What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?
If you feel anger when reading that the largest and most profitable companies in the world won’t pay a living wage, the. You should be. There isn’t two side to simple greed and exploitation.
"Living wage" assumes you're the head of a household, so it's a pretty incoherent idea applied to just anyone. You can live on pretty much anything as long as another member of the household can supply the rest.
Minimum wage increases generally do not negatively affect employment, but if you set the minimum wage high enough to be a head of household "living wage", it certainly would make people unemployed.
Or instead we could pay people welfare benefits and support them that way.
Amazon is hardly one of the "most profitable companies in the world".
Also Amazon can't really raise prices without losing sales - I've already shifted many of my purchases because Amazon is too expensive. They don't really have room to raise wages without hurting the people who are buying the products.
People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.
> What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?
To have more money than you had before.
I feel no anger here, people are paid based on the economic value of their output. They are not paid based on their worth as humans. If you want to be paid more you need to be able to do move valuable work.
> People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.
This is simply false. It’s false just thinking about it, and it’s false from multiple economic studies in the real world. It’s a common falsehood spread by corporations, but it’s false.
First, you can’t have it both ways and say companies “can’t raise prices without losing sales” and then turn around and say, “if you raise wages, you have to raise prices” and “people are paid according to their economic value”. If all of these statements are true, then no one could ever be paid more than their starting wage, because if their pay increased, then sales would go down due to price increases. Even if a person’s perceived economic value increased, they could never be paid commiserate with their value, because that would lead to a decrease in sales. This is obviously false.
Minimum wage increases simply don’t lead to price increases or unemployment or any of the sky is falling predictions typically touted. We’ve known this for over 30 years now. Of course, lest we forget, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been fixed since 2009, months much represents a real wage cut in 2024.
Why is this related to amazon though? It sounds like the blame should be fully put on the federal/local governments for the minimum wage that they've set.
Capitalists (large business owners) generally pay higher wages than the alternative, small/family business owners. Eg Walmart/Amazon have better benefits than an equivalent small business, unless you're the owner of that small business.
(This is "income", which is a superset of wages. I didn't link wages because those are confusing, average wages go up during recessions because the lower earning people get laid off.)
You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you. Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right, the aggregate effect is the same. Productivity goes up and wages don't.
>But also, wages generally go up
Just utter nonsense. Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.
> You don't know what a capitalist is and that's on you.
Are you going to provide a definition? I think it's people who own and trade capital.
> Regardless, benefits and job security are abysmal at small businesses so even if you were right
You're agreeing with me and then doing "even if you were right"? Also, this is pretty much out of Marx - capitalism was better for workers than the preceding stage. Small businesses are the preceding stage.
> Accounting for COL, wages more often remain stagnant in the US over the past 50 years.
You said wages don't go up, which means nominal wages don't go up.
If you wanted to say real wages don't go up that's a different question. And it's true because our response to the 2008 recession was bad. But not our response to the 2020 one! They're way up now! It's great.
Eventually there will be jobs not worth paying people to do; subsidizing that at the government level seems fine (albeit not capitalistic) but that does require taxation (not necessarily on the higher paying jobs) to cover the shortfall.
Part of the reason for minimum wages is that by eliminating bad jobs (the ones seemingly not worth paying people for), it can save time and effort for workers who accidentally take those jobs when they could have found better ones. This is called search effects.
Another related one is that it can increase your competitiveness with other countries, basically by making employers stop wasting time and think of more productive things for people to do.
But the main reason they can help is that, insofar as employers are monopsonies (sole payers of wages), they often literally don't know what wages they "should" pay because they don't have any incentive to find out, and in that case setting a higher minimum wage actually causes everyone to become more employed.
why does that distinction matter? are you saying it's okay for workers to be on medicaid or food stamps if they work in a warehouse, but not if they work in a different position?
Without that comparison this title is just flame bait.