$15/hr is not a lot of money, regardless of how positive and mind blown these media websites are. Nobody's "moving cities" for $15/hr. It's still barely above poverty in anywhere that's not rural. $15/hr in Seattle is poverty or living 2-3 hours away from work.
Most amazon warehouses are not located in Seattle. This compensation might be very attractive to more rural/small town folks and could considerably improve their quality of life.
One of the biggest Amazon warehouses in the US is in Lexington, KY. The average income of a Lexington-Fayette resident is $29,168 a year. For them, $15 / hour puts them above the average, so that is still an improvement.
I'm not going to argue that 15/hr is a lot of money, but as someone who didn't grow up with much, it isn't terrible either.
That translates to ~30k/year, which doesn't sound like much, but for a dual-income family a $15/hr min wage (Something Amazon is lobbying for) becomes 60k/year — Pretty much the median household income in the US [1]
keep in mind 15/h is radically different from when you grew up, especially in a city that anyone wants to live in. Over half your wage is going towards rent, even with the shittiest conditions.
Many people are choosing where to live based on income/expense differential instead of just income. Talent is choosing not to relocate to high cost of living areas, so many companies are opening up offices in these middle-tier cities.
Not to mention that, based on some of the Reddit threads I've seen on this from actual Amazon warehouse employees, they're often not even getting full-time hours. Lots of people seem to be getting 4 6-hour or 3 8-hour shifts a week.
I don't think the shift to $15/hr will make as much of an impact as this article theorizes. It's not barely enough to live off but the buying power still isn't substantial. So giving workers more 'freedom' because of the hike to $15 won't make much of a debt imo.
If you go from $12/hr to $15/hr, that might not seem like a large difference, but it might mean going from a net income of -$50/week to +$50/week, which is a massive difference - one means a debt spiral, the other means building savings. Or $20 to $120, 6x the disposable income.
$15/hour in some cases is enough to move above the maximum for Medicaid (133% of FPL for various family/household sizes).
Many low-income workers DO NOT want to lose Medicaid as it is a big benefit, works well, esp. for large families (consider a grandma that has adopted three of her grandchildren and needs to care for them, I talked to one last week).
I own a small business with a few part time employees, and I run into people asking for less pay but more in other benefits (PTO, holidays, etc.)
Do any of them ask for less pay with no compensating benefits? If not it seems like this is still a good result, if not perfectly optimized to take advantage of benefits for those with low income.
Just to add another anecdata.. A close friend of mine owned several Subway franchises. This was always a double edged sword for trying to figure out how to reward the best employees. Virtually every single time a person was given a significant raise, they asked for fewer hours. They were comfortable living on $X/wk and now they could make that working fewer hours. This is perhaps good for the worker but obviously bad for the store. The best employees are working less and less, decreasing the quality of work done in the store. This may or may not have had anything to do with qualifying for benefits of some sort. But it is a very difficult problem a lot of small business owners face.
I think it's more difficult than that. They are happy with their current living situation. In over a decade of owning Subway stores not a single person took their newfound wealth/leisure to improve their lot in life. When they left it was always to other Subway-esque jobs. Nobody took night classes or anything of the sort. Sure, some people took a job at Subway while they were in college or whatever, but what I mean is that getting that big raise was not a deciding factor in taking the steps to improve their financial situation.
From there I get a lot of mixed feelings about projection. Who am I to tell someone that they should increase their income if they're happy with their lives? Or perhaps they don't understand/see a path from here to greater economic success? If that's the case, we have a different problem. I really don't know, it's very confusing. It's hard to consider public policy in a way that doesn't project my own sense of values on others.
We're talking on the order of several dollars an hour, which is a lot when you're making minimum wage.
>The raise is not going to be enough for them to move from being workers to being owners.
I feel like this is intentionally obtuse. It may not directly make them an owner, but if they leveraged that raise it could put them on the path there. They could take management classes at a community college or something. Even without the classes they could double down on the behavior that was returning a good benefit and learn those management skills "on the job." Instead they reduced their hours to maintain the same weekly take home pay. Of course there's a nearly infinite number of options unrelated to Subway they could have spent their new money/time/leverage going towards. But not one time did it happen in ten years and across several stores.
