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Your own link [0] shows they aren't even close to the highest (Sysco - $30.99). At $16/hr they don't make the top 25.

And knowing people who work warehouse for Best Buy and Target ($19.33), the working conditions are so much better as to be incomparable to what Amazon does to warehouse workers. Ignoring the fact they get paid more.

So not the highest, but above average.

It’s cool you know people who make $19.33 but I was referencing average pay.

Target seems to pay $13.68/hour [0] and BestBuy $13.69 [1] so they pay substantially worse than Amazon.

It’s hard to systematically understand working conditions though so hard to compare.

But again, the claim that Amazon employees aren’t paid well seems unsubstantiated.

[0] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Target_Corpora...

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Best_Buy/Hourl...

>Target seems to pay $13.68/hour

You're comparing apples and oranges. The $13.68/hr includes high school cashiers. The average wage for a Target warehouse worker is $17, again from your own link [0] on page 2. The average range for best buy is $15, well north of the $12.61 Amazon is paying.

And AGAIN, far better working conditions. So no, not unsubstantiated. And no, it isn't hard to understand working conditions unless you're intentionally trying to gaslight. Amazon has pretty well known requirements for packages per hour that they brutally enforce to the detriment of employee health. Their competitors do not.

Amazon doesn’t pay $12.61.

Target and Bestbuy also have metrics. Companies aren’t “brutally enforcing” performance metrics.

Warehouse workers are average $17 Target and $15 Best Buy

Your link doesn't show Amazon, but found it here https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Warehouse-Worker...

which puts in in the average of Target, Amazon, and Best Buy

> Doesn’t Amazon pay highest in its industry?

Absolutely not. On the tail of the recession, I moved back near my family and got a warehouse job doing the same thing that Amazon workers do. It was shit work under even shittier superiors, but by no means was it worse than what Amazon pays. And that's even being generous to Amazon, comparing it under conditions that totally stacked in Amazon's favor: it's almost like comparing apples to oranges, given that it's now 10 years hence, not to mention that the reference point is the recession. What's the bastion of magnanimity that we're comparing it to, by the way? None other than Walmart.

When I learned how little Amazon workers made, at the time around five years after my experience at Walmart, where you're essentially guaranteed a 50 cent raise every year (or more when the company does well, which is, again, essentially guaranteed), I was floored.

So if other unskilled jobs pay better or have better conditions, why are hundreds of thousands of Americans taking these “horrible” Amazon warehouse jobs then?

Are they all being irrational? Are they being forced at gunpoint to take these jobs?

The real issue is that removing Amazon from the equation doesn’t suddenly make these people’s lives a utopia. They still won’t have healthcare or get higher wages, our laws (the real issue here) will remain the same.

In fact, smaller businesses tend to pay people less and closer to the minimum wage (or even below it, in the case of many Texas and California businesses who employee illegal immigrants).

But nobody writes news stories about tiny warehouses nobody has ever heard of overworking and underpaying their employees.

Not an odd complaint considering he's worth 207 billion. He could more fairly divide that stock wealth among Amazonians. Question is: that 207 billion, did he accumulate that fairly himself or did his workforce accumulate that for him? Hard to answer from the outside but could a single man accumulate 207 billion without help as a corporation of one.

How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a totally reasonable compensation

He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee, warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000 employee base built Amazon into the >$1T behemoth it became due simply to the fact one man can't do it alone. A lot of those employees may not have been able to make the important decisions that Jeff Bezos was able to, but they instead contributed blood and sweat. I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself. By that metric he is overcompensated and others are under.

>simply being a decision maker.

This right here shows you don't understand what it takes to make a trillion dollar company.

They were a book seller that eventually expanded into an online Walmart, that ended up becoming the largest cloud provider in the world.

Just look at Borders/Barne's and Noble if you want to see two companies that were actually in a better position in the same industry 25 years ago. That's the difference between 'simply a decision maker' and an average CEO.

> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself.

This is actually just false. He essentially just proved you could. [0]

[0] Reality

It’s not like he gets a $207B salary. That’s the worth of the equity that has increased over time.

He literally has a percentage of the company and it’s increased in value.

So he’s not paid such an astronomical salary. His salary was about $1.6M [0] as his fortune comes through his stock in founding the company.

I agree that it would be absurd to pay someone $1B, but it’s odd complaining that his assets shouldn’t appreciate in value.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/much-does-jeff-bezos-per-143450179.ht...

> But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker

> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself

Being 1000x smarter or more productive isn't why Amazon is with >$1T though, and saying "simply being the decision maker" is very dismissive of the hardest part of his job.

I think it's likely that there were a few (Maybe tens) of key decision that largely determined Amazons trajectory. If Bezos was wrong on those, no >$1T company. That's why he's worth 1000x more.

Sure, employees didn't have the chance to make those decisions themselves but why does that matter? Opportunity will never be equally distributed. Bezos happened to flip 20 heads in a row, and got to reap the rewards.

You don't make a company out of a bunch of workers in a field though, do you? People underestimate what good leadership it worth - sometimes even people who I later see worshipping Lisa Su (She's not a chip architect, she lets the chip architects fly - Bada bing Bada boom AMD is up however many gazillion percent).

> Question is: that 207 billion, did he accumulate that fairly himself or did his workforce accumulate that for him? Hard to answer from the outside

Not hard to answer at all, the answer is of course not. The unbalanced property relations ensure that the workers who build the wealth are not fairly compensated and have to consent to surrendering the lion's share of the value they produce to their boss.