One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid
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At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount.
As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. There is no magical future where AI serves as a democratizing "labor enhancer" for the masses. The value-add of some random person will be 0 in nearly all cases.
We will have to decouple our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value.
The entire system is designed to drain as much value out of hardworking people into the pockets of those who do not work, but simply own shares.
Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company. In other words, all workers of a rich company should be (relatively spoken) rich, corresponding to the value they provided to the company.
You are wrong, but so very close that it's understandable.
What can be done with an hour of labour has gone up so very high. That it is true. But what has increased in value is the infrastructure of that allowed for the force multiplier. The actual value of labour thus goes down because it can be consumed so efficiently.
Since it's the infrastructure that provides most of the heavy lifting, the owners of it get the benefit.
If you need another analogy it'd be like a sport where players win the games, but it's really about the excellent coach that calls the plays. The players have no leverage even if they win all the games.
The price of unskilled labour is objectively higher today than one hundred years ago, and it's clearly higher in developed countries in comparison with undeveloped ones. This is due to a myriad of factors. But to date, workers have done well by way of increasing productivity. (Others have done better.)
So how come some input resources are priced a lot more highly than others? How come sometimes, say, labor gets a big cut and capital a small cut, and other times the other way around?
Supply and demand. Bargaining power. That's why. Nothing to do whatsoever with the actual value involved in the process.
What portion of the value we apportion to the suppliers of each resource is purely a political question based on bargaining power -- who is less willing to withdraw from providing their resources, etc
To use your sports analogy, if this magic genius coach can easily find plenty of any old players to execute his strategy with, then I guess he will manage to absorb the lion's share of profits. If it's hard to find players relative to supply/demand, then it doesn't matter if they're dipshits who barely manage to do anything and who just do what the coach says, it doesn't matter if anyone could do what they do. All that matters is the coach needs them and there's not enough of them. You can't have a team without the coach and you can't have a team without the players, regardless of their respective merits.
How you divide the spoils among resourceholders all of whom are critical to the process is purely political, based on leverage and negotiation, not based on actual "value" which cannot be computed unless a sports team can exist without players or without a coach and merely be a little, measurably worse.
With no one to run the tools or tools workers chained to tools what good are the tools? They decay and many cannot be moved effectively.
Thanks to the fact that criminals won the war on drugs - a destitute life on the streets perpetually high on meth or heroin and alcohol appears to remain within reach for the foreseeable future posing an attractive alternative lifestyle for those dispossessed of abusive labor conditions. Funding social welfare programs would rebalance the calculus but that fact is angrily denied by most wealthy people despite the overwhelming consensus amongst researchers and practitioners.
Expect the difficulty to staff these expensive tools with impoverished staff to fuel inflation for the foreseeable future. It is not impossible that ever more creative financial engineering may stave off any of the countless imposing financial crises but the rebalance against capital for labor is long overdue even without a financial crisis to fuel discontent.
I for one hope that the rebalance can occur peaceably but accept the fact that rich and powerful live in reality distortion fields so are more likely to lash out violently than concede a single of their unearned pennies.
Also, the average real purchasing power in America has been declining for a very long time and cannot afford goods and services except through taking on debt.
1. Everyone works less (the government mandates a 35, 30, 20... hour workweek), raising the relative value of labor.
2. We collectively do more than the bare minimum needed for survival and comfort (the government raises taxes, spending them on activities like building sports stadiums or moonbases), raising the demand for labor.
This is of course because labor has received virtually none of the labor productivity gains since 1965.
Whether either of these things are "correct", time will tell and likely will be nuance and vary by job role, but they're both reasonable.
Amazon picks the places where it can hire extremely cheap labor, because usually they are the only game in town. (monopsony market for labor.)
it happened without automation and happens with automation too.
of course it's on society to help those who are stuck in these unfortunately places.
Yes, when the inelastic aggregate supply of labor (expressed as an explicit work quota or expressed as an implicit work quota equal to cost of living divided by wages) exceeds the demand for labor, capitalism turns what should be a happy situation (let's all work a bit less!) into a horror show where working hard for scraps is a privilege and rotting in unemployment is the norm.
That only works for some of their locations. They are limited by the need for their distribution centers to be in good proximity to the customers they deliver to. In my area, that means their largest distribution center is in one of the more expensive areas of the city. And the other big one is in a less-nice area that is probably still fairly expensive because it's close to the center of the metro area.
Thats not a bad idea. If it was required to run some sufficient percentage of the company as if it was a cooperative and give a defined amount of shares to any joining employee for X years of service and also give representation to the workers in the governance of the company, things could be better. Europe already has the latter in the form of 'work councils'.
Also, it's weird you pose this as some kind of counterfactual proof by contradiction, it already happened, because "locking up the labor market" the way you describe is kind of what FAANG did, in at least a mild way, to software engineering, during what we now have to sadly call (if we rely on it for our livelihood) the good old days of the 2010s.
In fact, the dearth of math teachers in America probably has to do with this a little, for example. Shortage of math skills, and they really help getting into tech or finance, and the pay difference is huge, so, they suck all the oxygen out of the room.
Even though this is totally wealth redistribution (which is politically unpopular, socialism and all), I bet you could market it as super American like Andrew Yang did with UBI as the "Freedom Dividend".
This way you could "work within the system" and still keep stonks going up, but also help redistribute wealth to poorer citizens.
"Siphoned off"? The shareholders funded the automation that boosted the workers' productivity.
If this were even slightly true, you could just go out and offer your labor on the street corner, and people would jump at the chance to buy it from you. Or you could "harvest" your labor and sell it retail to others trivially, and just loaf around half the year on the cool half million you earned the other half.
