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Comment by Egidius | Hacker News Reader

I believe people working in Amazons warehouses ended up in a situation they did not want to end up in the first place.

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.

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Amazon provides generous education benefits to their hourly employees: https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/career-choice

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.

I'd rather see actual numbers about the flow of Amazon employees who get promoted in stead of a website with their good intentions.

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.

I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement either; my country was settled by people who decided that enduring short term hardship for the sake of a better future was a worthwhile risk, and your country was left with those who decided to stay home and play it safe. It’s inevitable that such a stark difference in basic attitudes and motivations would lead to vast cultural and political differences.

Very well put, Sir. :) Cheers

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