One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid | Hacker News Reader

One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

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405 pointsZuckMusk467 comments

Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies.

At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.

As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. There is no magical future where AI serves as a democratizing "labor enhancer" for the masses. The value-add of some random person will be 0 in nearly all cases.

We will have to decouple our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value.

I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.

That's all very well for those lucky enough to be employed. In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? Eventually, that's going to be nearly everyone.

>In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed?

A lot of work that's absolutely needed for our survival is still paid dogshit: think construction, cleaning, waste disposal, agriculture, fruit picking, etc. Even in developed countries with human rights, most of this work is done by what are basically modern slave workers usually from abroad on dinghy visas.

Those are the jobs getting the least amount of automation. Robotics is insanely far away from reaching the speed, dexterity, cognition, perception, adaptability and cost for that to be automated at the same rock bottom prices as human slaves.

Currently we live in a society in which a few people have more wealth than tens of millions. The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and there needs to be an evening out of this distribution. Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.

> Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.

In other words let's never tackle the problem of underemployment? A good way to ensure that something never gets done is to require a very hard thing to be done before it.

Your statement assumes a conclusion that has not been established and indeed that conclusion is wrong in my opinion. We can tax wealth and tax money transfers out of the country and do a host of other things to equalize things. We can establish labor standards that mandate a certain level of living for workers. We can also require a high level of labor standards for imported goods.

As an extreme example of how easy it can be to better equalize the distribution of wealth, and not one that I'm advocating for, the Soviets did a great job of ensuring that economic inequality was low. Of course this was obtained by ensuring that everyone was equally poor.

The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to.

America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do.

Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking.

America needs stronger, effective unions too.

third option is dispose of them by letting whoever can't find a job fall into (if they're lucky) being NEETs at a relative's house, or (if unlucky) meth and fentanyl addiction in encampments, scrounging off scraps, essentially in a waiting room for a quick death, while the masses are distracted by mass media with one unrelated distraction after another

in the meantime, the defeated homeless addicts serve as a "reserve army of labor" or as george carlin put it to "scare the hell out of the middle class" in other words, keep wages down and enforce docility for those who are still lucky enough to have jobs

The third option is what is happening right now. It's pathetic. The ruling class has perfected its use of media technology to influence the masses so well that we can even analyze, discuss, and reveal their methods without fear, because even if we announce it from the rooftops the masses will still turn back to their TVs and tiktoks and forget they heard anything, dividing their attention among 100 distractions to keep them from ever banding together.

>At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.

It's not just automation that made low-skill labor worth shit, it's also the next to zero import tariffs on cheap textile and e-waste from overseas.

We traded the cost of our labor for cheap mass produced junk.

Put tariffs on imports proportional to the lack of environmental and human rights regulations the source country has or doesn't have, and boom, problem solved.

And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country"

Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.

Yeah, there's definitely downsides to that since there's no free lunch, but maybe our society should focus on providing affordable essentials for most (education, housing, healthcare, etc), instead of gleiing at the though of getting a new games console for only $199 and that GDP went up by 2%, while food, rent and medical went up by 10%.

Optimizing our society for excessive consumerism and the eternal "line must go up" race, just to plow the wealth in the hands of a few billionaires, at the expense of workers and the environment, doesn't seem like the best long term.

The poor spend a higher percentage of their income on imports than the rich do.

Imports that are actually necessary or frivolities? Also, how were poor people surviving without cheap offshore imports before those became a thing?

Well you see that thing used to be made with higher cost American labor, and those workers were paid more, so they could afford the things they were making.

When the jobs were shipped overseas, those workers were not able to get higher paying jobs, so they were stuck with less purchasing power, such that even though "stuff" is way cheaper now, all the things that couldn't be built overseas now cost an insanely higher percentage of that worker's take home pay.

Sure, you used to have to save up to buy your one pair of shoes per decade, but they mostly lasted a decade. Now you can buy three pairs for the same price, but all together they only last 5 years. You are poorer even though you can "afford" more.

The poor definitionally spend a higher percentage of their income on just about everything because their income is significantly smaller

True, that is the primary effect.

But it holds even if we calculate as a percentage of expenditures rather than as a percentage of income.

The poor tend to spend more of their money on hard goods and the rich a higher percentage on services. And of course goods are a lot easier to import than services.

> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.

That is nonsense. In the highly automated USA labor commands an extremely high wage relative to highly non-automated countries (or almost any country, for that matter). Compare low-skilled comp in the US to somewhere like India, or even Japan - which has a lot less automation in shops and offices than you might expect, and correspondingly lower wages.

It's impressive how many otherwise apparently intelligent people here comment to state as facts what are really their entirely made up opinions growing from some pet dogma. Even when a statement could be debunked with a minimum of consideration (such as in this example) it gets put forth as if it were a sophisticated truth.

Actually, it's the opposite. At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker. So the issue is simply in how corporations are set up and how the stock market is designed.

The entire system is designed to drain as much value out of hardworking people into the pockets of those who do not work, but simply own shares.

Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company. In other words, all workers of a rich company should be (relatively spoken) rich, corresponding to the value they provided to the company.

And I would say that developed western nations, including the USA, have done a pretty good job of providing subsidies and benefits for low skilled workers, so they can get on the lowest rung of the totem pole and contribute to society without starving. We specifically have food stamps, the EITC, welfare, child tax credit, housing vouchers, and so on specifically so they can provide valuable labor to society (and minimum wage is definitely a cost to businesses) and not starve.

and I would assume you would agree that these benefits be expanded as needed and cover a larger population if necessary, right? In fact, it would correct if everyone gets these living expenses taken care of, right?

No I don’t want to give free housing to rich people. I support means tested benefits. The goal is to make people self sufficient, not dependent on the government handout for life.

Surviving in these systems is incredibly stressful and leads to trauma for both the workers and their families. The stigma, uncertainty, and bureaucracy exact tremendous tolls.

Try surviving in the world before those systems existed.

This is not a helpful mindset. Because things were worse before, we should ignore how they are still not faultless?

Isn’t perfect the enemy of good? It’s better, but not better enough until it’s faultless?

The comment I replied to made no constructive suggestions.

They didn't explicitly, no. But implicitly, their constructive suggestions seem obvious to me. Reduce barriers to benefits often called "means testing" - also make them more comprehensive.

Oh, it was most certainly worse. But that doesn't mean we can't do better.

I wonder how our "pretty good" would rank in percentage terms on an absolute scale (what is possible under the circumstances we find ourselves in).

I bet cultures that have the ability to consider such perspectives would beat us handily, especially if they could do it willingly.

Asking for a friend - how do you get access to those programs? He's about to be homeless.

Just Google your state plus food stamps.

Typically that will lead to a portal for all of the Social services benefits.

If not they need to also Google your state plus Medicare, as long as your state participated in the Medicare expansion.

It's Texas so there could be problems. Certainly no Medicare expansion.

oof yeah. Not sure what to say about that.

worth of labor is not the worth of product/service.

Amazon picks the places where it can hire extremely cheap labor, because usually they are the only game in town. (monopsony market for labor.)

it happened without automation and happens with automation too.

of course it's on society to help those who are stuck in these unfortunately places.

> monopsony market for labor

Yes, when the inelastic aggregate supply of labor (expressed as an explicit work quota or expressed as an implicit work quota equal to cost of living divided by wages) exceeds the demand for labor, capitalism turns what should be a happy situation (let's all work a bit less!) into a horror show where working hard for scraps is a privilege and rotting in unemployment is the norm.

Which system works better?

We've been here before, shortly after the industrial revolution. Some countries tried communism, some countries tried fascism, and the US tried Roosevelts. The results speak for themselves. Large, meaningful compromises to labor can thread the needle well enough to avoid bloodshed. We need us another Roosevelt.

Whatever system they use in Scandinavian countries.

we are working less.

is it due to capitalism? is it just the technological progress fairy? (maybe the fairy is more attracted to the smell of capitalist pigs?)

it's not capitalism's fault that people are extremely bad at coordination problems (it's Mr. Moloch's fault obviously, who poisons people's minds with shortsightedness!)

it's not capitalism's fault that people choose to block densification of cities, higher taxes, welfare reforms, or that people vote based on their xenophobia.

> Amazon picks the places where it can hire extremely cheap labor, because usually they are the only game in town

That only works for some of their locations. They are limited by the need for their distribution centers to be in good proximity to the customers they deliver to. In my area, that means their largest distribution center is in one of the more expensive areas of the city. And the other big one is in a less-nice area that is probably still fairly expensive because it's close to the center of the metro area.

Sure, but their move into cities was after they already had a brutal margin and the free money press of AWS.

And cost pressure always applies.

They might put smaller less labor-intensive centers in those places. (Maybe a handover depo for last-mile delivery with some Prime stuff.) Though, of course, maybe the cost of managing non-uniform centers is more than vice versa.

Isn’t that how the market should work? Economically depressed area has people in need of jobs, companies should come in and satisfy that demand, making the place less economically depressed and eventually raising the cost of labor. No point to put an Amazon warehouse in Seattle’s south lake Union neighborhood, for example.

it's not how it works if there is a monopoly. E.g amazon is the only employer. I think this is where the local and federal governments should step in. If someone is working for 40 hours and needs foods stamps then the companies should be required to reimburse the government. It's a disgrace for society to take advantage of people like that.

If Amazon has a monopoly because they are the only ones interested in taking advantage of the surplus labor, then that’s a huge problem, but unless they are somehow locking other companies out, they aren’t the cause of that problem. Are you trying to tell me that Amazon shouldn’t bring those jobs to those areas, and that would somehow be better for the residents? I don’t see any good logic in that, yes, they are taking advantage of an opportunity, but no, those people are worse off if they don’t take advantage.

I’d love to see you go to a place like Yazoo Mississippi and tell the residents how lucky they are to not have Amazon there employing them.

The issue is simply companies taking advantage of people. We like to call it the market, but the market only works when there is a balance. I am simply advocating for a balancing force. Government or Unions usually fill this role.

I would equally challenge you to go to a warehouse and listen to peoples stories about their working conditions and personal stories.

I have friends who are immigrants and have heard them recommending Amazon to each other for warehouse work; apparently Amazon is very flexible if your schedule has to change.

Amazon is a huge player in e-commerce, but there are a lot of employers of warehouse workers and Amazon isn't close to having labor pricing power from what I can see. It's true I am located in a large city and they might have more wage-setting power in smaller cities.

In most cases for low end jobs, you have a lot choices, you just work somewhere else. Amazon usually isn’t the only job in these towns, just the one that pays the most without requiring much education and experience. Ya, life still sucks for a lot of these people working in a warehouse, but less than it would without the job.

The edge could be taken off of these jobs by just giving health insurance to everyone and not making it employer responsibility anymore. This would actually hurt Amazon since they often provide health benefits more easily than the rest (by giving enough hours). Detaching healthcare and maybe even minimum wage (via UBI) would go farther than expecting companies provide everything to workers no matter the job value.

Do amazon workers not require house, food, entertainment, etc.? Amazon isn't the only employer anywhere. Those people want and need services.

only doesn't mean they don't have effective pricing power in the local labor market due to their size

It is how it works given enough time and size and spherical cows and a bit of vacuum. :)

Amazon does provide jobs, in fact it provides too many jobs, crowding out other buyers on the local market, then after they downside/close, Amazon can effectively set the price of labor there, and it sets it to the minimum. (Meaning Amazon takes all the economic surplus produced, basically those who work there cannot save, cannot really raise children, etc.)

The problem is not that the market doesn't work, the problem is that it doesn't help with the desirable things society wants.

And if we only consider economic surplus, it is better to have Amazon there than not. (Before Amazon we can assume people there had even worse jobs, and the region heavily subsidized by various welfare programs.) But big companies inherently do very profitable things that look like coordination (ie. they look like they are in a cartel), that's why - other factors being equal - they won't open factories/warehouses in already saturated labor markets, instead they pick a place where cost of operation is cheaper (wages are lower).

And then through consolidation the market can get into a (pathological) state where there are only big companies, and they just buy/deter/sabotage new small companies.

No. You're forgetting that there is a finite amount of work needed and so orders-of-magnitude fewer people are required.

Also, the average real purchasing power in America has been declining for a very long time and cannot afford goods and services except through taking on debt.

There are two basic solutions to this problem.

1. Everyone works less (the government mandates a 35, 30, 20... hour workweek), raising the relative value of labor.

2. We collectively do more than the bare minimum needed for survival and comfort (the government raises taxes, spending them on activities like building sports stadiums or moonbases), raising the demand for labor.

Or we could just have the government stop having laws that constrain competition, so that automation makes things cost less instead of siphoning the money into the coffers of megacorps, and then at lower prices people buy more products and services, increasing the demand for labor and decreasing the cost of living.

The recent profitflation phenomenon demonstrates pretty conclusively that we can’t rely on lower production costs to result in lower prices without a lot of aggressive trust-busting.

> so that automation makes things cost less instead of siphoning the money into the coffers of megacorps

I cannot trust any company with any modicum of success not to immediately exit into the hands of megacorps. I cannot hope that companies have any type of morality/"want to make the world better" anymore.

But you trust governments to have that morality?

You don't need to trust in their morality, you have a direct ability to influence representative democracies.

You have no way to influence the governance of corporations.

Sure you do. You could buy shares.

It won’t give you much influence in isolation, but I challenge you to show more influence over your elected representatives.

> Sure you do. You could buy shares.

Oh, yeah, it's a great system if you're someone who has money. Most people don't.

Representatives, on the other hand, can't exist without votes.

Most of the money in politics is spent on convincing voters to vote for a particular rep, that's why money holds sway over politicians. But money in itself isn't actually going to get someone elected.

And isn't it weird how the people who do get elected actually tend to be of at least vaguely similar political leanings to their constituents?

If money was all it took, we'd have no issue electing hard-conservative anti-abortion fundamentalists in, say Chicago, as long as they had policies that their donors found appealing. (Or, conversely, socially progressive, economically regressive 'liberals' in the deep south.)

As it turns out, money in elections can only shift the needle so much, and won't turn black into white.

What it can do is pick a winner out of a lineup of similar candidates, where the margins are close enough that a bigger advertising war chest will move the needle... And even then, all of those campaigns are only possible by ground-canvassing volunteers, who are motivated ideologically, not financially.

If it was that simple then this problem would be solved. Clearly most voters (in your opinion) want a higher minimum wage, UBI, and greater corporate taxation. If elected representatives do what their voters want, why are we discussing this?

> If it was that simple then this problem would be solved.

Only if you see the world in black and white.

My thesis is that money is a corrupting influence in politics, but is not the main driver of it.

Meanwhile, money is the only influence in corporate ownership. Which is, incidentally, why most people with money do everything in their power to try to convince us that the solution to all the problems they cause is to move more power out of democratic institutions, and into corporate ones.

> Clearly most voters (in your opinion) want a higher minimum wage, UBI, and greater corporate taxation.

What on earth made you think this?

I said that the politicians that get elected vaguely, in aggregate, share the views of their constituents, and you're not going to tell me the deep south in aggregate wants any of these things. It does, however, want a lot of people who talk a lot about Jesus in government, and, well, their ballot results definitely deliver them.

If you believe my thesis is wrong, roughly how much money do you think will get someone like AOC elected in a district in rural Oklahoma? Or MTG in NY's 14th district?

minimum wage is a state issue , so i’m not sure why the south matters.

I'm confused. Do you think there aren't states in the deep south?

Study: Politicians listen to rich people, not you

Rich people don't want a higher minimum wage, UBI, and greater corporate taxation.

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...

That does support both that governments can't be trusted to behave morally and that voting shares is just as good, but your tone suggests that you're disagreeing with the parent. Am I misreading that intent?

Thank you for prompting me to reread the comment tree to untangle the meandering rambles. Hopefully, this will clarify my perspective.

I think there's a chance you misread. Many times, I feel the conversations we have online would be better off held over a few beers and a backyard barbecue.

I feel that any concentrated center of power cannot be trusted to behave ethically. That's a fancy way of saying you can't trust the government or corporation to behave morally/ethically.

I assert that you have more control over government than you do corporations because, as someone said above, you can lobby/campaign/vote and have an impact on local, state, and federal government. As an aside, the further away from local, the less impact you have.

With corporations, you could buy shares, but given that each share is equal to one vote, the more money you have, the more influence you can exert.

I know it's been a fashion since Reagan to distrust government, but decades of neoliberalism have shown that counting on corporations usually makes things worse. Anytime one transfers a communal benefit into the pockets of a few, bad things happen.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/exxon-sui...

How's that working out for these people who bought shares?

Monopolies are the natural end here, since more money means more ability to invest in machinery to produce (or AI), or just buy up any of the newcomers.