You can't do these things, and few can. Your labor has no economic value whatsoever, nor does the labor of most other people.
> The entire system is designed to drain as much v
Designed by who? Why does everyone use the word design here? It sounds every bit as dumb to say "design" here as it would if we were talking about biology. The system evolved. No one person got to design, or parts of it, nor did a committee. If some billionaire or pope or warlord wanted to redesign it today, he couldn't. It's never been designable. No one would even know how to design it so that they could get the results they desired.
> Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company.
How could it possibly be more accessible? If a hobo walked off the street smelling like poop and vodka, with a wad of money in his hands, right into the broker's office... do you think they'd turn down the money?
Did you mean affordable?
Of course no country wants to give up their capacity of cheap labor, so politics move slowly or worse, it becomes the literal race to the bottom.
It is false to believe they could do without these workers while in reality they probably could do without much of their management.
> there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company.
At the end of the day, the price of labor is going to be a the intersection of supply and demand, so this isn't much different that forcing an employee to spend x% of their wages on buying shares in their own company. This would be great if you were a 1997 Amazon employees, but it would be a disaster for 1997 Sears employees.
Labor already earns 10-40% of the net income of capital (over and above what they are compensated for for their labor) because of government taxation. It's ridiculous to claim they should be getting even more of the pie or have any say beyond convincing their manager of something.
Also, this idea that a worker should be paid what they provide is stupid. They should be paid the lowest price the market will bear, the same as capital. What matters for labor's salary is not what they did but that a company is willing to pay the market clearing price for their labor set by supply and demand.
Labor jobs seem to demand a huge price right now - and I don't think anyone is predicting robots that can tile a backsplash, install a 240v outlet, or even dig a trench for a sewer line anywhere in the near future. Let alone have the cost of owning and operating such a robot be more cost effective than paying a human.
I'm much more concerned about lawyers, accountants, marketers, and software engineers than I am people who physically build and fix things.
People need to pay rent. As the housing crisis spirals and people need more money to pay rent, they will job hop to do so.
Imho labour rates are going up because they are for people who are actually doing real, scientific-definition-of-work while other people collect ridiculous paycheques for chatting on Zoom
Sorry if I sound bitter but I implore anyone to give it a shot themselves before they complain about paying for real labour.
Why one pays more? Not sure. Some kind of higher barrier to entry for software, weirdly enough. Something about the working with your hands stuff I think makes it easier to persevere than working with something virtual and abstract? Just guessing here. But the smoking gun is, why is abstract math achievement so low in America? Like a small minority of grown adults can do basic algebra. Yet a lot of blue collar work really is just as intellectually demanding. I mean you're constantly solving the [[Planning problem]] and all kinds of problems that come up in [[Operations research]]
It's not just automation that made low-skill labor worth shit, it's also the next to zero import tariffs on cheap textile and e-waste from overseas.
We traded the cost of our labor for cheap mass produced junk.
Put tariffs on imports proportional to the lack of environmental and human rights regulations the source country has or doesn't have, and boom, problem solved.
Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.
You can't automate a lot of tasks firefighters do. You need someone to actually show up in-person, in an area where there might be things that interfere with electronics.
Automation in cleaning or cooking is pretty minimal. I don't see computers replacing chefs at any of the restaurants in town. We have roombas, but they aren't even particularly good at vacuuming - they can't move furniture to get behind it - and I don't know of anything that automates dusting, etc. There's laundry machines and dishwashers, but they still require human intervention.
We have more and more people delivering packages, not less, and self-driving technology is a dangerous/morbid joke.
On the other hand, automation of websites is getting better, but we didn't really need most websites anyway.
Once humanoids are good enough nobody will be, or rightfully want to be a firefighter. Even without AGI, teleoperation could be enough. However once AI is good enough that you don't need a human to operate it then there's no reason to hire a human for any step in the process.
America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do.
Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking.
America needs stronger, effective unions too.
Who's going to subscribe to Prime and buy stuff when everyone is poor? The Walmart/Amazon wage strategy only works if the rest of society doesn't defect too. Henry Ford understood that his workers were also consumers.
Nobody is seriously scared of that in 2024.
We're going to have to reform extreme wealth inequalities and move to UBI and redistribution of wealth, or otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years.
Already, there are vastly undercounted millions of homeless and functionally homeless people in America, a supposed first-world countries.
To maintain a humane standard of living for all people requires recapturing trillions the ultrarich have taken for themselves.
Let me just... yep. 1.1 billion living in slums or slum-like conditions today. We're already there.
The assumption is that their salary is tied to their potential economic value. Human value and dignity is separate.
We have been automating work for many centuries. And after a hundred years Keynes prediction [1] still isn't reality, somehow we keep finding ways of keeping ourselves busy :)
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
Maybe, just maybe, this time is different.
Honestly, Amazon is kind of the snake that's eating it's own tail. Nobody feels good about buying from Amazon anymore. The customer service treats you like crap. The employees don't do a good job because they'd be fired if they did. The time is right for them to disappear overnight. I already don't trust them for anything expensive; if I'm ordering electronics, I get it through B&H, who makes some minimal amount of effort to ensure that you don't get a brick instead of a camera. Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is chipping away at their empire. "You have to indirectly torture one of our employees to get your thingamajig," isn't helping. I really think that if we fast-forward 20 years, we'll see that "no bathroom breaks, pee in a bottle" didn't make society much richer. (Of course, none of this matters. The early execs are out and incomprehensibly wealthy. I feel bad for the people that saw that and joined late, but will never achieve their goals in that area.)
