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Amazon worker’s median pay in 2017: $28,446
- sputniq 9y agoSo much for equality. I guess jeff bezos just thinks it normal
- jdoliner 9y agoThinks what's normal exactly? That not all of his employees get paid an equal amount? I'm inclined to agree that he thinks that's normal, yes. Given that it's true at almost every company in the world, that seems like a reasonable position.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoI’m pretty sure it was about the amount paid not that not everybody is paid the same.
- unpopular42 9y agoSo what exactly is wrong with this amount? And what amount would be the correct amount?
- krapp 9y ago> And what amount would be the correct amount? Full time employees, at any position, should at least be paid a living wage commensurate to the local standard of living.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's driven by Amazon's low prices just as much as it is driven by Bezos' wealth. Customers get the benefit of the low prices. I'm not saying that to congratulate Amazon, I'm pointing out that there are more people involved than Amazon shareholders and employees, people who apparently put low prices ahead of any concerns they have over compensation at Amazon.
- Reedx 9y agoExactly. You can't have high wages and cheap shipping of cheap products. So far people are choosing the latter.
- randyrand 9y agoInequality is natural and just.
- SE4L 9y agoEquality of what? Should one of the people who works in their warehouse in North Carolina make equal pay with a software engineer who lives in Seattle?
- rinchik 9y agoYep. That's the ultimate goal of the far left. Pure utopian Communism. Sad part is that they don't even realize it. The equality of outcome controlled by the Government -- to even think about this concept is scary. This shit will def end with totalitarianism.
- scarface74 9y agoI consider myself to be a "bleeding heart capitalist". I don't believe that we should be increasing the minimum wage because history shows anytime you interfere with the free market, there are unintended consequences. It's also not the role of private businesses to manage social policy. On the other hand, I think the richest country in the world shouldn't have people starving on the street and without basic healthcare. We already know how to square that circle. 1. Universal Healthcare that's not tied to the employer. 2. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, make more people eligible, and make it easier for people to get it during the year to supplement their wages instead of at tax refund time. why go through the circuitous route of forcing companies to pay above market rates and raising prices on everyone? Just give working people money. 3. Better mass transportation to make getting to a job easier without having to have a car. 4. Subsidize child care. If conservatives truly believe in protecting life, caring about children means caring about the born - not just the unborn.
- rinchik 9y agoGreat points, except child care. With subsidized childcare, I’m afraid, you will def be promoting all the wrong (and quite selfish, to be honest) goals and values. Richest country in the world? That’s quite arguable and very common mistake. It’s not fair to compare US to countries with negative GPD (this sentence is sarcastic, not literal). I have been unfortunate enough to to leave in a state built on top of socialist agenda. Where the concept is extremely fragile. Once you increase the government’s role in lives of ordinary people (which sounds great in theory! As per Marx’s and Lenin’s paperwork) you are risking of turning the whole country into the ordinary DMV Office (one we all hate an avoid) wherever you go. That’s a nightmare that’s not that far from reality if we jump collectively on this socialist bandwagon.
- nathanaldensr 9y agoThis is a great article for demonstrating how mean and median can be used to manipulate perception.
- jaysonelliot 9y agoMedian is the appropriate measure to use if you're looking at the overall pay of a company's workforce. Average/mean is disproportionately influenced by a small number of highly paid employees. In this case, the article is clearly demonstrating that despite Amazon's commanding market share, incredible wealth, and the largess bestowed upon their executives, some of their workforce is so poorly paid that they may not even make a living wage.
- goshx 9y agoThat median is not US only.
- baby 9y ago> Median is the appropriate measure to use if you're looking at the overall pay of a company's workforce. I would disagree with that. Imagine this dataset of salaries: [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10] You have around half employees being paid like shit (1) and half being paid well (10), but the median will show a good salary (10).
