Impossible to judge the effect until someone investigates the relative sizes of the lost bonuses and the increased hourly wage.
I did read Amazon's claim in the article that the increase outweighs the decrease. But I would like to see a journalist confirm that and also report on how big the difference is and whether it affects certain types of workers differently than others.
I don't think there's anything to judge here. Amazon said multiple times that with bonuses and stock awards their average compensation was well above any compensation for fulfillment workers in the sector.
People thought this was bullshit/paper money and kept demanding for a higher hourly wage.
So Amazon did the logical thing. It increased the hourly wage, removed a highly unappreciated and misunderstood form of salary and simplified the compensation scheme so it could actually rebalance this value into a more predictable, easy to understand and liquid compensation. This should help anyone that felt exploited and of-course is going to piss off the people who actually understood the variable portion of their compensation and the ones who were already above the 15 USD mark.
I don't think what were people expecting? Hourly wage raise + stock + bonuses?
I mean I don't want to sound like a capitalist pig, but that doesn't make sense, especially when we are talking about this kind of job.
People deserve livable wages but also they deserve to get recognized economically when they pursue advanced studies and put the effort to get into jobs that require more specialized skills.
Saying that their compensation is higher than competitors in the sector says nothing about whether they will be paying out more total dollars after the changes than before.
For those hourly workers, Amazon plans to replace its RSU grant program with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of 2019. The net effect, the company says, will mean "significantly more total compensation" for the workers.
Moreover, it stands to reason that much of that excess (beyond assets) value is predicated on their unit economics, which depend on fulfillment costs, remaining good.
Bonuses for warehouse workers, presumably throughput-based, seem like a way to optimize for maximum output at the expense of worker health. It's good that those are going away.
Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?
In every thread like this, there's an argument like yours, taking the absolutist view that individual workers should have unlimited freedom ("completely and totally incapable," as you wrote) to sacrifice themselves for money. In the micro sense, you are possibly correct. However, as a society, we have decided at the macro level that no, workers are not free to make that decision because to do so would inherently drive the collective working environment to the bottom.
We make rules about a lot of things to protect the collective good at the sacrifice of the individual. Workers are not free to decide that climbing a tall tower without a safety harness so as to go faster and complete more jobs for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to put their unprotected hands into fast-moving machinery so as to be more efficient and complete more piecework for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to inhale toxic gases, labor in buildings without sanitary facilities, or be worked non-stop until the worker passes out from exhaustion. (These are, of course, generalities but, again, we as a society have also decided that carve-outs can exist where required but these are the exceptions to the wide rule.)
I would also note that the person to whom you replied expressed a favorable opinion of the trade-off for health against money not being made. No rule or law was proposed. That, too, is part of what society does: we debate things in good faith, not with the assumption that an opinion is a dictate by fiat. These rules are generally considered acceptable and good. It is up to you, the person with the view opposed to the current situation, to express why you disagree instead of simply turning the question back on the person commenting.
You make a great point. We have to be careful when we design a race to the bottom. We don't let companies do it to themselves, so we shouldn't let them do it to their employees.
There's also the fact that if you are free to choose it, you could also be pressured to choose it. Like companies that give you the freedom to cash out your vacation instead of taking it. It'd be great because not all of us want to go on vacation every year.
But unless there's a mandatory minimum vacation, some employees will be pressured into literally never taking a vacation. Think of Japanese work culture. Top down work-life balance measures are completely ignored because they're not mandatory.
I'm not taking an absolutist view at all. I was asking questions challenging a blanket statement without any supporting evidence that the workers or society or some very broad concept's welfare was improved by removing performance based incentives. I don't even make a positive statement at all.
These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?
I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.
I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide.
We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think this wouldn't happen to modern workers, go look at what goes on in Dubai and the UAE.
It would be nice to hear opinions from the workers at amazon.
I find it very compelling to agree with you. But i also like to make my own decision, to negotiate. My ideal, at least. And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world. And I also think, its a two way street. I will not risk my life, and Amazon does not want dead people.
And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
> And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
Because people taking this up live in even worse conditions in some of the most abject poverty there is and they have no way to climb up the social ladder that doesn't involve saving some money with this kind of work even at the expense of their physical safety.
And here i am confused. So from their perspective, they can achieve something better for themselves, with that risk. And from my perspective, i see it as abuse of their situation, because iam on a different cushion level, where i dont have to risk my life for my job.
> And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world.
My personal elders and seniors don't know the first thing about how to judge whether workplace chemicals would be harmful to me or not.
They're just other human beings, very fallible like myself.
As long at it seems decently run, I trust a government agency full of experts and reams of research over the elders and seniors I happen to know personally, who are generally totally lacking in both expertise and knowledge in most areas, any day.
I do not mean my personal elders, or, if you will, my parents or friends.
What i mean is, in whatever workplace i worked so far, there were people telling me, what not to do. Surely playing around with me at first, but always keeping me away from dangers.
In the long run, well, i agree, that there are many things, that are not very obvious to me. Like office work, sitting in the chair all day, not moving, looking at screens all the time. But iam sure my boss does not mean no harm. He surely looks more at his phone than me on a screen. We get smarter over time, i hope.
I can only speak for myself as an Amazon fulfillment center employee... I haven't directly witnessed any of the horror stories people tell about working there, but knowing the culture as I do, I would not be surprised at all that such things happen. Someone complained on the VOA board where I work about having been docked for time off task when they had to clean up after their own nosebleed, but that's anecdotal. You read about people having to pee in bottles to make quota, people passing out from heat exhaustion, people being forced to stand on injured feet because Amazon has a policy against employees sitting for any reason. Enough anecdotes pile up, though, and it smells like data.
The thing is, not everyone working at Amazon is a young, single person without any ties, who can afford to simply quit at a moment's notice and not worry about the risk of unemployment, or losing healthcare. So it's not a binary situation where if Amazon's employees are willing to work there, then clearly they must be willing to accept anything the company does because otherwise they would quit. For low income people, the cost of quitting can be significant, much more so if they have families to support.
Which is why regulations are necessary - because the relationship between employer and employee is not equal, as is often assumed in a perfectly ideal free market model. The ability of a company to coerce their employee due to holding arbitrary power over that employee's livelihood must be limited somehow, and there must be some means by which consequences can result for bad actors.
In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones. That's not a game most people can win alone against a billion dollar corporation.
>In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones.
The history of planet earth is full of bad actors in all kinds of markets, regulated or not. The animal kingdom is full of examples of deception. Seeking personal gain at the expense of others is a very deep feature of life.
If you look at a graph of historical workplace deaths you can’t tell where OSHA was enacted. There’s no change in the rate of decrease of workplace deaths. As far as minimum wage laws go less than 5% of the US workforce gets paid minimum wage, and unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit. Minimum wage laws are a great way to reduce workforce participation, just look
at France. Does the US even have overtime laws as such?
Dubai is part of the UAE for what it’s worth but it would be impossible to treat workers like that in the US because (a) the US does not do slavery, or indentured servitude outside prisons (b) you can sue people in the US because you have the rule of law and a functioning legal system where everyone has equal rights. Before OSHA if a worker got injured at your place they they could sue you, so most places had insurance, which got more expensive if injuries happened. People also notice if a workplace is more dangerous. They demand higher pay to work there.
> unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit.
Unpaid internships are a great way to gate off poor people from high-paying jobs. No matter how beneficial they are to the intern, if said intern can't afford rent and food while on your internship it's simply not an option for them. Unpaid internships have no place in a society that wants to consider itself a meritocracy because the primary qualification for an unpaid internship is not merit but a well-off family.
If you can afford to not work for three or four years while getting a Bachelor’s and the tens of thousands of dollars you pay in tuition you can afford to do a six month unpaid internship.
What you say is absolutely true but if unpaid internships are a problems journalism schools and other forms of credentialist gatekeeping are much worse.
If the choice existed would you rather go to Columbia Journalism School it spend two years working for the New York Post unpaid? Wouldn’t you get more and more valuable experience as a dogsbody for a fashion photographer than doing a degree in photography?
Credentialism is bad for the sane reason unpaid internships are bad but does vastly more damage to oppprtunity.
OSHA is why I can't have a perfectly normal UL-listed power strip at work, but somehow a UPS (with a battery full of lead and sulfuric acid) is perfectly fine. Every place where I'd want a power strip, I have to use a UPS.
Possibly, but generally the difference is one of power structure. With OSHA, workplace safety laws are put in place to protect workers from the tyranny of their need for wages. People need to work and therefore their workplaces should pose a maximum amount of risk that society defines as reasonable. What's at stake here is not the general safety environment of the employee but rather the amount of effort the employee VOLUNTARILY chooses to exert. Who are we to define how much effort an employee chooses to exert? Who are we to define incentives that encourage a worker to exert more effort? None of this seems reasonable to me.
Because Taylorism is a blunt instrument that is marginally effective.
If you’ve ever worked in an environment with those sorts of incentives, it’s immediately obvious that they are loosely related to productivity and turn into tools of favoritism and control.
Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They no doubt concluded that just focusing on objective, easily controlled measurements like hours ultimately made more sense. The workers themselves are disposable anyway.