I'm not 100% sure of this. As a software engineer and AI researcher I actually feel that AI is more likely to replace my job before it replaces some dude hauling boxes in a truck across Colorado during a blizzard and then figuring out how to unload them into the back of a poorly-organized grocery store, or some restaurant chef working with open flames in the back of a restaurant while figuring out how to make something vegan and dealing with someone else's peanut allergy.
Robotics+AI will happen eventually, but high-paid computer-based jobs are IMO the easiest targets to replace. Human labor involves dealing with a lot of corner cases safely and it's going to take a while.
False dilemma. There are other methods to implement tax and redistribute. Additionally some countries like Canada and Switzerland are taking the lead in offering legal frameworks for life management solutions.
I think the realities of the workforce are wildly different to what we'd typically experience outside of the tech sector.
That is nonsense. In the highly automated USA labor commands an extremely high wage relative to highly non-automated countries (or almost any country, for that matter). Compare low-skilled comp in the US to somewhere like India, or even Japan - which has a lot less automation in shops and offices than you might expect, and correspondingly lower wages.
Almost every form of production uses low skilled labor and there is no technological solution yet. If it were possible, there would be a solution. The same is applicable for health care.
The truth is that these companies could easily pay enough but there is a competition to suppress labor wages, the famous race to the bottom.
1. Companies need consumers to sell to. If no one earns enough money to buy then the companies gave a problem. 2. If people cannot feed themself from working for others then becoming a subsistence farmer and forming tight knit communities is the best way to survive.
People can exist without companies, the reverse is not true.
No
Comparative Advantage, Google/GPT it
A person who is actually working within an industrialized economy produces at least ten times more than what is needed to sustain them. Your attitude is exactly what the communist rulers in the political class and the capitalist rulers in the business and banking class want the serfs to believe. They work together as brothers when it is against the common man.
I say it is completely groundless fear. Even non-talented and non-gifted persons can achieve extreme productivity with modern tools and training.
That's pertinently false.
And this wasn’t inevitable. But we have made it so.
Now we get to talk about philosophical feel-good nonsense like “decoupling assumptions about a person’s value”. When in an alternate reality we could all share in this plenty equally.
Let’s have a fun future being at the mercy of our arbitrary asset-sitting overlords.
Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? It would be fairer and more just, but words about justice are cheap and power is expensive.
But importantly only the lowest of the low wages
There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc.
Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealth, even in the form of cash savings, but the government has arbitrarily decided you make too much or some other form of disqualification[0].
To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients.
EDIT: To those whom have questions on the fact that means test cost more than the fraud of social benefit programs, Last Week Tonight did a break down on Medicaid[3] (linked to below) that explains all this better than I can.
[0]: often by declaring some aspect of the filing paperwork invalid or the beneficiary unresponsive, more often than not due to errors by the agency rather than the individual(s)[1]
[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2024/04/12/vulnerable-f...
[2]: How an applicant/recipient is screened and continually screened for eligibility
that may make sense in 2012. In 2024 I am much less optimistic that this is the case.
This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the economic case for reducing or increasing funding for eligibility screening.
There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine.
On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.
We should just let these things cancel out, using a flat tax that funds unconditional cash benefits (i.e. UBI) and delete an epic amount of unnecessarily complexity.
This is like saying that since robbery is rare, the cost of permitting robbery is lower than funding the police force, thus we should defund the police.
Robbery is rare because the police exists
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/if-the-crime-rate-goes-d...
The point of means testing isn't to fight fraud, it's to better divert a limited pool of resources to the neediest people. If you have a pool of money to distribute, only giving it to the poorest 25% (ie. means testing) means the recipients can get 4x the money compared to giving it to everyone. Sure, there are ways this can be done badly through onerous requirements or whatever, but the cost of means testing vs the fraud rate is a completely irrelevant metric.
The common criticism of means testing is that more money is spent on the bureaucracy implementing the testing than if you just took the money you otherwise spent on bureaucracy and gave it directly without means testing.
There's only so much money to go around, if I chose to spend more money on preventing fraud than the fraud would cost, I'm prioritizing righteousness over helping people.
If you have funding for 500 people, and fraud would cost you funding for 10 people. If you spend the cost of funding 40 people on fraud prevention, you're harming the 30 people you can no longer fund to keep those 10 from undeserved funding.
Intuitively, I'd expect fraud to go up (at least to some degree) as means testing goes down like a differential equation. The depressing part of this is that it doesn't matter what is actually true, or what either of us are convinced is true, as the system will do its own thing.
In principle you can do this without affecting the budget at all -- if there is a benefit that phases out at, say, 20% up to $30,000 in income, this is equivalent to paying the benefit unconditionally and increasing the marginal tax rate by 20% in the same income range. All it does is eliminate the application paperwork.
In practice the problem is that there are multiple overlapping programs like this, so the poor aren't paying a 20% marginal rate (on top of any formal taxes), it's more like 60-80% and in some cases it even exceeds 100%. This is a poverty trap. But to get out of it while balancing the budget you'd have to use a lower total phase out rate, requiring higher marginal rates on people who make more money. These people -- as much upper middle-class doctors and computer programmers as Jeff Bezos -- then object to this, and so here we are.
Of course, another way to do it would be to cut some other government spending and use the money for this.
Also, the benefits are paltry. If you're completely homeless, have no resources, and out-of-work in, say California, per month you will get MediCal*, $240 for food**, $149 in cash "aid", and that's it. There is an inconsistent patchwork of programs to give slightly more benefits that require a certain range of income threshold and specific demographic strings. Most all of these programs treat recipients like criminals and require regular paperwork and significant time, time during work and transportation that the working-poor can least afford.
