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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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