Besides, the workers now have more guaranteed income that can be invested in Amazon stock! They gain the freedom of dollar cost averaging.
Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder??
Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.
Citation needed. This makes no sense. There's always going to be heterogeneity in output per worker in every role. Amazon pays for a baseline of expected output and wants to ensure that within a role they can manage to capture those workers whose productivity will exceed that. To do so, they provide performance bonuses. Not everyone will get the performance bonuses. Amazon is willing to pay the bonuses because the increased output is worth the increased cost. This race to the bottom isn't at all aligned with reasoning and could only happen in a monopsony which Amazon is obviously not.
For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?
This will help with recruitment, but the sentiment that new workers will essentially get paid the same as older workers is going to immediately be a big sticking point. From watching the Boeing union strikes over many years, I get the sense that once a labor force unionizes they setup their own structure for pay and get that signed off -- where they have seniority and things like that. But it also means the company becomes very adversarial with their work-force and spends most of its time trying to figure out how to get around the demands of the union.
I feel like the concept of unions needs to be rejiggered for the modern era where its less (But still to some degree) about worker safety and more about control over compensation / days off / healthcare stuff.
Maybe somebody could come up with something that is like a union but meant to be more lightweight and more focused on compensation type things and has some self-imposed restrictions on things like strikes and bargaining hold-outs and things like that.
This is how grocery unions (like UFCW) operate. There isn't a lot of debate about health and safety, mostly thanks to government agencies. Most of what the union does is operate the health insurer, and push for pay raises & fewer pay scale steps.
Obamacare is very, very far from universal healthcare. A more accurate comparison would be Medicare For All, which has broad support from a variety of unions.
What drove the costs of the "Cadillac plans" up was that the members worked in injury-prone industries, i.e. fishing, construction &c. The benefits weren't particularly rich. Small wonder that the unions in those industries would come out against provisions that would penalize their members for working in their line of work.
There's plenty of things wrong with US unions, but opposition of fishermen to Obamacare isn't amongst them.
"Cadillac care" provisions are in no way related to universal healthcare. They are a tax on healthcare plans that are more expensive than some threshold, intended to drive down the cost of healthcare plans by steering companies away from the really high-end plans.
The relationship between labor and management/capital has historically been adversarial in all countries, in many cases much more so than US. I mean, US didn't have an attempted socialist revolution, for one - several European countries did.
And yet they developed a working system involving unions out of it all. There's no reason why we can't, too.
America didn't get their socialist revolution because the companies and government brutally suppressed every rebellion and even basic strikes. America as a government and capitalist society has been actively against unions since forever, and in the past few decades they've convinced workers to be against unionizing as well
My point is precisely that there were numerous violently suppressed socialist revolutions in Europe, on a scale far greater than anything that had ever happened in the USA:
Any government is going to violently suppress a revolution (or cease to exist immediately). The difference is that there wasn't even an attempt at a socialist revolution in US. The labor movement here was mostly focused on labor rights, not on the broader politics of class struggle. Radical socialists and communists within the movement were never numerous enough to organize a revolution.
My understanding was that America got the heads up on what would happen based on Europe's experience and was thus quicker to crack down on any sort of worker movement
> But it also means the company becomes very adversarial with their work-force
This is due to a combination of lack of social safety net and lack of worker representation.
In the places where unions are noted for being "good", the government covers the social safety net and workers unions are given board seats as well as stock.
For real. Unlike private sector unions, the people that the unions ares negotiating against are politicians, who have no real incentive to push back. "I'll grant your raises, you vote me back in, then I can grant more raises". The incentives are messed up.
Given my description, why in the world would you jump to public sector unions in the US instead of trades unions in Germany? (which is what I was describing)
You might want to do a bit more research into actual unions around the world rather than simply regurgitating propaganda.
A company doesn't become adversarial with its workforce because of unions; a company is forced to treat its workforce more as an equal because of unions. The adversarial nature of the relationship between a workforce and its company is not a result of unions, it exists without unions. It's just that, without unions, companies are free to largely ignore the demands of individual workers.
Control over compensation and healthcare "stuff" (and, I'd argue, even days off) is just as important to the well-being of a workforce as worker safety, especially in a country with a relatively weak "social safety net".
How exactly does a union show that it is worth negotiating with as an equal without things that demonstrate its power, like strikes and bargaining hold-outs?
> A company doesn't become adversarial with its workforce because of unions; a company is forced to treat its workforce more as an equal because of unions.
I'm not convinced. My brother's work has a warehouse. The warehouse unionized (a large push by two folks who are no longer there). Most of the warehouse workers are now making _less_ than they were before due to union dues. There are guys that my brother would love to promote and reward with better pay, but the union does not allow that. The union demands such-n-such, the business pushes back. The workers are in the middle and get shitall. This union (at least) exists to grow itself and for no other reason.
Now the "office personnel" are not allowed to talk anything union related with the "warehouse folks." It went from "us" to "us" and "them." The office people have to be careful on how they say anything or a union rep can file grievances. When you have to watch your behavior in fear of retribution, I'd say that is adversarial and I would say this happened due to the union.
Does that make the account no longer valid? His problem is not "lazy union members," he has folks he thinks are getting screwed over that he would fight for a promotion for.
And yet presumably the union would be quite happy with across-the-board raises, so the complaint tries to casually gloss over the implied conflict with management about who deserves a more limited supply of raises.
The only union experience I have was that the whole concept of performance based compensation was something to fight to the teeth (in France, 12y ago). The pay structure was almost exclusively seniority-based.
No, you aren’t arguing the union has a different idea who has higher performance. You are arguing the case that everyone should be paid more regardless of performance.
No, I'm not. I raised the "across-the-board raises" example to point out that the union obviously would not be opposed to more money for everyone, so there must be a reason they oppose more money for only the specific people chosen by management.
If the management gets to decide who gets raises, why wouldn't they give it to themselves. You've never seen companies do layoffs right before the end of the quarter so management can get raises, and then immediately go on a hiring spree when the new quarter starts so they can get the work done again?
I haven't, that sounds like a massive waste of time and energy, so those managers are doing a very bad job if their goal is to get stuff done. Most well functioning companies that I've seen act very much the opposite. I could believe that some companies are crappy enough to do that, though.
Their goal isn't to get stuff done. No one in management other than maybe founder's have a goal to get stuff done. Their goal is to make money and getting stuff done is one possible way to do that. Well run companies manage to properly align the interests of the company and the management and the workers all towards those same goals.
Well the manager could decide that the best performance is the people who does their work and don't make a fuss. Those who go to work even when they are sick, do a little extra without expecting compensation. If you reward those "performing" employees you get everyone trying to do the same. The reward then might even be very small but it would be presented as "this year the general pay increase will be 0.69%, but you have broken your back for the company so you will get almost double that, 1.18%". Just to create a divide and something to strive for. Im aware that this is the American Way and as a swede we value the collective more, as a culture. But a divide work force is an obedient work force.
I worked with a software team once where the manager let the team divide up the raise pool. And they didn't divide it evenly. There was consensus about who deserved more each year. Of course that could still be a cultural value of working long hours or working when sick.
if unions were not actively trying to sabotage their own companies most of the time, maybe the sentiment would be different. There are several cases when unions actively push to destroy companies just to get short term benefits.
If that’s the case then please list them. I can find many more examples of executives destroying companies and employee livelihoods for short term gain.
> There are several cases when unions actively push to destroy companies just to get short term benefits.
And there are many-fold more cases where managers and execs have ruthlessly driven companies into the ground for their own personal short term gain. That's unequivocally worse than workers trying to protect their livelihoods.
Why would an organized labor force try to sabotage the company they work for? If their company goes bankrupt, they all lose their jobs. I've yet to see a union contract that guarantees the type of golden parachutes that executives routinely line up for themselves (and only for themselves) when their firm goes bust or they start to run for the door.
In general, when a company fails, the rank and file have to find new jobs. Executives, on the other hand, never have to work again. We observe this trend over and over again (unionized workforce or not).
Given this trend, which side is more likely to be the one that blows the whole thing up?
So who's running the union? Some measure of nonsensicality exists here in the idea of a union composed entirely of warehouse workers that is somehow magically acting against the best interests of those warehouse workers.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that there is a unitary “interests of those warehouse workers”.
Collective decision making and fiduciary duties are directly contrary to each other but unions are supposed to feature both. The way the circle is squared is that unions don’t in fact represent all their members’ interests, only those of 50% + 1.
If only! In reality, long-living unions create such a layered bureaucratic structure that they don't represent most workers in most matters anymore (case in point: unions in Italy, since decades ago when they were protected by law.)
I think the disagreement is that a new worker who is skilled and hard working wants compensation to be based on output. An older worker who has been there for awhile wants compensation to be based on seniority. Workers with big families and medical problems want better benefits while single healthy folks want more cash. The disagreements are that different people want different things.
Traditionally the way it has played out is that casual workers are screwed in favour of permanents (who are more likely to be union members). The company saves on wages overall but some employees get better wages. And of course corrupt kickbacks to prevent industrial action, aka a protection racket.
There can be multiple unions too, and inter-union conflict. Some of the unions are very right wing (hate gays and women basically) and have e.g. opposed paid maternity leave in a zero sum game approach.