I think the US should seek both capitalistic and socialistic policies simultaneously, but this would require a revolution that may [not be possible / very difficult] to achieve from within the US political system because its "operating system" is tainted by lobbyists for the billionaires.

i. Restore corporate tax rates to historically high levels

ii. Increase capital gains tax significantly

iii. Tax speculation-derived activities, especially real estate and REITs

iv. Gradually curtail subsidies on field corn, currently occupying 5% of America's land (~100 million acres)

v. Shrink defense spending by half

vi. Enact single-payer healthcare for all eliminating co-insurance and better than Medicare up to UK NHS levels but without the government delivering healthcare directly; there shouldn't be good health insurance for just a few people with good jobs

vii. Greatly expand visas for engineers and entrepreneurs

viii. Also expand visas and professional certification "homologation" for teachers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, and researchers so they don't have to start over

ix. Invest in trade schools: plumbers, electricians, machinists

x. Invest in adult education, GED, and pre-college prep courseware

xi. Earmark funds and network applied STEM courses and internships for industry-practical training, especially for fabs, robotics, and high-tech manufacturing

xii. Invest in childcare and pre-K

xiii. Revisit tariff adjustments on a more frequent and selective basis

xiv. Entrepreneur incubators should get federal subsidies because they're generating wealth

xv. UBI - Everyone gets it without requirements excepted tapering down based on income

xvi. Small businesses should have even greater incentives in banking, real estate, state and federal bid contracts, and tax treatment

> i. Restore corporate tax rates to historically high levels

My gut feeling is that this would increase inflation, but I could be wrong.

> iv. Gradually curtail subsidies on field corn, currently occupying 5% of America's land (~100 million acres)

I would much rather the US spend $2.2B on corn subsidies so that we have food security in the event of a global catastrophe. I’d prefer eating nothing but corn flour/meal for years than starving to death.

> v. Shrink defense spending by half

As a (biased) US citizen, I would prefer keeping American Hegemony around, and that doesn’t happen without the massive military overspending the US does.

>I would much rather the US spend $2.2B on corn subsidies so that we have food security in the event of a global catastrophe. I’d prefer eating nothing but corn flour/meal for years than starving to death.

Are those really the only two options?

There are definitely other options, I’m not trying to present a false dilemma. My point is that spending 0.03% of total federal expenditures to guarantee food security is money well spent. Subsidizing other crops would work, it just happens to be easy to industrialize and automate corn farming and there’s plenty of good agricultural land in the US that is suited to grow corn.

> the US political system because its "operating system" is tainted by lobbyists for the billionaires.

It's "tainted" by lobbyists in the same way a Superfund site is a bit "dirty".

Shrink defense spending when Russia and China are gearing up for World domination?

I am from Europe, and in more immediate danger, but I would still hope US will defend any sort of democracy we have vs the threat of dictatorships. I know my country has helped out US with its wars.

Now is the time to increase those budgets, not decrease. Decreasing would actually increase the odds of WW3.

Why do you say there is a finite amount of work needed? There might be, at any one time, a finite amount of work someone is willing to pay x > 0 dollars for, but as x goes to 0 I’d intuitively think the amount of work increases indefinitely.

This is exactly what happens. Because of automation, the amount of labor needed to do all the work that was done in the 19th century is now a low single digit percentage of the population, and yet the unemployment rate is low.

The actual problem is artificial scarcity, not automation. A robot that can build housing cheaper than humans is great. A law that restricts new housing from being built so young people can't afford it is not.

We need to find more work for people to do and make it easier to start businesses.

Workers are already at an extremely high level of productivity compared to any other time in history. The problem is what they get in exchange for their labour, and that is a question of monetary policy and how inflationary money enters the economy (it's through real estate).

Going beyond unionization to ownership, one solution is worker-owned co-ops. Making those easy to start and providing tax benefits for such would be fantastic.

Worker owned co-ops have existed for a long time and they don't solve the problem, because they still have to compete on the free market for money that is created out of thin air and distributed through real estate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

This itself is a fallacy derived from the Keynesian crowd. There isn't unlimited demand for labor and never was. In the real world at microeconomic and local levels, labor demand is absolutely limited to discrete job posting and people who are already employed. This number is ultimately countable and finite. There are not infinite jobs available.

Things don't have to be mathematically infinite for them to be practically infinite.

> labor demand is absolutely limited to discrete job posting

Only for a very limited definition of labor. How many children post job offers for rearing them, for example?

> isn't unlimited demand for labor and never was

Correct. But we're nowhere close to it. To the extent labor is a limiting factor on growth, it's in its lack of adequate supply.

> In the real world at microeconomic and local levels, labor demand is absolutely limited to discrete job posting and people who are already employed

You're describing edge cases, e.g. mining towns and war zones. In enterprises, it's an open secret that most jobs aren't filled by asking for applications. In small businesses, it's quite common for someone to pitch a service or a role. (A lot of "small business" is indistinguishable from freelancing/contracting. For example, the person who told me at a bar that he does yard work, and whom I wound up hiring.)

Ah, no. There are absurd numbers of job reqs that don't provide livable wages, lowball workers compared to industry brackets, or require skillsets that are niche or unrealistic.

> absurd numbers of job reqs that don't provide livable wages, lowball workers compared to industry brackets, or require skillsets that are niche or unrealistic

Sure? How does that even remotely advance your argument?

I've seen people asking hundreds of dollars for a specialty pineapple, that doesn't mean we're running out of pineapples.

If what you say was even remotely true, wages would increase automatically because there would be superior demand to offer. Yet this does not happen.

In the end business output is constrained by demand and unlimited growth is a big fat lie. There are only so many goods/services that can be sold to people.

At some point you run into a situation where everyone has more stuff than they know what to do with (especially true if it is working people, because they are time constrained) and there are more services on offer that they are needs for, regardless of price/affordability.

If you do a thought experiment and give everyone infinite money you will realize that you will be constrained by real world considerations, just like the housing market is constrained by location...

Yes, the minimum wage in Big Macs has absolutely cratered, something like a sevenfold decrease. I haven’t checked the numbers but I expect the price of a house in minimum wage hours has similarly skyrocketed.

This is of course because labor has received virtually none of the labor productivity gains since 1965.

There is a lot of work to be done. Literally everywhere is short staffed: hospitals and other medical groups, construction, retail, restaurants, pharmacies, etc. I don't remember things being like this 20 years ago. Wherever you go, there's huge waits due to staffing issues.

And yet those places are entirely unwilling, and sometimes literally economically unable, to increase what they are offering to fill those positions.

It's not staffing issues. Companies very clearly are willing to overwork their existing staff rather than hire new.

There's a store of our local grocery chain that is placed in an extremely high traffic, high income, extremely high wealth portion of the state. It pulls in over $1 million a day in sales. They have complained about "staffing" for years now, all this "nobody wants to work" BS, to the point that they most likely are losing sales to competitors. They offer $20 an hour starting. They could offer $40 an hour and have their pick of great employees and unlock more revenue, but they choose not to do that, because it's better to struggle with an understaffed store than it is to set a precedent of people making actual money for their labor.

So, your theory is that they could double their payroll because grocery stores are so high-margin that this is no big deal? Or is it that you believe they wouldn't have whiny complainoids even at $40/hour, making it expensive but worth the increased cost? What happens when their competitors need to do the same thing just to stay in business... will everyone somehow magically have the top 5% of the wagie class, and everyone will be be happier, customer, employee, and boss alike? Would the people who do no-show-no-calls stop doing those when for the first time in their lives they can afford to skip a day or two, or would they do this even more?

I'm not convinced that there is any merit in this plan.

there's no merit because if there was, someone would be doing it.

The fact of the matter is most real-life business deal with razon-thin margins, particularly retail , and if you want to compete with amazon chinese subsidies, you have to literally run on fumes, all the time.

I have an idea: let's try and see - although I know it's against any current business teaching. Seems easier to assume the employees are whiners, especially from a position where the hourly rate is at least an order of magnitude higher. But I digress: of course the first question will be, who's trying first this novel approach? My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worker is more than double yet the big mac price is pretty much the same. Who would have guessed...

> I have an idea: let's try and see

While I encourage and am delighted by your attitude that you want to see experimental results, there are some insurmountable issues:

1. I don't have any friends who want to run their multi-million-dollar-or-billion-dollar grocery businesses into the ground. 2. People of leftist bent, when seeing results they don't like tend to blame it on non-leftists and double down. 3. This is such bad budgeting that there's no need to jump off the cliff just to prove we'll splat. You're doubling payroll in an industry where profit margins are razor thin.

> My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worker is more than double yet the big mac price is pretty much the same

Do the Danish customers trash the place like they do in every McDonald's I've ever been to in any large city in the US? Do they deal with hobos coming in with their own cups and just filling those up without purchasing anything? Or any of a thousand other issues (I guess you'd call them "social") that make operating a franchise so much more difficult and expensive in the US? Do they have to hire twice as many employees just to get 80% of the labor (oh wait, that one's rhetorical, we already know the answer). Has a Danish McDonald's employee ever had to hose down the restroom because someone projectile-diarrheaed every surface within that room, includin 8ft up the walls and so forth?

We can't have that, unless you can get everyone in the United States to behave like Danes. But then they'd also eat better (and be taxed like Danes), like Danes, and so sales would fall. And where Denmark has fewer than 100 stores, the US has 14,000... how many of those will close? Of the ones that remain open, how many would they lay off? Are the stores in Denmark franchises, or corporate and just there as loss leaders or something like that?

So some are paid more, the rest just become unemployed. Forgive me if I think that the Danish model doesn't work here.

>My favorite example is the comparison with Denmark, where the hourly wage of the mac worker is more than double yet the big mac price is pretty much the same. Who would have guessed...

Not me! Can someone explain this to me?

I worked in a restaurant for 5 years. It's a notoriously tight-margin industry, the poster child for late stage capitalism. We aimed for labor costs of ~30%. If we doubled wages, holding margins constant, we'd have to charge 30% more. Another ~40% goes to ingredients- I don't know what their labor percentage is, but conservatively assuming 20%, that's an additional 8% if they doubled wages too. If we let margins go to zero (they do have to be non-zero to incentivize opening a restaurant at all, but can be arbitrarily small), we're still a minimum of 28% more expensive.

But even if we ignore all of that, the US notably subsidizes beef to a large degree. If we had salary parity with Denmark, I'd still expect the US Big Macs to be cheaper. And that's all before factoring in Denmark's higher taxes.

So what gives? Does McDonald's have wider margins or a lower labor percentage than the rest of the industry? Does Denmark also subsidize beef?

There’s an aversion to calculating wages based on local rent, food, and gas prices that I haven’t found an explanation for.

If you’re hiring machinists or nurses for $2 more than fast food wages you will be continually understaffed and the local pool of skilled workers will dry up.

> There’s an aversion to calculating wages based on local rent, food, and gas prices that I haven’t found an explanation for.

If this is a recent development, I would say that it's just inertia against inflation. Are you saying this has been happening more than the past couple years?

From my perspective it’s post-pandemic behavior, but I’m just one set of eyeballs.

Inflation inertia seems reasonable but this is back of the envelope math most businesses do as a matter of course.

Everyone is trying to get someone else to eat the inflation.

Yet all they offer are ghost jobs at worst and hourly/gig work at best?

You guys are talking different things when you each say "worth". You're reasonable in saying the price of most labor may be lower due to the automation, and GP is also reasonable in saying that the productivity of labor may be much higher.

Whether either of these things are "correct", time will tell and likely will be nuance and vary by job role, but they're both reasonable.

The average real purchasing power in America has been increasing since at least 2010: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-purchasi...

This is so weird.. my experience doesn't match with this data at all.

Because money doesn't buy happiness, and a lot of the increase in purchasing power is pointless stuff like the fact that you can buy an iPad that's twice as powerful for half the cost, or get YouTube for free instead of paying $50 for cable, while the things that really matter like housing go up in price relative to wages.

If you want to feel richer, look on Amazon/AliExpress and try to remember what stuff like that used to cost decades ago. It's not BS, it's very real. It's amazing how cheap random knickknacks are now.

But, you're right -- it's a pyrrhic victory because I'd rather own my own home and have a tough time affording a breadmaker and blender than rent forever and easily afford having all the gadgets that I do, and I think most people feel similarly.

Well mostly I was fixating on the health insurance, and how health insurance's growth rate has slowed, but healthcare costs have gone way up in general and health insurance covers almost nothing anymore while deductibles have also gone up (for me). But again it's about rates, and I guess when I look at Figure 3 again it just seems deceptive.. a personal computer purchase for me includes a GPU and those prices did not decline (the total cost of a gaming PC like tripled over that time period). Overall this just seems like it's cheer-leading industries that are shrink-flating: health insurance that covers nothing, shit tvs, cheap crappy PCs, airline fares (ever shrinking leg room?).

Edit: Also probably because I remember when the dollar had WAY more purchasing power, so my baseline is skewed already. But this "increase" in purchasing power is just a return to more normal levels. This data feels more relatable.. slightly less purchasing power since 2019 https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/purchasing-power-constant...

Yes, agreed, healthcare is another great example alongside housing. Healthcare, housing, and education have famously gone up far faster than wages for decades, while gadgets and knickknacks and furniture, etc, have gone down. Hindsight is 20/20 but most people would rather have more security (which is what healthcare, housing, education give) and less luxury (knickknacks, gadgets) than the other way around

Your link examines the purchasing power of "a dollar", not the purchasing power of the average person. Inflation is always supposed to be positive because deflation is far worse for the economy than inflation is. Average wages have also increased since 2019, hence average purchasing power of people increasing. Inequality has increased, but real purchasing power is still increasing for people at the 75th percentile, so generally almost everybody is getting more wealthy in real terms.

Housing and healthcare costs are outpacing wage increases, it's true. The CPI (which is used to determine real purchasing power) weights them at about ~44% and ~7%, respectively [1]. So together, these constitute about half of the CPI, and yet average real purchasing power is still increasing.

The big factor is where you live. If you live near a wealthy coastal city, you're getting railed by NIMBYs into far higher housing costs than the average American. You're also more likely to be in the minority of Americans who don't already live in a home they own (65% of Americans own their own home), so housing price increases are even worse for you. This group is likely over-represented on HN, but it's not exactly "average".

Cold comfort I'm sure... but migration is a potential solution.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2023.htm

You're right. We get cheap knicknacks instead of cheap housing, electricity, water, food, etc.

Work feeds in to quality of life, quality of life is unbounded. If we had nuclear power plants in every town we could have nearly anything we could imagine.

Labor is fluid, if everyone working for a rich company should be rich, then why would anyone work for a not rich company? It would completely lock up the labor market, where everyone vies to work at the richest company rather than the company that can use their labor the best.

That's like asking why would anyone go to college anywhere but Harvard. They would, but Harvard has limited slots, so you do the best you can.

Also, it's weird you pose this as some kind of counterfactual proof by contradiction, it already happened, because "locking up the labor market" the way you describe is kind of what FAANG did, in at least a mild way, to software engineering, during what we now have to sadly call (if we rely on it for our livelihood) the good old days of the 2010s.

In fact, the dearth of math teachers in America probably has to do with this a little, for example. Shortage of math skills, and they really help getting into tech or finance, and the pay difference is huge, so, they suck all the oxygen out of the room.

So who gets to work for the richest company? The luckiest, the most connected or the hardest working? Is it better being a warehouse worker for Amazon rather than a ML engineer for a poor startup?

You're asking how it should be or how it actually is? If the latter, have you like, actually been in the workforce?

Yeah, it's a combination of luckiest, most connected, and/or hardest working, depending on the company, depending on the situation. You should know this if you've interviewed for jobs a few times. I'm really confused by your train of thought. Are you a college student?

how have the shareholders siphoned off money? dividends? Has amazon ever paid a dividend? does capital investment provide no value? If "shareholders" suddenly sold the stock, would the workers dump money into the organization to keep it afloat? There are a whole host of logical fallacies here.

When an activity produces an economic surplus there's a pretty obvious conflict that occurs in terms of how that surplus will be distributed between workers and capital owners.

You can search for "productivity vs compensation" to see the classic graph that shows compensation and productivity decoupling around 1980 in the US. One such is e.g: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ or for Australia (because that's where I live) over a different timeframe: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/has-worker-compensation-refl... - I'm not sure anybody has conclusively identified the root cause although a lot of people have ideas.

> If "shareholders" suddenly sold the stock, would the workers dump money into the organization to keep it afloat?

Mature businesses don't make money by selling shares, they make money by selling products and services that the workers make. Share value is not of that huge importance.

'At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker.'

"Siphoned off"? The shareholders funded the automation that boosted the workers' productivity.

Then the question is: how they came about getting that much cash that they could fund such a thing?

Did they get it solely from their hard work or a large amount of luck/exploitation was involved? It is a rhetorical question, because of course the only right answer is the latter. The reality is that across all ages, you could never get there just by hard work.

I have a very fitting example in my family: my great-uncle/aunt were hardworking people and extremely thrifty (not to stay stingy, but to be fair they grew up in war time when everything was in short supply). Yet after 42 years of stable hard-working career and 33 years of confortable retirement pension (over the median salary for the area); the total of their assets doesn't even cross the million euros mark.

In a way they could have much more if they had put their capital to work, but since they were simple blue-collar workers, they did not, and what they end up with is just the result of their labour (and social system). This amount could just about pay for the adult life of a single person at minimum wage and you could barely fund a small/medium business acquisition. There are many businesses in the area that sell their assets for much more than that, and you would still need to exploit it to get anything; which is exactly where we started: make other people work to make you money, and give them less for their labour than you make exploiting the assets.

