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Comment by smugma | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has significantly increased wages. They were at the forefront of the $15 wage, more than double the federal minimum wage. I think at the time Walmart was at $10 or $11.

I live in very liberal SF but outside of my bubble, I hear people complain that it’s not possible to hire Nannies/housecleaners/employees anymore when Amazon and Starbucks pay $18/hr. Seems like the answer is easy: pay them more or make the job more desirable.

Amazon working conditions are challenging, and they have been super anti-union. But they’ve also done more to increase wages in the US than anyone in Washington in the past 15 years, arguably second biggest in past 40 [1].

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart

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Yes, a big chunk of the labor shortages in hospitality, child care, etc. we’ve seen the last two years is a direct result of Amazon hiring lots and lots of people. And as shitty as the conditions of those jobs may be, they’re often still better than where they’re coming from. Sticking labels to boxes and moving them around a warehouse all day may still be better than dealing with handsy bar hounds or screaming children.

I’m not here to say that Amazon is doing a great job and we should all be singing Jeff Bezos’s good graces. But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but on everyone who could want to work at Amazon but can’t because their jobs are more scarce, and by everyone who buys things from retailers (Amazon or not) in the form of higher prices.

Unionists like to talk about how the labor movement provided a lot of basic protections for workers and the 40 hour work week. What they like to talk less about is American unions’ frequent associations with organized crime, it’s history of racism and sexism, all of the environmental bills it has fought against. I could go on.

A union-free Amazon has driven up wages for workers throughout the economy. And it has helped keep prices low for everyone else so that even if you don’t earn as much as a Amazon warehouse worker nor shop at Amazon, you can still afford many basic necessities. So yes, I’m saying we should be singing the good graces of competition.

While I like the idea of unions, I can say that they've been a disappointment in my career. One of my colleagues desperately needed the protection of the union at work when he got caught up in office politics. Some of his rivals for a big promotion got him accused of something that had nothing to do with work. It was all cancel culture. The union, though, didn't back him up at all. They make a big show about somehow fighting management for the workers, but in this case they were happy to help the management screw the guy over and end his career. Sure they're a union, but they're humans and sometimes they'll be aligned against you.

This is not a problem with unions as a concept, but rather with the huge, centralised, bureaucratic, political entities they have become in practise. That type of organisation has some benefits, but I believe federations of highly local unions would be more effective for helping individual people deal with specific pickles.

It’s easily possible to argue that the concept or structure of unions, and their relationships to business, as generally implemented, tends towards those corruptions.

The same argument applies to the structure of capitalism.

I’m reading this as, he made racist or otherwise hateful statements in a semi-public forum and nobody was going to put their organization’s name behind that. It’s an interesting problem. On the one hand it’s a free country you can say what you please and your employee can fire you for it. On the other hand I think it’s inhumane for someone to lose their job - and most notably healthcare - because they are one of a large number of knob heads out there and were unwise enough to advertise it.

I think someone who is willing to speak out hatefully against large swathes of the population based on things like sex and race are exactly the kind of people that should be ostracized. In the case of the work environment, getting fired. If they aren't, they stick around, making coworkers uncomfortable, possibly getting promoted and then ensuring the group they hate doesn't get hired or promoted

But HR departments are not usually doing that as a first step. They talk to the employee and try to get an apology if needed. The stories in the news are always egregious examples or people with a long history and it was the last straw

Without a due process ensured by a union, it’s very hard to know what they did.

Even if someone does something truly horrific, unions still need to protect their rights to a proper hearing, evidence, etc.

A while ago a reporter was fired from the NYTimes for repeating racist language used by a third party.

The reporter had works at the NYTimes for decades with a clear record. A few years before the incident, they became part of unions negotiating team.

Once they joined the negotiating team, the paper suddenly began disciplining then for minor infractions.

Once the allegations about racist language came about, they had a dirty record.

Per the union agreement, had a right to see the evidence against them. The paper refused to do that.

If this person hadn’t been part of union negotiating team, they would have had a clean record, and likely would have survived.