>> Some measure of nonsensicality exists here in the idea of a union composed entirely of warehouse workers that is somehow magically acting against the best interests of those warehouse workers.
...is this hard to believe? This happens all the time with unions. Professional sports unions fall for this all the time, most notably Major League Baseball and the National Football League. The former butchered their negotiations so bad in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that they screwed themselves out of hundreds of millions of dollars due to their own ineptitude and the latter settled a concussion lawsuit that didn't require ownership to admit that they negligently and criminally lied about the safety (or lack thereof) of union members at their job.
Unions regularly act against their own interests; rarely do they have legal/arbitration representation nearly as good as ownership, and this is only one factor that causes it. Oftentimes they have leadership that prioritizes the needs of the few (seniority) over the needs of the many, or are just outright corrupt.
Consider politics. We, citizens, elect other citizens to represent us in office. Is it nonsensical to then suggest that these citizens we voluntarily choose to elect are not acting in the best interests of those that put them into office? The problem is a typical one. The vast majority of people are motivated by their own intimate interests. Elevate them to power and that not only becomes even more true, but their interests also change.
>Most of the warehouse workers are now making _less_ than they were before due to union dues.
If most of the workers are making less now, why would they vote to unionize? Before the union formed did workers get vacation and sick time, or were their unaddressed safety issues, or was management treating employees unfairly?
In the US it is a lot of work to convince people to form a union even when the benefits are clear. Companies will bring in professional union busters, force employees to watch anti union propaganda, many employers will illegally fire employees who are pro union, and they will threaten(illegally) to shut down the whole company if a union is formed.
What we're the expected benefits of joining the union that they didn't get then? For instance in most low level jobs I've had like that, just getting a consistent schedule would be worth half the hourly wage, without a bonus all. You'd be able to have a life or a second job. When you don't have a union you get companies ignoring even basics like that and doing random scheduling with leaves you with the inability to do anything but be ready for work, without being paid for the time.
There are tons of little things like this that all add up to value that's just as good as money and that we take for granted by being in the tech world
Yep there are heaps of reasons. For example, 'zero hours' contracts are all too common now. You have to be available for a shift, but if there is no work they send you home. (Or if you don't suck up to the supervisor he gives you less hours.) It's an unfair one way obligation.
Something we also take for granted in the tech world is companies running on ridiculously high net margins. Apple, for instance, makes about $400,000 in profit per employee. They could literally give every single one of their 123,000 workers a $200k raise and still be making tens of billions of dollars in profit per year. Now let's consider WalMart, the largest employer in the US and one many have chastised for poor pay. The make a bit less than $4,300 in profit per employee. And that's one of the largest companies in the world that can take advantage of economy of scale to push their profit margins as high as possible.
Most companies operate on very thin margins, made up for by scale. Selling $300 hardware for $1000 is, fortunately, an exception rather than the rule. But what this means is that unions are not going to suddenly send major benefits towards employees, because the companies simply do not have the money for these benefits. Factor in the frequently unreasonably high union fees and unions are often going to be a negative overall outcome at many companies. For instance the united autoworkers union demands 30 hours of pay, or 1.44% (which is 30/2080) of your annual pay in dues per year. So in other words workers would need to see an extra 30 hours of pay or a ~1.5% raise, just to break even.
But many people don't consider economic realities when they believe they can get more stuff. If you had a national vote on enacting a $50/hour minimum wage you'd have tens of millions people vote for it even though it would lead not only to their direct unemployment, but also throwing the entire nation into complete chaos and crashing the US and world economies as well. For instance you regularly see things like employees trying to unionize at companies that are operating in the red. What exactly do they think is going to be the outcome there?
On the other hand, you constantly see people defend ultra rich CEOs by dividing their salary across all employees in the company and showing how it would only be a raise of a few hundred a year. Those defenders then claim that's barely a raise so why take from the CEO?
When you are minimum wage even 100 extra a year would have absolutely helped. I thinks it's fairly disengenous for any company to be raking in billions in profits while employees need public assistance to survive.
Yea, you can suddenly double your work forces wage, but you can still improve the situation.
A union can provide value even if it is not tied directly to a raise, or to benefits like 401k matching, employer paid healthcare, or time off. Requiring just cause before firing an employee, having regular shifts that can be planned around, and having someone to look out for your behalf besides the dept of labor all go a long way to improving the working conditions of a job, and don't directly affect the bottom line. The lower turnover can even improve it in the long run.
Their existence is almost always protected by law in e.g. the US, but de facto and de jure are not the same thing, and as with many relationships involving asymmetric power, the risk/reward and burden of proof may be too high to justify the actual legal case about illegal actions versus quietly settling things for more/less than you would have originally earned, but with much reduced legal fees.
This is not always true. For example, the union relationship with Eastern Airline, where the union decided that it was better to eventually kill the airline in exchange for a better contract today. (Reference - Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger). Unions are yet another human organization. Like all human organizations, it in-enviably becomes about sustaining itself, and that sustaining and power structure can become as destructive as corporations themselves to individual rights when the institution is opposed to the something the individual wants or needs.
> the union relationship with Eastern Airline, where the union decided that it was better to eventually kill the airline in exchange for a better contract today.
> a company is forced to treat its workforce more as an equal because of unions.
Isn't this dream of every company to treat their workers as 'equal' interchangeable cogs. Union is co conspirator in this scheme, turn all workers into 'equals' of each other.
I believe the assertion was, rather than equal in the sense of interchangable, that it is a counterweight to the inherent asymmetry of a large body (company or otherwise) and any individual worker trying to negotiate.
In that case, absent other constraints, one party usually has much less reason to accommodate than the other, as not hiring or continuing to employ one worker rarely would deeply impact the company, while the individual is looking at {continuing to commit, committing} a good portion of their available time, along with possibly relocating and however their income is derived, and so has much more to potentially lose by trying to receive even minor concessions.
(Footnote: Not all companies necessarily desire their employees be cogs, as some level of {competition,contention} can result in much better outcomes than any of the parties might have achieved on their own, but there is increasingly a sense that some portion of labor will be ever more readily automated with, indeed, fairly literal interchangeable parts, as well as the historical perception you describe, which can yield incredibly toxic cultures that don't care because they can, more or less, train more people whenever someone burns out or leaves because they find something better. )
> A company doesn't become adversarial with its workforce because of unions; a company is forced to treat its workforce more as an equal because of unions.
(Not arguing about benefits or usefulness of unions)
As an organization unions have the same prime directive as every other organization, survive (and grow). One of the ways of a union to survive (and grow) is to demonstrate that it takes action and to be adversarial. So many unions tend to be adversarial. In Germany in the past especially smaller unions were highly adversarial to gain ground against larger unions in the same company ("grow").
> But it also means the company becomes very adversarial with their work-force and spends most of its time trying to figure out how to get around the demands of the union.
Companies don't become more adversarial when they deal with a union - what happens is that the union shines some sunlight on any existing adversarial relationships.
When your boss asks you to work an extra hour without pay, and you tell him to pound sand, pointing at union rules, the union looks like a bad guy. Rolling over to his demands, because you lack union protection, is, for some reason, not considered 'adversarial.'
There is no need to be adversarial as long as workers have the right to leave. These are not slaves. They only stay until they can get a better deal (pay, respect, safety...) elsewhere.
Workers derive 100% of their income and survival from their employer. Employers dervie some sub-percentage point of their income and survival from any one worker.
Unions level the playing field. Now, both sides have to negotiate from an even position - neither can do without the other.
That isn't a level playing field with an even position. The employer can't get other employees (due to union-favoring laws) but the employees can get other employment. The closest thing the employer has to "get other employees" is to shut down the workplace, possibly outsourcing to a different country.
Yes, they can. They can just close down the branch in question, and re-open two months later. Why do you think Wal-mart is so successful at union-busting?
Or, they could actually negotiate on an equal basis with the union.
> employees can get other employment
Collectively? For an employer that's big enough, this is not at all the case. Their industry may not be able to absorb them, individuals within the union may not be able to handle the interruption in pay, etc. This is also why striking is used as a last resort.
> The closest thing the employer has to "get other employees" is to shut down the workplace, possibly outsourcing to a different country.
Trying to find another job is very similar to what you've just described. You cut yourself off from your stream of income, and often have to relocate to a different city, or country, at great personal expense.
Temporary shutdown is likely to attract trouble from the federal government.
I forgot to mention that there is something deeply wrong with the presumption that employees (or their union) should be able to negotiate on an equal basis. They didn't risk their money to found the business. They don't own it, and shouldn't own it, because they didn't put up the funds to create it.
It doesn't belong to you. It's not yours. Do not perform a mugging.
Sure, employees want to negotiate from a position of equality or strength, but wanting something doesn't mean you deserve it or get it. To them we must say: find your own business idea and venture capital, and work hard for years with the possibility of losing everything.
Most businesses fail. Most of them fail quickly, causing painful losses. Nobody would bother if they didn't have a chance to get lots of money and power. We need people to bother, because this creates jobs.
Most of the unsolvable adversarial issues are related to the inconsistent legal framework, various holes pinched in labor law and the constant threat of closure.