It took them over 75 years to accumulate all that, anyone getting that much cash earlier in life either inherited it or got lucky another way (did something that somehow got valuation way over the actual labor cost, which is basically the case for all early tech stuff).

The shareholders didn't fund jack shit, they took some money from someone else and used it as leverage to exploit the labor of other people, it's simple as that. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

If shareholders aren't entitled to the profit of a business, then they wouldn't have invested in it in the first place.

> there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company.

At the end of the day, the price of labor is going to be a the intersection of supply and demand, so this isn't much different that forcing an employee to spend x% of their wages on buying shares in their own company. This would be great if you were a 1997 Amazon employees, but it would be a disaster for 1997 Sears employees.

> Actually, it's the opposite. At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to

If this were even slightly true, you could just go out and offer your labor on the street corner, and people would jump at the chance to buy it from you. Or you could "harvest" your labor and sell it retail to others trivially, and just loaf around half the year on the cool half million you earned the other half.

You can't do these things, and few can. Your labor has no economic value whatsoever, nor does the labor of most other people.

> The entire system is designed to drain as much v

Designed by who? Why does everyone use the word design here? It sounds every bit as dumb to say "design" here as it would if we were talking about biology. The system evolved. No one person got to design, or parts of it, nor did a committee. If some billionaire or pope or warlord wanted to redesign it today, he couldn't. It's never been designable. No one would even know how to design it so that they could get the results they desired.

> Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company.

How could it possibly be more accessible? If a hobo walked off the street smelling like poop and vodka, with a wad of money in his hands, right into the broker's office... do you think they'd turn down the money?

Did you mean affordable?

> At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker.

You are wrong, but so very close that it's understandable.

What can be done with an hour of labour has gone up so very high. That it is true. But what has increased in value is the infrastructure of that allowed for the force multiplier. The actual value of labour thus goes down because it can be consumed so efficiently.

Since it's the infrastructure that provides most of the heavy lifting, the owners of it get the benefit.

If you need another analogy it'd be like a sport where players win the games, but it's really about the excellent coach that calls the plays. The players have no leverage even if they win all the games.

> what has increased in value is the infrastructure of that allowed for the force multiplier. The actual value of labour thus goes down because it can be consumed so efficiently

The price of unskilled labour is objectively higher today than one hundred years ago, and it's clearly higher in developed countries in comparison with undeveloped ones. This is due to a myriad of factors. But to date, workers have done well by way of increasing productivity. (Others have done better.)

Infrastructure is not sentient. Remember that and the causes of French Revolution my friend.

With no one to run the tools or tools workers chained to tools what good are the tools? They decay and many cannot be moved effectively.

Thanks to the fact that criminals won the war on drugs - a destitute life on the streets perpetually high on meth or heroin and alcohol appears to remain within reach for the foreseeable future posing an attractive alternative lifestyle for those dispossessed of abusive labor conditions. Funding social welfare programs would rebalance the calculus but that fact is angrily denied by most wealthy people despite the overwhelming consensus amongst researchers and practitioners.

Expect the difficulty to staff these expensive tools with impoverished staff to fuel inflation for the foreseeable future. It is not impossible that ever more creative financial engineering may stave off any of the countless imposing financial crises but the rebalance against capital for labor is long overdue even without a financial crisis to fuel discontent.

I for one hope that the rebalance can occur peaceably but accept the fact that rich and powerful live in reality distortion fields so are more likely to lash out violently than concede a single of their unearned pennies.

  >criminals won the war on drugs - a destitute life on the streets perpetually high on meth or heroin and alcohol appears to remain within reach for the foreseeable future posing an attractive alternative lifestyle for those dispossessed of abusive labor conditions. Funding social welfare programs would rebalance the calculus but that fact is angrily denied by ....

reality?

You're both wrong -- if you need two different resources as inputs to make something, and either missing makes the process impossible, it doesn't matter what your subjective opinions are when deciding which is more valuable. They are equally necessary and that's all there is to it.

So how come some input resources are priced a lot more highly than others? How come sometimes, say, labor gets a big cut and capital a small cut, and other times the other way around?

Supply and demand. Bargaining power. That's why. Nothing to do whatsoever with the actual value involved in the process.

What portion of the value we apportion to the suppliers of each resource is purely a political question based on bargaining power -- who is less willing to withdraw from providing their resources, etc

To use your sports analogy, if this magic genius coach can easily find plenty of any old players to execute his strategy with, then I guess he will manage to absorb the lion's share of profits. If it's hard to find players relative to supply/demand, then it doesn't matter if they're dipshits who barely manage to do anything and who just do what the coach says, it doesn't matter if anyone could do what they do. All that matters is the coach needs them and there's not enough of them. You can't have a team without the coach and you can't have a team without the players, regardless of their respective merits.

How you divide the spoils among resourceholders all of whom are critical to the process is purely political, based on leverage and negotiation, not based on actual "value" which cannot be computed unless a sports team can exist without players or without a coach and merely be a little, measurably worse.

> They are equally necessary and that's all there is to it.

Equally necessary doesn’t mean equally valuable. So there is that.

The more tasks that are automated, the more easily a low level worker is replaced. And the less they will get paid.

Think warehouses, checkout attendants, gig workers, …

The masses of jobs don’t require unique humans. And the more is automated, the less individual worker skills matter. For most jobs.

This gives businesses huge economic leverage over their workers. They will pay them the minimum it takes, and since this is an economy wide problem, every drop in wages somewhere makes it easier for wages to be dropped elsewhere while still retaining workers.

Finally, any area where many workers manage to hold onto higher wages will have a target painted on it as a prime place for new business value to be made finding a way to commoditize their work with automation.

Businesses are rapidly growing the capabilities of their physical and informational automation. Human workers are not getting stronger, faster, or smarter. So they are forced to compete for jobs by getting cheaper.

But isn't it more profitable to replace a high-cost job like a data analyst or logistics expert than 10-20 low-cost jobs like warehouse workers? Like the cost of the machines and the maintenance probably will end up costing more than humans.

Except replacing the data analyst is very difficult, especially since he probably brings to the table a good amount of human intuition is involved (thinking).

You cannot replace it straight with an AI or automated process because we just don't have the tech yet and you cannot replace it easily with any other human because it requires not only a particular education but also very specific skills that are not ubiquitous.

That human has more leverage and this is why he is getting paid more. It's very logical but I don't think it is fair to the other humans at the bottom, because while they are much easier to replace, they are still very necessary.

> Human workers are not getting smarter.

Everyone is walking around with devices that connect them to nearly the total sum of human knowledge. Not acting on that to get out of an easily replaceable job is a skill issue. Also, the education systems currently aren't the best. Automation and IT hasn't penetrated them as much as is feasible.

> skill issue

"To each according to his ability. Everyone else suck shit."

Being unable to learn is a matter of either unwillingness or disability.

Nowadays it's easier to learn than ever, and the real rates of intellectual disabilities/neurodiversity hadn't gone up that much. Such conditions are just easier to diagnose nowadays.

Thus yes, if you won't learn, and you can't prove that it's an organic problem, enjoy a job that sucks.

Blaming capitalism for that is meaningless.

> Equally necessary doesn’t mean equally valuable. So there is that.

But there's no objective way to measure valuable other than what the output is and what happens if the resource is removed. That's circular reasoning. You want to believe that doing something easy can't possibly be as valuable, but, it sure can, it's all a matter of supply and demand. We've all seen boomtown situations, especially if we read history or follow current events, where suddenly an undersupply of warm bodies relative to the opportunities makes for high wages relatively speaking for anyone just willing to move to the boomtown area.

There would be an objective way but it wouldn't be politically accepted. Because then there wouldn't be so much difference in compensation for work and it doesn't do rich people or politicians any good. After all, if everyone is closer in net worth, many of the problems politicians are supposed to solve just go away.

In any case, objectively the ones who get a shit ton of money just for owning a stock or just leading (making choices, good or bad) are overcompensated compared to the rest.

Supply and demand don't work for this type of stuff because demand (for better paid jobs/position) is basically infinite while supply is artificially constrained: we are making sure that only one in a hundred or one in a thousand can get the position, regardless of actual worker competence. One might be perfectly good enough for the job but if all the positions are taken, he will have to settle for a lower position.

The fact is that the difference between lower levels of pay and higher ones is way too large and this inequality has increased 10-50-fold in the last 50 years. Clearly the system is broken.

I agree that extreme inequality is generally bad and the value of labor should be higher than the value of capital. But market forces are really important for the functioning of the economy and the welfare of everybody, including low-skilled workers. Regulations like this would distort market forces. A much better solution is progressive taxation. Capital gains and dividends should be taxed much higher, with the benefits predominantly going to workers.

Probably not a new idea, but something I've been wondering is if the US implemented progressive taxation, and instead of a UBI implemented a stock buyback program where the government buys shares and then redistributes ownership to citizens.

Even though this is totally wealth redistribution (which is politically unpopular, socialism and all), I bet you could market it as super American like Andrew Yang did with UBI as the "Freedom Dividend".

This way you could "work within the system" and still keep stonks going up, but also help redistribute wealth to poorer citizens.

Interesting idea, but if you need medicine for your child and are low on cash, you will sell those stocks today rather than save them for the future.

And the buyer will be someone who has enough cash to not worry, and will thus get even more cash to not worry.

That is, I don't think it'll be that simple.

edit: one way to solve the above would be like the Spanish coops, where the ownership (stock) is tied to your employment. IIRC you have to buy say one stock to get employed, and you can only sell when you leave your position.

But then it's harder to redistribute the stocks...

Hmm, maybe then maybe put the shares into a retirement account? Basically a government 401(k). Then people will be discouraged from selling because of the tax hit when selling before retirement age. Unless of course they really need it. Which presumably they would also be receiving other government services and payments (Section 8, foodstamps, etc) if they are desperate enough to be liquidating a 401(k).

You are confusing the "productivity" of labor with the market value of the labor.

Exactly. Just correct the % gains in productivity terms to those from 1969 and the average worker would be making 6 figures right now.

Labor is worth more because there are "choke points" which need human intervention to run. Logistics companies need legal, support, drivers, operations, etc. However as certain domains prove entirely automatable via different tools, human labor will be redundant. There will be thousands of "ghost factories" and "ghost stores" which operate perfectly 24/7 with no human employees once intelligence and robotic physical labor become cheap and reliable enough.

Also it would be easy to completely restrict very profitable corporations using publicly funded workers. That is completely insane.

Of course no country wants to give up their capacity of cheap labor, so politics move slowly or worse, it becomes the literal race to the bottom.

It is false to believe they could do without these workers while in reality they probably could do without much of their management.

That's not true. The system is designed to pay least cost to both capital and labor. Labor just notices it more and whinges more because of sticky prices on their cost side, a less equal distribution of payouts because the quality of labor is far more varied than the quality of capital and the value of capital has been exploding over the last at least 5 decades as technology pushes output per worker far higher over time than output per unit of capital (because the technology is basically allowing more capital to be deployed per worker to increase worker output at a higher ratio of capital to labor).

Labor already earns 10-40% of the net income of capital (over and above what they are compensated for for their labor) because of government taxation. It's ridiculous to claim they should be getting even more of the pie or have any say beyond convincing their manager of something.

Also, this idea that a worker should be paid what they provide is stupid. They should be paid the lowest price the market will bear, the same as capital. What matters for labor's salary is not what they did but that a company is willing to pay the market clearing price for their labor set by supply and demand.

> Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company.

Thats not a bad idea. If it was required to run some sufficient percentage of the company as if it was a cooperative and give a defined amount of shares to any joining employee for X years of service and also give representation to the workers in the governance of the company, things could be better. Europe already has the latter in the form of 'work councils'.

I don't think this is strictly true. I think that Amazon could automate more of their order fulfillment if they were willing to invest in that. I also think that for the jobs that do need humans, they could afford health insurance (really not insurance these days, just a way of paying for some healthcare pre-tax) and to fully-fund the employees 401(k) or similar. Like, nobody shops on Amazon because they have the best price. If some other company starts doing same-day delivery for a wide variety of products, and the employees are treated well, and it costs $5 more per package... who cares? I'd switch to them overnight.

Honestly, Amazon is kind of the snake that's eating it's own tail. Nobody feels good about buying from Amazon anymore. The customer service treats you like crap. The employees don't do a good job because they'd be fired if they did. The time is right for them to disappear overnight. I already don't trust them for anything expensive; if I'm ordering electronics, I get it through B&H, who makes some minimal amount of effort to ensure that you don't get a brick instead of a camera. Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is chipping away at their empire. "You have to indirectly torture one of our employees to get your thingamajig," isn't helping. I really think that if we fast-forward 20 years, we'll see that "no bathroom breaks, pee in a bottle" didn't make society much richer. (Of course, none of this matters. The early execs are out and incomprehensibly wealthy. I feel bad for the people that saw that and joined late, but will never achieve their goals in that area.)

Yep. There will be too many people competing for too few jobs, even so-called high demand professional specialities. There are always too many lawyers, and it's not a lawyer joke.

We're going to have to reform extreme wealth inequalities and move to UBI and redistribution of wealth, or otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years.

Already, there are vastly undercounted millions of homeless and functionally homeless people in America, a supposed first-world countries.

To maintain a humane standard of living for all people requires recapturing trillions the ultrarich have taken for themselves.

There is no "system" nor "reform" that can magically fix a problem that is fundamentally within the modern human soul. Avarice has become the defining characteristic of most people and that reflects in the culture. If you look with the same critical eyes that you use on the government, big businesses and ultra-rich, and use those critical eyes on people near you including family and friends, then you will be quite uncomfortable.

> otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years.

Let me just... yep. 1.1 billion living in slums or slum-like conditions today. We're already there.

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI.

That's pertinently false.

All it takes in one example to change your comment into something that provides additional value to the thread

Sorry, but: first, the usual criticism is that the one who claims has to show some proof, unless it's commonly accepted. The parent comment didn't. It just says "it's A or B", excluding the viability of every other option. Your criticism is better directed at that comment.

Second, look at Western/Northern Europe, or if you really insist on making this a US-only discussion: look at the period following WW2. It is possible to pay a living wage and to build a social safety net for the unemployed. It just requires the political guts to regulate the market.

Third, you can't just go around making absurd, polarizing comments and demand to be corrected in detail.

I'm not talking about anything other than your comment which was downvoted when I saw it (and check, yup, still downvoted). That comment just says, "nope" -- and doesn't add anything to the discussion, just "nope." Since that comment was saying that the option is not just a binary A or B, you can change the value of the comment from negative (as evidenced by negative votes) to positive simply by engaging slightly further and saying "It is not just A or B, for example C". I'd be surprised if the comment was downvoted then.

I think you are maybe reading more into my reply than I ever intended to put into it. It is a meta comment about a comment.

> At the level of automation we've reached in society

We have been automating work for many centuries. And after a hundred years Keynes prediction [1] still isn't reality, somehow we keep finding ways of keeping ourselves busy :)

[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

Have we also had for centuries a small glass brick that we can point at things and have the things described (by something that's not human) in real time? And then have that something tells us what do with those things to achieve a goal?

Maybe, just maybe, this time is different.

>our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value.

The assumption is that their salary is tied to their potential economic value. Human value and dignity is separate.

What implicit assumption? Implicit? There are only hard facts. This “inevitability” is only caused by private ownership of real, tangible things as well as nebulous things like ideas (or the reproduction of assets that cost marginally nothing). No one talks about what those who sit their asses on these assets are “worth” economically. Because it’s besides the point. They sit on the assets so they win. Those who have nothing to sell but their labor lose.

And this wasn’t inevitable. But we have made it so.

Now we get to talk about philosophical feel-good nonsense like “decoupling assumptions about a person’s value”. When in an alternate reality we could all share in this plenty equally.

Let’s have a fun future being at the mercy of our arbitrary asset-sitting overlords.

> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility

Who's going to subscribe to Prime and buy stuff when everyone is poor? The Walmart/Amazon wage strategy only works if the rest of society doesn't defect too. Henry Ford understood that his workers were also consumers.

Henry Ford lived in a universe where the odds of the working class getting together and guillotining the owners were non-zero. Most of the West's labour gains were done under the shadow of the Red Scare.

Nobody is seriously scared of that in 2024.

It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. Or are you going to stockpile them?

> It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods.

It's fundamental logic that unless your company provides something close to 100% of the employment market (as in, you are a complete monopolist on all economic activity), you are better off paying your workers as little as possible.

Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well.

Now, if you have other reasons to pay your workers well (competitive demand for their labor, high turnover, need for growth, motivation tied directly to output, etc), then it is also logical to come up with a nice-sounding fairy tale justifying your largess.

(Or you might actually be motivated by some kind of chivalristic noblesse oblige largess, and are tricking yourself - or socially signaling to your peers - by coming up with a 'logical' motivation for it. I wouldn't immediately assume this of HF, but I am not exactly a Fordian scholar. All I know about him is that he owned a factory that built cars, was a bit of an anti-semite, and also had a lot of opinions about how his employees should live their lives.)

> Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well.