They are now working as a reporter at the Economist.

> Some of his rivals for a big promotion got him accused of something that had nothing to do with work.

How does that translate into making racist or hateful statements?

A better translation is they were in a forum where racist or hateful statements were made, but did it participate in making them.

> But I will say that unionization does come with a cost that is borne not by Amazon’s executives or their shareholders, but ...

I like parts of the analysis (if a big player has to pay higher wages, this will affect many in different ways). But I think it's hard to discuss what exactly the implications would be without a deeper analysis including numbers.

Without numbers, I find that participants in a discussion are often tempted to put a high emphasis on a certain argument or on the impact of a mechanism just because they have come up with that argument or mechanism. But actual numbers might imply a different weighting.

An example would be: With longer fingernails you might be able to swim faster. But to what degree?

wages are one thing, working conditions are another.

It doesn't matter how much you pay me if I can't see my kids and have to pee in a bottle.

Easy to say on a forum, but the reality is that wages and working condition is related.

Obviously Amazon is giving good enough wages for their working condition as evidenced by people choosing to work there rather than leaving.

> Amazon has significantly increased wages. They were at the forefront of the $15 wage

Warehouse workers before Amazon were making over $20/hr. Amazon seriously depressed wages for that kind of work. How do you think they got so profitable and outcompeted everyone else in that space?

Could you share a source for this? Couldn't find much after a bit of googling.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...

Only been in a few rando warehouses, and I think the reason is most rando warehouses are inefficient. One worker may ship 15 packages an hour. I bet the Amazon packages per worker per hour is multiple times higher.

You’re saying conflicting things, Amazon “leads raising wages” to you but then “it’s not possible to hire X at rate Y so people have to pay more.”

Amazon has to pay more because their jobs are shit. They aren’t doing anything to raise wages they’re just trying to get people’s asses in the door. I’m sort of shocked you linked to the department of labor’s historical page as some sort of proof of your idea.

I can guarantee that wage is the minimum they can pay to get people in the door for the level of work required by them calculated by a legion of economists.

The fact you think Amazon jobs are competing with “Nannies/house cleaners/employees” is equally strange. Like somehow these jobs are related?! Why do you only compare those jobs to Amazon factory jobs?

Amazon rose wages and have some the highest warehouse worker wages around, to the point where they are creating upward pressure on wages in other industries.

Their jobs also are super stressful and burn people out.

These things are not contradictory.

Anecdotally, in support of the comment you are replying to, Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here, and $100-$150 a night isn't anywhere near enough to screw with her sleep schedule. She works $18/hr morning shifts and now owns a car.

This seems like a poor comparison. Your babysitter left a part time job (100/25 = 4 hours of work per day) for a full time one and can now afford a car.

Yeah; good for her. The point is that Starbucks and Amazon have created an ever raising floor for the price of labor.

They're low-skill/training jobs, so no skilled job is able to pay less than that. (Also, the Starbucks thing is part time, and she had babysat for other people too -- babysitting probably made sense at 2x the hourly rate of a part time job, but $25 isn't 2x anymore.)

> Starbucks poached our babysitter. $25/hour is the market rate for babysitters around here

Seems like $25/hour was the market rate.

I get the impression the dollar amount didn't change. Instead, the existence of the market did. (None of the other parents we know have been able to find babysitters either.)

Presumably, it'll even out after the labor shortages subside.

Have you tried offering $2,500 per hour? The market exists. There are babies that need babysitting, and people capable of babysitting.

What does not exist is an intersection of the supply and demand curves of people willing and able to pay what people capable of babysitting want to get paid for babysitting.

Are we talking about nannies or a sitter for a random single night? Are there no teenagers in the neighborhood who want an “easy” 4 hours work? That’s what we did with my son (late 90s). Same as my parents did with me and my sister (early 80s).

If he's in SF.. probably not, actually.

