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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.
Well, if you grew up and you or your culture didn't value an education, or make an effort when you had the opportunities....guess where you end up?
Remember the old saying:
"Well, the world needs ditch diggers too..."
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Boohoo. Minimal skills demand minimum wage. Want to make more? Learn a valuable skill.
Such a high minimum wage will never work because living wages aren't capitalist and this is literally white genocide and minimum wages literally killed the Lindbergh baby and a living wage is exactly the same thing as burning a flag and worse than 23 Benghazis and *pant pant pant*
*mops forehead with fedora*
Don't forget day 1 benefits. Full disclosure, I work for Amazon. And I haven't regretted it for a minute. Yes, the packers/pickers/stowers/etc do work hard, but as for as my FC is concerned, I haven't seen anything at all resembling the urban legend horror stories.
850,000 people lining up for $15/hour despite the repeated documentation of truly terrible, dehumanizing working conditions. Amazon employees urinate in bottles and trash cans in the warehouse because it's faster than going to the bathroom and they might face consequences for wasting that much time. They get various injuries as a result of proper industrial hygiene. They get fired for being ill. They're treated like disposable meat-bots. But I guess that's better than no job.
I have no facts to back up this feeling, but I'm suspicious that something has gone wrong with the way we measure unemployment and underemployment in the US. We're at about 4% unemployment, lowest in ~50 years. Unemployment that low should drive wages up, but they reportedly aren't even rising as fast as inflation. So, congratulations, here's some wage growth, but it comes at the cost of the boss' recognition of your humanity.
From 1965--2015, real median annual household income in the US increased by about 11%. In 2015 dollars, median household income in 1965 was about $50,000 per year... in 2015, it was about $56,500. Meanwhile, real GDP per capita increased by about 150%. Now, it's true that average household size decreased over that time, but not by nearly enough to explain this stagnation. It's also true that employees have had non-monetary benefits like health insurance, but employers have been gradually chipping away at those benefits.
Maybe these things aren't as important as I suspect they are, and maybe my intuition is just not good in this area. Like I say, I can't exactly explain what the core problem is, but the symptoms make me uneasy.
Depends.
$15 an hour in Omaha, NE would be a good deal more attractive than $25 an hour in the SF Bay area.
Downside? Once folks are mandated a living wage for holding a job, automation and robotic replacement become incrementally more attractive.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Just like the immigrants that built the railroads. They have no options. System working as designed.
Have you ever seen the inside of a meat packing plant? None of those people want to be there. They have to be there because they have no other options.
It's pretty sad that this many people are lining up for these jobs. Read between the lines. This is pretty damn bad.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
More attractive, certainly.... but not not necessarily practical on account of limitations on technology and potentially very high up-front costs, at least for the time being.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's fair, but an argument can also be fairly made that minimum wage should never be less than the amount that a person needs to live, without requiring further aid from social assistance programs, and assuming that they work full time hours. Anything less is dehumanizing, and if you want to dehumanize your workers, then use robots. This also means that minimum wage would vary, depending on the cost of living in the municipality where the wage applies.
If the technology doesn't exist to use robots for your business, then too effing bad. Treat human beings like human beings and pay them enough to actually live on.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How long ago? There indeed was a point in time where one could work a minimum wage job part time, and afford housing, food, school books and tuition costs. We aren't in those days anymore. Now minimum wage alone barely covers housing and food... so a spare 15k a year for a public college, or 30k+ for private college, is a tad harder to come by.
That's fair, but an argument can also be fairly made that minimum wage should never be less than the amount that a person needs to live
Most minimum wage earners are 2nd or 3rd earners for their household. So the amount they "need" to live is $0.
Most minimum wage earners live in households above the median income level, while relatively fewer poor people earn the minimum wage. So raising the minimum wage actually helps the better off more than it helps the poor.
The problem with the poor is not LOW wages, but NO wages. 60% of households in the bottom income quintile have zero full time workers. Even fewer have more than one person earning income.
If you want to help the poor, minimum wage increases are a bad way to do that. Far better are policies like EITC that specifically target the working poor.
Today, public schools closed because TEN DEGREES is considered too cold to allow kids to wait a bus stops.
10F is not too cold. But 10F with 40mph winds is too cold. School can wait till Monday.
Vermont routinely gets that cold and they do not close their schools for 10 degrees or even -10 degrees.
That's why Vermont doesn't have to close schools when it's -10 F - everyone is prepared for it, particularly when it comes to owning adequate winter clothes. When it only goes below freezing once a year, most people, especially people with lower incomes, don't waste money on that kind of winter gear. If you only have clothing that's helpful for 40 F, going outside when it's -10 F can be deadly.
Only if by minimum wage you mean the exact legislated amount that is the minimum you can pay a worker,
That's what the phrase means, and is what Amazon means when they say it.
If a job isn't worth paying a human being a living wage to do, then you shouldn't be paying human beings to do it in the first place.
Your entire argument eliminates every part-time job open to high school and college students, along with a lot of others. And every entry level job that would cost more to automate than it returns in production.
Are you trying to increase unemployment and poverty?
When will the bean counters and HR realize years of experience with the same job title does not bring higher quality workers. Higher wages do. You want to know why software developer salaries have gone up more? Easy, if you want something done you gotta pay the market wage.
Or is this socialism because it makes the CEO and Wall Street cry?
http://saveie6.com/
I was meaning it more to mean any wage that is less than what a person can fairly live on.
Some people have 10 kids. Should they be paid more than someone with none?
If a job isn't worth paying a human being a living wage to do, then you shouldn't be paying human beings to do it in the first place.
So if a high school student wants to flip burgers part time for some extra spending money, that should be banned, since they can't live on it?
