“I agree. Workers with full-time jobs should make a living wage. It’s a travesty that companies such as Amazon and WalMart have founders and upper-echelon employees who make fortunes while their employees collect food stamps and other benefits at taxpayer expense.”
And fast-food joints ought to pay 15 an hour too?
They aren’t slaves. They can quit. They also aren’t morons when they filled out an application to work there. The pay wasn’t sprung on them 4 months after starting.
The thing is that if they all quit, Amazon has enough cash to make the whole thing automated.
Bull crap.
They do not have enough cash to make it all automated.
They would do it now if they could, they can’t. Their profit margins were so thin to non-existent for years and if Bezos said no profits for 3 years but when we are done we’ll have cut our work force in half the markets would reward him richly.
Will a company like Amazon be automated for the most part? 20-40 years from now very likely. Could they do it now? No way. Not without fleet ready self -driving vehicles, automated picking and fulfillment centers and certainly not from a customer service and retail development standpoint.
I may not be socialist in the respects that Bernie is associated with but it is not a free market or capitalism when large profitable companies are taking direct advantage of government programs like Medicare, SNAP, WIC and who knows what else to contribute to an employees overall survival abilities.
Spare me the entry level argument, we’re not talking about burger flipping jobs for teenagers.
If you’ve never seen the size and scope of an Amazon fulfillment center multiply the biggest Wal Mart Supercenter you’ve been in by 10 and the employees accordingly. Then know they’re all hourly, they aren’t bonus or profit sharing eligible, they don’t receive health care, aren’t unionized and aren’t paid for waiting in line 2+ hours a week waiting to be scanned that they’re not shoplifting.
Amazon purposely builds these places with depressed wages, double digit unemployment and rural areas for the express purposes of running a de facto company town.
If they could get away with it they are evil enough that they would pay these workers in script..
$10 or so would be a living wage for a full time employee. I'm assuming it might take two wage earners in a house in order to make ends meet. In areas of the country where the cost of living is high, yeah, they should get enough money to survive. In those areas, fast food should cost enough to reflect economic realities.
It's disingenuous to say "they can go elsewhere". As long as they have to compete with invader labor, businesses will be able to keep wages low. The other issue is bring a lot more higher-paying jobs back to the US. What has to end is access to cheap labor that undermines the US worker.