for in this kind of argument.
British, Americans, and others historically fought many battles (often naval) and pressured many governments to stop slavery.
What do you think ended the barbary slave trade? Why do you think Saudi stopped formally trading slaves?
You really think they "felt shamed"? They don't care about your morality in the slightest.
The fight continues today as well. Slavery goes on. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of racial slaves (i.e. black people kept as slaves for being black) in places like Mauritania. Slavery-like transactions continue in the middle east, Africa, and India. Supra-national authorities are still pushing, albeit often ineffectually, to end this.
An elected leader is an authority. A valid one-world government would presumably have authority.
A military superpower is not an authority. It's just a force. Every time it "unilaterally" makes a decision, it has to back that up with renewed force. As soon as the force stops, its control stops. That's not authority. (Think: the Byzantine empire. It had force over much of Western Europe for a few hundred years; but the people there never saw it as a valid authority. So as soon as its ability to project force ended, it lost control of its Western-European assets, and became the Eastern Byzantine Empire.)
Also, a "supra-national" body like the International Court of Justice isn't an authority or a force; it's just a hub for communication. It has no command over anyone. The only thing it does is come up with ideas, and then — if UN member countries like — they can take those ideas for their own (i.e. sign on to a given declaration to give it force within their borders.)
Such bodies are basically like the IETF, issuing RFCs. There's nothing requiring anyone to implement an RFC. You just implement it if-and-when you think it's a good idea.
Countries are top-level; nobody has true authority over them. That's what "sovereignty" means. You only have a true supra-national authority if sovereignty ceases to exist.
> You really think they "felt shamed"? They don't care about your morality in the slightest.
Adults don't generally change their ethical norms in response to exposure to external systems of ethics, no. But children often do.
This is why many countries (e.g. the US) think that putting their media out on the global stage is important: it allows them to influence the political/ethical views of children in other countries in ways that make them think more like the origin culture of that media; and so make the country more likely to invite their cooperation and influence two or three generations later, when those children are now the country's leaders.
There is a reason that e.g. America had to fight for sovereignty, but Canada did not. Or why France needed a series of internecine wars and bloody revolutions to establish democracy, but many neighbouring countries to France then peacefully, gradually established democratic societies some time later. Cultures are object-lessons for their neighbours!
> The fight continues today as well. Slavery goes on.
Well, yeah. Precisely because there isn't a supra-national authority with any authority to tell them to stop. There's just people with guns. You don't have to listen to guns if you have your own guns; especially if the guy that would point the guns at you has too many other higher-priority people to point their guns at first.
I am not aware of any such common consensus. You are confusing legality with morality. Interracial marriage was also illegal. Blacks wedding whites was seen as blacks forcing themselves on the white community for their selfish romantic interests.
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you there. It means to reduce the funding (i.e. defund) the police in the same way that education has been defunded. That doesn't mean that a group is entirely disbanded, rather than the scope gets similarly restricted. When education is defunded, this means that after-school programs get cut, and school lunch programs are reduced. It doesn't mean that the school itself gets shut down. Should police be defunded, it means that extraneous use of police force, such as for mental health checks, are no longer part of the budget. It also means those funds can be shifted to programs specifically designed for mental health checks.
You are assuming that "defund" means to completely remove funding rather than partially remove funding.
I'm not aware of a standard definition. With capital O and B, I think of the book: https://www.smbc-comics.com/openborders/
With regards to "defund the police" I'm perfectly happy to accept that it means different things to different people marching side by side with the same banners. And similarly with BLM.
I think it would be great if people would question others who use slogans without explaining what they actually mean. (For example even if someone is full abolish the police yesterday, sure, there's still a lot of explaining to do. How would this happen? By a federal law? Is that even constitutionally sound? Oh, by a change in the constitution? Oh, just a local thing? So the FBI/ATF/DEA are still on? Okay, so what will happen with all the police staff, and their hardware? And naturally what will be done to .. um ... fight crime? Neighborhood watches? Random deputyzation every time a crime is committed? Is there going to be a standing committee that handles this? How are the members chosen? Etc.. etc..)
Often this is paired with gaslighting. When called out, somebody employing the motte-and-bailey may refuse to admit the bailey exists at all. People who argue against the bailey get ridiculed for thinking the bailey exists.
