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Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

The blog post says "employees". No reporter I've seen has bothered to ask if it applies to contractors.

The press release says it includes seasonal and temp workers, so the answer is surely yes. Besides, imagine if the answer were no. That would be easy to report on and then this big PR story would turn into a disaster.

Edit: Looks like the press release has been updated to make this explicit: Amazon today announced it is increasing its minimum wage to $15 for all full-time, part-time, temporary (including those hired by agencies), and seasonal employees across the U.S.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181002005317/en/

NYTimes says it applies to part time and temporary employees, even those hired through staffing agencies.

NPR reported this morning that it does.

Are you sure it was contractors and not seasonal/temp employees? Not the same thing.

That was the first thing I thought of too. It's such an obvious question to ask, too, given that many (most?) of Amazon warehouse employees are contracted out.

I think we're seeing an Amazon press release regurgitated as news on a wire service, no independent reporting involved.

Wouldn't contractors set their own rates?

No. The majority of "contractors" in America are really just employees of subcontracting firms who have way fewer rights, don't get benefits, and have to pay applicable employment taxes themselves instead of the company taking care of it.

It is exploitation at the highest levels.

Employer pays subcontracting company $30-$35/hr, subcontracting company pays the employee $15/hr or lower and pockets the rest. Subcontracting company offers benefits at almost 1/2 of your paycheck every month, and nothing else. Subcontracting company offers you nothing of benefit except for the job you could've gotten without them if the parent employer posted the jobs but they don't because then it would be FTE. Parent employer only provides the job openings to the subcontractor. This is all done so the parent employer can avoid paying any benefits.

It should be illegal in my opinion. A lot of lower level tech jobs and now even software development are going this direction. It's very big in Seattle and in my field it's impossible to move jobs unless you're willing to drop your salary $40k/year and wait for a potential FTE opening in which that company will hire you FTE, but you don't know how long you'll be making minimum wage.

In modern America, many "contractors" are just regular employees in every respect except that they're employed and contracted out by a third party, so they don't get the same privileges, protections, and benefits as "real" employees.

A lot of companies (Lexmark is one I know for sure) like to trot out press pieces on how well they treat their employees, leaving out the fact that maybe 80% of the people working for them are not technically "employees."

My company does this to an extent, but they claim it's to avoid trouble with "co-employment". As it was told to me when I was myself a contractor (that is a regular employee of another firm who hired me to work on-site at the company of which I'm now an employee), they have to withhold certain benefits because if they treat me like an employee, I could sue to get them listed as a co-employer, making me eligible retro-actively for benefits the regular employees received during my time there.

I've never quite understood the system, to be honest. My company pays a contract company for my time. The amount they pay for my service is much more than the cost of hiring me as an employee, because they have to pay my portion of my managers' time along with enough to cover my benefits and some profit for the contract company. The company could have just hired me directly for some portion of the cost. The only downsides I see are that they can tout they didn't fire any employees when things get tight and they slash the number of contractors.

No, the contract itself is with a separate firm, who in turn pays their employees a minimum wage.

Most contractors to Amazon get paid set amounts for work. i.e 30p per parcel delivered.

Will this increase push Amazon to make more people contractors? Time will tell

That's the idea, but considering Uber/Lyft drivers are deemed "contractors" the line has clearly blurred in recent years.

Yes, excellent point.

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