A place like Boeing is really a government employer in disguise and has entirely different dynamics.
Codetermination seems to work well in Germany.
Employees and shareholders are both represented on the board and perhaps that allows better negotiation and less adversity?
Unions are good for the union members most of the time, and generally bad for everyone else: shareholders, management, customers, etc. I'm not saying that's bad, that's the most obvious position for the union to take, to maximize benefit for itself at the cost of everything else. We don't seem to have any problem acknowledging that corporations do this, but unions, while not technically corporations, operate largely like one.
I feel like the concept of unions needs to be rejiggered for the modern era
This is very much a cultural thing. A German union for example ensures that Workers get their fair share but understands that the company must be profitable and successful first - they know not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Whereas unions in the UK immediately try to destroy a company to prove a point about capitalism, union bosses are lavishly paid, and the Workers are mere pawns, in some cases even actively working against their members wishes. That’s why Germany has a strong auto industry and we do not.
unions should be for labor what HR is for the company - a single force with a comparatively large negotiating power instead of a thousand individual non-professional negotiators. it doesn't always look like this and this is a problem that unions have.
Part of the problem with unions here is the decades of anti-union lobbying which has resulted in locking in unions in place and restricting how they operate. Many places with a union now you HAVE to join and pay them and that is the end of discussion. And your voice doesn't matter for shit in the union, you are just meant to fall in step with your union leader's commands. And the structure of the unions themselves have come to resemble another profit-seeking business with a bunch of financial and business managers from outside taking over all the top positions, not former workers that rose from the ranks of workers and know the business, and then those outsiders raising management pay for themselves. If unions weren't so restricted, if talking about a new union couldn't get you fired, you could easily replace the old unions by a handful of workers freely starting their own union while opting out of the old shitty one ran by non-union workers. It would ideally light a fire under those entrenched union's positions.
That seems like an overly simplistic anlysis, unless an employee who quits or gets fired not on an anniversary receives a pro-rated partial share at departure.
Otherwise, a separation before the first anniversary (presumably a certainty for seasonal workers) results in losing none of the raise, at just shy of the second anniversary only one quarter of the raise.
Half the raise is an upper bound, and we'd have to know at least the average tenure of a warehouse employee to guess how much an average worker loses.
This doesn't take into account that the stock didn't begin to vest until a worker was at Amazon for one year, and with such high employee turnover few made it to that mark.
I’ve always thought the answer to the union “problem” was easy: multiple unions. Mandate that no more than, say, 30% of the workforce may be part of a single union, then let them fight it out. Monopolies suck both when it comes to corporations and the workforce.
In my experience corruption sinks in on both sides when people can get away with putting in place policies to protect the status quo. When there are multiple options, and the same antitrust policies that are in place to prevent collusion between employers are also enforced to prevent “unionization of unions,” I believe that is when the individual worker actually wins.
Taken to the limit most regular employees are a union of 1 and it doesnt work like a union. How would collective action (strikes) work? What about tragedy of the commons (join the cheaper union, but get the better collective bargain) ?
In Italy that’s basically what happened. Because each political party had its own trade unions, and there were quite a few parties after WWII, pretty much any unionised workforce is split between three or more unions.
The results differ by sector. In some cases, this plurality allowed for classic “divide & rule” strategies from management; in others, it produced chaos because each union can (and will) call for strikes at different times with little or no coordination, or refuse to agree on deals that everyone else has accepted.
The best outcomes have been consistently obtained in companies and sectors where the plurality was reduced to one or two dominant unions. Some competition is good, but it significantly increases complexity in all related processes.
Sure and also make sure that a single hr department can’t hire more than 30% of the staff and make them compete for employees.
You have a single employer on one side, you need a single union on the other side to make negotiations fair, otherwise they just would just low ball each other to get more jobs.
The history of labor activism shows that workers only get big gains when they work together.
Unions were largely a victim of their own success, though — once a lot of their gains were codified into laws and regulations there wasn’t as much to fight for.
I think the multiple employer comes from having multiple employers in the marketplace for a given profession, the logic being that an employer should not be restricted to a single union just as a union should not be restricted to a single employer.
You do have multiple employers, and a single union can represent workers across an industry, not just at 1 employer. Having multiple unions would remove the monopoly power unions enjoy, but a triopoly is still pretty powerfull, and reduces the risk of corruption.
Of course, if the triopoly was enforced by statute, then a corrupt member could act with impunity knowing that it cannot loose too much of its power.
the power of a union is the ability of its workers to withhold labor. this would make unions ineffective and I'm not sure what the upside is other than an aversion to monopolies.
The actual true power of unions is to restrict entry to the trade. A union that is adversarial to employers may achieve some insignificant pay increases. But the only truly successful unions when it comes to improving pay and working conditions have exclusively done so through limiting entry to the profession, think the AMA, ALPA, Bar Associations.
I appreciate that you believe that, but that's simply not based in any historical fact. The height of the AFL, IWW, etc. in terms of power was when their power to strike, especially wildcat strike, was the highest. At that time unions had more twice the membership amongst working people than they do now. Hardly a sign of unions winning because they keep workers out (racism aside).
You’re confusing a nebulous idea of political influence with real outcomes. Strikes have been used to resolve labor disputes, but if your goal is long term and meanful improvement to working conditions and remuneration, then the only times unions have ever achieved that is by restricting access to the profession. Salaries are determined by market forces, political influence will never be able to exert much pressure on the equilibrium. The only time unions have truly succeeded in this is by limiting labor supply over the long term.
> Strikes have been used to resolve labor disputes, but if your goal is long term and meanful improvement to working conditions and remuneration, then the only times unions have ever achieved that is by restricting access to the profession.
Collective bargaining is how unions achieve long term and meaningful improvement to working conditions and renumeration.
> Salaries are determined by market forces, political influence will never be able to exert much pressure on the equilibrium.
This is just demonstrably untrue -- we've been in a bull market for almost a decade. Worker pay -- in contrast to company profits -- hasn't even kept up with inflation. Something is missing.
> The only time unions have truly succeeded in this is by limiting labor supply over the long term.
> Monopolies suck both when it comes to corporations and the workforce.
Agree with the idea, but in pracice every employee can just pack their baga and go to another other company. If enough employees do that, then companies sooner or later have to change, or remain with the worst of the workforce. There is monopoly on employment.
> but in pracice every employee can just pack their baga and go to another other company
Maybe you don't live in America, or maybe you grew up with lots of privilege, but in reality, not a lot of people can do this. If you pack your bags and leave, you need to have some way to feed yourself, clothe yourself, and get health care, which is most likely provided by your employer.
The people who have the least ability to do these things without a job are also the ones who are most exploited.
Of course, universal health care and a universal income would solve these problems...
Not everyone has the luxury to just switch jobs. A large portion of the population has very few job options so they get exploited by employers who know they don't really have other options.
Aside from the philosophical objections to this model, think about the practical issues that arise, specifically regarding overhead. Unions are notorious for having well-paid administrative staff and leadership, and that does not scale with three or four separate unions. You end up with a net drain even if you were able to eke out some slight pay advantage.
Corporations are spending their own money, unions are spending someone else's. That's the main difference. To be clear what I mean: At least in my country it is a legal requirement for the corporation to pay salaries of union leaders and staff - few FTEs per union.
Corporations are spending someone else’s money. They aren’t a mint. That is in no way different. A corporation is accountable to its owners, and a union is accountable to its owners. A corporation usually has fewer owners than a union, or at least can ignore most owners who aren’t on the board; whereas union leadership can be changed by its members, the workers.
So how do you create a union that has the right amount of power? When unions are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure.
> When unions are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure.
I love how this argument gets applied to unions but not to companies. Many companies have killed themselves through greed and short-term thinking, yet you are not arguing that something is wrong with corporate structure.
Ultimately every human organization is prone to screwing up - unions are not at all unique here - but in the US unions often get singled out as a boogey man that hurts the economy.
I guess to me it just seems especially perverse, because the union is supposed to be working in the interest of the worker. The worker even pays the union. Yet sinking the company is not in the interest of the worker.
Corporations can sink themselves because they are granted self-determination. That's sort of fundamental, sans bailouts.
That said, I would be happy if we could tweak incentives to shift focus away from short term returns towards long term. Companies are not perfect either, and my omission was not meant to imply they were.
I guess I didn't mention, but I'm most specifically thinking of unions that have sunk the company in a fight over pension obligations. Union has a choice of reduced pension payout, or drive the company under & everybody loses their pension as a result. Union, unwilling to reduce pension payout, chooses the latter. Everybody winds up worse off. It almost reminds me of The Scorpion and The Frog
shrug I've done it while on minimum wage. Unions are needed to raise wages, not because it's necessarily hard to move from one low wage job to another. People do it all the time.
The company going out of business is a problem for the employees and is obviously a risk, it's just not a big and existential risk like it is for the owners.
"So how do you create a CEO and Board that has the right amount of power? When CEO's and Boards are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure".
I'd argue that a CEO running a company into the ground for their own selfish, short term gains is far worse than a union ruining a company, because at least when the latter occurs it's because a significant amount of the employees aren't being sufficiently paid, or are being subject to unsafe/inadequate conditions. That is far more important than a CEO getting a bonus.