...is doing a lot of work here. No argument was being made about what Somalis and Mexicans should be allowed to do, arguments are being made about what US employers should be allowed to do. It's a common anti-slavery argument - the exploitation of people in a precarious position to do the same work that free people do demeans the value of work. If you want to see a real market in wages, and you have a real belief in the goodness of that, remove the legal situation that makes the immigrant workforce's situation precarious.
Two years ago, seven factories owned by the same company: 680 individuals arrested for being undocumented - a misdemeanor, leaving aside all the other polarization of opinions on that.
It's a felony to (knowingly) employ someone without work authorization.
Not one supervisor, manager, or executive has been charged with anything in relation to these raids. And ICE announced that they have no plans to do so.
Also - I would say that from the point of view of the native Americans, the migration of Europeans into their land kind of did cause something like "deteriorating solidarity and social insurance". Wouldn't you? Can't you imagine why others would not want to suffer the same fate?
And the issue isn't necessarily immigration per se as ethnic fractionalization. E.g. if a ton of French expats were to immigrate to France that would create different levels of social strife than, say, a ton of Russians entering France. There have been many studies on this, e.g.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586963?seq=1
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20504
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4551797
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/archive/doc/events...
There is no moral justification for that position.
Enforcing labor laws equally for all people (even in cases of undocumented workers) would be a better solution. Just because someone is undocumented is not a license for the employer to break additional laws.
Equal application of the law should apply to all people, even if you consider them criminals. We give murderers fair trials and presumption of innocence, for example.
You are arguing for slavery.
Quotes are often used on posts in lieu of sic when it's not just a quote, but a term that is likely being misused.
eg Identifying misrepresentation of circumstance is not "villification".
> Industry consolidation has been accompanied by important changes in labor relations in meatpacking. In 1980, 46 percent of workers in the meat products industry were union members, a figure that had remained stable through the 1970’s. Most unionized slaughter plant workers belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, whose base wage rate was $10.69 an hour in 1982. In that year, many unionized firms began to press for large reductions in base wages, to $8.25 an hour, consistent with what was being offered in non-union plants. The union at first acceded to wage cuts, but by 1984 adopted a strategy to vigorously contest them, in the view that large wage cuts at older unionized plants only postponed plant closings. Between 1983 and 1986, there were 158 work stoppages in cattle and hog slaughter plants, involving 40,000 workers. There were lengthy strikes, plant closings, and deunionizations at some ongoing and reopened plants.14 By 1987, union membership had fallen to 21 percent of the workforce, and has remained at that lower level through the most recent data (1997); wage reductions were imposed in most plants, and wages have risen only modestly since then.
> Declining unionization coincided with changes in slaughter plant demographics. Immigrants, primarily from Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Central America, make up large and growing shares of the workforces at both hog and cattle slaughter plants.
There was a structural shift in power between workers and corporations. Unions representing the worker who had pushed for those higher wages were fairly systematically pushed out of power. The loss of power of unions is what led to the low wages. The use of immigrant labor is just the particular method companies went about implementing it, but if there hadn't been people immigrating it still would've been forced low wages by the corporations. This is evidenced by the fact that the low-wages began in the non-union corporations.
A lot of people look at this same situation and mistake the cause for the effect. The cause of the situation was a huge shift in power away from workers to corporations via the loss of union power. The particular manifestation of how corporations used that power was by changing who they were hiring, but to be clear even without immigrants, wages would've still fallen as they already were doing. Ie if unions had negotiated and maintained a minimum wage of $10 or $12 it's irrelevant where the people they're hiring come from.
1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41108/18003_ae...
I don't really see how any attempt to prop up the unions without introducing prohibitive tariffs would have resulted in anything but American companies becoming totally uncompetitive (this mostly happened anyway, though...).
We do have an example of an industry that was protected by tariffs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax. For the most part Volkswagen, Toyota and friends are still doing fantastically in the US.
According to https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm... immigration didn't start growing until ~1970 and it increased significantly in the 1980's and later.
Take railways. Railroad standards (until the late 2010s) were totally incompatible between Canada/US/Mexico and the rest of the world, and combined with Buy America regulations for federal funding you pretty much had to buy domestic. This had the effect of making international customers totally disinterested in incompatible American railroad locomotive products and hiking up costs for American railroads who could also not source internationally without a lot of paperwork, but also not actually resulting in a healthy American railroad manufacturing industry because it turns out the addressable market in just North America was not large.