Other companies notice your "brilliant" strategy and start adopting it, and now your sales are in terminal decline as your customer base is impoverished. Short-term thinking is the Achilles heel of modern capitalism. Unless of course the new economy is automated companies trading with other automated companies; maximizing shareholder value as the human race withers away. This reminds me a short story of a damaged ambulatory AI space-suit carrying an injured and dying/dead astronaut over the surface of a desolate planet to get to "civilization" thousands of miles away.

I think they're talking about one of the short stories in The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks

What a great read.

I was - thank you! I should have realized the story belongs to the Culture universe.

Is there a story where non-sentient automation takes over society and leaves humanity by the wayside? Not malicious, sentient AI subjugating humanity (like Terminator or Matrix), but apathetic automated corporations maximizing profits trading with other automated corporations as humanity withers. I'd read/watch that

> Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base.

But they are the best representation of your customer base possible, if you're an industrialist selling mass market goods for civilan use. If they can't afford your stuff, then the rest of the masses can not either. Because among the masses of the population that you can draw your workforce from, the factory worker will be the best paid. They wouldn't work in a factory otherwise.

The dilemma of the industrialist has always been that it's easy to crank up production enormously and the problem is to find enough customers to sell your product to that can afford it and keep the wheels running. Before industrialisation you only produced to demand and did bespoke stuff. So affordability and finding customers that can afford your product was always on top of the mind of any industrialist.

Didn't people make similar claims around the industrial revolution?

Historically humans have been much more adaptable than machines. When machinery catches up to human capabilities, it out-competes them and humans find a new economic niche. In a world where machines are more adaptable and beat us to the new niches, where do we go?

Personally, I am finding the sublime in numerical methods and I have always been horrible at manual algebra.

It's like a time travel movie. "We have to go back!"

Machines can do math, sure, and even learn the contours of the systems they represent. That's incredible. But machines lack the human interface that allows infinite abstraction.

So, humans, left with the power of infinite regress, must teach the machines that are so adamantly automating the tasks we deem important as a species.

It is possible now, in 2024, to legislate runaway automation with more human-verified checkpoints and more skilled humans running these checkpoints.

Major integration network paths are verified by the veracity of the integral checks performed on the flowing data.

From here you can measure capacitance, rate of flow, and begin to inspect the data as far as legislation will allow you to.

For any practical scientific purposes, such as analyzing tornado paths and devising a rubric of resource allocation,

You can measure all elements as a wave until a significant event occurs (including malicious data vectors). You can tune a sample rate for that.

With enough people continuously performing validation analysis on data flow, the machines we rely on to achieve our target numbers can begin to rationalize truth and fiction.

Here's the catch: we just have to do it right the first time round.

How does this new niche form? How does the AI know to fill it? How does the AI get access to fill do what it needs to do? How does AI solve the edge? Humanoid robots? Who is going to protect the robots from the people who aim to destroy them? More robots? Are they allowed to kill? How is AI policed? What happens when the AI does something it shouldn't do? What happens when AI decides humans are getting in the way? This is how The Matrix started.

I don't think humans are going to just roll over and accept their new AI overlords.

> This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies.

A person who is actually working within an industrialized economy produces at least ten times more than what is needed to sustain them. Your attitude is exactly what the communist rulers in the political class and the capitalist rulers in the business and banking class want the serfs to believe. They work together as brothers when it is against the common man.

I say it is completely groundless fear. Even non-talented and non-gifted persons can achieve extreme productivity with modern tools and training.

Right. It's the workers that have zero value add and not the people who sit in offices or at home making hundreds of thousands, tens of millions, or hundreds if millions doing a job anyone could do or even a job that isn't needed at all.

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI.

False dilemma. There are other methods to implement tax and redistribute. Additionally some countries like Canada and Switzerland are taking the lead in offering legal frameworks for life management solutions.

Please say more about "legal frameworks for life management solutions". You can't just drop those words in that order with no further context and walk away.

What is there to add? People have a growing need to make and express choices about hastening unavoidable eventualities. Willing service providers need legal protections and the ability to document a person’s choices. In Switzerland this has grown into a minor tourist industry.

https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47

Switzerland and Canada are hardly taking the lead; I live in a US state where assisted suicide has been legal for 27 years.

Isn't it mid-skilled desk jobs that are becoming worth less and less?

You can't automate a lot of tasks firefighters do. You need someone to actually show up in-person, in an area where there might be things that interfere with electronics.

Automation in cleaning or cooking is pretty minimal. I don't see computers replacing chefs at any of the restaurants in town. We have roombas, but they aren't even particularly good at vacuuming - they can't move furniture to get behind it - and I don't know of anything that automates dusting, etc. There's laundry machines and dishwashers, but they still require human intervention.

We have more and more people delivering packages, not less, and self-driving technology is a dangerous/morbid joke.

On the other hand, automation of websites is getting better, but we didn't really need most websites anyway.

You can't yet, but with robots you will be able to.

Once humanoids are good enough nobody will be, or rightfully want to be a firefighter. Even without AGI, teleoperation could be enough. However once AI is good enough that you don't need a human to operate it then there's no reason to hire a human for any step in the process.

There is no clear path to a general android. Every physical task that has been automated with robots requires robots engineered specifically for that task. Engineering, building, and maintaining those robots is a massive expense and only happens for tasks that are lucrative and occur at scale. Much of the economy is in a long tail of tasks that would not be profitable to automate, barring a major revolution in robotics.

Or more importantly you can make each human far more effective with partial automation (AKA tools).

I'm not sure what you consider low-skilled - but have you tried to hire someone to build or fix anything recently?

Labor jobs seem to demand a huge price right now - and I don't think anyone is predicting robots that can tile a backsplash, install a 240v outlet, or even dig a trench for a sewer line anywhere in the near future. Let alone have the cost of owning and operating such a robot be more cost effective than paying a human.

I'm much more concerned about lawyers, accountants, marketers, and software engineers than I am people who physically build and fix things.

Exactly! I used almost the same example as you doing a tier ranking of jobs impacted by AI (https://youtu.be/4KSs29EPd8M)

I’m not sure if it’s what you meant but have you ever tried to build or fix anything recently? It’s the opposite of low-skilled and I’d bet the majority of supposedly high-skilled workers wouldn’t have a hope of completing a job even satisfactorily.

Imho labour rates are going up because they are for people who are actually doing real, scientific-definition-of-work while other people collect ridiculous paycheques for chatting on Zoom

Sorry if I sound bitter but I implore anyone to give it a shot themselves before they complain about paying for real labour.

I've done it and I think it's neither. Neither easier nor harder than software engineering and the like. Just different tools. Very similar in a way really.

Why one pays more? Not sure. Some kind of higher barrier to entry for software, weirdly enough. Something about the working with your hands stuff I think makes it easier to persevere than working with something virtual and abstract? Just guessing here. But the smoking gun is, why is abstract math achievement so low in America? Like a small minority of grown adults can do basic algebra. Yet a lot of blue collar work really is just as intellectually demanding. I mean you're constantly solving the [[Planning problem]] and all kinds of problems that come up in [[Operations research]]

The cost of labor is tied to rent.

People need to pay rent. As the housing crisis spirals and people need more money to pay rent, they will job hop to do so.

BS. People with the most money have the most power, make laws, and continually grow more powerful. Labor is extremely valuable, but suppressed by those with more money.

> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility.

I'm not 100% sure of this. As a software engineer and AI researcher I actually feel that AI is more likely to replace my job before it replaces some dude hauling boxes in a truck across Colorado during a blizzard and then figuring out how to unload them into the back of a poorly-organized grocery store, or some restaurant chef working with open flames in the back of a restaurant while figuring out how to make something vegan and dealing with someone else's peanut allergy.

Robotics+AI will happen eventually, but high-paid computer-based jobs are IMO the easiest targets to replace. Human labor involves dealing with a lot of corner cases safely and it's going to take a while.

According to this we were doomed by the 1950s Then in the 70s Then in the 90s Then now

Comparative Advantage, Google/GPT it

In Australia unskilled labourers are highly sought-after. It's physically demanding but you can do very well for yourself.

I think the realities of the workforce are wildly different to what we'd typically experience outside of the tech sector.

I think what we need to remember is that there are two issues with your ststement.

1. Companies need consumers to sell to. If no one earns enough money to buy then the companies gave a problem. 2. If people cannot feed themself from working for others then becoming a subsistence farmer and forming tight knit communities is the best way to survive.

People can exist without companies, the reverse is not true.

I think UBI will be pointless because machines will be able to do all the work. Other machines will fix them. Humans will have everything they need or want deliverable by drone and summonable from their phone. Humans will then focus on love, fun, play, and exploring the subjects they are most passionate about.

> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.

Almost every form of production uses low skilled labor and there is no technological solution yet. If it were possible, there would be a solution. The same is applicable for health care.

The truth is that these companies could easily pay enough but there is a competition to suppress labor wages, the famous race to the bottom.

This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would otherwise need to be replaced at higher rates.

Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? It would be fairer and more just, but words about justice are cheap and power is expensive.

Who bears the blame for this though? If social programs are cut then voters freak. If the price of goods increase then voters freak. If taxes increase then voters freak.

It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.

I think your question carries the seeds of the answer within it.

We collectively bear the blame for allowing a system where government subsidizes shareholders and the wealthiest owners of these companies by not paying a living wage.

In this case, these are Amazon government subsidies by way of the disadvantaged. "Why are consumers receiving low prices and shareholder profits more important than workers receiving a wage they can survive on?" seems to be a question no one wants to answer.

As Galloway showed, we don't love our children, or even fellow humans in this context. We love line goes up more. At least we're making progress with the fertility rate going off the cliff, less humans to suffer under this regime in the future.

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

>In this case, these are Amazon government subsidies by way of the disadvantaged. "Why are consumers receiving low prices and shareholder profits more important than workers receiving a wage they can survive on?" seems to be a question no one wants to answer.

If this is a "subsidy" to Amazon, what do you think would happen if they were pulled? Would amazon be forced to raise wages, or would the wages stay the same (because labor supply and demand is still the same) and the people starve instead?

This is a a false dilemma. Force corporations to raise wages, continue to provide social safety nets (so basic needs are met), and if there is a gap, raise taxes in a progressive fashion. There is enough wealth to not configure the system in this manner; to continue to do so is a choice. It's just a big spreadsheet, you're arguing over a cell or two, I'm arguing over the function result and working backwards from there.

Otherwise, we admit we're just fine with the current setup and that is who we are. We prefer the human suffering for magic numbers in a database.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-45

> continue to provide social safety nets

Ok. So you admit that it's not a subsidy to businesses then and you're just using that word as an inflammatory talking point?

> It's just a big spreadsheet, you're arguing over a cell or two, I'm arguing over the function result and working backwards from there.

The problem is that if you're making wrong observations about these individual cells, you're going to write bad functions trying to wrangle them into the result you want. An example of this is the San Francisco blamed "greedy businesses" on their housing crisis, so they passed a ballot initiative that would raise hundreds of millions in taxes on businesses that they could spend housing. The problem is that housing problem was caused by NIMBYism all along, and despite spending billions of dollars on homelessness since then, their housing crisis only gotten worse and businesses are refusing return to SF even more than other cities.

> Force corporations to raise wages

Do you realize that this is exactly what Amazon wants? https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage

I think this goes to highlight why capital is winning over labor. Shareholders will do whatever it takes to make money without being blinded by ideology. Amazon investors realize that they would actually benefit from an America with higher labor costs because they are more automated their their competitors and are positioned to capture market share in such an environment. Meanwhile, most regular people are apathetic towards politics and those who care are too committed to their ideology to make good decisions.

No, I still assert government subsidies to people employed below a living wage are corporate subsidies. I am referring to citizens needing a social safety net who do not have an employer, children, or the elderly (social security, medicare, medicaid, wic, snap, section 8 housing, to name a few but not all encompassing).

> Do you realize that this is exactly what Amazon wants? https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage

They fight unions awfully hard for an org proclaiming to want better wages and working conditions for their workers. Amazon wants both the positive PR while maintaining unilateral control over workers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/economy/amazon-u...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_worker_organization

My talking points aren't inflammatory, they are observations. If the observations are inflammatory, change the state being observed if you don't care for current state being inflammatory. "I don't like the truth" is not a rebuttal, and the truth is pretty terrible based on all available evidence.

> No, I still assert government subsidies to people employed below a living wage are corporate subsidies.

This is the first result with I look up the definition of a subsidy:

> A sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive.

You never disagreed with the parent comment that if welfare got pulled, Amazon wages would stay just as low. In fact, states or countries with less welfare tend to have lower wages, so if it's the opposite of a subsidy for Amazon. Therefore, welfare isn't a corporate subsidy. QED.

The vast majority of the world can and does live with off of less than $17/hour and healthcare benefits, which is what Amazon pays for entry level roles these days. Even in the US, that's enough for a single person without children. If Amazon only hired only these people, would that relieve their burden of having to pay a "living wage" to people?

I wonder if social programs were pulled then people would push harder for changes, unions, benefits, etc. As it stands now the social programs keep people pacified.

It's notable that several countries with very strong unions have no minimum wage because there's no feeling of need. Norway, for example, has less regulation of the labour market in this respect than the US (but much more in other areas) in large part because the unions have been strong enough to push through higher salaries without it.

But changing that in the US would be an incredibly long slog.

That's what I was getting at. Rather than laws like minimum wage you could write pro-labor and union laws to empower workers.

Just pulling them isn't the only option. Raising minimum wage is another.

> Who bears the blame for this though?

Those who refuse to question the legitimacy of our so-called democracy, even more so those who engage in deceitful (even if well-intended!!) rhetoric or other actions[1] to present any such discussions from taking place.

> It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.

Consider what voting (or "democracy") is actually(!) composed of. Do we have any good reason to expect other than what we get?

[1] which can come in many forms

My impression is a lot of the people affected either don’t vote or are actively distracted so they’ll vote based on less relevant factors or pure theater.

Blame is less important than who is responsible for the solution!

Bezos and execs, who earn billions of dollars in compensation on the shoulders of the working class like leeches. Reduce their compensation packages and redistribute it as wages in their baseline workers.

Do the math instead of just seeing red at large numbers. Jassy earns about 29.2 M$. Lets round it to 30M$ for the sake of convenience and assume all 17 of the board members get paid the same. Amazon has about ~1.5M employees. Which means that if the entirety of their earnings were redistributed they would get a whopping ~$340 per person. An insult for a yearly bonus and certainly not enough to get people off of food stamps.

What if you instead capped executive compensation to a ratio, say 1:25 pegged against the lowest wage earner in the company?

e.g., you can only be compensated (meaning stock options inclusive) 25 times what your lowest paid employee is paid.

Would this naturally raise the floor at companies as executives want to increase their own compensation?

I remember an idea like this being floated 15 years ago or so and on the surface it seems sound, but the devil is always in the details.

The biggest challenge is to prevent companies from just far more aggressively outsourcing. E.g. you get your CEO on contract from YourBrandCEOs'r'us, where he is paid 1x the salary of the lowest paid employee.

Interesting thought, but if one is legislating a wage ratio, one can also outlaw outsourcing executive functions/positions above a certain level, no?

Then the company hires a stooge CEO that happens to have "coach", and if they don't listen to their "coach" the board fires them. Or the CEO gets handed a board seat or side consulting gig from a key investor. Etc.

You can certainly try to address this, and I'm not saying it isn't worth trying. But I do think you'd be playing whack-a-mole with creative management consultancies and accountants trying to find workarounds for a very long time, and you'd need to be prepared for that.

It also doesn't really address the problem so much - while CEO pay is often entirely out of proportion, the money flow to investors is often a far bigger issue, and would also be a workaround: Ensure the CEO has enough shares, and gets to sell enough shares, and they have a vested interest in doing the work even with lower pay. E.g. there are plenty of CEO's on low pay because their ownership is sufficient.

If income taxes increase, then voters freak. We can increase the corporate tax, ban share buybacks, impose limits on the executive to non-executive pay, tax wealth etc, which will freak out the richest, but will benefit the society better.

Share buybacks were illegal stock manipulation for the majority of the USAs existence, until Reagan legalized them. They need to be made illegal again, they serve no purpose other than short term stock manipulation. If companies have excess cash, they should issue dividends (which was a huge part of the reason stocks were initially desirable). People would then buy stocks with good dividends (i.e. long term value, versus short term quick gain).

>It prevents competition

How does food stamps/medicaid prevent competition?

because small companies can't get away with paying poverty wages. amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring.

companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for people and have to offer wages that are high enough to actually attract employees.

Is this really? If foodstamps were to suddenly disappear, would Amazon increase their wages? I doubt it. In fact, there would be _more_ desperate people scrambling for some paying jobs, which would depress wages further. Right?

> amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring.

I agree that larger companies are better capitalized and therefore can better withstand economic shocks than smaller companies, but how does that mean that foodstamps "prevents competition"? Foodstamps aren't tied to a specific employer, so it doesn't favor large companies over smaller one, because employees can continue to get benefits even after switching jobs.

Why can't smaller companies get away with paying poverty wages? I don't quite see the connection.