The elderly and disabled qualify for Medicare***, which isn't quite "Cuba-level" health insurance but administered by a for-profit health insurance company under the vague supervision and standards of Medicare who pays for it. Medicare+MedicAid special needs plan (SNP) and Social Security**** is what a disabled or elderly homeless person would typically have.
* Same as the federal program known as MedicAid. It is much worse than Obamacare (health insurance for the working poor), and moderately worse than Medicare (for the disabled and the elderly) and almost no regular doctors take it. Providers who do take it usually are far away and usually serve a specific demographic. While it covers emergency care almost completely and some medications, it's not very good. There is significant healthcare bias in America based on health insurance and age.
** "Food stamps" that used to be actual stamps. In the US, the federal program is either SNAP or WIC (pregnant women, infants, and children).
*** Medicare is a federal health insurance system comprising many types of plans run by private corporations with a Byzantine patchwork of limitations and benefits.
**** Social Security is monthly cash for disabled (SSIDI) and retired people. SSIDI waives work requirements. Non-disabled elderly receive an amount based on how many years they worked and how much income they received, up to a relatively low limit. There is a debate about cutting off income- and/or asset-rich people from receiving Social Security when they don't need it.
Note: this only works for large corporations. Small corporations don't get this benefit.
To make it more fair and increase competition and reduce corporate corruption, the system should increase support for everyone on a fair basis, not just these particular wage slaves.
It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.
In this case, these are Amazon government subsidies by way of the disadvantaged. "Why are consumers receiving low prices and shareholder profits more important than workers receiving a wage they can survive on?" seems to be a question no one wants to answer.
As Galloway showed, we don't love our children, or even fellow humans in this context. We love line goes up more. At least we're making progress with the fertility rate going off the cliff, less humans to suffer under this regime in the future.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
If this is a "subsidy" to Amazon, what do you think would happen if they were pulled? Would amazon be forced to raise wages, or would the wages stay the same (because labor supply and demand is still the same) and the people starve instead?
Those who refuse to question the legitimacy of our so-called democracy, even more so those who engage in deceitful (even if well-intended!!) rhetoric or other actions[1] to present any such discussions from taking place.
> It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.
Consider what voting (or "democracy") is actually(!) composed of. Do we have any good reason to expect other than what we get?
[1] which can come in many forms
How does food stamps/medicaid prevent competition?
companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for people and have to offer wages that are high enough to actually attract employees.
I agree that larger companies are better capitalized and therefore can better withstand economic shocks than smaller companies, but how does that mean that foodstamps "prevents competition"? Foodstamps aren't tied to a specific employer, so it doesn't favor large companies over smaller one, because employees can continue to get benefits even after switching jobs.
And was criticized as indirect corporate welfare then too
Sounds alright, but then you have noticeably less unskilled and semi-skilled labor demand (possibly as much as 1-4%) in an environment where:
* the long struggle of delegitimising explicit political violence is waning,
* nobody outside of the Club of Rome wants to so much as touch the application of the framing of subsidies and overbuild to the topic of population
* and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable.
There have been lots of empirical studies of UBI and the evidence from them is pretty clear that… they don't actually affect employment much either way.
Which I don't think is an answer that advocates or opponents like, as seemingly everyone thinks it would cause people to retire and write a book or something.
But how is this related to the subject?
There is an article lamenting that a third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps. Now suppose that Amazon paid more taxes and correspondingly provided more funding for the food stamp program. The next week a third of Amazon warehouse workers would still be on food stamps and media outlets would still be publishing the same clickbait headline.
Where interventions need applied to companies, namely conglomerates, they are not and virtually nobody seems to want to discuss this, but it's the bull in the China shop because these monoliths have a unidirectional charter toward profit and infinite coffers by which to affect policy change and ensure that margins can remain relatively extreme without regard to consequences which either the individual or the society in which they operate suffer.
Notion being that the corporation that is so severely under paying its work force isn't genuinely profitable and is falsely portraying itself as so.
A lot of discussions of inequality in the US eventually end up as discussions of nominal equalness, like the problem is about making sure everyone gets paid the same amount. What the real problem is probably is more like certain beneficiaries are overvalued and overpaid, either through rent seeking, structural problems, deception, or something else, and/or the others are underpaid, and/or certain costs of labor are being unpaid.
If you have a highly profitable business and basic employee needs aren't being met by the employer's compensation, it's sort of necessarily a sign that certain costs of labor -- food, shelter, and healthcare for the workers -- aren't being paid when they could be.
It's like if I hired a carpenter to redo cabinetry in my house, and then decided I wouldn't pay for the materials because it wasn't something the carpenter themselves produced. The food and health of the workers is something the employer is benefiting from that is necessary to the labor, and they're just assuming that the workers are getting it from elsewhere.
I think the tendency for "greater equalness" to often seem like a goal in itself is kind of an indirect consequence of the fact that often when you account for all the hidden unpaid costs and overvaluations and undervaluations, employees of a company or institution probably should be more equal than they often are.
It's strange that we accept all these economic notions of price fixing, fraud, theft, and over and undervaluation when it comes to physical goods, but when it comes to labor and employer and employee compensation we just kind of pretend it's all perfect markets, with perfectly rational actors and no structural problems.
Minimum wage is set by politicians, not some arms length regulatory agency. So it's entirely possible that the minimum wage is stagnant for intractable political reasons and out of touch with reality.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, so that's not saying much.
