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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

> why doesn't amazon just respect its worker's basic human dignity?

Because that directly conflicts with making the highest profit possible (still legally).

What’s sad in these discussions is that it’s both true that Amazon is a terrible employer and that it often pays more than alternatives for many workers. This seems like a failure of policy (ex. Enforcing living wage standards) and American business well-being at least as much as a failure of Amazon to “do the right thing.”

Edit: Cracks me up that I got downvoted for telling the truth about capitalism.

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I don't understand why we expect Amazon to do the right thing vs we should expect in this case all retailers to do the right thing? Unfortunately as consumers we are always looking for the best deal or the lowest price on everything. Which means retailers need to cut costs every way possible which in turn leads to sucking every ounce out of workers.

Let's assume that Amazon did end up making things way better for their workers. That means higher costs and hence higher prices. This will allow other retailers to win markets by setting the best prices.

I think we need regulation that applies to all retailers in this case or all industries that hire manual labor vs constantly targeting Amazon for being the bad guy.

Jeff Bezos's $200B says he's not paying the most he can while still surviving in business.

Let's do some math for fun. Amazon now employs about a million workers in the US. Let's naively assume 3/4 of them work in warehouses and delivery as opposed to corporate. Let's also assume they work, on average, 2000 hours a year (roughly full-time). For Amazon to raise those wages by $1/hr (or lower efficiency demands by ~7%) it would cost them around $1.5B every year.

Now, you're probably thinking that's chump change compared to Amazon's profits, but fun fact: Amazon's online sales segment doesn't make much profit. In fact, it lost $200M in Q4 [1]. So you basically want Amazon to either go deeply in the red, or else they have to raise prices on products to also raise worker wages.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/amazons-profit-engines-are-h...

If it was really losing $800M/year why would they keep it running at all? Could this be "creative accounting"?

Amazon doesn’t lose money with what you’re saying. They are moving money around. We need to stop trusting wildly rich and powerful people and corporations so much.

It's funny that this logic is rarely applied to executive compensation or stock buybacks. Apparently it only hurts competitiveness to increase wages for the low-level workers. Any of the other ways that money gets wasted in a major retail corporation is fine.

And then there are the counterexamples, like Costco, that manage to pay well and be wildly competitive.

If Jeff Bezos wants to work his staff until their bodies break and delivery trucks crash, the least they can do is the same to his body.

Eat the rich.

As a minimum wage McDonald’s cashier, I refuse to get a raise if that means any of my bosses up through corporate don’t get raises.

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