Poverty wages comes with the cost of constantly hiring, and hiring is a relatively expensive thing to do, mostly in terms of time, unless you're big enough to make it a fixed cost (eg an internal team and a job marketing budget).

Of course small businesses can always pay poverty wages or constantly hire. Amazon actually actively advocates for more than doubling the minimum wage because it would be beneficial for them.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage

Supposing that fulfillment industry in general went without these labor subsidies - the industry would pass the costs on in some proportion p and 1-p to dividends and customer prices, resulting in lower investment and smaller sales volumes.

Sounds alright, but then you have noticeably less unskilled and semi-skilled labor demand (possibly as much as 1-4%) in an environment where:

* the long struggle of delegitimising explicit political violence is waning,

* nobody outside of the Club of Rome wants to so much as touch the application of the framing of subsidies and overbuild to the topic of population

* and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable.

> * and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable.

There have been lots of empirical studies of UBI and the evidence from them is pretty clear that… they don't actually affect employment much either way.

Which I don't think is an answer that advocates or opponents like, as seemingly everyone thinks it would cause people to retire and write a book or something.

>The government subsidizes corporate low wage work

But importantly only the lowest of the low wages

There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc.

Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealth, even in the form of cash savings, but the government has arbitrarily decided you make too much or some other form of disqualification[0].

To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients.

EDIT: To those whom have questions on the fact that means test cost more than the fraud of social benefit programs, Last Week Tonight did a break down on Medicaid[3] (linked to below) that explains all this better than I can.

[0]: often by declaring some aspect of the filing paperwork invalid or the beneficiary unresponsive, more often than not due to errors by the agency rather than the individual(s)[1]

[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2024/04/12/vulnerable-f...

[2]: How an applicant/recipient is screened and continually screened for eligibility

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVIsnOfNfCo

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients.

Intuitively, I'd expect fraud to go up (at least to some degree) as means testing goes down like a differential equation. The depressing part of this is that it doesn't matter what is actually true, or what either of us are convinced is true, as the system will do its own thing.

"Eliminate means testing" doesn't mean that you stop verifying if someone qualifies for the program, it means that you stop imposing conditions on qualifying for the program, i.e. turn it into a tax credit that everybody gets unconditionally, and adjust rates to compensate.

In principle you can do this without affecting the budget at all -- if there is a benefit that phases out at, say, 20% up to $30,000 in income, this is equivalent to paying the benefit unconditionally and increasing the marginal tax rate by 20% in the same income range. All it does is eliminate the application paperwork.

In practice the problem is that there are multiple overlapping programs like this, so the poor aren't paying a 20% marginal rate (on top of any formal taxes), it's more like 60-80% and in some cases it even exceeds 100%. This is a poverty trap. But to get out of it while balancing the budget you'd have to use a lower total phase out rate, requiring higher marginal rates on people who make more money. These people -- as much upper middle-class doctors and computer programmers as Jeff Bezos -- then object to this, and so here we are.

Of course, another way to do it would be to cut some other government spending and use the money for this.

> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the economic case for reducing or increasing funding for eligibility screening.

> The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud.

There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine.

On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

We should just let these things cancel out, using a flat tax that funds unconditional cash benefits (i.e. UBI) and delete an epic amount of unnecessarily complexity.

>On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

Isn't this already the case? It's true that you need to means testing to get access to additional benefits, but the tax rate itself is already progressive even if you don't any means testing.

Means testing does the opposite of progressive marginal tax rates. It cancels them out by increasing the marginal tax rate on people who make less money, by the amount of the benefit phase out. There is no point in incurring the complexity of doing both at the same time just to have them delete each other.

Another way of saying this is that a flat marginal tax rate combined with a fixed-amount universal tax credit (UBI) is a progressive tax system. But it's a much simpler progressive tax system which is harder to game and doesn't result in unintended nonsense like phase out cliffs or higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people.

I love the idea of a UBI, but there is a real risk of the UBI being impacted like the minimum wage. When initially passed it's set to a barely reasonable level, and then not adjusted for decades.

Not saying it can't be solved, tie it to inflation or CPI, but I doubt that could pass.

This has nothing to do with a UBI. What happens if the government doesn't raise the benefits amount for a food stamp program? In both cases you can either index the amount to inflation or you have the same concern, so it doesn't matter which one you use and isn't a reason not to use a UBI.

If anything it's a reason to use it, because raising the amount that everybody universally gets would be easier to pass when there are more beneficiaries. Nobody cares about the minimum wage because hardly anybody actually makes minimum wage, whereas around half (and plausibly a slight majority) of the population would be a net beneficiary with a UBI.

Index it to inflation and someone that wants to attack the program just needs to make the Bureau of Labor unable to issue accurate inflation metrics.

I think UBI would need some sort of scaling factor but you can't just hand wave it away to some other corruptible government group.

I would argue progressive taxes are less complex than your proposed flat tax because you can load all the expenses on the high brackets who won't miss a meal if you set the value too high instead of trying to pick a single value that works for everyone.

To begin with, that isn't what "complex" means. Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that. We nominally do it so people who make more money pay higher effective tax rates -- but a flat tax with a UBI does the same thing. If everybody paid a 30% marginal rate and everybody got a $12,000 UBI then the effective tax rate on someone with $30,000 in income would be -10%, at $60,000 it would be 10% and at $200,000 it would be 24%. That's a progressive tax system.

Meanwhile you don't really want low marginal rates when you're providing benefits, because then the benefits phase out too slowly. Suppose you were providing $12,000 in benefits and the phase out rate was only 10%. Then someone making $100,000/year would still be a net recipient of benefits, which would bankrupt the government. In practice the phase out rates we currently impose on the poor are higher than the marginal rates in the highest formal tax brackets, which is probably bad, but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.

>Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that.

It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.

>That's a progressive tax system.

No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.

>but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.

A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.

> It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.

It is not. If you go and work for a corporation and they pay you a salary without a flat tax, they don't know what your tax rate will be. It depends on whether you do any work for someone else, or sell any property with a taxable gain, or have any tax deductions, all of which change your taxable income and therefore your tax rate, so now you have to keep track of all of them.

With a flat tax the rate is always the same, so your employer withholds the tax from your paycheck, the seller of some deductible product simply doesn't pay tax on it to begin with, and there is no individualized calculation to do because the rate for each thing is always the same and known ahead of time.

> No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.

The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire are as much the same in the existing system. Someone who makes $5 million currently pays ~36% compared to someone who makes $5 billion who pays ~37% (because the highest bracket is 37%).

> A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.

That has nothing to do with the mechanism, it's just because the example rate was 30% instead of 37%. You can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by changing the flat rate and the amount of the UBI.

But also notice that you wouldn't need tax rates to be as high, because in a simpler system less of the money would be wasted on administrative overhead or arbitrary constraints on what the poor can do with the money which causes it not to go as far for them. And they would spend less time doing benefits paperwork which they could instead spend doing work that earns money, or use the time for DIY instead of paying someone else to do things they didn't have time to do. Allowing everyone -- including them -- to pay lower tax rates from the increase in efficiency.

A flat tax disproportionately favors the rich and hurts the poor; a progressive tax is much, much more fair. A poor person making $2k a month can make more use of $200 to improve their lot vs what the person making $2M can do with $200k to improve theirs

You've missed the part where we've already removed -- no, inverted -- the progressive rate structure via benefits phase outs.

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

The point of means testing isn't to fight fraud, it's to better divert a limited pool of resources to the neediest people. If you have a pool of money to distribute, only giving it to the poorest 25% (ie. means testing) means the recipients can get 4x the money compared to giving it to everyone. Sure, there are ways this can be done badly through onerous requirements or whatever, but the cost of means testing vs the fraud rate is a completely irrelevant metric.

The problem is that means testing programs often have a cliff where you go from qualifying to not qualifying instead of being a gradual ramp-off. In other words, earning $1 more can remove $100 in support from the government instead of something more reasonable like only removing 10c at the beginning and up to $0.9 if you’re already on your way out.

The common criticism of means testing is that more money is spent on the bureaucracy implementing the testing than if you just took the money you otherwise spent on bureaucracy and gave it directly without means testing.

I disagree.

There's only so much money to go around, if I chose to spend more money on preventing fraud than the fraud would cost, I'm prioritizing righteousness over helping people.

If you have funding for 500 people, and fraud would cost you funding for 10 people. If you spend the cost of funding 40 people on fraud prevention, you're harming the 30 people you can no longer fund to keep those 10 from undeserved funding.

This is exactly what Mitt Romney was referring to during the 2012 election when he said he wasn't worried about the very rich, and he wasn't worried about the very poor. The truth is if you are making $20k/yr in income you're likely in a better position day-to-day than someone making $40k/yr, especially if you're raising a family and especially if you live in a city with functioning social services. He was excoriated in the press for saying he didn't care about poor people, which isn't exactly what he said and isn't at all what he meant.

>especially if you live in a city with functioning social services.

that may make sense in 2012. In 2024 I am much less optimistic that this is the case.

Compare that calibre with this year’s roster and it makes me cry. Why didn’t he run a term later?

Let's be honest, no matter who the Republicans run, the candidate will be demonized. Only years later, when the person is not a threat to Democrat dominance will people judge them more positively on their actual value like is happening here (and has happened to McCain, and to Bush...).

If you don't get points for running a good candidate, there's no incentive to run a good candidate, only one who can win.

Heh dont get me wrong. I think Obama is a philosopher king but by giving such emotional speeches and rhetorics he set the stage for very strong reactions. Reactions that bloomed into the awful culture wars of today. At the time I saw Obama as a good politician but the wrong time for it. Mitt Romney was a good candidate that would likely have normalised the tensions post 9/11. Alas it did not happen so.

The current republican candidate is highly different. He fomented a mob on the steps of the capital because he was upset he didn’t win.

The others you mention just had political qualities people disliked.

That's part of the point. People spewed vitriol at both Bush and Trump with similar levels of hate. It didn't matter that they were of different quality.

If you're already 100% sure the other side is going to passionately hate your candidate, no matter who you pick, then you can't win by choosing a reasonable or moderate candidate. Therefore, you pick whoever has the strongest appeal amongst your side.

Because people don't care who it is. If it's a Republican candidate, he will be portrayed as devil incarnate.

Mitt Romney was a smart guy who actually had plenty of on-ground experience. But no, deliberately interpreting everything he said in the worst light (anyone remember "Binders full of women"?) was more important.

> means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

This is like saying that since robbery is rare, the cost of permitting robbery is lower than funding the police force, thus we should defund the police.

Robbery is rare because the police exists

>Robbery is rare because the police exists

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/if-the-crime-rate-goes-d...

This is by design, and not an anti-socialist viewpoint, but another way to treat poor people with disrespect and to encourage class warfare between the working semi-poor and very poor. Keep people trapped by a myriad of low arbitrary thresholds rather than tapering off. In America, you're sometimes "better off" making no or almost no money.

Also, the benefits are paltry. If you're completely homeless, have no resources, and out-of-work in, say California, per month you will get MediCal*, $240 for food**, $149 in cash "aid", and that's it. There is an inconsistent patchwork of programs to give slightly more benefits that require a certain range of income threshold and specific demographic strings. Most all of these programs treat recipients like criminals and require regular paperwork and significant time, time during work and transportation that the working-poor can least afford.

The elderly and disabled qualify for Medicare***, which isn't quite "Cuba-level" health insurance but administered by a for-profit health insurance company under the vague supervision and standards of Medicare who pays for it. Medicare+MedicAid special needs plan (SNP) and Social Security**** is what a disabled or elderly homeless person would typically have.

* Same as the federal program known as MedicAid. It is much worse than Obamacare (health insurance for the working poor), and moderately worse than Medicare (for the disabled and the elderly) and almost no regular doctors take it. Providers who do take it usually are far away and usually serve a specific demographic. While it covers emergency care almost completely and some medications, it's not very good. There is significant healthcare bias in America based on health insurance and age.

** "Food stamps" that used to be actual stamps. In the US, the federal program is either SNAP or WIC (pregnant women, infants, and children).

*** Medicare is a federal health insurance system comprising many types of plans run by private corporations with a Byzantine patchwork of limitations and benefits.

**** Social Security is monthly cash for disabled (SSIDI) and retired people. SSIDI waives work requirements. Non-disabled elderly receive an amount based on how many years they worked and how much income they received, up to a relatively low limit. There is a debate about cutting off income- and/or asset-rich people from receiving Social Security when they don't need it.

Agreed. I really think we'd be better off if EBT was expanded to everyone. Maybe this is a more palatable step into UBI.

This is free speech, the GOP is still the problem. This is free speech.

When you put it that way it sounds a little like communism.

This sentence sounds like semantic anarchism.

> Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? It would be fairer and more just, but words about justice are cheap and power is expensive.

But how is this related to the subject?

There is an article lamenting that a third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps. Now suppose that Amazon paid more taxes and correspondingly provided more funding for the food stamp program. The next week a third of Amazon warehouse workers would still be on food stamps and media outlets would still be publishing the same clickbait headline.

This implies that government expenditures are based on actual revenues, and that $x in additional revenue is divided proportionally to all government services. Neither of these is true.

It does not. The amount Amazon pays in taxes is independent of the proportion of their warehouse workers eligible for food stamps. This is entirely consistent with amount they pay in taxes also being independent of the amount of their taxes that go to fund the food stamp program in particular.

> Should the companies shoulder more of the burden?

Note: this only works for large corporations. Small corporations don't get this benefit.

To make it more fair and increase competition and reduce corporate corruption, the system should increase support for everyone on a fair basis, not just these particular wage slaves.

No, people should shoulder the burden and when a business model is untenable, there should be a correction which is instantiated by a lack of labor. It's neither the company nor the governments responsibility to dictate what the market will bear, only follow the optimization curve that the charter is architected to. A lot of the problems we see in the modern market are a product of well-intentioned interventions, namely things like welfare that allow for low-wage workers to sustain a long term position at a job that underpays them which is ultimately zero-sum to those individuals which it is supposed to support.

Where interventions need applied to companies, namely conglomerates, they are not and virtually nobody seems to want to discuss this, but it's the bull in the China shop because these monoliths have a unidirectional charter toward profit and infinite coffers by which to affect policy change and ensure that margins can remain relatively extreme without regard to consequences which either the individual or the society in which they operate suffer.

I'll avoid the low hanging fruit but: if the government needs to supply aid to working citizens, they aren't getting much or any tax on a non-trivial portion of the population. I don't see how the government benefits from this transaction, and why they wouldn't at least (on the state level) increase minimum wage to offset this.

Three different 'governments' in this scenario. The local government still benefits from having people employed even if state government/Federal government doesn't.

This has been going on since the 1700s, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

And was criticized as indirect corporate welfare then too

If a corporation is making strong profits and its workforce is on poverty level incomes and relying on public financial support to survive, kind of feels like it makes sense for the government to claw back those profits in higher taxation.

Notion being that the corporation that is so severely under paying its work force isn't genuinely profitable and is falsely portraying itself as so.

Amazon Warehouse positions all pay well above minimum wage, in every state. They also offer benefits. Concluding Amazon isn’t paying enough, because a large portion of their workforce qualifies for food stamps, is the wrong conclusion.

If you knew someone working at an Amazon Warehouse position who needed to use government benefits to get by, would you consider them "well" or even "fairly" paid?

What is your null hypothesis here? Would they be better off if Amazon moved their warehouse to another state or country?

Amazon can raise prices slightly.

Or Bezos can have fewer yachts?

The "hypothesis" is that you can, in fact, dislike it when people are criminally underpaid by corporations, even if it is supposedly a "good" wage.

The point is that amazon isn't doing anything nefarious in paying people minimum wage

By that logic, if we had universal health care, you could then say every single person who chooses to use it instead of buying private insurance "needs govt benefits to get by" and is therefore not well paid.

They either aren't working very many hours or they have a lot of dependents. There is no other way to legally qualify for government benefits even at the lowest wages Amazon pays.

If you have several children and are a single parent, should Amazon pay you 2x or 3x your childless coworkers, just to keep you off of government support?

This just means that minimum wage is currently set at poverty wages.

Minimum wage is set by politicians, not some arms length regulatory agency. So it's entirely possible that the minimum wage is stagnant for intractable political reasons and out of touch with reality.

Amazon warehouse pays $21+ an hour here, and you only need at least 12 hours a month to keep the job. The vast majority of workers are part time, and work in 4 hour shifts.

> Amazon Warehouse positions all pay well above minimum wage, in every state

Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, so that's not saying much.

Going by state minimum wage, your statement is incorrect. According to Google the average Amazon warehouse worker in California makes $17-18 an hour. California minimum wage is $16 per hour.

Wherever you’re getting the pay rate info is wrong. You can go to the Amazon Hiring site and see they’re offering $20.75/hr right now in California. Amazon has always paid high wages for warehouse work, and not even close to the Federal line, so brining that up proves nothing.

I'm sure Bezos appreciates the PR you're doing for him, but you're wrong. "Up to $20.75/hr" is what they're offering, that's not the same as $20.75/hr. The pay rates marginally above minimum wage for California.

https://hiring.amazon.com/app#/jobDetail?jobId=JOB-US-000000...