- WhompingWindows 9y agoYes, I agree. Mean is obviously going to be to the right of median in this income distribution, since there will be many employees making 200k+. >In Seattle, Amazon’s more than 45,000 employees are paid an average of more than $110,000, according to an analysis of individual worker data posted to job review site Glassdoor. The median, or midpoint, of Amazon’s 566,000 individual employee salaries worldwide stood far lower. Granted, we are using average data from Glassdoor, whereas Amazon is self-reporting the median salary information. Plus, Amazon has part-time workers whose wages it annualizes to include the dataset. This makes me wonder though, are they counting the benefits that those workers are not receiving due to their lower number of hours?
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- DimitarIbra9987 9y agonicely done Jeff Bezos, richest person in this world.
- unpopular42 9y agoBezos' duty is to keep costs low and profits high and indeed he does his job well, just look at their stock.
- DimitarIbra9 9y agoand exploit employees.
- randyrand 9y agoExploit = "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)". Sounds like a very good thing for a company to do. No waste.
- unpopular42 9y agoWith their explicit consent.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- elicash 9y agoThis means a very sizable percentage of Amazon's workforce (though not quite half) could qualify for SNAP. "130% of the poverty line for a three-person family is $2,213 a month, or about $26,600 a year." https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-quick-guide-to-snap-eligibility-and-benefits https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-quick-guide-...
- jonknee 9y agoAssuming these minimum wage workers are the only source of income for a family of three.
- epicureanideal 9y agoYou're assuming 2 kids and 1 income earner, though. It's above minimum wage. If we say that's not enough, we should raise minimum wage. Or we should create a society where it's possible for the people currently working for $26k/yr to have a stable roadmap to much higher earnings. But I don't think Amazon alone is to blame for the problem.
- elicash 9y agoI'm not assuming everyone with that salary qualifies. I think we just have different definitions of "sizable." I think given these numbers it's highly likely to be sizable percentage of salaries, essentially, that we're subsidizing for Amazon because of their refusal to pay living wages. What's sizable? 5%? 10%? 30%? Hard to say, and I don't exactly expect Amazon to come forward with these numbers. Edit: Here's an article claiming it's more than 10% in Ohio that are on SNAP: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2018/01/08/amazon-employees-food-stamps-poverty-snap.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2018/01/08/amazon-e...
- jrs95 9y agoAre we subsidizing Amazon, or are we subsidizing irresponsible reproduction? Maybe both?
- SolarNet 9y ago
- bluedino 9y ago>> Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos received $1,681,840 in compensation in 2017, the proxy statement said, $1.6 million of which represents the cost of providing his security. Is that pretty typical for a person who is say, in the richest 5-100 people in the world to spend on security? What kind of protection does that buy?
- Anderkent 9y agoIt does seem pretty low, but at some point I guess the lifestyle changes required become the constraint, not the money.
- hjnilsson 9y agoIf we assume a reasonable bodyguard charges $100 an hour, and he has 2 bodyguards 16 hours a day (or 4 in 2 by 8 hours). 100 * 2 * 16 * 365 = $1.16 million Count in that they need travel, food and hotels along with Bezos, and it’s not unreasonable or excessive.
- duck 9y agoAnd I would assume he has at some sort of protection around the clock, so that seems pretty low actually.
- gowld 9y agoMore to the point, the $1.6M number is wholly irrelevant, an accounting detail due to the "security" issue. Bezos makes $1B-$10B/yr because he is a major shareholder in Amazon. Probably includes private air travel and some bodyguards.
- donarb 9y agoNot irrelevant because the news story is about direct compensation by the company to 2 different classes of employees. Factoring in stock ownership by Bezos is what's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throwaway637h 9y agoThat's more than a junior yearly salary for a software engineer with a degree where I'm from though. With higher taxes, higher prices for consumer electronics and much more expensive gasoline.
- seattle_spring 9y agoAnd, presumably, far lower housing costs and overall CoL.
- scarface74 9y agoAnd probably universal healthcare, and stricter worker protections.
- NegativeLatency 9y agoThat amount isn't much in the US.
- elgenie 9y agoAmazon employs significantly more workers that are stocking warehouses and filling boxes than are writing code. So the median Amazon worker by pay is working in a warehouse, probably entry-level or thereabouts, and is making about $14 an hour.
- krapp 9y ago>So the median Amazon worker by pay is working in a warehouse, probably entry-level or thereabouts, and is making about $14 an hour. Many are not even making that much.