There was a bit of exaggeration for effect there, but my point is that a few dollars above minimum wage may be a big percentage rise in your opinion, but is still not a good wage. They go from "hardly able to afford food" to "maybe able to not live paycheck to paycheck - until something unforeseen happens".
edit: offtopic because you said they wanted less hours but I'm leaving it there:
Maybe they wanted to enjoy spending some of their newfound discretionary income on something other than rent and bills. Or maybe they wanted to go from a shitbox car that needs repairs to a slightly better shitbox car. Or a million other things they've been waiting until they have the cash for.
I feel like you may be a bit out of touch on how close to the edge someone living on slightly over minimum wage actually is. There's a thousand things they might need to spend that extra cash on. It costs more to be poor.
back on-topic
I know you said they wanted to reduce their hours but from my own experiences when I was doing shitty jobs I honestly felt that I wasn't being paid enough for my time so as long as I can earn enough to eat and pay the rent, I'd rather just have the time to do what I want, because (at least to me), that free time is really what makes life worth living at all.
So, at least in my case, an incremental raise to a sandwich workers wage wouldn't be enough for me to still want to exchange my time for that money.
Now I'm being paid well so I have enough incentive to keep me from wanting to reduce my hours because I can see progress being made, but only just... Maybe I overvalue my time but at the end of the day, time is all we have, and it's limited.
A few extra dollars per hour isn't going to change someone from a sandwich maker just above the poverty line into some trust fund baby that has the time and spending money to do extra courses and start being an entrepreneur.
I know what you're saying about them having (slightly) more of an avenue to success with a raise but there's always more that any of us can do to improve our lot in life, if we have the energy. Arguably poor people have more demands on their time, so I feel that looking at the poorest workers and saying, "why don't they do better" is a bit unfair.
Also, how do you know what they did with their extra time?
It's not just medicaid, there's typically a whole range of low-income benefits that have income cliffs. It's a little screwed that they don't phase out gradually with income, but that is often the way that they are setup. So it is possible to hit situations where earning an extra dollar on the books can cost you thousands...
> According to the Pew Research Center, when adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage in America peaked at $8.54 in 1968. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with increases in worker productivity since then, in 2012 it would have been $21.72 an hour.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/07/there-is...
I know nothing of economics, but I’m curious how relevant comparing against our own historical productivity actually is. For example, shouldn’t the comparison also be against productivity and productivity/wage growth in other countries we’re competing with? Is productivity even something that can be measured in such a way that useful comparisons can actually be made across time periods?
> Is productivity even something that can be measured in such a way that useful comparisons can actually be made across time periods?
[Inflation-adjusted] GDP is held to represent the productivity of an entire country in a way where one can make historical contrasts.
Therefore, [inflation-adjusted] GDP per capita (a.k.a. PPP, Purchasing Power Parity) could be a valid measure of average individual worker productivity.
It was $8.54 in 1968 "when adjusted for inflation", not the actual value it was at the time. (at least according to the article, I didn't calculate it myself)
Warehouse has always paid well for the educational requirements. Many people don’t love walking a few miles a shift, nor not having time to use the restrooms. Others obviously thrive in it, they have a lot of workers and can’t all be turned over every month.
Calling it "minimum wage" seems like a marketing gimmick. I believe Amazon finds themselves needing to raise wages because the other large employers are as well.
In other words, the unemployment level has finally dropped far enough that employees start to feel the benefits of competition. This is good news for lots of people, but not really a paradigm shift.. ?
And, from what I've read, Amazon is supporting legislation of a higher minimum wage. Which, seems to me, would be more of a burden on their competitors than themselves, thus giving Amazon a competitive advantage.
I had many summer warehouse jobs doing picking and shipping/receiving. I busted my ass off with lots of manual labor and strict timetracking. But my co-workers were not exactly the brightest of the bunch: alcoholics, ex-cons, high school drop outs, poor English, etc. There's an entire bottom rung of society that most people ignore. Higher wages are for attracting and retaining better workers. If $15/hour ever becomes minimum federal wage, I bet Amazon would up their own minimum wage as well.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadI thought the goal of the living wage was to ensure that, in general, people can cover their necessities without having to resort to welfare.
Once the first couple levels of maslow's hierarchy are taken care of, doesn't the usual advice of "start climbing" apply to the rest of it?
[1]: http://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/42660
I included that.