The US emerged from the war as the only Western power without a shattered manufacturing base. By the times the '70s rolls around this is no longer true; Germany and Japan are now alternate sources of manufacturing for non-US countries so the current account surplus is no longer there. This is ultimately what led to Bretton Woods' collapse; it wasn't that imports were necessarily flooding into the US, it's that the US ceased to be the only source of manufactured goods in the world. The oil embargo further walloped American manufacturing, particularly automakers which had (and have) relatively gas-guzzling models compared to international carmakers.
Even if we had high tariffs manufacturers would've figured something out, like how Boeing and some automakers have shifted jobs over the years to the less unionized south. Some of the biggest Ford plants on this list are in Kentucky and Missouri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ford_factories
That’s a myth.
https://fee.org/articles/dispelling-the-myth-that-wages-have...
Ford assembly worker mean wage: $4.30 in 1970* (equal to $29.60 in 2020) $6.57 in 1976. ($30.84(
average $20 in 2020* (range $13 - $33)
And in any case the article only references the average wage and nobody is disputing that it has increased since the 1970/80s. However it has increased at much slower rate than worker productivity and incomes in lower quantiles have been largely stagnant due to rising income inequality.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.49....
*https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Ford-Motor-Company-Asse....
The people that actually care about the workers at the bottom of the totem pole (Bernie Sanders mostly) were strongly against such policies until the increasingly polarized nature of our politics made it untenable to be on the "left" and not pro-endless-immigration.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not generally in favor of protectionism and think our immigration system could use a bit of renovation, but anyone who pretends that low wages is just corporate America being mean and stealing profits for themselves without also acknowledging the impact of importing massive amounts of unskilled labor is being disingenuous at best.
If my opinion doesn’t matter, my vote and political capital aren’t on the table. If one wants public support for something, the public’s opinion matters. Separately, if you ask a group of New York bankers if $500,000 is a livable wage for them, you’ll get a spectrum of answers.
And I guess I find it odd that you’ve, apparently, decided that all immigrants have lower expectations and standards of living.
I take issue with the notion that immigrants inherently deserve less because of some perceived expectation of what is good enough for them based on where they came from.
You are if you're implying that wages are somehow unlivable today.
> And I guess I find it odd that you’ve, apparently, decided that all immigrants have lower expectations and standards of living.
No. They decided that themselves when they decided to spend their summer in hundreds of miles away from their family to pick strawberries for the summer to undercut domestic labor. Surely, they're intelligent enough to act according to their best interests.
> I take issue with the notion that immigrants inherently deserve less because of some perceived expectation of what is good enough for them based on where they came from.
I don't think they deserve less. Unlike GP, I'm pro immigration. I just pointing out the incompatibility between both demanding a "living wage" and laxer immigration. The price of labor is determined by supply and demand just as like anything else with a price. Low-skill immigrants consume less than the average resident, so they increase the supply of low-skilled labor much more than the demand.
I’d also point out that immigrants labor isn’t worth less in terms of pure output, but they’re forced to accept less because they aren’t offered the worker protections that citizens get. It’s not a fair supply/demand market.
Reducing all immigrants to strawberry pickers hundreds of miles from their families is also questionable.
The minimum wage is probably somewhat too low for the states, but is far too high for territories like Puerto Rico. Many employers can only afford to pay people less than minimum wage by either employing youths, who can be paid $4.25 an hour or remaining small enough to legally avoid having to pay minimum wage. Even then, labor force participation there is significantly lower than that of the US, which implies that a lot of them are simply working for less under the table.
> It’s not a fair supply/demand market.
We don't live in a perfectly efficient market. An American citizen is always going to have an advantage over a foreigner from a poor country no matter what. However, the fact millions of people work so hard to seek employment here is proof enough that the market is efficient enough to improve people's lives.
I don’t know, your point seems to boil down to ‘it’s just like that because of how it is’. Policy matters and can have an impact on the status quo. Sure, we don’t live in a perfectly efficient market but we can make improvements.
For a large part, it is. The exceptions are very limited in scope. The only reason their economy isn't completely messed up is because the minimum wage isn't enforced very well there.
