Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
But like it or not, the average hourly Amazon warehouse employee is likely to be happier with the increased salary. Similar to the way people are happy with a tax break even if the vast majority of the benefits go to the extremely wealthy and it causes programs that benefit the poor to be cut. People can be short-sighted.
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Have you asked them?
NBC did and they're not all happy.
New hires and temps will *start* a couple bucks higher but the veterans who received part of their pay as ever-appreciating stock will end up with less in pocket down the road. Probably as early as next year.
And yes, people can be and were short-sighted.
Those stock options meant a *lot* to the veterans. And the bonuses, too.
The problem the activists refuse to accept is that a job is only worth the value it adds to the product or service. Blindly squeezing employers will either result in added product prices or the outright end of the product if the profit margin goes away.
And just like a lot of people refuse to pay more than x-amount for a backlist ebook because it isn't worth more to them, business types can and do refuse to pay more for a job than it is worth to them. And it's not just a matter of "greed": oftentimes the revenue just doesn't allow the added cost for that product.
Without going too far, quite a few bookstores have closed in recent years because their costs exceeded their revenues. And those were places paying minimum wage with minimal if any perks. And more will close as the rush to fifteen takes hold.
Minimum wage or not, employees *always* cost employers a lot more than just the nominal salary; there are taxes, pension contributions, health care costs, and negotiated perks like free tuition, free meals, free day care, etc. Different companies balance out salary vs benefits depending on the nature of the job and prevailing terms in their sector.
Once you get past entry level minimum skill jobs, no two companies offer the exact same compensation packages.
In this particular case, Amazon offered entry level employees prevailing rate salaries with added fringe benefits more typical of tech companies than of retail.
Now they will treat the hourly warehouse workers to "industry-leading" salaries but without the benefits offered to their tech industry employees.
And, as I pointed out: salaries are taxable but the now-lost benefits weren't. So the net making its way to the employee's pockets will be a lower fraction of Amazon's cost. And to whatever extent Amazon's cost go up, there will be an added incentive to accelerate automatization.
Short term thinking indeed.
Not a particularly good deal for Amazon's employees but a pretty good deal for stockholders.