How many times has this actually happened, and were they even the root cause or would the company have failed for some other reason anyway?
Having worked in an Amazon warehouse before this would have been nice. Some families need their money right away and can't really afford to wait for a bonus or stock options.
This is a direct attack on competitors, designed to enlist the help of the federal government to raise payroll and put pressure on arch nemesis Walmart and any other company that has lots of retail other jobs that are not conducive to automation.
Remember that Amazon thinks 5 years ahead, and they waited for the perfect PR and political threshold to announce these changes and capitalize on the news.
If you compare the UX at Walmart vs, say, Costco (which pays higher wages) I'm not so sure that paying the lowest is good business. i.e. is 1 Costco employee equal in productivity to 1 Walmart employee? I suspect not.
Walmart pays less because it has much lower profit margins. It serves far more customers and the average employee is a great deal less skilled. And it’s cheaper, with greater product choice. The average Walmart employee is definitely worse than the average Costco employee but Walmart is clearly the better business. It has higher gross profits, employs more people and serves more people.
That article is paywalled for me, so I did some quick research. It looks like Walmart's gross profit of 25% is almost double that of Costco's 13%. Am I doing the math correctly?
I was wrong on gross margins. You’re right. Walmart still can’t adopt Costco’s business model. It sticks many more things, in much smaller units, in way, way more stores and the average employee is not as skilled.
> While Walmart’s gross margins are more than double those of Costco’s, an efficient model with significantly higher revenues per square foot ensure that Costco’s gross earnings for the same size of a store are higher than Walmart.
It’s a description of the economics of a corporation. If they have so much in revenues and so much in non wage costs the difference either goes to wages or profit. If revenues drop either profits will drop or wage costs will.
In the very long run your pay will tend towards your productivity but ease of replacibility will also play a role among other things. Sculptors and aerospace engineers are both highly skilled but there are many more jobs for the second than the first so they get paid more.
In the long run it is almost a rule that if gpm drops wages will. Profits could also drop. The mix of compensation could change. They could keep wages the same but fire the least productive staff so the wage bill drops but the remaining workers do more work.
I'm not sure why they have to be 1 to 1 in worker productivity. They fill the specific roles they're looking for, and the companies aren't very interchangeable in either products or scale so it's hard to compare UX in any standard metric other than marketshare and goods throughput, in which case Walmart is bigger and better.
It seems like you're conflating several things. Productivity of the worker is different from the UX of the store brand and neither have anything to do with the job role.
A checkout operator at Costco can be 2x as efficient as a checkout operator at Walmart while having a completely different customer UX (both the worker and the store itself) and being paid different wages. So what? Walmart and Costco serve different markets and sell different products so of course they will be differently run businesses.
Nothing about this is abnormal so I don't understand your comparison. They are not interchangeable other than looking at them as general retail companies.
Back in my day, Walmart was the great evil retailer, threatening to put everyone out of business. Many towns had their retail core destroyed by having a Walmart open, defeat all the small businesses, then close.
I didn't say anything about penalizing them. The point is that it's a shrewd business move planned out years ago. It wasn't done out of purely good intentions and may not have the desired effect, and many people seem to miss that.
Because it might not actually benefit more people? The posted article is about warehouse workers losing bonuses and stock, which would negatively affect anyone already over $15/hour (which happens to be quite a few who have multi-year tenures).
This change has long-term repercussions in total current and future jobs offered, within Amazon, its competitors, and the wider labor market with govt influence. Is is not worth caring about such wide-reaching externalities of a $1 trillion company?
That isn't what I said - I said if it does benefit more people. If it doesn't, then my statement doesn't follow.
People always act like the sky is falling. Minimum wages were higher in terms of actual value many years ago and the world didn't end then and it won't end now.
Walmart and Amazon are prime examples of centralizing forces that slurp up wealth into urban areas and increase wealth inequality. Sure minimum wage goes up, but at the cost of more money leaving circulation in rural economies. It’s a non-trivial topic.
> This is a direct attack on competitors, designed to enlist the help of the federal government to raise payroll and put pressure on arch nemesis Walmart and any other company that has lots of retail other jobs that are not conducive to automation.
Good. I hope they force their competitors to pay employees better wages.
Are we really comparing the tangible leap from $7.5 -> $15/hour that will help people get out of the government sponsored poverty, to the potential gains that some workers who already make more than $15/ hour would make in the future (if AMZN does not become GE)?
Isn't it better to get your money and not be hoping for a bonus or stock award?
Most people would take the guaranteed pay raise over the non-guaranteed bonus or profit sharing/stock awards. Let people decide what to do with their money, 'benefits' largely benefit the company not always all individuals.
The problem is real pay/share of GDP to persons has gone down consistently [1] while 'real compensation' [2] has supposedly gone up and supposedly makes up over 30% of everyone's pay on average, that includes bonuses, healthcare, other benefits that most people don't see or use regularly. Even real compensation is dwindling. [3]
As an example of increasing wages over benefits, I'd rather people got paid and then purchased healthcare for instance on their own as it would be a more consumer, rather than employer, focused market.
Raises should be given on the regular and the base way to reward value creating employees, not some might be bonus or stock award tied to the company instead. A bonus oro profit sharing on top of increasing wages is still ok but not in spite of it. What if the employee wants to buy other stock, pay them so they can. Give raises, quit with the 'real compensation' gains that don't put actual money in your accounts, people would always take actual money over benefits.
The velocity of money (domestic money that changes hands) has also fallen off a cliff [4] because pay to persons/raises have been efficiently worked out of the system in favor of 'real compensation' which does not get money in accounts consumers can spend.
AIUI the problem with individual medical insurance, in the US, is that without group bargaining and a requirement that all people must have it, there's both little incentive for insurance providers to compete for business, and the nasty reality that lots of people not having many expensive problems subsidize the few that do, and if you cut the long tail of people with problems that are cheaper than their premiums, you end up with exorbitant costs for the remaining people, and then a death spiral as "more healthy" people continue to opt out of rising costs, and the cost needle keeps moving up.
I'd probably prefer something more like a logical inverse of that - baseline guaranteed coverage for everyone by a government agency, and then if necessary private providers can wrestle over offering various incentives to use them beyond the guaranteed coverage. (Not that I have an incredible amount of faith in most governments acting efficiently, but they almost always have a better record than for-profit agencies, and I'd prefer to avoid a government mandate of a non-government agency.)
(I'm not going near the convoluted structure of compensation types because I don't think I'm informed enough.)
SO, that explains the business case behind the pay raise just fine. Reducing the $ 4.2 billion stock based compensation (2017 figures) and giving the blue collor workers an added sense of stability. In Germany, one of the main complaints used by Unions was that RSUs and bonuses are not what workers want. So both problems solved, kind of.
I thought the main complaint is that Amazon regards it's warehouse staff categorized as logistics, while the unions want them categorized as (higher paid) retail.
The underlying reason for this are salary levels. In Germany Retail agreements are higher paid (and almost dead, another reason why unions want them). In France it's the contrary, so Amazon put warhouse worker in the logistics category.
Hi, I work at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania. I agree with one of Amazon's sentiments regarding these changes - that it's better to get more direct pay than to "hope" for a bonus" However, the nature of our VCP (variable compensation pay) bonus is such that half of it is actually completely and fully within an individual's control. Half of the VCP bonus is given based on our own personal attendance. If we use personal time or approved vacation time that's all fine and dandy, but using something called "Unapproved Time Off" (UPT) is what will end up lowering or negating our monthly VCP bonus for attendance. The other half of VCP is granted based on building productivity. So yes, that's largely out of control by the individual. But it also provided actual incentive for us to do well. Now we don't really have any incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum. In any case, the personal attendance thing is completely within an individual's control and is not just mere "hope" for a bonus.
VCP is up to 4% for attendance and 4% for building productivity normally. But during Oct-Dec (peak season) these figures double to 8% each. If you average together the 4% attendance VCP (totally within our control) for 9 months and 8% for 3 months, you get a yearly average of 5% bonus, totally within our control.
I was earning $15/hr prior to this "wage boost". A 5% bonus on top of that would make my effective wage $15.75. This is without receiving any VCP bonus in regard to building productivity. This is also before you consider any "income" we were receiving through stocks. After the wage boost, my hourly wage is becoming $16hr. But I will never be able to increase that through VCP and I will never receive company stock again.
I am glad that employees across the country who were previously at $11/hr and that new starts at my warehouse are jumping from the starting $12-$13 immediately to $15, but it's hard for existing employees such as myself to see these changes as anything but a pay cut.
Slightly off topic, but I'm from Europe, and when you are saying "you get $15 an hour", do you include taxes or not and how much taxes do you have there?
From Europe too, they have progressive system same as we do, if you earn below certain threshold you pay no taxes, and amount specified $15/hr is before tax.
Someone from US can probably elaborate on the exact numbers where you start paying the tax, as far as I know it depends if you have children etc.
Yes, hourly earning in the US is customarily gross earning (before taxes).
