Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

I think one important point is that Germany currently doesn't have a minimum wage. It is the job of the union to negotiate a reasonable salary for the workers in a given field.

In many European countries unions and employers have historically been able to work together and reach agreements that have been better for both parties, compared having a law impossed by the government. Amazon is ruining that, and I don't believe that the rules that will follow from the governments will be as good as an agreement reach between an employers and the people who work for him.

View on HN

Germany has minimum wages, but not for every industry. The government standpoint was up to now that minimum wage needs to be negotiated between employers and employees and it's not the government job to set the level of the minumum wage.

This might change with the current government.

The minimum wages in Germany, if I understand it correctly, are set by the union and employers, not the government. So there's no legal requirement to pay a minimum wage. Or is that not how it works?

It's a little more complicated, but yes [1].

The current government promised a 8,50EUR minumum wage.

Fun fact: The leftist German news paper TAZ who was fighting for minumum wage for quite some time, argued against the minumum wage for it's intern as "not possible".

[1] e.g. when you are below some wage, the government pays you some money for the "gap"

>when you are below some wage, the government pays you some money for the "gap"

Sounds like corporate welfare - companies don't have to provide a decent wage if the government will make up the difference.

Yes.

I fully agree that it's best to be in an environment where people and companies come to agreements on wages that is best. My thought is about what happens when you don't agree - in that case, go work for someone else. And as a society, we're better off encouraging the creation of new companies, and educating people to get better jobs.

Not everyone are meant to start a business and while education is important, it's not always the answer either.

Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon. Regardless of how highly educated a society is or how many new companies we start, there's still someone who has to do the manual picking in the warehouse. Someday that job may be automated away, but until then, we need to ensure that the people taking these jobs are treated decently and paid a wage that will sustain them.

Amazon can move their warehouse to Poland, and pay a little less and still provide a decent salary. The behavior however should be the same regardless of which country they operate in.

We often forget that there are bad/boring/hard/dirty jobs and that they actually need to be done. Education won't make these jobs go away. Just as often we forget that there are people who enjoy them and have no desire to educate themselves further. Regardless of our feeling towards the lack of education or dislike of the job fulfilled by the people "at the bottom of society", we should be respectful of their choices in life and help them should they feel exploited.

Just for the record I work for a online shop and are on occasion asked to help in the warehouse. It's physical hard work, boring and you're on a strict schedule to ensure that everything is ready then the delivery companies arrive to pick up orders. We pay a lot better than Amazon, almost double it seems and your not given a fixed time in which to complete the picking of an order, so there's hopefully less stress. So I have no reason to believe that Amazon couldn't a nice place to work as well, and still make a profit.

As a matter of fact, Amazon is opening large centre in Poland. It's not clear to me how much of Germany's workload will it pick up, but it wouldn't surprise me if it played a major role in bargaining with the unions in Germany. Also, regarding "paying a little less and still providing a decent salary", given that the government social safety net in Poland is minimal, my guess is they'll be paying around or below bare substistence levels (2 - 2.5 eur/h) and still get workers.

First - I very much respect your point of view, since you're working for a similar firm.

I don't believe that everyone needs a Phd, and not everyone needs to start their own business. My point is that if we create an environment where enough businesses are competing for our labor, all of us (even the non-entrepreneurs) benefit.

> Currently someone has to pick stuff of the shelves for Amazon

There may be a fairly short time horizon on "currently"- Amazon bought Kiva, a warehouse automation/robotics company, a few years ago, and it wasn't because they thought it looked cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com