Going by state minimum wage, your statement is incorrect. According to Google the average Amazon warehouse worker in California makes $17-18 an hour. California minimum wage is $16 per hour.
https://hiring.amazon.com/app#/jobDetail?jobId=JOB-US-000000...
If you have several children and are a single parent, should Amazon pay you 2x or 3x your childless coworkers, just to keep you off of government support?
According to Pew [0]
The numbers vary from month to month. But in April 2023, the most recent month with available figures, 41.9 million people in 22.2 million households received SNAP benefits. That translates to 12.5% of the total U.S. population.
84,041,447 individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in the 51 states and the District of Columbia that reported enrollment data for January 2024.
1 https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children.
Some states you can get it if you're pregnant no matter what.
(It can often be a strategic thing to get if you can, because large numbers of other programs that require applications will declare you automatically qualify if you get SNAP.)
Most states are following the federal guidelines of 200% of the poverty line. Four kids is $80k a year and still qualifies.
Household size: monthly pre-tax income limit
- 1: $2,430
- 2: $3,288
- 3: $4,144
- 4: $5,000
- 5: $5,858
- 6: $6,714
- 7: $7,570
in the 51 (states and DC)
Are people on Food Stamps always going to be unemployed? No? Then are they are going to be employed somewhere? Am I supposed to be mad that these programs are working as designed?
Food stamps and medicaid in particular are also explicitly tied to family need. Unless Amazon is going to start paying someone with a family of 5 more than a person with a family of 3, these criteria are always going to be malleable. (In our state, Medicaid eligibility goes up to $80k in income and up to $100k for food stamps!)
As a proud taxpayer, I am happy my money is going towards working families. I would be more concerned had it not. And I am not going to pretend to be shocked that the beneficiaries work in (surprise) low-income jobs.
Obviously, there isn't a silver bullet, and every potential solution has thorns, but are food stamps really meant to perpetually sustain individuals that make low wages at companies that can afford to pay them more?
In FL, Medicaid adult eligibility ceiling is $Ø. Also the next states over. And states past that. And more states.
In FL SNAP income limits for adults are [whatever the ASCII symbol is for irrelevant]. Whatever the guidelines are, the vast majority of impoverished adults are denied. Same for next states over. And you get the idea.
Folks posting from states that aren't hostile to vulnerable people are posting their healthcare/assistance figures - in a way that seems to imply their numbers could well represent America. They don't tho.
Let's say there are a thousand people on food stamps, getting $2000/mo from the government. A company comes along and says "we will employ all thousand people part-time for $1000/mo, and so the government now only has to pay them $1000/mo in assistance". Did the company do a good thing for society?
What if the company had instead said "we will employ 500 people full-time and pay them $2000/mo, so now the government only has to take care of the remaining 500"? Is that better or worse?
Or what if the company only employed a hundred people and paid them $10000/mo so they could live a good life, at the expense of the rest?
If one of the employees had 8 dependents and another had none, should they both get the same salary for the same work? What if it isn't enough for raising 8 kids?
Or if none of these options are palatable should the company and its warehouse not be allowed to exist at all? How does the government generate tax revenue for social services in the first place then?
So let's say you have someone that's getting the $2000/mo from the government for assistance. Amazon hires them and pays them $1000/mo, the only way this makes sense for Amazon is if they can extract more than $1000/mo of value out of that employee.
I think where the disconnect is in a lot of these conversations is how much value is being extracted.
Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $1500/mo of value for Amazon. Then the fact that the government has to support them to the tune of $1000/mo as well might be acceptable. Amazon gets profit, government (and the tax payers) have to spend $1000/mo less, employee gets enough money to live. Everyone is happy.
Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $5000/mo of value for Amazon. This scenario is a bit harder to accept, why should the tax payers have to subsidize those low wages when Amazon could pay $2000/mo and still make a healthy profit?
The problem is that that figure, "how much value does an employee generate?" is hard to come by. You can get more aggregate figures https://csimarket.com/stocks/AMZN-Revenue-per-Employee.html which tell us that every employee generates on average $326,428 but it is harder to find details on "How much value does an amazon warehouse worker generate?"
So it all hinges on how much value Amazon extracts from the worker. If it's $50/mo then I don't think anyone is picking up their pitchforks. If it's $4000/mo and they've decided that they can squeeze their workforce because the tax payer will pick up the slack and they can pocket the difference, then pitchforks come out.
There is some finite amount of demand that needs to be processed by the warehouse, the fact that I can satisfy that demand with a small number of low paid workers doesn't somehow increase the demand.
I think it is better to see it as the government's responsibility to take care of it citizens. Medicaid, food stamps, and the negative income tax represents this approach. We don't necessarily see it as a bad thing that the government takes care of citizens. If someone is struggling, it is the governments role to step in and support that person.
But it does make sense to talk about whether these programs provide sufficient support, or if our approach to taxation, which supports these programs, is fair.
Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".
Minimum wage has always trailed living wage. Often by a decade plus. It's always in arrears that it is updated (and several of the last updates have been further and further apart).
Businesses have been able to pay people less than liveable wages, and then when there's an attempt at parity, they scream about how unfair it will be to that untouchable and sacrosanct pillar of American society, the Small Business Owner.
Except I don't recall reading anywhere that a business owner was entitled to profitability.
At a certain point, if your business can't afford to keep up with living wage needs, the solution is to close your doors, not advocate for underpaying people.