The median rule of hourly earnings to yearly earnings is 40 hours/week and 50 weeks/year, which results in every $1/hour == $2000/year in earnings.
For $15/hour, that's about $30,000. For a single person in California, without dependents and claiming themselves for one exemption, it would be 4,264.50 (14.22%) in Federal taxes and 579.35 (1.93%) in State taxes for a total of 4,843.85 (16.15%) in taxes.
Many people in the US don't even get that. Having two weeks vacation is usually waved in peoples faces as an incentive not to leave after a few years of full time employement.
Presuming the previous lives in Allentown PA (ABE2 fulfillment center?), and presuming 2000 hours of work per year at $16/hour ($32,000/year), the tax calculator I found online says that taxes and social security add up to around $5222. $500 less under the tax changes Trump passed for next year.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI did read Amazon's claim in the article that the increase outweighs the decrease. But I would like to see a journalist confirm that and also report on how big the difference is and whether it affects certain types of workers differently than others.
They gained a pay rise, but lose a yearly share (£1,500 or $1,950), and another share every five years.
So Amazon did the logical thing. It increased the hourly wage, removed a highly unappreciated and misunderstood form of salary and simplified the compensation scheme so it could actually rebalance this value into a more predictable, easy to understand and liquid compensation. This should help anyone that felt exploited and of-course is going to piss off the people who actually understood the variable portion of their compensation and the ones who were already above the 15 USD mark.
I don't think what were people expecting? Hourly wage raise + stock + bonuses? I mean I don't want to sound like a capitalist pig, but that doesn't make sense, especially when we are talking about this kind of job. People deserve livable wages but also they deserve to get recognized economically when they pursue advanced studies and put the effort to get into jobs that require more specialized skills.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...
Is that something you expect a 16 year old to know is going to happen?
Biomechanics is a complicated subject.
I worked on a farm throwing hay from 12-17. I ended up needing back surgery at 25.
It is hard to tell nowadays, with multiple people coming out and saying things like "millennials could afford houses if they didn't buy iPhones!"
We make rules about a lot of things to protect the collective good at the sacrifice of the individual. Workers are not free to decide that climbing a tall tower without a safety harness so as to go faster and complete more jobs for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to put their unprotected hands into fast-moving machinery so as to be more efficient and complete more piecework for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to inhale toxic gases, labor in buildings without sanitary facilities, or be worked non-stop until the worker passes out from exhaustion. (These are, of course, generalities but, again, we as a society have also decided that carve-outs can exist where required but these are the exceptions to the wide rule.)
I would also note that the person to whom you replied expressed a favorable opinion of the trade-off for health against money not being made. No rule or law was proposed. That, too, is part of what society does: we debate things in good faith, not with the assumption that an opinion is a dictate by fiat. These rules are generally considered acceptable and good. It is up to you, the person with the view opposed to the current situation, to express why you disagree instead of simply turning the question back on the person commenting.
Also the part where the cost burdens of bad health outcomes are generally socialized.
There's also the fact that if you are free to choose it, you could also be pressured to choose it. Like companies that give you the freedom to cash out your vacation instead of taking it. It'd be great because not all of us want to go on vacation every year.
But unless there's a mandatory minimum vacation, some employees will be pressured into literally never taking a vacation. Think of Japanese work culture. Top down work-life balance measures are completely ignored because they're not mandatory.
These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?
I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.
We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think this wouldn't happen to modern workers, go look at what goes on in Dubai and the UAE.
I find it very compelling to agree with you. But i also like to make my own decision, to negotiate. My ideal, at least. And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world. And I also think, its a two way street. I will not risk my life, and Amazon does not want dead people.
And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
Many confusing signals i receive.
Because people taking this up live in even worse conditions in some of the most abject poverty there is and they have no way to climb up the social ladder that doesn't involve saving some money with this kind of work even at the expense of their physical safety.
Good luck to them!
It's not about the type of labor or physical effort but the completely inhuman conditions. How the heck is that a contradiction?
My personal elders and seniors don't know the first thing about how to judge whether workplace chemicals would be harmful to me or not.
They're just other human beings, very fallible like myself.
As long at it seems decently run, I trust a government agency full of experts and reams of research over the elders and seniors I happen to know personally, who are generally totally lacking in both expertise and knowledge in most areas, any day.
What i mean is, in whatever workplace i worked so far, there were people telling me, what not to do. Surely playing around with me at first, but always keeping me away from dangers.
In the long run, well, i agree, that there are many things, that are not very obvious to me. Like office work, sitting in the chair all day, not moving, looking at screens all the time. But iam sure my boss does not mean no harm. He surely looks more at his phone than me on a screen. We get smarter over time, i hope.
The thing is, not everyone working at Amazon is a young, single person without any ties, who can afford to simply quit at a moment's notice and not worry about the risk of unemployment, or losing healthcare. So it's not a binary situation where if Amazon's employees are willing to work there, then clearly they must be willing to accept anything the company does because otherwise they would quit. For low income people, the cost of quitting can be significant, much more so if they have families to support.
Which is why regulations are necessary - because the relationship between employer and employee is not equal, as is often assumed in a perfectly ideal free market model. The ability of a company to coerce their employee due to holding arbitrary power over that employee's livelihood must be limited somehow, and there must be some means by which consequences can result for bad actors.
In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones. That's not a game most people can win alone against a billion dollar corporation.
The history of planet earth is full of bad actors in all kinds of markets, regulated or not. The animal kingdom is full of examples of deception. Seeking personal gain at the expense of others is a very deep feature of life.
Dubai is part of the UAE for what it’s worth but it would be impossible to treat workers like that in the US because (a) the US does not do slavery, or indentured servitude outside prisons (b) you can sue people in the US because you have the rule of law and a functioning legal system where everyone has equal rights. Before OSHA if a worker got injured at your place they they could sue you, so most places had insurance, which got more expensive if injuries happened. People also notice if a workplace is more dangerous. They demand higher pay to work there.
If you look at this economic history link you’ll see a reasonably consistent trend, not universal, of decreasing workplace deaths.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-workplace-safety-in-th...
Unpaid internships are a great way to gate off poor people from high-paying jobs. No matter how beneficial they are to the intern, if said intern can't afford rent and food while on your internship it's simply not an option for them. Unpaid internships have no place in a society that wants to consider itself a meritocracy because the primary qualification for an unpaid internship is not merit but a well-off family.
What you say is absolutely true but if unpaid internships are a problems journalism schools and other forms of credentialist gatekeeping are much worse.
If the choice existed would you rather go to Columbia Journalism School it spend two years working for the New York Post unpaid? Wouldn’t you get more and more valuable experience as a dogsbody for a fashion photographer than doing a degree in photography?
Credentialism is bad for the sane reason unpaid internships are bad but does vastly more damage to oppprtunity.
Given the evidence, OSHA looks dumb and useless.
If you’ve ever worked in an environment with those sorts of incentives, it’s immediately obvious that they are loosely related to productivity and turn into tools of favoritism and control.
Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They no doubt concluded that just focusing on objective, easily controlled measurements like hours ultimately made more sense. The workers themselves are disposable anyway.
Besides, the workers now have more guaranteed income that can be invested in Amazon stock! They gain the freedom of dollar cost averaging.
Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.
For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?
I feel like the concept of unions needs to be rejiggered for the modern era where its less (But still to some degree) about worker safety and more about control over compensation / days off / healthcare stuff.
Maybe somebody could come up with something that is like a union but meant to be more lightweight and more focused on compensation type things and has some self-imposed restrictions on things like strikes and bargaining hold-outs and things like that.
There's plenty of things wrong with US unions, but opposition of fishermen to Obamacare isn't amongst them.
So a much less radical approach of simply copying what other countries do, should work just fine much more reliably.
We can’t just adopt the laws from countries with good labor relations like Germany or Denmark and expect the culture to follow.
And yet they developed a working system involving unions out of it all. There's no reason why we can't, too.
-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Corn_Rebellion
This one on Blair mountain was big -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Veterans wanting to get paid in less than 20 years of waiting, so why not beat and shoot them? -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Just the history of union busting here -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...
Any government is going to violently suppress a revolution (or cease to exist immediately). The difference is that there wasn't even an attempt at a socialist revolution in US. The labor movement here was mostly focused on labor rights, not on the broader politics of class struggle. Radical socialists and communists within the movement were never numerous enough to organize a revolution.
This is due to a combination of lack of social safety net and lack of worker representation.
In the places where unions are noted for being "good", the government covers the social safety net and workers unions are given board seats as well as stock.
This keeps everybody's goals aligned.
For real. Unlike private sector unions, the people that the unions ares negotiating against are politicians, who have no real incentive to push back. "I'll grant your raises, you vote me back in, then I can grant more raises". The incentives are messed up.
You might want to do a bit more research into actual unions around the world rather than simply regurgitating propaganda.
Control over compensation and healthcare "stuff" (and, I'd argue, even days off) is just as important to the well-being of a workforce as worker safety, especially in a country with a relatively weak "social safety net".
How exactly does a union show that it is worth negotiating with as an equal without things that demonstrate its power, like strikes and bargaining hold-outs?