I'm not sure why you have the impression that I'm in favor of the status quo. I'm explaining why forcing employers to increase wages will do little to help domestic workers unless if you discourage immigration in some way. Even if you're able to double the minimum wage with minimal economic side effects, you would just incentivize even more immigrants to seek employment here.
Put another way, over the long term legislating significant wage increases without also creating incentives to also increase housing supply won't solve the true problem. Sure, you can move to areas with lower housing prices and commute, but the resources (time & money) to commute is a cost as well.
Seems easier to just put real penalties for corporations that exploit unauthorized workers.
Oh yea, raise the penalty for hiring illegial, or
at least enforce the laws we alwready have.
I'll probally get hammered for saying this here. HN crowd has this pollyannaish attitude towards problems that don't effect them, exception being Visa workers that are paid less than them, and the price of owning a home.
I guess it's human nature?
Prison population too high? Fix this "supply side", build much much bigger, much cheaper gulags than today's fancy, small prisons - U.S. has a warm climate, that won't be hard or expensive or too torturous - and make sure criminals and delinquents know that these will fit EVERYONE. Make them work (say build roads) to pay for that.
And yes, U.S. needs a 24/7 physically defended border. Russia has it being a much poorer much sparser populated country with a much longer border, so U.S. can too. No "refugess", "asylum seekers" etc. You try to cross border without papers or outside of designated crossing points - you get a bullet.
Supply and demand is a wonderfully simple system that regulates itself, and as much as it sounds appealing, us messing with it will only make things worse.
Sure supply and demand would state that if the price goes up, demand goes down. What it Doesn't state is how much demand will go down, whether that decrease in demand Actually offsets the increase in price, or whether total revenue stays net neutral.
Whole swathes of people wouldn't just stop buying turkey if the price went up a few cents, or maybe even tens of cents (but this is speculation, I'm not sure if anyone's published the numbers on how much the price of turkey would have to increase to support a higher wage). But people buy turkey over pork for a number of lifestyle reasons, too.
Suppy and demand is more of a model than a system. It's not perfect, no model is, but it's useful. But life is a lot more complicated than a simple model
Did children go hungry in the 80s when this person says that the turkey factory paid people well?
They’ve hired somewhere around a million employees in the past 5 years.
> The $15 is enough to lure some people to work at Amazon but it seems there are others for which slightly lower pay and the benefit of bathroom breaks
I know a couple of people who work at an Amazon warehouse, and I’ve asked them about this, and they said it’s never been an issue.
But while it's the same type of problem, it's not quite the same problem as before.
America needs public restrooms. That's the core issue here.
To be fair I suppose, peeing in a bottle could be gross and messy if you only had a narrow-necked bottle. And in some situations it might get you into legal trouble. Both matters are resolved with a little common sense.
At least you could suggest retrofitting each truck with a urinal. That would make more sense despite being equally untenable.
How did you get anything about tracking fluid intake from "regular good opportunities"? I'm really curious.
So yeah, obviously they should have bathrooms at the warehouses that drivers can use. I'm earnestly surprised they don't already, it's common sense. But I don't think it will stop drivers from peeing in bottles.
Edit:
> 2-3 hours since the last bathroom break shouldn't be unhealthy.
That assumes you chose to avail yourself at that time. If didn't feel like you had to use the bathroom at that time, you might neglect to do so anyway. Maybe because you were walking around outside your truck, and walking around somewhat suppresses that full-bladder sensation. Then you sit down in your truck and half an hour later, after a cup of coffee, you realize you have to piss. You're still 2 hours away from your next bathroom break, so what do you do? Is this a consequence of poor planning on the part of the driver? Maybe. But that's inevitably going to happen anyway.
> That assumes you chose to avail yourself at that time. If didn't feel like you had to use the bathroom at that time, you might neglect to do so anyway. Maybe because you were walking around outside your truck, and walking around somewhat suppresses that full-bladder sensation. Then you sit down in your truck and half an hour later, after a cup of coffee, you realize you have to piss. You're still 2 hours away from your next bathroom break, so what do you do? Is this a consequence of poor planning on the part of the driver? Maybe. But that's inevitably going to happen anyway.
If you've been doing the job for a while, this should be very rare. Or maybe you're new to the job and this happens a few times. But you can probably at least find some kind of fast food place at least.
