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Amazon Is Raising Some Workers' Pay Further, Adding Bonuses After Controversy (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon is sweetening the pay for some of its longtime warehouse workers after employees criticized the loss of bonuses and stock awards as part of the company's pledge to boost all wages to at least $15 an hour. The world's largest online retailer grabbed headlines last week with its minimum-pay pledge -- followed by concerns from veteran workers who feared their compensation would actually decline because the company also eliminated bonuses and stock awards. Amazon said any workers already earning $15 would get raises of $1 per hour. Now, some of those employees are learning their hourly raises will actually be $1.25 an hour. Additionally, Amazon is introducing a new cash bonus of $1,500 to $3,000 for tenure milestones at five, 10, 15 and 20 years. Workers with good attendance in the month of December will also get a $100 bonus, according to the company. "All hourly Operations and Customer Service employees will see an increase in their total compensation as a result of this announcement," Amazon said in a statement. "The significant increase in hourly cash wages effective Nov. 1 more than compensates for the phase out of incentive pay and future (stock) grants."
The lack of vacation time except for Asians is pretty normal in the Seattle area. I grew up in Seattle and graduated from Univ of Washington with a CS degree in 1989, and I haven't had an entire week off my entire adult life but most of my coworkers from India have always been allowed two or more weeks off. Yes, I understand the hassle of 24+ hours of travel time and the expense to take you entire family home, but it's unfair to the rest of us. In addition, requesting time off from amazon.com just sucks. I've been trying to see my eye doctor to get new glasses for almost five years. I keep making appointments, and my time off either gets denied or it's approved then later denied since something comes up. It sucks that the company plus myself pays so much for vision coverage, but I can't use it.
it's a tactic management has used for decades to excuse poor pay. You keep a few better paid employees because it keeps everybody from organizing and demanding better pay. I saw this in the call centers in the late 90s/early 00s. Management would tell the existing employees how lucky they were because they started at $10/hr when the new guys started at $7. Nevermind that $10/hr wasn't enough to get by even back then.
Also before everyone piles in with the old "if you raise wages prices go up" nonsense, if that were true humanity could never progress as a species. We'd still be subsistence farmers and the big mac index wouldn't be a thing. Prices go up slower than wages when productivity goes up faster than wages. And productivity has been raising pretty much non stop if you focus on raw output (yes, an increasing number of low wage service employees replacing high paying manufacturing jobs means that measured productivity growth across the entire economy is flat, but we're still making more real goods with less people, see here).
Basically so long as you're making more stuff with less or even the same people you can raise wages without price inflation, because that's real wage growth. e.g. there's more stuff for everybody. Well, not since 2008 though. Since 2008 the more stuff part of the equation has gone to the top 1%....
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