Hidden in this is an assumption is that everyone is more than more productive than the "living wage" (whatever that is). In a country that has high living costs and is facing competition from developing countries with far less living costs, I think it's fairly reasonable to say there's a non-negligible population where this assumption doesn't hold. What about those people? For them, raising the minimum wage to the living wage won't increase their income, it'd make it $0 because there's no point in hiring them.
>Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".
You realize I explicitly mentioned "welfare/UBI" in my previous comment? Or do you somehow think it's bad for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by taxing people/companies and then distributing through welfare/UBI, but it's somehow okay for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by mandating that companies pay their workers more?
Everyone should get food stamps - enough to survive. If you want, you can eat cheap store brand food for free year-round, or you can spend your entire balance at the beginning of each month at restaurants and artisan grocers because you make enough to afford to buy what you want with your own money when it's gone.
Everyone should get healthcare, full stop. Going to the doctor should be free. Public health is massively important to a healthy society, we should treat that as core investment in the future of our nation.
Everyone should get some form of housing. If you want, you can use a voucher to get a tiny studio for free, or you can apply the voucher to a larger rental that you can afford with the money you make. If you own a real estate, you can forfeit the rental voucher for a tax credit.
Everyone should get some sort of universal basic income. With food, healthcare, and housing covered, it would just need to be enough to fill in the gaps for everything else. Enough to put gas in your car every once in a while, or to buy clothes, or anything else you might need.
At this rate, you could just sit at home eating Great Value brand canned food and wearing clothes from Goodwill indefinitely, but it would be a boring life. The majority of people would seek something profitable to do with their lives, and the "profit motive" of capitalism would finally be realized for every American when people actually work for a better quality of life, rather than for survival.
We could finally be free to pursue our careers or the sake of contributing to the world, rather than for the sake of "making a living". We could dedicate ourselves to noble yet unprofitable causes without relegating ourselves to poverty.
though it is fair to point out that this type of system does require a few other changes in the corporate incentive structure. shareholder primacy for one, would have to go. you can't really be a shareholder profit maximalist and provide a consistent standard of living for everyone in your society, because every possible penny is supposed to end up in the shareholders pocket. even if you could technically build more long-term wealth by investing in things like education, infrastructure, and affordable housing.
Companies want to price gouge all the time, but were only able to do so because everyone, especially lower income people, had extra cash.
Good luck introducing price controls on basic goods like groceries. Otherwise, things like UBI will increase inflation.
"They were recruited into the survey using the Meta/Facebook" that's a red flag on the quality of the study.
"To provide a more demographically representative picture, we reweighted survey responses using data on race and gender composition that Amazon reported to the EEOC in 2021.2" also a red flag because they already don't necessarily have a representative sample, and then are reweighting using data from a different selection criteria.
The study said that 13% of workers moved into higher paying jobs within Amazon, and their numbers were removed from the study.
Yah, I think I'm going to stop reading this study. Very low quality work.
I'm also not a fan of focusing the headline or finding on a single company without a cohort to compare against. If anything, this would punish individual companies for hiring low income people at all. Easy to have 0% here if you just refuse to hire anyone that qualifies, after all. And that is a terrible goal. If I'm off on any of that, happy to be corrected.
I think state healthcare is pretty ideal.
Food stamps though, that's not cool.
Why?
We subsidise and socialise healthcare because the cost between people can vary extremely (it can cost between nothing and millions per year!) and it's a basic need. Food is not like that, basic food needs cost roughly the same for everyone. Of course there's $1000 a plate restaurants but those are not a basic need, you can get just as much nutrition for $5.
Someone who has a job should be able to cover food and housing. Otherwise society is severely broken.
Is it ever possible they are wasting money on things they don't need that could have allowed to not need food stamps?
Just wondering how this would be determined.
Welfare is mainly intended for children and the elderly because we don't want child laborers.
And I suppose that's ultimately the problem: through a combination of technological advances, which automate much unskilled labor, and a broken incentive structure in many social welfare programs, which disincentivize investment in human capital (because of the "benefit cliff"), a larger and larger underclass of unemployable[0] people grows.
[0]: meaning, the economic value of their labor output is less than the minimum cost to employ them.
if you or anyone else can get marginal productivity from these workers for more than amazon is paying then just go and do it, or do you have some bias against hiring people on welfare?
> A third of survey respondents reported using government-funded programs – primarily food stamps or Medicaid – in the last three months.
It's very hard to gauge what the real numbers are from that quote. It's also hard to gauge if Amazon made these people better or worse off. But again, from the actual article:
> Amazon’s median US employee was paid $45,613 in 2023, up from $41,762 the year before, the company said in a filing last month. The company says employees in warehousing and transportation are paid more than $20.50 an hour, on average. The survey, which was conducted between April and August 2023, excluded managers and skews a bit lower: Most respondents reported wages from $16 to $20 an hour.
> Some 65% of workers who come to Amazon earn more than they were making at their previous employer, the survey shows.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Walmart
McDonald’s
FedEx
Amazon
Dollar General
Kroger
Dollar Tree, Inc.
Safeway
Waffle House
Burger King
Goodwill
Sonic
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stam...
>In an emailed statement, Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly called the researchers’ methodology “deeply flawed” and said the company had tried to raise its concerns with the study’s authors but never heard back.
>“It’s a survey that ignores best practices for surveying, has limited verification safeguards to confirm respondents are Amazon employees, and doesn’t prevent multiple responses from the same person,” he said. Kelly added that Amazon has increased average pay to $20.50 an hour and provides a range of benefits, including health care, dental, 401(k) and pre-paid tuition.
Also, this guy has no citations.
It's more about the relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO.