I'm not convinced. My brother's work has a warehouse. The warehouse unionized (a large push by two folks who are no longer there). Most of the warehouse workers are now making _less_ than they were before due to union dues. There are guys that my brother would love to promote and reward with better pay, but the union does not allow that. The union demands such-n-such, the business pushes back. The workers are in the middle and get shitall. This union (at least) exists to grow itself and for no other reason.
Now the "office personnel" are not allowed to talk anything union related with the "warehouse folks." It went from "us" to "us" and "them." The office people have to be careful on how they say anything or a union rep can file grievances. When you have to watch your behavior in fear of retribution, I'd say that is adversarial and I would say this happened due to the union.
Manager complains about unions. I’m absolutely stunned.
A lot of companies are not well run
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/867492/leading-swedish-n...
I worked with a software team once where the manager let the team divide up the raise pool. And they didn't divide it evenly. There was consensus about who deserved more each year. Of course that could still be a cultural value of working long hours or working when sick.
And there are many-fold more cases where managers and execs have ruthlessly driven companies into the ground for their own personal short term gain. That's unequivocally worse than workers trying to protect their livelihoods.
In general, when a company fails, the rank and file have to find new jobs. Executives, on the other hand, never have to work again. We observe this trend over and over again (unionized workforce or not).
Given this trend, which side is more likely to be the one that blows the whole thing up?
Company: that seem expensive we will shut down and move the capital to another town and try to hire people that will accept this state of affairs.
Company fails
Innocent bystander: how could the union be so evil!?
When businesses do it, we say "it's just business." Not when workers do, though.
Collective decision making and fiduciary duties are directly contrary to each other but unions are supposed to feature both. The way the circle is squared is that unions don’t in fact represent all their members’ interests, only those of 50% + 1.
If only! In reality, long-living unions create such a layered bureaucratic structure that they don't represent most workers in most matters anymore (case in point: unions in Italy, since decades ago when they were protected by law.)
Hint: it pays off both mortgages and bar tabs.
There can be multiple unions too, and inter-union conflict. Some of the unions are very right wing (hate gays and women basically) and have e.g. opposed paid maternity leave in a zero sum game approach.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/huge-pay-rise-for-...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-28/union-accused-of-ties-...
https://amp.smh.com.au/national/why-is-the-union-that-repres...
...is this hard to believe? This happens all the time with unions. Professional sports unions fall for this all the time, most notably Major League Baseball and the National Football League. The former butchered their negotiations so bad in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that they screwed themselves out of hundreds of millions of dollars due to their own ineptitude and the latter settled a concussion lawsuit that didn't require ownership to admit that they negligently and criminally lied about the safety (or lack thereof) of union members at their job.
Unions regularly act against their own interests; rarely do they have legal/arbitration representation nearly as good as ownership, and this is only one factor that causes it. Oftentimes they have leadership that prioritizes the needs of the few (seniority) over the needs of the many, or are just outright corrupt.
If most of the workers are making less now, why would they vote to unionize? Before the union formed did workers get vacation and sick time, or were their unaddressed safety issues, or was management treating employees unfairly?
In the US it is a lot of work to convince people to form a union even when the benefits are clear. Companies will bring in professional union busters, force employees to watch anti union propaganda, many employers will illegally fire employees who are pro union, and they will threaten(illegally) to shut down the whole company if a union is formed.
You seem to be confusing the direction of time...
There are tons of little things like this that all add up to value that's just as good as money and that we take for granted by being in the tech world
Most companies operate on very thin margins, made up for by scale. Selling $300 hardware for $1000 is, fortunately, an exception rather than the rule. But what this means is that unions are not going to suddenly send major benefits towards employees, because the companies simply do not have the money for these benefits. Factor in the frequently unreasonably high union fees and unions are often going to be a negative overall outcome at many companies. For instance the united autoworkers union demands 30 hours of pay, or 1.44% (which is 30/2080) of your annual pay in dues per year. So in other words workers would need to see an extra 30 hours of pay or a ~1.5% raise, just to break even.
But many people don't consider economic realities when they believe they can get more stuff. If you had a national vote on enacting a $50/hour minimum wage you'd have tens of millions people vote for it even though it would lead not only to their direct unemployment, but also throwing the entire nation into complete chaos and crashing the US and world economies as well. For instance you regularly see things like employees trying to unionize at companies that are operating in the red. What exactly do they think is going to be the outcome there?
When you are minimum wage even 100 extra a year would have absolutely helped. I thinks it's fairly disengenous for any company to be raking in billions in profits while employees need public assistance to survive.
Yea, you can suddenly double your work forces wage, but you can still improve the situation.
Did they work for the union? Off to the next warehouse to liberate?
This is the case for most unions in Italy, for example, where their existence is protected by law. It's a very sad state of affairs.
Management is often guilty of this kind of thinking, too. It's not just unions.
Articles from the time paint a different picture. They claim it was mismanagement that caused the bankruptcy of the airline - not union intervention. See https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/20/us/eastern-airlines-broug..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/20713006?seq=1#metadata_info_ta... or https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&co...
Isn't this dream of every company to treat their workers as 'equal' interchangeable cogs. Union is co conspirator in this scheme, turn all workers into 'equals' of each other.
In that case, absent other constraints, one party usually has much less reason to accommodate than the other, as not hiring or continuing to employ one worker rarely would deeply impact the company, while the individual is looking at {continuing to commit, committing} a good portion of their available time, along with possibly relocating and however their income is derived, and so has much more to potentially lose by trying to receive even minor concessions.
(Footnote: Not all companies necessarily desire their employees be cogs, as some level of {competition,contention} can result in much better outcomes than any of the parties might have achieved on their own, but there is increasingly a sense that some portion of labor will be ever more readily automated with, indeed, fairly literal interchangeable parts, as well as the historical perception you describe, which can yield incredibly toxic cultures that don't care because they can, more or less, train more people whenever someone burns out or leaves because they find something better. )
You act like it can't be both.
As an organization unions have the same prime directive as every other organization, survive (and grow). One of the ways of a union to survive (and grow) is to demonstrate that it takes action and to be adversarial. So many unions tend to be adversarial. In Germany in the past especially smaller unions were highly adversarial to gain ground against larger unions in the same company ("grow").
Companies don't become more adversarial when they deal with a union - what happens is that the union shines some sunlight on any existing adversarial relationships.
When your boss asks you to work an extra hour without pay, and you tell him to pound sand, pointing at union rules, the union looks like a bad guy. Rolling over to his demands, because you lack union protection, is, for some reason, not considered 'adversarial.'
Unions level the playing field. Now, both sides have to negotiate from an even position - neither can do without the other.
Yes, they can. They can just close down the branch in question, and re-open two months later. Why do you think Wal-mart is so successful at union-busting?
Or, they could actually negotiate on an equal basis with the union.
> employees can get other employment
Collectively? For an employer that's big enough, this is not at all the case. Their industry may not be able to absorb them, individuals within the union may not be able to handle the interruption in pay, etc. This is also why striking is used as a last resort.
> The closest thing the employer has to "get other employees" is to shut down the workplace, possibly outsourcing to a different country.
Trying to find another job is very similar to what you've just described. You cut yourself off from your stream of income, and often have to relocate to a different city, or country, at great personal expense.
I forgot to mention that there is something deeply wrong with the presumption that employees (or their union) should be able to negotiate on an equal basis. They didn't risk their money to found the business. They don't own it, and shouldn't own it, because they didn't put up the funds to create it.
It doesn't belong to you. It's not yours. Do not perform a mugging.
Sure, employees want to negotiate from a position of equality or strength, but wanting something doesn't mean you deserve it or get it. To them we must say: find your own business idea and venture capital, and work hard for years with the possibility of losing everything.
Most businesses fail. Most of them fail quickly, causing painful losses. Nobody would bother if they didn't have a chance to get lots of money and power. We need people to bother, because this creates jobs.
A place like Boeing is really a government employer in disguise and has entirely different dynamics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
This is very much a cultural thing. A German union for example ensures that Workers get their fair share but understands that the company must be profitable and successful first - they know not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Whereas unions in the UK immediately try to destroy a company to prove a point about capitalism, union bosses are lavishly paid, and the Workers are mere pawns, in some cases even actively working against their members wishes. That’s why Germany has a strong auto industry and we do not.
The TL;DR for the UK is they lose over half the pay rise from losing the bonuses.
They got one share, worth £1,500 or $1,960 after every year, and an additional share once every five years. That can be tax-free if held for 2 years.
They also lose the possibility of cash bonuses for meeting targets.
Otherwise, a separation before the first anniversary (presumably a certainty for seasonal workers) results in losing none of the raise, at just shy of the second anniversary only one quarter of the raise.
Half the raise is an upper bound, and we'd have to know at least the average tenure of a warehouse employee to guess how much an average worker loses.
You mean you can pay only cap gains if you hold it versus income tax?
In my experience corruption sinks in on both sides when people can get away with putting in place policies to protect the status quo. When there are multiple options, and the same antitrust policies that are in place to prevent collusion between employers are also enforced to prevent “unionization of unions,” I believe that is when the individual worker actually wins.