>their jobs are shit I have a couple friends that have worked at Amazon warehouses and also worked at shipping centers for UPS and FedEx and they both told me that Amazon not only paid better but had better working conditions. Not saying that's the case universally, but I don't think it's right to uniquely criticize Amazon and not the industry at large, especially if Amazon really is a better employer than their competition.

Additional context: it wasn’t until 2015 that Walmart raised its minimum wage from the federal minimum to $9/hr. It’s now $12.

The federal minimum is not really something that should be taken as a point of reference (from the employees side).

A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)

Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".

>Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".

In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.

If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.

So, you would have the government step in and deny the right of an individual to earn what they may need at that moment, in their specific circumstance, to form a contract with another person - a business owner? The bureaucracy knows better, and if the individual can’t find another job at a level to even scrape by then the bureaucracy steps in again, but is this a path to a solid job in 20 years? The higher the wage, especially federally, the more dramatic and onerous the effect.

It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.

I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.

> I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.

This is the most salient point in my opinion when discussing minimum wages. Employers have to decide which potential employee can produce enough to make up for the wages that they pay. The higher the minimum wage goes, there are less opportunities to get a career started due to not being hired. Experience is highly valued in almost every field. If you cannot get a low paying job just to build some experience in your resume, you delay or never get the next high paying job. Minimum wage ends up crippling the very people it was meant to help.

Or employees could group together to form cooperative companies that don't simply work to extract from their labor and actually provides a decent living for everyone. There is no reason that we should be all working together as a group to make a few people wealthier when they didn't do any of the actual work.

We already produce enough food, goods, and housing for everyone in the country to live with their basic needs met. The only reason that isn't happening is because there is a small group of capital owners and corporations that work to create artificial scarcity. It's an absolutely disgusting practice that benefits nobody but people who are already rich

With the AI cliff that you discuss, productivity will increase even more than it did in the industrial revolution and there is even less of a reason to continue with our absurd current system of making a tiny out of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

> If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist.

I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.

Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.

> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.

I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.

I'm talking about all jobs

Capitalism was good for the time between feudalism and the industrial revolution, but now we have an excess of goods, food, and housing yet corporations are creating artificial scarcity in order to continue enriching a few people at the expense of everyone else.

We have enough empty housing in California alone to house all homeless people in the US yet we still have people living in the streets. We have people starving while we produce enough food to not only feed all of the US but also Africa, yet corporations throw away good food to create artificial scarcity to protect the profits of a few.

Forming cooperatives owned by the workers who make up the business would be a good step in the right direction, and making the excuses like 'some people don't need that baseline' is horse shit. The purpose of a system is what it does and those jobs aren't just filled by young people, there are older people who should be retired worming minimum wage jobs. There are people trying to support their families in those positions. If those jobs are meant for kids, why are the business open during schools hours?

If we work together we can improve living conditions for all humans

Transacting is one aspect of business - ownership is much more important, and only exists as far as the government enforces it.

Did early humans own the tools they created? Probably. Government limits this in almost all cases. Even the liberty minded founders of the USA created eminent domain which is not limited in which property the state can take, technically. The USA typically is supportive of private ownership, but not the originator. I think ownership exists inherently in humans. As does it's counterpart theft. We have decided that theft is bad and ownership is good over the millennia. It is possible we may change to not value ownership and theft would then have a more positive connotation.

Business cannot exist without two parties transacting. Businesses can exist without ownership. That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them. There does not even have to be capital exchanged. Bartering for labor can and does happen.

Businesses can be owned by all of the workers collectively, its rather silly to assume that's not true and it needs a singular owner. There is zero reason why this would be the case. Groups of people can agree on things, believe it or not.

> That is if you do not consider a persons labor to be "owned" by them

That would be an insane stance to take. That is essentially arguing in favor of slavery, the idea that someone other than me owns my labour.

You can own the output of my labour if you have an employment contract with me where I trade you that in exchange for something from you, but you can't ever own my labour itself. That would be nuts.

> I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster.

And such quibbling over definitions is irrelevant when people can't even afford the more affordable of the two.

You are right that Amazon has raised wages, but only by a fraction of what they will have to if their workers unionize.

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