- elgenie 9y agoThat's how a median works, yes. I got the $14 per hour figure from the annual income reported as the median assuming 2080 work hours per year.
- goshx 9y agoWorldwide. No idea if they operate in Brazil, but using it as an example, USD $28,446 in Brazil is a great salary.
- matheus2740 9y agoThe thing is, direct conversions do not really work. I don't think they operate much in Brazil, but if they did, the salaries would be adjusted to the Brazillian reality (minimum wage, average person income, purchasing power, etc), so in reality, it would be much less than 28 grand USD. The more real conversion is to use a purchasing power index, such as the big-mac index. Using the 2018 data for the big-mac index, that would probably equate to mostly 30.000,00 BRL, which is 2500 BRL/month, which is above Brazil's minimum wage, but it's still a very basic salary, probably comparable to earning 2200,00 USD in the US.
- goshx 9y agoThe point is, we don't know how the data was presented by Amazon. I'd expect that the wages reported would be in USD to show how much it actually costs to the company in the United States, and not some weird index. If they pay, say, R$ 30,000.00/year, I doubt they'd report anything other than the direct conversion to USD.
- austincheney 9y agoBefore people comment too much about wage inequality consider for a moment that this ins't a feudal state where people are locked into role and wage limits outside their control. I am a software developer for one of the larger companies and also an Army Reservist. When I go away to do Army stuff I frequently encounter people who work much harder and earn much less than I do in their civilian jobs. Is that fair? I would say, it doesn't matter. I tell those people how being a software developer generally isn't super intense or stressful and you make all this money, but yet the people I tell this to generally don't want to write software. The disparity is that a senior software development position isn't immediately free like a dinner mint at the end of dinner. You have to practice writing software really hard and really invest your time into solving hard problems. In all my experience talking about wage inequality the ultimate disparity that always arises is time spent investing in yourself without any reasonable compensation. EDIT: I did not start programming until age 28. I was already married and had two children.
- Tyrek 9y agoSure, but you're omitting a crucial step - a relative minority of the population were actively enabled and were able to pursue their interests/self-invest/etc. when they were much younger (read: teenaged), which gave them a snowballing competitive advantage as they got older.
- c2kc 9y ago100%
- zdragnar 9y agoI didn't pursue programming as a hobby- and then a career- until later in life than what you are assuming here. In fact, I have worked with a number of people at multiple companies- their first programming jobs- who are older than me. They have all come from lower paying jobs. The key is that they put in effort to change. One was raising two children- an infant and a toddler- and if he wasn't actively coding, he was reading or listening to something programming related. For now, at least, programming is a highly sought-after skill, and with determination and effort, you can get into it. There really aren't any other barriers than (1) saving up for a cheap computer, and (2) having reliable internet access.
- colek42 9y agoThere is this false assumption that people are paid what they are worth. People are paid what the market will bear. $28k is about 13/hour. For places like East TN this is not a horrible wage, and you can live on it. As a comparison, an entry-level position in the military, E1, makes less even when you account for allowances.
- gowld 9y agohttps://www.thebalancecareers.com/enlisted-paygrades-and-ranks-3356726 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/enlisted-paygrades-and-ran... says E1-E3 are for basic training and first assignment, and E4 is $25k/yr. Plus I suppose (not sure) that military has much better health insurance (and other benefits, like food and maybe housing?) than Amazon warehouse employees
- ceejayoz 9y agoI'd suspect the military jobs have substantially better job security, as well.
- colek42 9y agoHousing is usually a shared apartment on base with high restrictions. Kinda like a college dorm room with lots of rules. Heath care is okay, it is free, which is nice, but military hospitals sometimes do not attract the best and brightest. We had some issues over the years. You get about $300 or so for a food allowance each month unless you live on base, then you get crappy chow hall food.
- colek42 9y ago
- swebs 9y agoHere's the source report in question: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9NjkyMDE5fENoaWxkSUQ9NDAyOTkzfFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1 http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N...
