Jeff Bezos has to respect the law or face a series of consequences up to imprisonment. We all know he is going to respect the law like we all do. It is mean spirited to write a (potential) law that disrespects him directly. He can't really respond to that.
Sanders should have stuck to calling him names in a speech, or informally calling it the Bezos' Act. That is just discussion and fair game. This type of formal embedding is unpleasant at a deeper level to no-one's benefit. We can do without that in politics, thankyouverymuch.
do you disagree with my understanding of the definition, or are you implying that jeff bezos is more powerful than a US senator who made a decent run for the presidency and is acting in his official capacity as such?
In a world where wealth distribution was flatter, and the richest person alive had access to like $100 million (a lot of money!), that would be one thing. The distribution is not so flat in our world, to put it mildly. Not to be pat, but money is power, and I think it's important to grasp the orders of magnitude at play here.
Mocking rich people for how they spend their money is a pleasant past time for humanity, not anything deplorable.
...then you're paying the wage your employees are willing to work for. Basic economics in action.
If you're making fun of this you need to take an econ 101 class.
More like have to work for. People working for minimum wage will work for whatever you pay them, because their choices are that or homelessness/dying of starvation which is no choice at all. Case in point, illegal immigrants work for less than minimum wage.
Adam Smith (writer of The Wealth of Nations, you might have heard of it) pointed out that forcing individuals to perform mundane and repetitious tasks would lead to an ignorant, dissatisfied work force. For this reason he advanced the revolutionary belief that governments had an obligation to provide education to workers.
I think that when you get payed $7.25 an hour you have to work so many hours that there's no way you have spare time to educate yourself to get out of that situation.
Amazon is an example of capitalism gone a tad bit too far. The market is only self correcting to a certain point.
It's great that Amazon (not only Bezos, but all the stakeholders that agreed with this step) is acknowledging that people deserve a decent pay.
Which is both a good thing for workers and something that makes sense for Amazon to provide. Amazon, believe it or not, doesn't actually want to hire and deal with workers who perceive themselves as perpetually and inevitably poor. They want to hire hardworking, ambitious people who want to move on to bigger and better things. Positioning themselves as a way up for hardworking, ambitious people who haven't developed marketable skills yet puts them in a position to benefit from the labor of hardworking, ambitious people, who are generally the most valuable people to employ.
The notion of minimum wage jobs as a stopgap that allows people to support themselves just long enough to improve their future earning prospects, as you point out, doesn't make sense--unless those people have the ability to improve their future earning prospects. Amazon is one of the very few employers, then, for whom it does make sense.
Ironically, Sanders and Amazon's other critics would probably much rather that Amazon pay people just enough money to spend their entire lives working in a warehouse for minimum wage than for Amazon to provide this education benefit. That's because someone who spends a year or two working at an Amazon warehouse, takes advantage of the education benefit, and transitions into a higher earning job is not going to believe Sanders' demagoguery.
Apart from that: do not think that I care about the party you're on and which political person you're against. I live thousands of miles away from your country. I only care about the idea. And the idea of getting payed $7.25 in the US seems like a preposterous way of life.
But I don't have the illusion I'm able to change your mind overhere, so I'll stop wasting my time with it. I believe in the free market, but without certain rules (like a reasonable minimum income) people and organisations are able to take advantage in a way that gets out of balance which the free market won't ever get the chance to ever fix.
Almost nobody who goes to work for a minimum wage job can afford to say "it's okay, I will find a better, high paying job later".
"Basic economy" is not an argument.
But I don't think it is in anyway moral that a company pay their employee so less that they need public benefit to be able to survive.
People are willing to work for pennies. Just look at India. If you want to turn USA into a third word country with high levels of income inequality that’s how you do it.
Have some empathy. Otherwise the peasants will revolt, and they have guns.
I don't think anyone deserves to be made fun of, full stop.
Grown-up criticism is fine.