Attacking someone character shows mental weakness. Even if everyone in the state worked at that pay rate, it would still be more than enough to live above poverty, which was the original point. If you want a consolation prize for finding a single contrary data point, then you’ve done it but haven’t really said anything relevant.

> Attacking someone character shows mental weakness.

Sure sounds like an attack on my character...

You didn't clarify what kind of minimum wage you're talking about, and I pointed out that you're mistaken regarding state minimum wages.

I think this is basically it.

A lot of discussions of inequality in the US eventually end up as discussions of nominal equalness, like the problem is about making sure everyone gets paid the same amount. What the real problem is probably is more like certain beneficiaries are overvalued and overpaid, either through rent seeking, structural problems, deception, or something else, and/or the others are underpaid, and/or certain costs of labor are being unpaid.

If you have a highly profitable business and basic employee needs aren't being met by the employer's compensation, it's sort of necessarily a sign that certain costs of labor -- food, shelter, and healthcare for the workers -- aren't being paid when they could be.

It's like if I hired a carpenter to redo cabinetry in my house, and then decided I wouldn't pay for the materials because it wasn't something the carpenter themselves produced. The food and health of the workers is something the employer is benefiting from that is necessary to the labor, and they're just assuming that the workers are getting it from elsewhere.

I think the tendency for "greater equalness" to often seem like a goal in itself is kind of an indirect consequence of the fact that often when you account for all the hidden unpaid costs and overvaluations and undervaluations, employees of a company or institution probably should be more equal than they often are.

It's strange that we accept all these economic notions of price fixing, fraud, theft, and over and undervaluation when it comes to physical goods, but when it comes to labor and employer and employee compensation we just kind of pretend it's all perfect markets, with perfectly rational actors and no structural problems.

The numbers country wide:

According to Pew [0]

  The numbers vary from month to month. But in April 2023, the most recent month with available figures, 41.9 million people in 22.2 million households received SNAP benefits. That translates to 12.5% of the total U.S. population.

Fed says [1]

  84,041,447 individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in the 51 states and the District of Columbia that reported enrollment data for January 2024.

0 https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-...

1 https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...

The 51 states huh

> in the 51 states and the District of Columbia

in the 51 (states and DC)

That is the number that a friend working for SNAP told... 1 out 8 Americans is on food stamps.

You'd be surprised, many people qualify for SNAP and may not realize it.

It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children.

Some states you can get it if you're pregnant no matter what.

(It can often be a strategic thing to get if you can, because large numbers of other programs that require applications will declare you automatically qualify if you get SNAP.)

Most states are following the federal guidelines of 200% of the poverty line. Four kids is $80k a year and still qualifies.

Household size: monthly pre-tax income limit

- 1: $2,430

- 2: $3,288

- 3: $4,144

- 4: $5,000

- 5: $5,858

- 6: $6,714

- 7: $7,570

I was amazed when an ex told me she was on food stamps as a part of the financial aid package for the Oregon university she was attending. Don't even believe she was an Oregon resident at the time (or ever), if you reside in a California county bordering a different state they let you attend university in the other state (or the other way around) without paying out-of-state tuition.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/students has the details, basically if you're not at least half time in college you'll almost certainly qualify, but there are ways to qualify as a full-time student.

> I was amazed when an ex told me she was on food stamps as a part of the financial aid package for the Oregon university

It's Oregon. In southern states, SNAP commonly isn't available to individuals/couples with zero income - and to many families with minor children.

This is irrespective of federal guidelines and sometimes counter what states themselves advertise. I was just saw a FL state site parroting federal guidelines as if they reflected reality for FL residents. They don't.

Why the disconnect between advertised and reality? I don't know.

Individual Floridians and couples (18?)21-63 with zero income and no other overriding factors (eg:SS Disability) are denied. I've seen a few exceptions.

Families with minor children are commonly denied or receive a few tens of dollars. For each needy family I knew received SNAP, I knew many more who didn't.

This is based on (20+yrs) my personal experience, interactions with the local homeless community, church based social work, discussions with other parents and years of feedback from a DCF case-worker friend.

I had 5 kids. They ate at school. Home was often white rice and nothing else. Sometimes there wasn't rice. My wife was disabled (per SS) but that didn't help in our case.

My relatives in VA tell the same story. Income is low, hunger isn't rare and SNAP is impossible to negligible.

> You'd be surprised, many people qualify for SNAP and may not realize it.

Also surprising is the number of people who lack food and SNAP isn't available to them.

> Most states are following [guidelines where $2,430 can get SNAP]

Most states meaning 52%? Asking because there are plenty of millions who can't get SNAP with zero income.

Source: 2008-2018 in hunger level poverty with kids. SNAP consistently denied for all but 6 mos.

> It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children.

SNAP also require asset limits, which is $2,750 per _household_. Given that rent for a large family may easily be in the ~$1,500-2,500 range, it leaves pretty much no money in the bank for any other expenses.

That isn't the case for most of the country. Page 5 of the following link shows it by state.

https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018/...

> That isn't the case for most of the country.

Most is a figure above 50%.

As far as reports indicate poor folks have access to SNAP, it's true in some states and mostly a lie in others.

My fingers are kind of tired from debunking SNAP myths today. My other posts here will have to do.

I responded to the asset limit statement. 30+ states do not one have, it’s well over 50% of the country including 9/10 of the most populous states.

The number that matters in a meaningful way is the % of the people in need who can reasonably access the promised amounts.

That figure excludes the millions of people who meet the guidelines discussed here but are serially denied by state agencies, across months and years. It also excludes millions more who are awarded aid (and categorized as such) but whose benefits total a few tens of dollars.

Florida can represent most of those numbers all by itself, as my earlier posts can attest. Most people here in the 0-30k bracket will be denied SNAP or any other aid.

Me and my own kids lived in and out of hunger for a decade; we were unceasingly denied SNAP by CPS. But mine were a few hungry kids among millions and millions, it makes our family story unremarkable.

FL is far from an outlier.

There massive swaths of the US containing millions of people that are unable to access food aid - no matter the need. Implications otherwise do not represent truth.

You're hallucinating a conversation with me. Someone brought up asset limits as a problem. I provided contrary information, and now you're arguing with yourself about something else. You are saying something, I comment that I wasn't suggesting what you're saying, and now you're doubling down and making up what you're responding too. You're obviously passionate about it, but maybe you should take a break from this thread. The way people get treated by some states is appalling and I'm sorry you and others have trouble receiving the help they should be getting.

60% of those people were not employed, unlike the Amazon workers workers

We really need to stop treating this as such a "gotcha!" The whole idea of welfare is that it is supposed to go to people who need it - working or not.

Are people on Food Stamps always going to be unemployed? No? Then are they are going to be employed somewhere? Am I supposed to be mad that these programs are working as designed?

Food stamps and medicaid in particular are also explicitly tied to family need. Unless Amazon is going to start paying someone with a family of 5 more than a person with a family of 3, these criteria are always going to be malleable. (In our state, Medicaid eligibility goes up to $80k in income and up to $100k for food stamps!)

As a proud taxpayer, I am happy my money is going towards working families. I would be more concerned had it not. And I am not going to pretend to be shocked that the beneficiaries work in (surprise) low-income jobs.

The food stamps are working as designed, no criticism there. It's the jobs that aren't.

Yeah, I took the article to signal that Amazon isn't doing enough for its employees.

Agree with all that. The criticism is that this is a big, American company, one of the largest and most impactful ever, that makes lots of money and is quite profitable, and yet pays its workers low enough that they need to be subsidized with tax dollars. Your tax dollars are given to Amazon's workers, so that Amazon can continue employing them for low wages, and the money saved by paying low wages is going into the shareholder's pockets. Is that a system that you are happy with, and would be fine with continuing in perpetuity?

Obviously, there isn't a silver bullet, and every potential solution has thorns, but are food stamps really meant to perpetually sustain individuals that make low wages at companies that can afford to pay them more?

> (In our state, Medicaid eligibility goes up to $80k in income and up to $100k for food stamps!)

In FL, Medicaid adult eligibility ceiling is $Ø. Also the next states over. And states past that. And more states.

In FL SNAP income limits for adults are [whatever the ASCII symbol is for irrelevant]. Whatever the guidelines are, the vast majority of impoverished adults are denied. Same for next states over. And you get the idea.

Folks posting from states that aren't hostile to vulnerable people are posting their healthcare/assistance figures - in a way that seems to imply their numbers could well represent America. They don't tho.

This is a nuanced discussion that is always derailed by the usual "down with evil corporations!!" rhetoric.

Let's say there are a thousand people on food stamps, getting $2000/mo from the government. A company comes along and says "we will employ all thousand people part-time for $1000/mo, and so the government now only has to pay them $1000/mo in assistance". Did the company do a good thing for society?

What if the company had instead said "we will employ 500 people full-time and pay them $2000/mo, so now the government only has to take care of the remaining 500"? Is that better or worse?

Or what if the company only employed a hundred people and paid them $10000/mo so they could live a good life, at the expense of the rest?

If one of the employees had 8 dependents and another had none, should they both get the same salary for the same work? What if it isn't enough for raising 8 kids?

Or if none of these options are palatable should the company and its warehouse not be allowed to exist at all? How does the government generate tax revenue for social services in the first place then?

It's an interesting question. Employees have to generate more value for the employer than the employer pays the employee, otherwise the employer won't employ the employee, or they will go bankrupt.

So let's say you have someone that's getting the $2000/mo from the government for assistance. Amazon hires them and pays them $1000/mo, the only way this makes sense for Amazon is if they can extract more than $1000/mo of value out of that employee.

I think where the disconnect is in a lot of these conversations is how much value is being extracted.

Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $1500/mo of value for Amazon. Then the fact that the government has to support them to the tune of $1000/mo as well might be acceptable. Amazon gets profit, government (and the tax payers) have to spend $1000/mo less, employee gets enough money to live. Everyone is happy.

Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $5000/mo of value for Amazon. This scenario is a bit harder to accept, why should the tax payers have to subsidize those low wages when Amazon could pay $2000/mo and still make a healthy profit?

The problem is that that figure, "how much value does an employee generate?" is hard to come by. You can get more aggregate figures https://csimarket.com/stocks/AMZN-Revenue-per-Employee.html which tell us that every employee generates on average $326,428 but it is harder to find details on "How much value does an amazon warehouse worker generate?"

So it all hinges on how much value Amazon extracts from the worker. If it's $50/mo then I don't think anyone is picking up their pitchforks. If it's $4000/mo and they've decided that they can squeeze their workforce because the tax payer will pick up the slack and they can pocket the difference, then pitchforks come out.

You don't need to wonder or make changes to "fix" this problem. If Amazon or anyone was making $5000 off employees they paid $1000, they would hire more and wages would go up.

That assumes that there is no diminishing return on additional hires. If I run a warehouse that generates $100,000/mo with 10 employees being paid $1000/mo and those 10 employees satisfy the needs of the warehouse, I wouldn't hire more for fun.

There is some finite amount of demand that needs to be processed by the warehouse, the fact that I can satisfy that demand with a small number of low paid workers doesn't somehow increase the demand.

A lot of comments have the assumption that it is corporations responsibility to look after people. That philosophy is how we get healthcare tied to one's employer. That approach attaches workers to their employer and makes switching jobs harder.

I think it is better to see it as the government's responsibility to take care of it citizens. Medicaid, food stamps, and the negative income tax represents this approach. We don't necessarily see it as a bad thing that the government takes care of citizens. If someone is struggling, it is the governments role to step in and support that person.

But it does make sense to talk about whether these programs provide sufficient support, or if our approach to taxation, which supports these programs, is fair.

Setting reasonable minimum wages would take care of citizens without a patchwork of programs being needed.

If you want the government to "take care of it citizens", what we actually need is a floor on income (eg. welfare/UBI), not a floor on wages (ie. minimum wage). Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate.

> Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate.

Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".

Minimum wage has always trailed living wage. Often by a decade plus. It's always in arrears that it is updated (and several of the last updates have been further and further apart).

Businesses have been able to pay people less than liveable wages, and then when there's an attempt at parity, they scream about how unfair it will be to that untouchable and sacrosanct pillar of American society, the Small Business Owner.

Except I don't recall reading anywhere that a business owner was entitled to profitability.

At a certain point, if your business can't afford to keep up with living wage needs, the solution is to close your doors, not advocate for underpaying people.

>Minimum wage has always trailed living wage

Hidden in this is an assumption is that everyone is more than more productive than the "living wage" (whatever that is). In a country that has high living costs and is facing competition from developing countries with far less living costs, I think it's fairly reasonable to say there's a non-negligible population where this assumption doesn't hold. What about those people? For them, raising the minimum wage to the living wage won't increase their income, it'd make it $0 because there's no point in hiring them.

>Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".

You realize I explicitly mentioned "welfare/UBI" in my previous comment? Or do you somehow think it's bad for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by taxing people/companies and then distributing through welfare/UBI, but it's somehow okay for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by mandating that companies pay their workers more?

Banning low wage labor hurts many low wage laborers

I think that government assistance should come universally. We should establish a minimum standard of living.

Everyone should get food stamps - enough to survive. If you want, you can eat cheap store brand food for free year-round, or you can spend your entire balance at the beginning of each month at restaurants and artisan grocers because you make enough to afford to buy what you want with your own money when it's gone.

Everyone should get healthcare, full stop. Going to the doctor should be free. Public health is massively important to a healthy society, we should treat that as core investment in the future of our nation.

Everyone should get some form of housing. If you want, you can use a voucher to get a tiny studio for free, or you can apply the voucher to a larger rental that you can afford with the money you make. If you own a real estate, you can forfeit the rental voucher for a tax credit.

Everyone should get some sort of universal basic income. With food, healthcare, and housing covered, it would just need to be enough to fill in the gaps for everything else. Enough to put gas in your car every once in a while, or to buy clothes, or anything else you might need.

At this rate, you could just sit at home eating Great Value brand canned food and wearing clothes from Goodwill indefinitely, but it would be a boring life. The majority of people would seek something profitable to do with their lives, and the "profit motive" of capitalism would finally be realized for every American when people actually work for a better quality of life, rather than for survival.

We could finally be free to pursue our careers or the sake of contributing to the world, rather than for the sake of "making a living". We could dedicate ourselves to noble yet unprofitable causes without relegating ourselves to poverty.

Wouldn’t this greatly increase inflation? Look at post Covid rise in the cost of literally every humdrum item.

there's significant evidence that this is due to corporate price gauging.

though it is fair to point out that this type of system does require a few other changes in the corporate incentive structure. shareholder primacy for one, would have to go. you can't really be a shareholder profit maximalist and provide a consistent standard of living for everyone in your society, because every possible penny is supposed to end up in the shareholders pocket. even if you could technically build more long-term wealth by investing in things like education, infrastructure, and affordable housing.

Corporate price gouging is only due to increase in consumer funds.

Companies want to price gouge all the time, but were only able to do so because everyone, especially lower income people, had extra cash.

Good luck introducing price controls on basic goods like groceries. Otherwise, things like UBI will increase inflation.

that's addressed in my comment :)

I don’t think it is. The price increases due to additional cash would not be addressed by restructuring corporate profits. Unless you want to do away with corporations all together and go full communist.

If people have more money, they will spend it. Since things are fixed, then prices will go up. That’s what happens when you increase money. You get inflation. You didn’t address how to stop that.

The issue is that the social safety net has been set afire and left to burn. We need a new narrative of a social structure. I have been calling it the 'social base case' instead of safety net.

Direct source: https://cued.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2024/05/Ha...

"They were recruited into the survey using the Meta/Facebook" that's a red flag on the quality of the study.

"To provide a more demographically representative picture, we reweighted survey responses using data on race and gender composition that Amazon reported to the EEOC in 2021.2" also a red flag because they already don't necessarily have a representative sample, and then are reweighting using data from a different selection criteria.

The study said that 13% of workers moved into higher paying jobs within Amazon, and their numbers were removed from the study.

Yah, I think I'm going to stop reading this study. Very low quality work.

Removing those that progressed out of the pay scale feels especially odd? That should be seen as a success of employment for this, no?

I'm also not a fan of focusing the headline or finding on a single company without a cohort to compare against. If anything, this would punish individual companies for hiring low income people at all. Easy to have 0% here if you just refuse to hire anyone that qualifies, after all. And that is a terrible goal. If I'm off on any of that, happy to be corrected.

Being on public healthcare is not really a shame though. It's like totally normal here in Europe :P And pretty good too. I'm glad I don't have any worry about my healthcare, the risk of insane bills, that I might lose expensive cover if I get fired (which is in itself also a lot less likely as there's no "at will" here) etc. It's just a solved problem. Yeah it costs us some taxes but it's not as insanely expensive as in the US (in fact I probably pay less tax than a US citizen pays in monthly health insurance).

I think state healthcare is pretty ideal.

Food stamps though, that's not cool.

> Food stamps though, that's not cool.

Why?

I view that as something that's really for people who can't take care of their basic nutritional needs. That's not normal in a civilised society. After all, food is cheap.