If we assume the company is doing things right, needing to pee in a bottle is not going to routinely happen unless that driver has a medical condition or is an idiot. So if there is a persistent problem with needing to pee in bottles, I'm confident that the cause is something bigger than 2-3 hour drives. Something like "all the drivers are rushed all the time" or "there's nowhere good to go to the bathroom between drives" or simply "they have to deliver too many packages at once". Or "the drivers are intended to take breaks mid-trip, but there was no thought put into making sure bathrooms are available on those breaks".
And this is their day job, they're not just forgetting because it's been a while.
Yeah but I assume someone doing this for their day job can manage a bit of planning. As long as the proper opportunity is there, on-the-go emergencies should be quite rare and wouldn't be a systemic problem.
> Holding in your pee for up to 2-3 hours isn't very healthy; that's the kind of thing Amazon got in trouble for demanding in their warehouses.
2-3 hours since the last bathroom break shouldn't be unhealthy.
I think you're 100% right, but that doesn't mean they don't provide a useful service in bringing up the bottom. If you're in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25, you're suddenly dealing with employees that have a credible alternative of $15/hour. To your point, a lot of folks will trade some money for better conditions, but it makes it pretty untenable to pay less than half of what Amazon's paying.
I really don't understand Amazon's position here. A small number of cheap improvements would vastly raise worker satisfaction. More bathrooms through the building, paid time in security lines, and some honest safety interventions are all cheaper than raising wages or even, say, a private space program or an airliner fleet.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331502/amazon-warehouse...
(Amazon doesn’t have a space program.)
(It's a pretty close parallel. Tesla is public and SpaceX is private. Similarly for Amazon and Blue Origin.)
Today you can get an $x/hour at Amazon or Target, but if Amazon does it right and keeps driving costs down and prices up, coupled with continuous explosion in online shopping, in 10 years Target loses its edge and you can only get a job at Amazon.
It's not to say that short term gains aren't worth it for employees, but long term, those gains might already be baked into Amazon's logic.
Today, they employ 1M people, but in 10 years, when there's no longer a Target or a Wallmart, they overnight add 10M robots and there's no one to say no at that point.
They are notorious for playing very long games, and they don't seem to do anything that doesn't eventually benefit them.
Being in tech I find the tactics very interesting, but it's getting progressively harder to tell if the world is becoming net positive as a result.
Amazon needs a lot of workers. You might get N qualified candidates per month with a $13, but need to offer $17 in order to get 3N.
The more people they need to hire, the more they need to offer. This is often why "mom & pop" businesses often represent the lowest salary tier. They need few employees.
Sure, many workers would choose the less labor intensive Target job over the shitty Amazon warehouse job for the same wage but in many of the warehouse locations, there is simply not that much demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise the market would bear that out.
Also, Amazon has more opportunities for career paths/upward mobility than a local Target/Home Depot.
Everyone who was getting +1,2,3 dollars over that got bumped porportionally, so if you were at 15, you now got 17, if you were at 22 (only things like paramedics) you were at 25 etc.
Why? Amazon has a warehouse nearby. We've bled staff to them for years.
It counters a common argument against minimum wage increases. The argument goes "Small businesses can't afford raises. If they are forced to pay their employees more, they will go bankrupt, leading to unemployment, and low wages are better than unemployment, so you shouldn't raise the minimum wage"
A company's money comes purely from extracting value from its workers. It then tries to return as little value as possible to the people who created that value, in order to reward its owners.
This is really hard to believe because it's pretty observable that labor isn't the only input to production. If that was truly the case, why would anyone work for a company? Why not go work for yourself and skip the middle man?
The truth is because production not only needs labor, but it needs capital, land, and entrepreneurship as well. Labor is only one component, and a decreasing one relative to years gone by. (For instance, the US auto manufacturers make more cars now then ever with fewer employees tham ever)
Estheticians and hair stylists make more than that (including tips) at a senior level.
Basically people put up with it because it's usually a stepping stone toward a job where you can print easy money.
Crappy job, terrible pay. I only did it because I thought the skillset would be valuable while I got an engineering degree. Newly graduated engineers with a 4-year degree and an EIT cert. (in the civil field) started at around $18-$20 / hr.
What do entry leaves hairstylists make?
