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Americans Are Lining Up To Work For Amazon For $15 an Hour (qz.com)
One of the most important takeaways from Amazon's 2018 fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report, released Jan. 31, had little to do with the usual financial results. Amazon disclosed in the report that it received a record 850,000 work applications for hourly jobs in the US in October 2018 after announcing it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour starting Nov. 1. From a report: The company said that was more than double its previous record for job applications received in a single month. Amazon said the new $15 minimum affects more than 250,000 employees in the US and 17,000 employees in the UK (where the increase was 10.50 pound in the London area and 9.50 pound everywhere else), plus more than 200,000 workers who were hired for the holiday season. As of Dec. 31, Amazon had 647,500 full- and part-time employees, up 14% from the same period a year earlier.
I'm not sure a lot of people realize (or want to realize) it, but Amazon was a proponent of the $15/hr. minimum wage laws from early on. That's simply because they know they're big enough and have enough money to handle that on their payroll, while many of their smaller competitors don't. They aren't trying to pay people more money because they're so generous and kind! They're trying to squeeze out their competition.
(And frankly? One of the reasons Amazon isn't hurt by having to pay that high a minimum wage is because it got such lucrative corporate welfare deals from New York and Virginia as they paid out BIG bucks to win the right to get HQ2 located there. (Virginia gave Amazon something like $20,000 for every single employee it was going to hire at that location.)
This idea of setting the lowest bar of what's legal to pay a person to do some work for you at $15/hr. is a bad one. There are a whole lot of jobs that companies only pay human beings to do as long as it's cheaper than automating them. $15/hr. is getting REALLY close to crossing that threshold, and is why you see so many places who pay their people better supplementing them with automated kiosks and checkout lanes. They're going to offset the increased labor expenses by hiring fewer people.