We subsidise and socialise healthcare because the cost between people can vary extremely (it can cost between nothing and millions per year!) and it's a basic need. Food is not like that, basic food needs cost roughly the same for everyone. Of course there's $1000 a plate restaurants but those are not a basic need, you can get just as much nutrition for $5.

Someone who has a job should be able to cover food and housing. Otherwise society is severely broken.

If workers need government aid to make basic ends meet, it is the employer, not the employee, that is on welfare, subsidized by taxpayers and government borrowing.

That is not correct - a person with no skills who has 10 kids will never be able to support themselves via a job. It is welfare for them.

In that case the welfare is for the kids, not for the parent. i.e. the number of kids is more important than what their head of household is earning.

Welfare is mainly intended for children and the elderly because we don't want child laborers.

A person with no skills wouldn't be able to support themselves regardless of the number of kids.

And I suppose that's ultimately the problem: through a combination of technological advances, which automate much unskilled labor, and a broken incentive structure in many social welfare programs, which disincentivize investment in human capital (because of the "benefit cliff"), a larger and larger underclass of unemployable[0] people grows.

[0]: meaning, the economic value of their labor output is less than the minimum cost to employ them.

A person with no skills that works 40+ hrs a week should be earning enough to live on.

If you work the lowest paid job at Amazon 40+ hours per week, you literally cannot qualify for government benefits unless you have like 3+ kids and you're a single parent.

Perhaps. But a person with only one kid? Doing a job that the company needs to have done, even if no great skill is required? If that person doesn't make enough for food and rent, then I repeat, it is the company that is on welfare.

What guarantee is there that the individual is managing what money they do get optimally?

Is it ever possible they are wasting money on things they don't need that could have allowed to not need food stamps?

Just wondering how this would be determined.

You came up with an extreme example that virtually never happens as a counterpoint to something that is ubiquitous in modern life. This behavior is why people don't like this forum.

why are you blaming amazon for this and not everyone else, including you, for not hiring these workers for a higher wage?

if you or anyone else can get marginal productivity from these workers for more than amazon is paying then just go and do it, or do you have some bias against hiring people on welfare?

From the actual article:

> A third of survey respondents reported using government-funded programs – primarily food stamps or Medicaid – in the last three months.

It's very hard to gauge what the real numbers are from that quote. It's also hard to gauge if Amazon made these people better or worse off. But again, from the actual article:

> Amazon’s median US employee was paid $45,613 in 2023, up from $41,762 the year before, the company said in a filing last month. The company says employees in warehousing and transportation are paid more than $20.50 an hour, on average. The survey, which was conducted between April and August 2023, excluded managers and skews a bit lower: Most respondents reported wages from $16 to $20 an hour.

> Some 65% of workers who come to Amazon earn more than they were making at their previous employer, the survey shows.

https://archive.is/J1MFq#selection-1767.0-1771.116

Here's an actual article about the survey https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-warehouse-workers-stru...

Don't forget that Amazon (and any other employer that applies for it) gets a $9,600 WOTC tax credit for employing a SNAP recipient (as well as veterans etc)

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Approximate nationwide list from 2020 produced by GAO:

Walmart

McDonald’s

FedEx

Amazon

Dollar General

Kroger

Dollar Tree, Inc.

Safeway

Waffle House

Burger King

Goodwill

Sonic

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stam...

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-45

Amazon statement to Time magazine on this study...

>In an emailed statement, Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly called the researchers’ methodology “deeply flawed” and said the company had tried to raise its concerns with the study’s authors but never heard back.

>“It’s a survey that ignores best practices for surveying, has limited verification safeguards to confirm respondents are Amazon employees, and doesn’t prevent multiple responses from the same person,” he said. Kelly added that Amazon has increased average pay to $20.50 an hour and provides a range of benefits, including health care, dental, 401(k) and pre-paid tuition.

I get the point, but this is a terrible goalpost to be using. Medicaid and SNAP have both expanded enrollment by making it easier to qualify. Being on government assistance is neither here nor there. I realize it's being used a proxy for poverty, but that's not going to be very accurate. There are multiple ways to qualify for these programs. Being a sold bread-winner for a family of 5 is a different scenario to a secondary breadwinner for a family of 2. We have enough direct data to compare their compensation levels that don't involve shaming people for needing help.

Also, this guy has no citations.

What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.

No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.

You need to apply marginal thinking here. They are better off with welfare benefits, which means it's a good thing that they have them. If you gave them more benefits, they would have more negotiating power and be able to become even more employed[0], and then would you complain more?

[0] assuming that's what they want to do

Giving benefits to employees, instead of forcing the company to pay a living wage, is effectively a subsidy for corporate profits.

No, giving money to employers is a subsidy for employers. Giving money to employees is a subsidy /against/ employers.

You seem to be assuming that if the government doesn’t give these people the money, the employer will. Why is that?

Is it not also possible that the government benefits make low-wage work less appealing, thus lowering the supply, and increasing the compensation?

The lowest skilled workers at the bottom of the productivity scale don't generate enough value to justify paying them a living wage. If the company is forced to pay a living wage to such workers then management will send the work offshore, or automate it, or just not do it at all. The worker will then have zero wage.

Instead of artificially raising the minimum wage we should put more funding into job training. Help those marginal workers build the skills they need to earn higher wages.

It's not the government assistance that's the problem (that shouldn't carry a stigma per se) - it's the fact that Amazon doesn't pay for it's own externalities (if you can call workforce exploitation an "externality")

Imagine a scenario where "assistance" wasn't stigmatized and Amazon had to pay higher taxes fully proportionate with the cost of paying it's employees properly?

I mean - at that point they might as well pay people properly!

Amazon is in Washington state, which doesn't have an income tax. In my opinion, if they need Amazon to pay more they should try having one of those.

Smartass question: how is it Amazon's externality when they would have been on food stamps without Amazon's job? It is clear that ideally they wouldn't be on food stamps with the job, sure but crediting preexisting problems towards whomever doesn't solve them fully sounds like a recipe for just making things worse.

So you'd prefer they'd be fired if they can generate more value than they cost?

> No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive.

The outcome of absolutes like these is that we would remove government assistance to those who are employed (excluding those who are handicapped, etc). You could fix it by raising the minimum wage higher - up to a point where government assistance is unnecessary. And it's on the government and the voters that they don't do that, not on Amazon.

Absolutes come with hard boundaries, and collectively, we've decided that those hard boundaries are suboptimal. Hence the status quo.

Companies exist by paying market wages. The whole point of the minimum wage is to eliminate jobs whose market pay would be below the minimum wage.

Lots of anti-Amazon ranting in the comments, but no one's outlining a clear solution beyond raising the minimum wage. (Yes, it's hopelessly naive to expect a large, powerful company to pay above market wages just out of principle - when their competitors don't need to).

Anti-disclaimers: I dislike Amazon. I avoid shopping there. I avoid working there. Yet, my biases aren't going to let me discount the fact that I personally know two people who've worked for Amazon - one also at other warehouses - and they liked the job more than the other places they've worked at.

Obviously I don’t mean my comment as a hardline absolute.

But I do mean that able-bodied people with what we would consider a substantial means of employment shouldn’t need government assistance. I’m obviously not talking about edge cases.

If you work full time you really can't qualify for government assistance unless you have children.

Is this a good comparison? Most businesses scrape by while Amazon is a behemoth.

Are you really saying, “But Walmart doesn’t pay a living wage either so it’s okay?”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

I dont agree.

It's more about the relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO.

Even if the post office has the exact same percentage of workers on food stamps, I would argue that because the postmaster general makes so much less than Amazon leadership that Amazon has the privilege and ability to do better, and still run a profitable business.

It's about profit, and sharing it more equitably.

The concept you are looking for is "payslope", and it should be a standard part of such conversations:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...

Amazon is famously not very profitable, mostly because they reinvest everything in growth.

They recently changed that, they famously reported a 30+ billion dollar profit last year.

If Amazon took the CEO’s salary and reduced it to zero and distributed the savings to every line employee, how much money would each line employee get?

Just to come up with a ballpark, I pulled some numbers from Google. Perhaps Amazon has 700,000 warehouse workers in the United States. CEO Andy Jassy's total compensation package in 2021 was about $212 million, though it dropped to $1.3 million the next year. So $212 million divided by 700,000 is about $303 for a warehouse employee for one year. Not close to enough to get anyone off food stamps.

Headline says 1/3 of those 700k are on food stamps. Would an extra $900/year be enough?

That's $40/wk - when we were that poor, that would have helped but not solved our food needs

For anyone curious about the math:

The Amazon CEO pay was $212 million in 2021.

There are 700k warehouse workers.

If the CEO put 99% of their pay to the warehouse workers, each would get an about $300/year, or $25/month more.

If you asked many of them if that amount would he meaningful to them they would say yes. IFor some it's the difference between a good holiday season or not. Just because it doesn't seem like a meaningful amount to you, doesn't mean that tracks to folks who are struggling.

Source - my mom just retired from the Amazon Warehouse night shift.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion. So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years.

If you expand consideration from just him to all of Amazon's major shareholders, top management, board members, etc., and then compare to the warehouse workers, "contractor" delivery drivers, etc., it's plain to see that a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards.

The way the power relations work is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles, though thankfully it's quite a bit less physically violent.

> So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years.

He was paid that by Amazon investors, who basically want to give him money because he's Jeff Bezos. If the warehouse workers owned the shares, those investors would have to want to give just as much money to them, but it doesn't seem like they do.

(Clearer case is Elon, who is pretty obviously super rich entirely because a lot of people want to specifically give him money. They're investor celebrities.)

> Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion

Computing someone's net worth by multiplying the number of shares he holds by the last-traded price of that share yields a theoretical number that's only good for placing people on Forbes rich lists and as fodder for demagogues. It is not possible for him to actually convert all of his shares to $200B.

> gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years

If anyone could be blamed for this, blame the Fed for endless ZIRP, QE, and other asset-inflationary policies that made it so that capital had to pour into companies like AMZN.

> a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards

A large group of people who are compensated for the work they do and are free to choose to work for a different employer.

> is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles

Is it valid to compare someone who started a company in and then benefited from a system of (mostly) voluntary exchange of goods and services to feudal lords who extracted rents from their peasants under the threat of violence?

Amazon has been incredibly hostile to labor rights for their employees, including worker safety, fair compensation, parental leave, provision of basic benefits, reasonable schedules, collective bargaining, etc. They've been cited by federal labor judges for systematic unlawful behavior, and are under congressional investigation. Hopefully there will be some real consequences sometime soon. I'm not holding my breath though.

In the markets for package delivery and warehouse logistics, Amazon's uncompetitive and worker-abusive business practices and basic design have been putting systematic pressure on other firms to similarly mistreat their own workers to compete. In the more general retail market, Amazon's unlawful (but thus far substantially unpunished) anti-competitive business practices drive smaller competitors out of business and extract rents not just from Amazon's own workers/contractors and suppliers but from the economy broadly.

> are free to choose to work for a different employer

This is certainly more true than in a feudal economy where peasants are literally considered the personal property of the lord, but in many of the relevant local labor markets Amazon is a disproportionately large and influential employer without enough local employer competition that employees can easily switch jobs. The only real way for employees to get a fair bargain in such situations is collective bargaining via a union, but Amazon is notoriously opposed to union formation at its facilities, which it blocks unlawfully wherever it can.

Amazon doesn't use systematic physical brutality or murder to maintain their power, as done by e.g. feudal lords or drug gangs, but they do routinely (unlawfully) threaten workers with loss of pay/benefits or termination when those workers exercise their legally protected rights, and unlawfully follow through on those threats when workers persist. Since most people need to collect a paycheck to survive, this kind of violence is not entirely dissimilar to more direct physical attack.

> Amazon's uncompetitive

Could you expand on this? If they were uncompetitive, from a worker perspective, they wouldn't have any workers. Having workers means they are the best choice out of all the other companies competing for those workers. It, quite literally, means all the other choices were even worse!

Amazon's model for package delivery is to hire "contractor" companies who then hire workers to drive around Amazon-marked vehicles to deliver nothing but Amazon packages, working under a long list of rules imposed by Amazon. These workers are effectively Amazon employees, but don't get the ordinary protections that would be afforded to workers hired directly by Amazon. Compared to other delivery drivers they have less training, higher turnover (less experience), higher delivery quotas, harsher schedules, worse pay/benefits, less job security, and no collective bargaining. This puts downward pressure on every other package delivery company, but those companies (and national postal services) can't legally mistreat their employees in the same ways Amazon can. This gives Amazon an uncompetitive advantage by reducing their costs below their competitors' costs, in a way that is unlawful and would be impossible if existing labor laws were vigorously enforced. However, they have thus far managed to evade legal responsibility in many (but not all) jurisdictions.

I get your point about misclassifying de facto employees as contractors, and also wanting as a society to avoid a race to the bottom in this type of stuff, but the fact remains that the delivery workers are voluntarily choosing to work with the compensation and under the conditions described. I presume that despite all the downsides you listed, it was the best possible option for them.

> This puts downward pressure on every other package delivery company

If in fact turnover is as high as you say, it would seem that it actually wouldn't be competitive over the long run; the overall customer experience would be worse and eventually Amazon would run out of people to work for them.

I think you're saying that this is the labor equivalent of the anti-competitive practice of dumping, but I'm not sure if it translates exactly.

You are basically arguing that rich entities shouldn't employ low income employees, with this logic.

While you can imagine this means richer people will start to do all of their low income work, that also means there are no lower income jobs. We can hope those are simply shifted up the pay scale, but it is equally as likely that the jobs just go away. Likely not full classes of jobs, mind you, but certainly there will be fewer low payed jobs than otherwise.

Just as likely, you will get companies relationships structured such that these relationships are not direct. Which... by definition is adding middlemen to the equation. I'm not a huge fan of efficiency arguments, but this does seem needless bad in that realm.

This is reducto ad absurdum

In a real sense, so is the other argument. It is not based on any real principal. It is literally reducing the argument to the absurd difference between the richest and the poorest.

I'm happy to see evidence on any studies that focus on optimal ratios of income for different people in an organization. Resting this on "relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO" would need more than appeal to emotion.

I say all of this as someone that is all for taxing rich people.

~12.6% per:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/food-stamp-...

>More than 42 million Americans receive a federal stipend for food through the program formerly known as food stamps.

Two thirds of those recipients are not actually expected to work at all, being too old/young or otherwise excused: https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-provides-....

I believe the question was "what is the rate of food stamp program eligibility for warehouse workers, regardless of their employer". Which is an interesting question, are there statistics for this which are broken down by profession?

Your link shows that 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps, which is interesting (and a surprise to me) but it's missing the point of the question above. What's the rate of workers on FS in any given warehouse across the country?

The question was about warehouse workers, not all workers.

I'm seeing about 19% on Medicaid and about 12.5% are on Food Stamps. In theory that could be up to 1/3, but there's presumably a lot of overlap... so maybe 25% give or take?

In any economy you need consumers and producers.

US economy has been trending towards fewer owners owning means of production.

Which makes sense, any business marginally better than their completion keeps on growing, the delta between 1st and 2nd keeps on increasing over time.

US consumer spending is strong right now. That is great for producers. If the economy goes to shit, govt can hand out stimulus and inject money into economy.

Propping up demand is very easy - stimulus checks! Propping up supply is very hard - requires great infrastructure, a check on monopolies, investments that encourage innovation and competition.

The fact that the young generation are so squeezed, they are not having kids is a sign that we’ve fucked up.

The big have gotten too big and there isn’t enough competition to prop up supply and bring prices down.

Both parties love turning on the money printer, driving up inflation.

It’s the societal equivalent of global warming. A slow disaster booking the frog.

Doesn't Amazon have to compete with welfare for workers, instead of benefiting from it?

The more welfare pays, the worse a job at Amazon is in comparison, is it not? How does Amazon benefit from this?

The point is that they pay such low wages that their workers are still eligible for welfare when working there (despite being hugely profitable). This essentially means that tax dollars are subsidizing their profits.

> The point is that they pay such low wages that their workers are still eligible for welfare when working there (despite being hugely profitable)

I'm not contesting this. This is a valid point.

> This essentially means that tax dollars are subsidizing their profits.

I don't see how this would be the case.

Two scenarios:

- Welfare is now $0/month

- Some people that could get by with welfare now can't. They start looking for jobs.

- Increase in the supply of workers.

- Decrease in wages. (good for amazon)

- Welfare is now $3k/month

- Some people decide that it's no longer worth it to work. They'd rather just live off of welfare.

- Decrease in the supply of workers.

- Increase in wages. (bad for amazon)

It is counterproductive to shame an employer for hiring hundreds of thousands of low-income workers who would likely be on government assistance regardless of Amazon. By all means, we can regulate companies to ensure that working conditions are safe and encourage companies to provide more opportunities for advancement. But the act of hiring low-wage workers who need welfare is a good thing. What are other companies doing to employ non-college-educated workers in the bad parts of town?

Surprised Dan Price keeps getting attention here. I thought he got busted for his “altruism” being a way to deflect from his women’s abuse/harassment and stealing from his brother.