The learning curve for warehouse work is very low, so if you cannot find someone that can do it, you are either in a geriatric community or you are not offering attractive wages (so wage shortage is more accurate than labor shortage).
Although wage shortages can lead to labor shortages years down for tasks that have high learning curves.
IOW, not competitive in a free market in labor.
Employers who talk about free markets have less enthusiasm when it hits the expense side of their P&L.
That is an interesting argument and I'd like to hear from members of the community about how they feel about this. (Sorry if the questions feel like they are begging the answer, I promise you I am trying to not bring my biases into this)
Should everyone play by the same rules?
For example, how should countries handle pollution? Do emerging economies (China PR in particular but it applies to all nations) have a different, lesser obligation when it comes to pumping carbon into the atmosphere? Did we (USA) and western Europe get a head start with our economy and therefore should be subject to lower limits on how much we carbon we pump into the atmosphere going forward? Or does this question sound absurd to you?
It sounds like an extremely leading question, or at least a dozen separate questions. But the further you go back in history the more, larger, and nastier questions you find where one country gained an advantage at the expense of another, often including a huge number of human lives. Was it really right for France to insist on reparations from Haiti, for example?
Debt between countries don't matter much, and I certainly hope one day we'll have the budget to repay Haiti, but I'm happy we solved it with this infamy rather than murdered each other for decades. It's not the most optimal way we could have behaved, but we've been more abject with former colonies.
Just set a cap based on cumulative emissions. 99% of the time such a cap is aspirational though... It may not be achievable or politicians have other priorities.
My family immigrated to America. Given we’re counting the sins of our forefathers, should the cap that applies to me be my origin country’s? Or America’s?
How do we apportion the USSR’s carbon emissions? Or the British Empire’s?
It is a terrible argument. Amazon does not control wages, supply and demand curves do. Amazon having lower wages before is simply due to the market for labor at that time having more supply relative to demand (or less demand relative to supply).
They did not have any special laws or circumstances which did not apply to everyone else, regarding the wages they pay. And they still do not.
Interesting! I had no idea submarining was happening a hundred years ago. I wonder how common it was.
This was my favorite line though:
> Ford employees would be “demoralized by this sudden affluence,” and, of course, Ford Motor Company would soon be bankrupt.
Nothing hurts employee morale like a huge raise!
Most of what we are looking back is the stuff with value that survived.
> Nothing hurts employee morale like a huge raise!
That seems likely to be language drift, and indeed checking a contemporary-ish dictionary produces:
demoralize 2 c : to throw into disorder
morale 2 b : a sense of common purpose with respect to a group : espirit de corps
which sounds like a much less stupid concern.
Good marketing, but a bad outcome once you've read Bastiat -- jobs and wages are a cost.
Wrong. You can't expect to increase the minimum standard of living without also increasing the minimum wage you have to pay to attract talent. The fact that companies have gotten away with lowering wages thanks to their monopsony power was a mistake to begin with. If you really want to lower the cost of production you also have to lower the cost of living.
Productivity going up does not cause wages to go up. Lower supply of labor relative to demand or higher demand relative to supply causes wages to go up.
High productivity leads to better margins. Better margins allow Amazon to raise wages. Raising wages helped them hire in a competitive marketplace, sure, but it was also a political act. Amazon has been accused of mistreating workers, and paying them above the going rate defuses that accusation.
But I do not think Amazon can afford to stay competitive with Target and Walmart and Home Depot and spend a material amount more on labor costs too. At least not without subsidizing the retail operations with margins from other areas of the business.
Which will be what sinks Amazon- becoming an fancy US storefront for Alibaba.
Is that correct or did I misinterpret the phenomena he was trying to describe?
Then the job market changes and they can go and get a better job somewhere else, so you now have to pay them x+y dollars for child care. Child care has not become more productive, the cost of living has not changed, but your child care is now more expensive.
You could call that a rising boat that lifts all boats, but if you need child care it doesn't.
In this case, though, haircuts get comparatively more expensive. Good for the hairdresser, and fine if your wages go up to match. Characterising it as a "rising tide" might be fair (both in terms of cost and in terms of standard of living), but it's not the "usual" tide of pro-market rhetoric.
Which they will, right? That's the whole idea.
Other things have gotten more expensive but more valuable. For example a car today is more expensive than a car in 1960, but it's got ton more comfort and safety features.