What percentage of non-amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps? We all love to hate Amazon, but such statistics are meaningless without context.
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.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
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.
Source - my mom just retired from the Amazon Warehouse night shift.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] assuming that's what they want to do
Is it not also possible that the government benefits make low-wage work less appealing, thus lowering the supply, and increasing the compensation?
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...