I would like to see negative income tax. You have to insert the fresh printed money into the economy some place. Why not have people work for it?

We have that in the form of EITC and child tax credits. They should be better though.

Through the Earned Income Tax Credit a some low earners do experience a negative federal income tax.

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/earned-income...

Income inequality is a big problem but this would be the only remedy I wouldn't like. Maybe do a percentage that excludes earnings beyond 500k

Should we want businesses that need public money to continue to operate? I suppose one should critically examine their usefulness. If they fail 0% income tax on salary would be good enough.

OT: It struck me a while back what work was involved in running a government using only paper. I guess they all found ways to burn the excessive funds over the years as the real work kinda vanished. I hear Estonia made an effort to write laws that are easy to automate simply because they didn't have money.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/1a89ed5e-en.pdf?expi...

Instead of pumping in ever more money to feed inflation, why don’t we ask how we can make food and healthcare cheaper?

Why is it “Amazon doesn’t pay enough for workers to afford healthcare” instead of “Healthcare is so exorbitantly expensive even people with relatively well paying jobs can’t afford it without government assistance”?

It's not amazon doesn't pay enough, amazon is the one paying these workers the most - else they would work somewhere else.

Everyone else except amazon is to blame for not paying them enough.

Why are people framing this like amazon is doing something wrong? They are the highest bidder for these low wage workers, not the lowest bidder?

I have no idea who this guy is, but a link / source would make the X post a lot more trustworthy.

I'm surprised it's that low.

> according to a new survey

which, conveniently, is not disclosed.

How would a survey manager get that data, for ALL warehouse workers? So most likely they sampled one warehouse and relied on voluntary participation. Amazon certainly isn't going to go out of their way to help them out.

Have govt mandated living standards - medicare for all, minimum wage.

Make corps revenue neutral - they fund all the services for their employees.

Govt fund unemployed including UBI.

Make corp tax rate = base + misery index = base + inflation + unemployment

Ultimately, the goal is to maximize worker exploitation. And to maximize exploitation, you need just enough welfare for people to survive, but not enough welfare for them to choose better jobs.

For example; in this scenario if we offered individuals far stronger welfare benefits (schooling benefits, UBI etc) the odds are that very few people would be warehouse workers for Amazon. Alternatively, if we we forced companies to pay for this welfare (such as with progressive taxation based on # of individuals working and on welfare), then they would offer higher wages and with higher wages gives greater mobility.

Make no mistake, this is a feature not a bug of our system. It is designed to keep the poor working in jobs that maintain their poverty.

Paying people >MPL doesn't work. The math just doesn't work.

You can't hire people and pay them less than their output.

If you tax Amazon more because they hire low skilled workers then the MPL of each low skill worker decrease. Does that increase or decrease the incentive to hire these people? what happens to the price of labor when demand drops?

If your options are pay a worker more than they produce or pay a similar amount in tax, aggregate wages will go down, not up.

Trying to balance my bleeding heart and pro capitalism free market proclivities…

Let the market decide how much employees get paid and increase taxes on corporations to fund a social safety net and remove loopholes. Also make any state tax incentives that a state gives a corporation to locate there taxable on the federal level.

I agree with this. It is societies responsibility, through their elected government, to take care of people. If we need to support people more, we raise taxes and provide more support via the government.

Holding the employer as responsible leads to things like employer provided healthcare, which ties people more strongly to their employer. Weakening the ties between employee and employer makes the workforce more dynamic and mobile.

How though? We raise corporate taxes on every corporation? We somehow target those with a certain percentage of employees on government subsidies?

Raise corporate taxes on every corporation based on revenue. We have a graduated system of income taxes for people, do the same for corporations. Small mom and pop companies wouldn’t see an increase. But the Amazon’s of the world would.

Why would you want to tax the people hiring the low skilled workers rather than the ones not hiring them? Please help me understand this I genuinely don't understand that position.

If you hire someone who has been on disability for more than 2 years, they still get their Medicaid for a year or two. I hope that explains most of this.

This is reminiscent of the incidents where walmart was instructing new hires on how to apply for food stamps...

Like universities guide students on how to apply for government grants and loans? Or for that matter, professors applying for research grants?

What’s the scandal?

So they’re only one third through their optimization process?

I think an issue here is pointing out Amazon. A corporation should take every inch of the law available to them, but no more. They are only evil if they then lobby to make things worse. Amazon workers needing assistance is not an issue with amazon, it is an issue with us ('us' being the US). We make it allowable to create a job that doesn't cover the minimums. 'part time' allows benefits to be slashed. 'gig' allows even more to be taken. Every job should have a living wage with usable health benefits and a path to retirement. Every job that doesn't do this, inevitably, is being subsidized by the tax payer and I for one don't want to pay it any more. There should be laws that heavily tax workplaces that don't meet the minimum standards in order to pay for the programs their workers are forced to use to survive.

How much tax subsidy is that for Amazon?

How many non-Amazon warehouse worked are on food stamps or Medicaid?

Without that comparison this title is just flame bait.

What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?

If you feel anger when reading that the largest and most profitable companies in the world won’t pay a living wage, the. You should be. There isn’t two side to simple greed and exploitation.

"Living wage" assumes you're the head of a household, so it's a pretty incoherent idea applied to just anyone. You can live on pretty much anything as long as another member of the household can supply the rest.

Minimum wage increases generally do not negatively affect employment, but if you set the minimum wage high enough to be a head of household "living wage", it certainly would make people unemployed.

Or instead we could pay people welfare benefits and support them that way.

You could just find a job to be fun.

Eventually there will be jobs not worth paying people to do; subsidizing that at the government level seems fine (albeit not capitalistic) but that does require taxation (not necessarily on the higher paying jobs) to cover the shortfall.

Part of the reason for minimum wages is that by eliminating bad jobs (the ones seemingly not worth paying people for), it can save time and effort for workers who accidentally take those jobs when they could have found better ones. This is called search effects.

Another related one is that it can increase your competitiveness with other countries, basically by making employers stop wasting time and think of more productive things for people to do.

But the main reason they can help is that, insofar as employers are monopsonies (sole payers of wages), they often literally don't know what wages they "should" pay because they don't have any incentive to find out, and in that case setting a higher minimum wage actually causes everyone to become more employed.

Why is this related to amazon though? It sounds like the blame should be fully put on the federal/local governments for the minimum wage that they've set.

The politicians are paid by the capitalists to keep minimum wages low.

Capitalists (large business owners) generally pay higher wages than the alternative, small/family business owners. Eg Walmart/Amazon have better benefits than an equivalent small business, unless you're the owner of that small business.

But also, wages generally go up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N

(This is "income", which is a superset of wages. I didn't link wages because those are confusing, average wages go up during recessions because the lower earning people get laid off.)

>Capitalists (large business owners)

You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you. Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right, the aggregate effect is the same. Productivity goes up and wages don't.

>But also, wages generally go up

Just utter nonsense. Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.

> You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you.

Are you going to provide a definition? I think it's people who own and trade capital.

> Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right

You're agreeing with me and then doing "even if you were right"? Also, this is pretty much out of Marx - capitalism was better for workers than the preceding stage. Small businesses are the preceding stage.

> Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.

You said wages don't go up, which means nominal wages don't go up.

If you wanted to say real wages don't go up that's a different question. And it's true because our response to the 2008 recession was bad. But not our response to the 2020 one! They're way up now! It's great.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

Note, it's difficult for them to go too far up because of "wage-price spirals", and also generally because voters hate it when prices go up.

a capitalist is an owner of capital

>Also, this is pretty much out of Marx - capitalism was better for workers than the preceding stage.

Marx also showed that workers didn't choose capitalism, and why it was not an option but a force of history.

I'm gonna need a wage to continue this conversation. It's too boring and unfruitful for my interest.

This is neither how economics nor politics works. For one, Amazon actually advocates for a higher minimum wage.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage

Amazon is hardly one of the "most profitable companies in the world".

Also Amazon can't really raise prices without losing sales - I've already shifted many of my purchases because Amazon is too expensive. They don't really have room to raise wages without hurting the people who are buying the products.

People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.

> What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?

To have more money than you had before.

I feel no anger here, people are paid based on the economic value of their output. They are not paid based on their worth as humans. If you want to be paid more you need to be able to do move valuable work.

> People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.

This is simply false. It’s false just thinking about it, and it’s false from multiple economic studies in the real world. It’s a common falsehood spread by corporations, but it’s false.

First, you can’t have it both ways and say companies “can’t raise prices without losing sales” and then turn around and say, “if you raise wages, you have to raise prices” and “people are paid according to their economic value”. If all of these statements are true, then no one could ever be paid more than their starting wage, because if their pay increased, then sales would go down due to price increases. Even if a person’s perceived economic value increased, they could never be paid commiserate with their value, because that would lead to a decrease in sales. This is obviously false.

Minimum wage increases simply don’t lead to price increases or unemployment or any of the sky is falling predictions typically touted. We’ve known this for over 30 years now. Of course, lest we forget, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been fixed since 2009, months much represents a real wage cut in 2024.

why does that distinction matter? are you saying it's okay for workers to be on medicaid or food stamps if they work in a warehouse, but not if they work in a different position?

People should take a history lesson from France. Let them eat cake.

Can you elaborate? What did France do exactly? Apart from having a minimal (but working) welfare system.

For several decades, liberal policies have been driving down the welfare system and the minimum wage. Macron is definitively trying to put a end to the french social welfare system.

I assume the original comment was calling for a revolution

He's suggesting that we break out the guillotines and murder the rich.

That worked out great for the French, after all.

But if you say "Let them eat cake"... you're not on the right side of the situation being proposed.

Did you read the rest of the history book? It wound up with them not only restoring the monarchy multiple times but getting a goddamned Emperor who went all proto-Hitler and tried to conquer all of Europe!

Walmart is another such employer.

Very true. Companies like McDonald's and Walmart (the two employers with the most employees that qualify for food stamps) have a lot of part-time employees. Do Amazon Warehouses?

Is that "McDonald's" or is it "McDonald's franchisees"?

Is this bad? I'm so confused by this whole thread.

Can you get higher productivity by hiring these workers than Walmart?

If no - then why is Walmart the bad guy for paying their employees more than any other company that would have them?

All I see is:

> Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com

The dumpster fire rises. I love the inversion of responsibility there. I guess everyone should just use GoogleAds Chrome.

... Just like Walmart. It's a shame.

It's not, it's mostly a sign that benefits are working.

Giving workers benefits /increases/ their compensation because it increases their negotiating power. This means they're earning more than they otherwise would. Not less.

If it was less, that would mean benefits are bad and we should take them away!

It's essentially just a subsidy to large employers? So they can not pay their employees enough? Is this what these programs are intended for? I didn't understand it that way but maybe I'm wrong.

If it was a subsidy to large employers it would be paid to the employer. Those are called wage subsidies. (Health insurance in the US works like this, obviously it's not great.)

These are paid to the worker though. That means it's a subsidy against the employer! It makes them worse off, not better.

It is in effect a subsidy to employers, while still being a benefit to employees.

As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to. As such, the only real solution to the issue that does not make the economic situation worse for employees is to punish corporations for paying so little that their employees need benefits from the government.

Anything else only hurts the employees or provides greater subsidy to the employer.

> As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to.

Such people are not particularly easy to find right now. The employment situation in the US is the best for workers it has been in decades.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

These datapoints strengthen my argument. More Americans are in the workforce than ever before, because every household requires more laborers to do work for less compensation.

Federal employment data also does not paint a cohesive picture of the situation.

For one, it does not include undocumented labor - the labor that makes up the vast majority of incredibly low paid positions. Secondly, it is inflated by the fact that so many people are forced to work part-time positions - usually multiple at once.

> More Americans are in the workforce than ever before, because every household requires more laborers to do work for less compensation.

That isn't what they show. Actually what they show is that households have gotten smaller over time, because people have gotten richer/older and no longer live with their parents.

> Federal employment data also does not paint a cohesive picture of the situation.

These numbers come from a monthly household survey and don't have this issue. They know what they're doing.

> For one, it does not include undocumented labor - the labor that makes up the vast majority of incredibly low paid positions.

Such people have, since 2019, actually gotten the most pay increases of any part of the working population.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

> Secondly, it is inflated by the fact that so many people are forced to work part-time positions - usually multiple at once.

Only 5% of Americans report working multiple jobs, and that's not particularly historically high.

Your idea of how the economy works is just a decade out of date. In the ways you think it's bad it is specifically the best it's been in decades, or in fact ever.

This is a common issue though: https://x.com/dkthomp/status/1793270876550398329

The cause of this issue is that the US media believes their job is to avoid reporting good news, unless they can do it ironically.

No, unfortunately you are mistaken - the US media does not inform my worldview as I generally do not consume it without supplement.

My idea of how the economy works is informed by the state of the economy for real people - unlike yours, which relies entirely on federal data manipulated to present the picture that the federal government is succeeding in its economic policy. They do “know what they’re doing”, certainly. You on the other hand, do not seem to.

Every single thing you have said here is wrong or a misunderstanding of what data has actually been gathered and where it comes from.

The BLS is an independent agency. There isn't a single "the federal government" that cares about its image like this. Nor does "the federal government" have a single economic policy. It has, like, two or three of them and some (fiscal vs monetary policy) are directly opposed to each other.

A monthly survey of 60k households is "talking to real people" and it's the only way to get accurate impressions of what's happening to them. If you rely on people bitching then you'll get a negativity bias.

> Every single thing you have said here is wrong or a misunderstanding of what data has actually been gathered and where it comes from.

I understand it fine. You seem to have moved from not realizing I was posting direct survey data, to coping by just claiming the numbers are made up.

Note that if you claim it's made up now, why was it not made up in 2009 or 2020 when it did look bad?

I assume Amazon pushes down wages accordingly and is happy that the public subsidizes their margins.

Why would they give someone more because they come to them with no alternative and under pressure from the government to take any Job.

No, wages are set by negotiating with workers; Amazon is not purely a price setter of wages. That means giving workers money lets them get better wages. (They would be one if they were a monopsony though. But mostly they aren't.)

> under pressure from the government to take any Job.

Work requirements for welfare can indeed hurt workers this way by making them take worse jobs.

It's incrementally better for them to be making $20 instead of $10, sure. But it's worse for the world for that to be footed by the tax payer instead of by the trillion dollar company that they work for. In effect the tax payers are lining Amazon's pockets.

The tax payers are /taking money from/ Amazon, because giving the workers money means that Amazon has to pay them more money to compete.

You can set a minimum wage too if you want, and it usually has positive effects in practice, but these two things are not opposed to each other.

Of course it should be footed by the taxpayer, ie you and me. If you don't want to pay the tax, then you hire these wokers for more than Amazon pays them.

Why is Amazon the bad guy here? If these workers are productive at $30/hr why hasn't someone hired them already?

I'm the one that should be taxed. I'm not sure I could make them productive in my business for $10/hr, or even $1.

You seem to think that healthcare is just like any other fringe benefit that employers and employees may mutually agree to in the employment market. But the US has a (deeply flawed) form of “universal healthcare” where the employer is required to provide the benefit. This mandate goes back to the New Deal era when capitalists were willing to accept such provisions if it allowed them to avoid a communist revolution, which was in fashion at the time. The mandate has been reaffirmed more recently with the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. So the story is not a sign that benefits are working, but that there are loopholes being exploited.

Aren't we talking about Medicaid and food stamps here? Middle class health insurance is indeed an employer subsidy in the US (and it's bad), but Medicaid isn't.

Part of the reason we still have this system is that unions like being able to provide healthcare as a benefit though.

The spirit of the policy as understood by most is that employers pay most of the cost of healthcare for their employees, middle class or not. So it comes as a surprise to learn that Medicaid, a program meant for children, the disabled and unemployed, is covering the benefit for employees at taxpayer expense. Amazon can’t have it both ways: lower corporate taxes based on the assumption that they directly provide health care, and the benefit of offloading the health care burden to the state. Can you see why people are concerned about this?

And Amazon pays no taxes

TAX AMAZON! TAX BEZOS! That is all.

Shame on Amazon for providing jobs to poor people. Best not to worry too much about it, in a few years they'll be replaced by robots.

Not sure how this economic illiterate Twitter post has nearly 100 upvotes within an hour. This is not how a subsidy works. I'm sure Amazon execs would be happy for the government to end their "subsidy", which would increase the demand for employment and downwardly pressure wages. Just because Jeff Bezo's company is primarily a retail company with lower margins than Dan Price's higher margin B2B company doesn't mean that Bezos is any more responsible for people's welfare than Dan Price is.

The problem of these bad economic takes is that they make the assumption that if only these greedy companies paid employees more money, all of society's problems would be fixed. We already know that this isn't true. Americans already has the highest incomes in the world. The San Francisco residents have highest incomes in America, but continue to have the worst rates of homelessness in America. Throwing more money won't solve fundamentally broken healthcare and housing systems.

>The San Francisco residents have highest incomes in America, but continue to have the worst rates of homelessness in America

Not true.

Ok. One of the worst rates of homelessness in America. Big difference.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-oa...

You see even more homelessness in nearby Oakland, whose residents are still some of the wealthiest in America.

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