Even if the post office has the exact same percentage of workers on food stamps, I would argue that because the postmaster general makes so much less than Amazon leadership that Amazon has the privilege and ability to do better, and still run a profitable business.
It's about profit, and sharing it more equitably.
The Amazon CEO pay was $212 million in 2021.
There are 700k warehouse workers.
If the CEO put 99% of their pay to the warehouse workers, each would get an about $300/year, or $25/month more.
If you expand consideration from just him to all of Amazon's major shareholders, top management, board members, etc., and then compare to the warehouse workers, "contractor" delivery drivers, etc., it's plain to see that a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards.
The way the power relations work is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles, though thankfully it's quite a bit less physically violent.
Computing someone's net worth by multiplying the number of shares he holds by the last-traded price of that share yields a theoretical number that's only good for placing people on Forbes rich lists and as fodder for demagogues. It is not possible for him to actually convert all of his shares to $200B.
> gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years
If anyone could be blamed for this, blame the Fed for endless ZIRP, QE, and other asset-inflationary policies that made it so that capital had to pour into companies like AMZN.
> a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards
A large group of people who are compensated for the work they do and are free to choose to work for a different employer.
> is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles
Is it valid to compare someone who started a company in and then benefited from a system of (mostly) voluntary exchange of goods and services to feudal lords who extracted rents from their peasants under the threat of violence?
He was paid that by Amazon investors, who basically want to give him money because he's Jeff Bezos. If the warehouse workers owned the shares, those investors would have to want to give just as much money to them, but it doesn't seem like they do.
(Clearer case is Elon, who is pretty obviously super rich entirely because a lot of people want to specifically give him money. They're investor celebrities.)
Source - my mom just retired from the Amazon Warehouse night shift.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
While you can imagine this means richer people will start to do all of their low income work, that also means there are no lower income jobs. We can hope those are simply shifted up the pay scale, but it is equally as likely that the jobs just go away. Likely not full classes of jobs, mind you, but certainly there will be fewer low payed jobs than otherwise.
Just as likely, you will get companies relationships structured such that these relationships are not direct. Which... by definition is adding middlemen to the equation. I'm not a huge fan of efficiency arguments, but this does seem needless bad in that realm.
I'm happy to see evidence on any studies that focus on optimal ratios of income for different people in an organization. Resting this on "relative income from the warehouse workers to the CEO" would need more than appeal to emotion.
I say all of this as someone that is all for taxing rich people.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/food-stamp-...
>More than 42 million Americans receive a federal stipend for food through the program formerly known as food stamps.
Your link shows that 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps, which is interesting (and a surprise to me) but it's missing the point of the question above. What's the rate of workers on FS in any given warehouse across the country?
The outcome of absolutes like these is that we would remove government assistance to those who are employed (excluding those who are handicapped, etc). You could fix it by raising the minimum wage higher - up to a point where government assistance is unnecessary. And it's on the government and the voters that they don't do that, not on Amazon.
Absolutes come with hard boundaries, and collectively, we've decided that those hard boundaries are suboptimal. Hence the status quo.
Companies exist by paying market wages. The whole point of the minimum wage is to eliminate jobs whose market pay would be below the minimum wage.
Lots of anti-Amazon ranting in the comments, but no one's outlining a clear solution beyond raising the minimum wage. (Yes, it's hopelessly naive to expect a large, powerful company to pay above market wages just out of principle - when their competitors don't need to).
Anti-disclaimers: I dislike Amazon. I avoid shopping there. I avoid working there. Yet, my biases aren't going to let me discount the fact that I personally know two people who've worked for Amazon - one also at other warehouses - and they liked the job more than the other places they've worked at.
But I do mean that able-bodied people with what we would consider a substantial means of employment shouldn’t need government assistance. I’m obviously not talking about edge cases.
[0] assuming that's what they want to do
Is it not also possible that the government benefits make low-wage work less appealing, thus lowering the supply, and increasing the compensation?
Instead of artificially raising the minimum wage we should put more funding into job training. Help those marginal workers build the skills they need to earn higher wages.
Imagine a scenario where "assistance" wasn't stigmatized and Amazon had to pay higher taxes fully proportionate with the cost of paying it's employees properly?
I mean - at that point they might as well pay people properly!
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
US economy has been trending towards fewer owners owning means of production.
Which makes sense, any business marginally better than their completion keeps on growing, the delta between 1st and 2nd keeps on increasing over time.
US consumer spending is strong right now. That is great for producers. If the economy goes to shit, govt can hand out stimulus and inject money into economy.
Propping up demand is very easy - stimulus checks! Propping up supply is very hard - requires great infrastructure, a check on monopolies, investments that encourage innovation and competition.
The fact that the young generation are so squeezed, they are not having kids is a sign that we’ve fucked up.
The big have gotten too big and there isn’t enough competition to prop up supply and bring prices down.
Both parties love turning on the money printer, driving up inflation.
It’s the societal equivalent of global warming. A slow disaster booking the frog.
The more welfare pays, the worse a job at Amazon is in comparison, is it not? How does Amazon benefit from this?
I'm not contesting this. This is a valid point.
> This essentially means that tax dollars are subsidizing their profits.
I don't see how this would be the case.
Two scenarios:
1:
- Welfare is now $0/month
- Some people that could get by with welfare now can't. They start looking for jobs.
- Increase in the supply of workers.
- Decrease in wages. (good for amazon)
2:
- Welfare is now $3k/month
- Some people decide that it's no longer worth it to work. They'd rather just live off of welfare.
- Decrease in the supply of workers.
- Increase in wages. (bad for amazon)
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/earned-income...