By raising the bottom rung of the economic ladder, you are just making it harder for people to reach that bottom rung. Getting a job, any job, is the first step out of poverty. The actual wage doesn't matter so much, because anyone willing to work hard is going to quickly move up.
Key facts about the minimum wage:
1. The average household income of a minimum wage earner is $53,000 per year.
2. Only 2 percent of full-time workers earn the minimum wage.
3. Two-thirds of minimum wage earners receive a raise within a year if they stick with the job.
4. Only 9 percent of adults living below the poverty line work full time.
Most of the benefits from a hike in minimum wages goes to people that are not poor. Efforts to help the poor should focus on getting more people into employment, and focus less on wages that jobless people don't earn.
America has one of the lowest economic mobility ratings compared to most western countries with peoples incomes usually quite predictable based on their parents incomes, though you are ahead of the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I am not sure what "CS" is. You mean CounterStrike?
Statistics disagree with your believe relative to the other western democracies. Odds are very good on being in the same income class as your parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Sorry, I realize I've been feeding the troll.
Your argument is identical to the one that says we should stop ordering everything online and shop brick and mortar stores where we can to keep humans employed in jobs they're eventually going to lose, anyway.
I suspect that his motivation was more along the lines of wanting to feel as though he was getting his money's worth.
Anyway, I like to shop locally when I can. When I find something I want on Amazon, I look to see if Best Buy has it, because BB has a policy of price-matching Amazon. Too many people use brick and mortar stores as Amazon showrooms -- I wonder what they plan on doing when Amazon finally puts the brick and mortar stores out of business.
It's quickly shaping up to be Amazon vs. WalMart .... with anyone much smaller than either one squeezed out.
Wait a second here... Do you mean to tell me that Americans will do "jobs that Americans won't do" if you pay them a living wage with benefits?
So, I was curious. I've never worked for minimum wage, I've either been dead broke in poverty and desperate and living in the back of a car which was waiting to be repossessed or I've make 6 figures but never between. I never had the chance to live like a normal person.
So, I just searched Omaha for apartments. It seems that a two bedroom apartment in a nice suburb will cost you $1030 a month. To secure this, it would require a $3090 a month income. That's about $18 an hour or it can be done at $15 an hour at 9.5 hours a day assuming time and a half overtime.
A 2014 BMW i3 with range extender would cost $18000 to $302 a month over 72 months. This is a good car because the resale value shouldn't drop considerably and after paying the car off, you can pay about the same for another year for a battery refurbishment. This car should have a very low cost of ownership (I drive one and it's almost like being paid to drive) and it should be relatively reliable. The only disadvantage is that it would have to be serviced by a BMW shop. But, it's still a far better purchase than a $12500 gas vehicle that has substantially more parts to break and replace... and pay gas for.
Car insurance will run about $125 a month on that for a 30+ man or woman.
I just grocery shopped online at one of the more expensive grocery stores I know of and shopped as if I had to budget. This didn't mean being stingy, but it meant grocery store brand over name. It meant fresh foods over packaged. It meant not paying double for organic. Choosing to shop the sales, etc... I came up with what should be a grocery card for a family of two including a month supply of soaps (bathroom, dish, laundry...), paper towels and toilet paper, tooth brushes, etc... I came up at $223. I suppose that using coupons and time as well as shopping at a non-rich person store would get it to $150, but I also didn't get anything really fun, it looked like what a healthy family would eat... you know, the kind of family where the parent loves the children instead of giving them food from boxes. So, let's choose $600 a month as a relatively round number for essentials (food, etc..) for a family of two.
Then there's clothes. Depending on your needs, you can dress fairly well on a budget of $100 a month for an adult... this will also cover buying new winter coats. And you can dress a child for $150 a month. They grow and require replacement of stuff much faster. So let's calculate $250 a month
The person would need furniture as well, but you can't budget that monthly, you buy that over 20 years and piece by piece. You inherit what you need from other people until you can buy the thing you actually want.
Then there's electricity, water, internet and telephones. I think even someone much better than I am at budgeting would still find this costing about $400 a month.
So, $1030 (rent), $600 (food stuff), $300 (Car), $125 (car insurance), $250 a month (clothes, shoes, etc..), $400 a month for utilities and phone.
We're up to $2900 a month. If the person manages to get 9.5 hours a day, they would earn $3090 a month. I think even if they get almost 100% tax free, they would still have to pay social security which I think is about 10%, so there goes $300 a month.
So, this person, if I don't account for any additional oopsies would be about $100 a month in the whole...at least.
The car is paid off in 6 years, so if they can do 8 years, that's probably an extra $100 a month in the bank. And if the car lasts 25 years... as it should since it's basically all plastic and easy to replace parts, after the loan is paid, the cost of ownership should drop to $100 a month. But that doesn't help earlier on.
There's no room for day car or babysitting... so, being a single parent would be REALLY REALLY difficult.
They could get a cheaper apartment, but the goal isn't survival. For $1000 a month, you get an apartment with a gym, a pool and other things. This is considered living like a human instead of someone who is simp
Yup, you've never been poor. Amazon is a dystopian nightmare, but $30k is solid for unskilled labor.
Roomate. Apartment not in the good part of town. 5-year-old Honda Fit or Civic for under $10k, lasts forever. $300 is plenty for food. That's doing OK.
Roomates. Apartment where you hear gunshots every night. 15-year-old shitbox. $150 is plenty for food if you cook. That's gettin by.
Good times. Any time you make a payment. Good times. Any time you meet a friend. Not getting hassled. Not gettin hustled. Keepin your head above water. Makin a wave when you can.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.