No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.
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!