- sol_remmy 9y ago$14 an hour is not as bad as you think. Median nursing salary in England = 23300 pounds = 32300 usd. So the median amazon warehouse worker makes 87% of what the median nurse makes in the U.K. Is that really so bad? Source on median salary: https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Registered_Nurse_(RN)/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Registered_Nurse_(R...
- songzme 9y agoIn the bay area, I'm currently paying 5 people 2k / mo and I've been paying them that much for about a year. They are incredibly hardworking and work about 12 hours / day. I mainly recruit from CalWorks (a public assistance program that provides cash aid and services to eligible families that have a child(ren) in the home), which is the same place that Amazon gets alot of their warehouse staff from. Every-time I pay them, I feel a sense of guilt/discomfort. 2k / month is really hard to live on in the bay area, especially when you have kids. I want to pay them more, but its all I can afford with my current salary. By "Work" they are learning and teaching each other JavaScript (Node, React, ReactNative, Vue, Redux, GraphQL) and building out some of my ideas. Hopefully they can find a job as a software engineer soon, it would change their lives permanently for the better!
- sol_remmy 9y agoDon't forget that their cash assistance/stipend from CalWorks counts as part of their salary. So their real take home is 2k/month + monthly stipend. You're doing incredible work though. You're allowing them to essentially apprenticeship with you to learn software development. Bravo sir
- ommunist 9y agoIf I have a chicken and you don’t, on average we have half chicken each.
- pg_bot 9y agoThe headline falls into what I would characterize as a "useless fact". The number is meant to manipulate you into clicking the article based on the belief that Amazon is unfairly compensating its employees. While I'm not an advocate for Amazon's work practices, this article provides no further analysis than a copy pasted line from a financial report. We need more context and analysis if you actually want to understand whether that number is or is not unreasonable.
- elicash 9y ago> The number is meant to manipulate you into clicking the article based on the belief that Amazon is unfairly compensating its employees. How is it manipulative to report on median pay for a company? This is as straightforwardly reported as possible, and not at all click-baity or manipulative. We shouldn't be afraid of basic facts that actually capture important information in an objective way. It's not a misleading number, it provides real insights into Amazon.
- ddingus 9y agoRight. Amazon, right along with other big players are not paying people well enough to make it. Increasing numbers of them don't, and that costs all of us while eroding demand needed for the economy to grow and perform for all of us. In a very real sense, failure to fund a better, more equitable, just standard of living means it won't exist at all. Flat out, it is unacceptable to make billions while a majority are on public assistance.
- pravinva 9y agoDemand is eroding? Any data to back up the wildly made up fact?
- ddingus 9y agoIt's not made up at all, and data isn't hard to find. There are two kinds of demand: The kind I wrote to here is backed by available, liquid dollars. Amazon, and others, paying people effectively less than it costs them to exist and work, very sharply impacts this kind of demand. An easy example can be seen with entertainment. For most people, entertainment dollars are largely fixed. That fixed amount is very low, when few dollars are available, not dedicated to basic needs. The other kind of demand is not backed by liquid dollars, and it's out there, growing, but not a meaningful part of any markets available to service it. That kind of demand is growing in the USA, with a clear majority of people now experiencing it. There aren't any free lunches here. When we don't pay people enough to fund reasonable, modest lives, we are basically requiring everyone else to subsidize their labor, and that cost gets distributed nationwide. If those people were businesses, they would have shut down by now. Since they are people, that would mean dying basically, and we prevent that with some safety net type spending and assistance. Should those programs be a part of Amazon and others business model? I feel they should not as that was never the intent. Those using them that way are doing all of us more harm than good too.
- oliwarner 9y agoConsider how much of the bottom tier is excluded by making drivers, cleaners, etc work as self employed contractors instead of "workers". I can only imagine it shunts the median up a long way.
- stevespang 9y agoApple’s average salary, according to data research firm Paysa, was $100,733. That includes lots of retails workers at Apple’s stores (though obviously not the low-paid workers at contractors like Taiwan-based FoxConn Technology Co., which do a lot of the assembly work on Apple's products). At Google, which has no retail workers, the average employee salary is $190,854. At Facebook the average is $203,894. We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com Inc. is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That says at all.