I dunno, smells of Communism to me. Smart workers better support the insane trust fund sex fiend.
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But not anywhere near 20%. Assuming the $480 billion gross income is from sales, a general increase of only 3% will produce $15.4billion in extra revenue, which if disbursed to the workers will cover the $3 raise and leave the company with the current gross, from which presumably they will reap the current net.
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I disagree on the significance of $6K to someone at the low end of the pay scale. A rates near minimum wage, that’s several months of income.
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I found it weird that the one time I used a self check out in the US, I had to go to an employee to get my change.
(UK self checkouts usually give change, Dutch ones don’t take cash at all)
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Or they’d spin each warehouse off into its own “franchise” that has less than 500 head.
It’s a nice idea, but I suspect it’d just end up keeping a couple of accountants a little busier.
Thanks. I had no interest in doing the research into this myself.
Equally, employees are free to leave Amazon and work else where.
Which, of course, means that the problem needing fixing remains the job they’re leaving.
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$7K is close to a 25% raise for someone making $30,000/year or less. An unheard-of annual increase in most places. I got 5% this year, and my boss made it very clear how much she had to go to bat for that with the finance department. Considering how much loyalty and ink Trump bought with a one-time $300 tax break, anything approaching this would be very significant.
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And let’s not forget the macroeconomic factors.
In general terms, wealthy people spend some of their money, then hoard the rest. In contrast, poor people spend all of their money, because they have none to spare.
Money in motion is the economic engine; consumption drives productive growth. When you raise wages, ordinary consumers have more to spend. This in turn drives sales, which in turn drives production, which in turn drives employment.
The basic consequence of this is that a dollar in the pocket of a poor person has more economic value than a dollar in the vault of a rich person. To create real economic growth, raise wages.
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I don’t think it would be possible for any company to out-and-out not hire employees with children.
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that under this plan a company whose employee families averaged three children would be much less profitable, all else held equal, than a company whose employee families averaged one child. There would absolutely be downstream effects from this which we should try to anticipate.
Possible effect 1 - Company A with big employee families needs to raise prices or cut dividends or some of each. This leads to it being squeezed out of the marketplace by company B with small employee families. This in turn results in more of company A’s employees being out of work, and on government assistance with no employer to reimburse those costs.
Possible effect 2 - Companies offer bonuses or other benefits to their employees who decide to have fewer children. This might be deemed illegal or it might not. If not, it might work well in the short run but over the long term it would have devastating effects on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
I’m sure there are other possible effects. The law of unanticipated consequences often has much more impact than the laws as enacted by the legislature.
It boils down to a question of fairness. Joe is a single person with no kids. Jack is a single parent with three kids. Is a “fair wage” one which pays Joe the same as Jack for the same work, or is a fair wage one which pays Jack more to take into account his family expenses?
That would only be a solution to consider if the CEO was the ONLY employee making above minimum wage. Of course, Bezos is not the only person making more than a million per year at Amazon by a long shot, and in McDonalds, there are literally thousands of million-plus executives, who then also pay themselves huge bonuses every year as a reward for shafting the low level staff and driving profits up higher.
A 10% cut to each of them, combined with a small (ie: 1-3%) price bump would increase revenue more than enough to increase staff pay without destroying, or even damaging the company. Of course, what would really happen is that the executives would set that price increase, then pay it all to themselves as a bonus for their brilliant idea of convincing people to pay them more for their products.
If only there were some kind of regulation to stop that sort of corruption…
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I’m not saying it isn’t significant. I am saying it still won’t get one to the “goal” of $15/hr. I think it would get more people off welfare (not sure what the cut off for that is wage wise) but depending what their benefits were, it might be the same gross. Though even if it were the same gross, I’d rather it come directly from employment vs going through the bureaucracy to get to people through benefits.
And this example shows what would happen if they poured ALL of their profit back into wage - which they won’t do. For people who think they could EASILY raise wages AND keep a healthy profit with out changing anything else - that isn’t true. Cost of goods will go up, though not more than the pay raise so yes, people would still benefit.
Wow, she must really value you.
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The whole reason the Democratic Party has been getting solid corporate support in the past election cycles has been because the Democrats promise to lower labor costs through mass immigration and benefits programs for underpaid workers. Both of those policies are a transfer of wealth from workers and taxpayers to large business owners so it’s no surprise that large business owners would support those policies.
It’s so convenient for employers to have an open border, and then when these workers (both legal and illegal) get here and can’t stay alive on their wages, they also get access to free healthcare, foodstamps, etc. (Yes, immigrants, both legal and illegal, do have access to a large array of public services.) Sure is magnanimous of Uber, for example, to support “immigrant rights” and Obamacare, which greatly reduce their labor costs. If corps were forced to pay all these external costs, there would be no reason for them to support most of the Democratic policies they support. So this proposal will never happen.
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Or maybe people making 300% their employees can take a slight pay cut…
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Greedy mother fuckers who think they need to make millions a year might have a tiny bit to do with it.
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Then maybe the executives can get a pay cut to increase pay for the people who literally are living hand to mouth. What, do they need yet another fucking bentley or another mansion in the Ozarks?
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Except for that whole decades long right wing propaganda campaign that made unions out to be the problem in the first place (instead of greedy capitalists).
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I don’t think anyone except CEO’s would object to an economy in which there was a shortage of labor, rather than trying to fix the problems resulting from surplus labor with tape and string solutions.
Any politician who has a well thought out plan to get us to a labor shortage has my full support (crickets…)
That would be a good argument for an e-verify plan, wouldn’t it?