Should we want businesses that need public money to continue to operate? I suppose one should critically examine their usefulness. If they fail 0% income tax on salary would be good enough.
OT: It struck me a while back what work was involved in running a government using only paper. I guess they all found ways to burn the excessive funds over the years as the real work kinda vanished. I hear Estonia made an effort to write laws that are easy to automate simply because they didn't have money.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/1a89ed5e-en.pdf?expi...
Why is it “Amazon doesn’t pay enough for workers to afford healthcare” instead of “Healthcare is so exorbitantly expensive even people with relatively well paying jobs can’t afford it without government assistance”?
Everyone else except amazon is to blame for not paying them enough.
Why are people framing this like amazon is doing something wrong? They are the highest bidder for these low wage workers, not the lowest bidder?
which, conveniently, is not disclosed.
How would a survey manager get that data, for ALL warehouse workers? So most likely they sampled one warehouse and relied on voluntary participation. Amazon certainly isn't going to go out of their way to help them out.
Make corps revenue neutral - they fund all the services for their employees.
Govt fund unemployed including UBI.
Make corp tax rate = base + misery index = base + inflation + unemployment
For example; in this scenario if we offered individuals far stronger welfare benefits (schooling benefits, UBI etc) the odds are that very few people would be warehouse workers for Amazon. Alternatively, if we we forced companies to pay for this welfare (such as with progressive taxation based on # of individuals working and on welfare), then they would offer higher wages and with higher wages gives greater mobility.
Make no mistake, this is a feature not a bug of our system. It is designed to keep the poor working in jobs that maintain their poverty.
You can't hire people and pay them less than their output.
If you tax Amazon more because they hire low skilled workers then the MPL of each low skill worker decrease. Does that increase or decrease the incentive to hire these people? what happens to the price of labor when demand drops?
If your options are pay a worker more than they produce or pay a similar amount in tax, aggregate wages will go down, not up.
Let the market decide how much employees get paid and increase taxes on corporations to fund a social safety net and remove loopholes. Also make any state tax incentives that a state gives a corporation to locate there taxable on the federal level.
Holding the employer as responsible leads to things like employer provided healthcare, which ties people more strongly to their employer. Weakening the ties between employee and employer makes the workforce more dynamic and mobile.
What’s the scandal?
Without that comparison this title is just flame bait.
If you feel anger when reading that the largest and most profitable companies in the world won’t pay a living wage, the. You should be. There isn’t two side to simple greed and exploitation.
Minimum wage increases generally do not negatively affect employment, but if you set the minimum wage high enough to be a head of household "living wage", it certainly would make people unemployed.
Or instead we could pay people welfare benefits and support them that way.
Also Amazon can't really raise prices without losing sales - I've already shifted many of my purchases because Amazon is too expensive. They don't really have room to raise wages without hurting the people who are buying the products.
People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.
> What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?
To have more money than you had before.
I feel no anger here, people are paid based on the economic value of their output. They are not paid based on their worth as humans. If you want to be paid more you need to be able to do move valuable work.
This is simply false. It’s false just thinking about it, and it’s false from multiple economic studies in the real world. It’s a common falsehood spread by corporations, but it’s false.
First, you can’t have it both ways and say companies “can’t raise prices without losing sales” and then turn around and say, “if you raise wages, you have to raise prices” and “people are paid according to their economic value”. If all of these statements are true, then no one could ever be paid more than their starting wage, because if their pay increased, then sales would go down due to price increases. Even if a person’s perceived economic value increased, they could never be paid commiserate with their value, because that would lead to a decrease in sales. This is obviously false.
Minimum wage increases simply don’t lead to price increases or unemployment or any of the sky is falling predictions typically touted. We’ve known this for over 30 years now. Of course, lest we forget, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been fixed since 2009, months much represents a real wage cut in 2024.
But also, wages generally go up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
(This is "income", which is a superset of wages. I didn't link wages because those are confusing, average wages go up during recessions because the lower earning people get laid off.)
Eventually there will be jobs not worth paying people to do; subsidizing that at the government level seems fine (albeit not capitalistic) but that does require taxation (not necessarily on the higher paying jobs) to cover the shortfall.
Another related one is that it can increase your competitiveness with other countries, basically by making employers stop wasting time and think of more productive things for people to do.
But the main reason they can help is that, insofar as employers are monopsonies (sole payers of wages), they often literally don't know what wages they "should" pay because they don't have any incentive to find out, and in that case setting a higher minimum wage actually causes everyone to become more employed.
For several decades, liberal policies have been driving down the welfare system and the minimum wage. Macron is definitively trying to put a end to the french social welfare system.
That worked out great for the French, after all.
Can you get higher productivity by hiring these workers than Walmart?
If no - then why is Walmart the bad guy for paying their employees more than any other company that would have them?
> Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com
The dumpster fire rises. I love the inversion of responsibility there. I guess everyone should just use GoogleAds Chrome.
Giving workers benefits /increases/ their compensation because it increases their negotiating power. This means they're earning more than they otherwise would. Not less.
If it was less, that would mean benefits are bad and we should take them away!
Why would they give someone more because they come to them with no alternative and under pressure from the government to take any Job.
The problem of these bad economic takes is that they make the assumption that if only these greedy companies paid employees more money, all of society's problems would be fixed. We already know that this isn't true. Americans already has the highest incomes in the world. The San Francisco residents have highest incomes in America, but continue to have the worst rates of homelessness in America. Throwing more money won't solve fundamentally broken healthcare and housing systems.
Not true.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-oa...
You see even more homelessness in nearby Oakland, whose residents are still some of the wealthiest in America.