Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Unless you believe that commerce is a goal in itself, and that building a successful business contributes positively to the world by default (I'm sure many people do believe this so just getting it out of the way), then you have to look at the outputs. For Amazon that's largely:

- extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers

- dominance driving smaller less-efficient enterprises out of business; this isn't just sentimental: efficiency is about driving cost down, including labour costs. SMEs employ more in aggregate than the large businesses replacing them, so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator.

- Amazon pays very little corporate tax, both by running low-profit/high-cashflow, through other methods particularly for it's operations in Europe, and they used to evade sales tax almost completely in the US. Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative.

- Jeff Bezos' personal tax story is not dissimilar.

etc. etc.

This isn't a criticism of Bezos or Amazon, but of large multinational corporate entities and their contributions to "charitable" causes in general. CSR is always an a attempt to offset something.

I'm curious, did any company ever contributed overall to a society in your opinion?

"extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers" Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.

"so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator." That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done. Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.

"Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative." They may not contribute by not paying taxes, but 0 contribution is not negative contribution.

> I'm curious, did any company ever contributed overall to a society in your opinion?

Yes. The issues I'm raising are largely to do with some extremely large companies.

> Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.

Are you saying that no company pays their employees enough? Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage? Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?

> That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done.

Less jobs is a positive* only if those without jobs have a living income. UBI is a proposed solution: it hasn't been introduced anywhere as far as I'm aware.

> Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.

And who pays these rock throwers? Do their wages come from the taxes Bezos doesn't pay?

* EDIT: To be clear, on the less jobs question, I am generally not in favour of having a less efficient system just to create jobs (it may sound that way above). I'm just a realist, acknowledging that we have a system that requires job-creation as a means to supply members of society with the means to sustain themselves. If we did not require job-creation to do that, I would completely agree that "less work, the same job done" would be a positive thing.

> Are you saying that no company pays their employees enough?

Companies pay enough to get the quality and quantity of employees that they need. Those who are coming up short on either side are the companies who are (presumably) not paying their employees enough.

> Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage?

In general, my answer is "null" here, as the definition of living wage is continually (and it seems to me, intentionally) slippery/non-specific. Make some definitions that are stable over a long period of time and that labor advocates agree to, and only then can we have a conversation.

> Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?

Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.

With respect to profit, Amazon is now profitable on a GAAP, EBITDA, and cash flow from operations basis. I believe that was always the plan and it's coming together now.

Whether or not a company is profitable and whether or not the founder is the richest man in the world does not feedback into an employee pay issue in my opinion. A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.

> the definition of living wage is continually (and it seems to me, intentionally) slippery/non-specific

That's a funny excuse not to engage with the point. Of course it's variable: different regions have different costs of living, and different social supports. Some countries or areas do have a specifically defined value for a living wage, my own definition for the purpose of this discussion is quite obviously: "enough money to meet your basic needs". This is distinct from subsistence, which is what a lot of employees do.

Plenty of people have defined and even calculated living wage, MIT even have a nice online one. Neither is necessary to engage with a discussion about the general idea of worker subsistence.

> Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.

You said "at the expense of customers", sorry the wording in my reply was slightly different.

> A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.

As in this context we've defined more as barely enough to meet their basic needs, I'll have to disagree with you on the ethical obligation.

> You said "at the expense of customers", sorry the wording in my reply was slightly different.

I directly copied text from your post and replied to it. I even tried to make a good faith charitable interpretation of it.

Are you accusing me of misquoting your own words to some end?

Apologies—I'm confusing commenters. I was originally replying Isinlor's post, not yours. That was the source of the "expense of customers" point.

Companies pay enough to get the quality and quantity of employees that they need.

This is an assertion not presently supported by evidence. With any other resource they need, companies typically respect the law of supply and demand: when there's low supply or high demand (or both), they pay more to get the resource. But when -- and seemingly only when -- that resource is labor, paying a higher price is practically unthinkable. That's why we've seen decades now in the US with little or no (inflation-adjusted) wage growth, despite higher average productivity and periods of low unemployment (either of which ought, in a rational market, to produce higher wages).

You are criticizing capitalism and globalization as a system for producing social progress, not Amazon.

Your points seem very weak to me. People perceive value from Amazon's tax "evasion" (efficiency) in buying goods at a cheaper cost. I'm sure you agree that not every dollar that goes to taxes is better spent than if it wasn't.

I highly doubt that net global employment in headcount dropped because of Amazon. For every store clerk that got fired in a US brick and mortar shop, probably 10 sweatshop workers in China were hired to make gizmos at a fraction of the cost.

If you are going to argue that the world would be better off without Amazon when hundreds of millions use and love their services every day, you need to at least make an attempt to quantify the value the company provides. You can't just point at 3 isolated data points. I'm not even saying you're wrong in your conclusions, but they're hardly unquestionable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com