That translates to ~30k/year, which doesn't sound like much, but for a dual-income family a $15/hr min wage (Something Amazon is lobbying for) becomes 60k/year — Pretty much the median household income in the US [1]
Just putting some perspective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
https://twitter.com/davehclark/status/1047071466787889154
Many low-income workers DO NOT want to lose Medicaid as it is a big benefit, works well, esp. for large families (consider a grandma that has adopted three of her grandchildren and needs to care for them, I talked to one last week).
I own a small business with a few part time employees, and I run into people asking for less pay but more in other benefits (PTO, holidays, etc.)
Will be interesting to see the impact of this.
From there I get a lot of mixed feelings about projection. Who am I to tell someone that they should increase their income if they're happy with their lives? Or perhaps they don't understand/see a path from here to greater economic success? If that's the case, we have a different problem. I really don't know, it's very confusing. It's hard to consider public policy in a way that doesn't project my own sense of values on others.
How big a raise are we talking here? It's a fast food job. I doubt we're talking CEO-level bonuses.
The raise is not going to be enough for them to move from being workers to being owners.
We're talking on the order of several dollars an hour, which is a lot when you're making minimum wage.
>The raise is not going to be enough for them to move from being workers to being owners.
I feel like this is intentionally obtuse. It may not directly make them an owner, but if they leveraged that raise it could put them on the path there. They could take management classes at a community college or something. Even without the classes they could double down on the behavior that was returning a good benefit and learn those management skills "on the job." Instead they reduced their hours to maintain the same weekly take home pay. Of course there's a nearly infinite number of options unrelated to Subway they could have spent their new money/time/leverage going towards. But not one time did it happen in ten years and across several stores.
There was a bit of exaggeration for effect there, but my point is that a few dollars above minimum wage may be a big percentage rise in your opinion, but is still not a good wage. They go from "hardly able to afford food" to "maybe able to not live paycheck to paycheck - until something unforeseen happens".
edit: offtopic because you said they wanted less hours but I'm leaving it there:
Maybe they wanted to enjoy spending some of their newfound discretionary income on something other than rent and bills. Or maybe they wanted to go from a shitbox car that needs repairs to a slightly better shitbox car. Or a million other things they've been waiting until they have the cash for.
I feel like you may be a bit out of touch on how close to the edge someone living on slightly over minimum wage actually is. There's a thousand things they might need to spend that extra cash on. It costs more to be poor.
back on-topic
I know you said they wanted to reduce their hours but from my own experiences when I was doing shitty jobs I honestly felt that I wasn't being paid enough for my time so as long as I can earn enough to eat and pay the rent, I'd rather just have the time to do what I want, because (at least to me), that free time is really what makes life worth living at all.
So, at least in my case, an incremental raise to a sandwich workers wage wouldn't be enough for me to still want to exchange my time for that money.
Now I'm being paid well so I have enough incentive to keep me from wanting to reduce my hours because I can see progress being made, but only just... Maybe I overvalue my time but at the end of the day, time is all we have, and it's limited.
A few extra dollars per hour isn't going to change someone from a sandwich maker just above the poverty line into some trust fund baby that has the time and spending money to do extra courses and start being an entrepreneur.
I know what you're saying about them having (slightly) more of an avenue to success with a raise but there's always more that any of us can do to improve our lot in life, if we have the energy. Arguably poor people have more demands on their time, so I feel that looking at the poorest workers and saying, "why don't they do better" is a bit unfair.
Also, how do you know what they did with their extra time?
> According to the Pew Research Center, when adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage in America peaked at $8.54 in 1968. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with increases in worker productivity since then, in 2012 it would have been $21.72 an hour. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/07/there-is...
[Inflation-adjusted] GDP is held to represent the productivity of an entire country in a way where one can make historical contrasts.
Therefore, [inflation-adjusted] GDP per capita (a.k.a. PPP, Purchasing Power Parity) could be a valid measure of average individual worker productivity.
Warehouse has always paid well for the educational requirements. Many people don’t love walking a few miles a shift, nor not having time to use the restrooms. Others obviously thrive in it, they have a lot of workers and can’t all be turned over every month.
In other words, the unemployment level has finally dropped far enough that employees start to feel the benefits of competition. This is good news for lots of people, but not really a paradigm shift.. ?