People's lives and families are worth investing in, no matter if a company deems it a benefit for itself or not. Such investments should not be coupled to company's bottom line.
For example, if a major shoe or clothing retailer provided a benefit for its (western) retail employees in order to preempt Congressional action into overseas sweat labor, then it's a really complex moral question, not just "it's better than nothing".
Let's say that Amazon is using this college benefit to avoid raising wages for their front-line workers. One could argue that the college benefit is "bad" because it allows Amazon to ignore the root cause. However, this ignores the fact that Amazon could have just kept wages down without the college benefit. The front-line worker still benefits, even if not in the way they would have wanted.
There could also be the argument that Amazon is offering these college benefits to avoid unionization by their employees, legal action in the form of new laws about warehouse work, or some other action I haven't mentioned. This would mean that the college benefit is "bad" in that it has prevented a larger, more beneficial change. Depending on how likely one thought the larger change was, this could even be seen as a decrease in the expected utility for these workers.
I think this situation is what you mean by a "complex moral question" and I honestly agree with that point. However, I think that most people would rather take a smaller guaranteed benefit over a larger, uncertain benefit. This is primarily because well-being tends to rise with log(income), so a small benefit vs a medium-sized benefit has a much smaller well-being difference than it would initially seem.
I do agree that it ultimately depends though, and that suspicion is warranted. I just think that the moral question is too complex to immediately assume that Amazon is acting in bad faith like some commenters seem to indicate.
To use a computer analogy, it's like: the problem is SQL injection. The "positive step" is disallowing special characters in user names. The radical solution is parameterized queries.
Adding in shitty character sanitization technically makes the situation better, but the bandaid-solution might make management less likely to sign off on fixing the actual problem.
(Note: radical in this sense basically means "addressing the root of the problem, transformative, fundamental" and not "fringe ideology," because everybody knows you should use parameterized queries.).
This might be a bandaid but this issue existed before Amazon, it's not created by Amazon. And many other companies have done this before Amazon. If the issue is the cost of education, there are so many factors causing that how can we expect a single private company to lead that change?
So what is the actual proposed solution that Amazon is making less viable through this change, and how could Amazon have enabled that radical change better? And once we derive what that action could have been, we have to evaluate the value it has to Amazon because at the end of the day they are operating a business not a social justice non-profit.
An obvious solution is to make secondary education free.
> And once we derive what that action could have been, we have to evaluate the value it has to Amazon because at the end of the day they are operating a business not a social justice non-profit.
This is a rather myopic view of society. If you believe that the status quo is unquestionable (that businesses should only prioritize their self-interest), then of course you can't believe in any radical change to it.
And yeah they are one of the largest employers in the world. You have yet to define what specific action Amazon should have taken to produce radical change. Maybe it would have just been a flat out increase in salaries, but with the lens of education, it seems like this is a positive move.
> This is a rather myopic view of society. If you believe that the status quo is unquestionable (that businesses should only prioritize their self-interest), then of course you can't believe in any radical change to it.
No, THIS is a myopic view of society. Entities are always going to work towards the social reward system established, and Amazon/Bezos are acting exactly as you'd expect for our reward system. If the issue is a broader society problem then by definition it cannot be exclusively Amazon/Bezos fault.
And this brings us back to what SHOULD they be doing in this scenario? I am not saying don't question the status quo. But how does questioning the status quo change anything about this scenario? We can question the status quo while also accepting that people live inside the status quo, and thats not inherently bad. I fail to see how it's inherently bad that Amazon is paying for employee education. What SPECIFICALLY does it block in terms of radical change? How do these two things become mutually exclusive in this scenario, not some hypothetical scenario?
Using parameterized queries is trivial, so it's not comparable here. A better analogy would be like arguing we should keep the SQL injection bug there, in the hopes that the hacks will convince management to rearchitect the whole app to using ORMs. Alternatively: we shouldn't use memory safety mitigations like ASLR/stack cookies/W^X, because that would impede the radical solution of rewriting everything in rust.
This is the media breathlessly reporting "Amazon bravely fixes SQL injection bug by disallowing special chars!" while every person who's thought about this for more than a minute goes "why the hell are y'all celebrating, that doesn't fix anything."
It's not hard to fix. It just requires the will do to it.
but it does? It's not the ideal fix, but it does prevent sql injections.
>It's not hard to fix. It just requires the will do to it.
Fixing the soaring cost of education is a non-trivial problem.