The results differ by sector. In some cases, this plurality allowed for classic “divide & rule” strategies from management; in others, it produced chaos because each union can (and will) call for strikes at different times with little or no coordination, or refuse to agree on deals that everyone else has accepted.
The best outcomes have been consistently obtained in companies and sectors where the plurality was reduced to one or two dominant unions. Some competition is good, but it significantly increases complexity in all related processes.
You have a single employer on one side, you need a single union on the other side to make negotiations fair, otherwise they just would just low ball each other to get more jobs.
The history of labor activism shows that workers only get big gains when they work together.
Unions were largely a victim of their own success, though — once a lot of their gains were codified into laws and regulations there wasn’t as much to fight for.
Of course, if the triopoly was enforced by statute, then a corrupt member could act with impunity knowing that it cannot loose too much of its power.
> Strikes have been used to resolve labor disputes, but if your goal is long term and meanful improvement to working conditions and remuneration, then the only times unions have ever achieved that is by restricting access to the profession.
Collective bargaining is how unions achieve long term and meaningful improvement to working conditions and renumeration.
> Salaries are determined by market forces, political influence will never be able to exert much pressure on the equilibrium.
This is just demonstrably untrue -- we've been in a bull market for almost a decade. Worker pay -- in contrast to company profits -- hasn't even kept up with inflation. Something is missing.
> The only time unions have truly succeeded in this is by limiting labor supply over the long term.
Do you have any citations for this? Any data?
Agree with the idea, but in pracice every employee can just pack their baga and go to another other company. If enough employees do that, then companies sooner or later have to change, or remain with the worst of the workforce. There is monopoly on employment.
Maybe you don't live in America, or maybe you grew up with lots of privilege, but in reality, not a lot of people can do this. If you pack your bags and leave, you need to have some way to feed yourself, clothe yourself, and get health care, which is most likely provided by your employer.
The people who have the least ability to do these things without a job are also the ones who are most exploited.
Of course, universal health care and a universal income would solve these problems...
Couldn't you say the same about corporations?
I love how this argument gets applied to unions but not to companies. Many companies have killed themselves through greed and short-term thinking, yet you are not arguing that something is wrong with corporate structure.
Ultimately every human organization is prone to screwing up - unions are not at all unique here - but in the US unions often get singled out as a boogey man that hurts the economy.
Corporations can sink themselves because they are granted self-determination. That's sort of fundamental, sans bailouts.
That said, I would be happy if we could tweak incentives to shift focus away from short term returns towards long term. Companies are not perfect either, and my omission was not meant to imply they were.
It's not necessarily a big deal. The workers can just go and get another job. It's the owners who are really crying.
It's not especially perverse for unions to be indifferent to the risk of sinking the company if the people they represent hold no stake in it.
Especially since the threats that this will happen from the owners will be overblown.
I guess it's like that "fairness experiment" where monkeys would rather deprive the other side of 8 berries than take 2.
If that were true, we wouldn't need unions in the first place.
The company going out of business is a problem for the employees and is obviously a risk, it's just not a big and existential risk like it is for the owners.
"So how do you create a CEO and Board that has the right amount of power? When CEO's and Boards are able to, & do, kill the host company through greed & short-term thinking, something is wrong with the structure".
I'd argue that a CEO running a company into the ground for their own selfish, short term gains is far worse than a union ruining a company, because at least when the latter occurs it's because a significant amount of the employees aren't being sufficiently paid, or are being subject to unsafe/inadequate conditions. That is far more important than a CEO getting a bonus.
How many times has this actually happened, and were they even the root cause or would the company have failed for some other reason anyway?
Remember that Amazon thinks 5 years ahead, and they waited for the perfect PR and political threshold to announce these changes and capitalize on the news.
Walmart pays less because it has much lower profit margins. It serves far more customers and the average employee is a great deal less skilled. And it’s cheaper, with greater product choice. The average Walmart employee is definitely worse than the average Costco employee but Walmart is clearly the better business. It has higher gross profits, employs more people and serves more people.
So sure when it has a local monopoly it ends up with great margins, but in high competition areas the stores are far less profitable. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-people-spend-th...
>> Walmart [1]
Total Revenue (TR) = 500,343,000,000
Gross Profit (GP) = 373,396,000,000
Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~25%
>> Costco [2]
Total Revenue (TR) = 129,025,000,000
Gross Profit (GP) = 17,143,000,000
Gross Margin = GP / TR = ~13%
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?p=WMT
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COST/financials?p=COST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/02/06/th...
> While Walmart’s gross margins are more than double those of Costco’s, an efficient model with significantly higher revenues per square foot ensure that Costco’s gross earnings for the same size of a store are higher than Walmart.
Huh? Is that a rule? So when a given corporation's GPM drops, they have to give their workers a pay cut?
In the very long run your pay will tend towards your productivity but ease of replacibility will also play a role among other things. Sculptors and aerospace engineers are both highly skilled but there are many more jobs for the second than the first so they get paid more.
In the long run it is almost a rule that if gpm drops wages will. Profits could also drop. The mix of compensation could change. They could keep wages the same but fire the least productive staff so the wage bill drops but the remaining workers do more work.
You will get to compare the UX if you walk into any Walmart store...
A checkout operator at Costco can be 2x as efficient as a checkout operator at Walmart while having a completely different customer UX (both the worker and the store itself) and being paid different wages. So what? Walmart and Costco serve different markets and sell different products so of course they will be differently run businesses.
Nothing about this is abnormal so I don't understand your comparison. They are not interchangeable other than looking at them as general retail companies.
But poor people still need food and various other necessities. I'm not convinced it's possible to pay high wages and also serve poor people.
Are we supposed to penalize Amazon for foresight?
If it benefits more people then what difference does it make as to why it was done?
This change has long-term repercussions in total current and future jobs offered, within Amazon, its competitors, and the wider labor market with govt influence. Is is not worth caring about such wide-reaching externalities of a $1 trillion company?
People always act like the sky is falling. Minimum wages were higher in terms of actual value many years ago and the world didn't end then and it won't end now.
Walmart and Amazon are prime examples of centralizing forces that slurp up wealth into urban areas and increase wealth inequality. Sure minimum wage goes up, but at the cost of more money leaving circulation in rural economies. It’s a non-trivial topic.
Why should I care about a dying small town in the rust belt?
Good. I hope they force their competitors to pay employees better wages.
Most people would take the guaranteed pay raise over the non-guaranteed bonus or profit sharing/stock awards. Let people decide what to do with their money, 'benefits' largely benefit the company not always all individuals.
The problem is real pay/share of GDP to persons has gone down consistently [1] while 'real compensation' [2] has supposedly gone up and supposedly makes up over 30% of everyone's pay on average, that includes bonuses, healthcare, other benefits that most people don't see or use regularly. Even real compensation is dwindling. [3]
As an example of increasing wages over benefits, I'd rather people got paid and then purchased healthcare for instance on their own as it would be a more consumer, rather than employer, focused market.
Raises should be given on the regular and the base way to reward value creating employees, not some might be bonus or stock award tied to the company instead. A bonus oro profit sharing on top of increasing wages is still ok but not in spite of it. What if the employee wants to buy other stock, pay them so they can. Give raises, quit with the 'real compensation' gains that don't put actual money in your accounts, people would always take actual money over benefits.
The velocity of money (domestic money that changes hands) has also fallen off a cliff [4] because pay to persons/raises have been efficiently worked out of the system in favor of 'real compensation' which does not get money in accounts consumers can spend.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006151
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
I'd probably prefer something more like a logical inverse of that - baseline guaranteed coverage for everyone by a government agency, and then if necessary private providers can wrestle over offering various incentives to use them beyond the guaranteed coverage. (Not that I have an incredible amount of faith in most governments acting efficiently, but they almost always have a better record than for-profit agencies, and I'd prefer to avoid a government mandate of a non-government agency.)
(I'm not going near the convoluted structure of compensation types because I don't think I'm informed enough.)
VCP is up to 4% for attendance and 4% for building productivity normally. But during Oct-Dec (peak season) these figures double to 8% each. If you average together the 4% attendance VCP (totally within our control) for 9 months and 8% for 3 months, you get a yearly average of 5% bonus, totally within our control.
I was earning $15/hr prior to this "wage boost". A 5% bonus on top of that would make my effective wage $15.75. This is without receiving any VCP bonus in regard to building productivity. This is also before you consider any "income" we were receiving through stocks. After the wage boost, my hourly wage is becoming $16hr. But I will never be able to increase that through VCP and I will never receive company stock again.
I am glad that employees across the country who were previously at $11/hr and that new starts at my warehouse are jumping from the starting $12-$13 immediately to $15, but it's hard for existing employees such as myself to see these changes as anything but a pay cut.
The median rule of hourly earnings to yearly earnings is 40 hours/week and 50 weeks/year, which results in every $1/hour == $2000/year in earnings.
For $15/hour, that's about $30,000. For a single person in California, without dependents and claiming themselves for one exemption, it would be 4,264.50 (14.22%) in Federal taxes and 579.35 (1.93%) in State taxes for a total of 4,843.85 (16.15%) in taxes.
Calculator: https://www.tax-brackets.org/californiataxtable
So after taxes around $13.40 to $13.70 per hour.