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Comment by comeonseriously | Hacker News Reader

Why not their IT department also? And management?

Why are companies like Amazon constantly kicking the shit out of the lowest paid employees!?

I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot. Two reasons this always happens to the lowest ranked. First because they can- these jobs are largely easily replaceable so even if the workers resist they will be quickly replaced by someone who can be pushed around. Second because people constantly come and go from these jobs they tend to attract some bad apples so there is some need to monitor them more closely.

The purpose of the monitoring is to prevent data theft, and is specifically for customer service associates. Customer service associates have access to sensitive customer data that even management or IT employees do not have.

Modern management believes that the lower ranks need the whip while upper ranks need the carrot to get motivated. It's the same as people are getting nervous about inflation when lower wages are rising but not when the top 1% incomes are going up.

> Modern management believes that the lower ranks need the whip while upper ranks need the carrot to get motivated

For some in the upper ranks, applying the whip to lower ranks is the carrot.

> It's the same as people are getting nervous about inflation when lower wages are rising but not when the top 1% incomes are going up.

Not really. Which do you think is a larger increase in total income?

- Bottom 50% of all wages increase by 5%

- Top 1% of all wages increase by 20%

Average top 1%ile income 1.7M USD. 20% increase = 340K.

Average Bottom 50%ile wage = 46K USD. 5% increase = 2.3K Multiply by 50 = 115K

So the 20% increase in top 1%ile represents a 3X increase in total income when compared with bottom 50%ile.

I'm willing to believe this, but I want to be clear - you've marked an average bottom 50% wage and an average top 1% income. Is that top 1% wage income or all income?

How does it matter to inflation, whether it is wage income or otherwise?

The bottom 50% has plenty of non-wage income too.

> people are getting nervous about inflation when lower wages are rising

Our current wage growth of ~3% combined with inflation of ~5% means that real wages have been falling at about 2%.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/27/wages-are-rising-but-has-inf...

The WSJ added:

> Average weekly earnings since January are up $15.59, but with inflation surging to levels not seen since the early 1980s, real weekly wages are down $8.99, the largest real-dollar drop in wages since Bureau of Labor Statistics data were first collected in 2006. By comparison, real wages have fallen more in the past seven months than they rose in the final 27 months of the Obama presidency.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-government-spending-w...

Check out the BLS (bls.gov) for the latest data and hope it doesn't get worse.

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