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JeffBezos Is Already $40B Richer This Year–While Typical Amazon Worker Made $12K

44 points by dsr12 8y ago

kvgr 8y ago
That makes no sense... net worth is not disposable cash. WTF is this article about.
- gorbachev 8y ago
  It's about how (certain types) of workers get shafted in favor of shareholders.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  the inane jealously used by politicians everyday when the election cycle is spinning up
infocollector 8y ago
Regulate that either investors or employees can not make more than 10X of minimum employee wage? Immaterial on how much they invest or have stocks. That way there is money available for more companies, and employees are paid fairly?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- poster123 8y ago
  That just encourages companies to subcontract out low-wage work rather than doing it in-house. The low-wage workers themselves are not better off. I believe that regulations on 401(k) plan participation have already encouraged companies to shed low-wage workers.
  - infocollector 8y ago
    When they game that regulation, then regulate sub-contracting. This is a cat and mouse game. The problem is, currently the mouse (regulators) - are dead.
    - InitialLastName 8y ago
      Wait, aren't the companies' anti-social behaviors the mouse, and the people trying to hunt down those behaviors (regulators) the cat? It may just be me; I always thought that the cat was doing the hunting in a "cat and mouse" game.
_coveredInBees 8y ago
This is an absolutely ridiculous article. There is zero substance to it, nor any meaningful discussion of any sort. I kinda expected more from an article on Time :-/
whitepoplar 8y ago
The problem isn't that some people have a lot of money. The problem (in America) is that too many people fall through the cracks. I think a healthy society would be one where there's a strong social floor, but uncapped upside potential for those who want to pursue it. However, if a company gets government support, de facto or otherwise, then I'm 100% in favor of pay caps.
- lovich 8y ago
  It wouldnt be a problem that people made too much money if it wasn't for the fact that those people are making too much money by taking it from others. You can grow the pie and everyone wins, but when executives go from a few multiples of an average workers pay to several hundred[1], thats a zero sum game [1]http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/ceo-pay-ratio-2016/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/ceo-pay-ratio-2016/
  - TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
    Does that 40B translate into more innovation or production from him? I don't think so.
    - datamingle 8y ago
      There is no way Bezos could pursue Blue Origin as fast as he has without being having multiple Billions of net worth. Rockets are expensive and extremely risky. So your premise is incorrect.
      - lovich 8y ago
        Have they produced anything actually useful yet and the capital wouldn't have dissapeared from the economy if it was shared more equally. Pointing to a billionaire's hobby as a reason he deserves to keep billions instead of his workers getting a living wage seems like a weak argument
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  I disagree. In America I think it’s more than just “some people fall through the cracks.” It’s a lot of people, and it’s not some unfortunate accident that befalls the occasional worker, it’s a systemic problem affecting tens of millions of Americans. The kind of poverty we have in America, the richest nation on earth per capita, is insane. And it happens because those in charge are satisfied. Who’s in charge? The people who can afford to buy the favor of politicians. They LOVE the huge supply of desperate workers we have because it means big profits. And that’s what this article is about.
in0v8r 8y ago
Here’s another way to look at the staggering amount of money Jeff Bezos has made so far in 2018. Amazon has an estimated total 566,000 employees worldwide. If the company CEO decided to pass along his $40 billion in increased net worth in 2018 to his workers, each of them would get about $70,000—which is more than twice the median Amazon employee’s salary. These statements are always ridiculous to me. There is no way he could convert $40B to cash and everything else stay the same.
- MR4D 8y ago
  I think the point of that is to show an order of magnitude. He could always give his stock away on a restricted basis. Same result, right?
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    No - as the restrictions fall off, the probable number of sellers rise and the price falls - some of the current value of his holdings reflects the fact that they are not at play in the market - its the old supply/demand at work
    - vec 8y ago
      I think you're getting too tangled up in the specific framing device the article uses. There's no easy way for Jeff Bezos to conjure up $40B in cash to hand out as bonuses, but there are plenty of ways he could have not made that $40B in the first place. For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash. They'd be fine. Jeff Bezos is prioritizing growth and shareholder value but it's entirely within his powers to prioritize other things, like paying his employees a living wage all the way down the pay scale. Amazon would be a slightly smaller and less important company with a somewhat lower share price and the world would be a better place. When he says that he doesn't have anything other than space exploration to spend his money on what he means, in part, is there's nothing he can change without negatively impacting the metrics he cares about. The point of this argument is that he could choose to care about different metrics.
extralego 8y ago
$166/week before taxes. We consider that “employed”? How can anybody live like that? I can’t imagine. Housing would be out of the question, but not having housing would be every bit as unsustainable. Considering the variablility in different prison or slavery experiences, I cannot help but wonder about the overlap in quality of life provided by one of these vs. $12,000/yr wage earnings in the contemporary US. While slavery won’t guarantee shelter, it does incentivize providing it. Prison even guarantees it. A $12,000/yr wage makes both food and shelter into a critical compromise.
- moltar 8y ago
  Maybe they are part time? It’s “average worker” after all
  - extralego 8y ago
    Do you mean to imply that this is their income by choice? Because they don’t want to work more than this? This sounds like a bold accusation. Let’s not play dumb. Part-time work is preferred by low-wage employers because it skirts providing benefits and job security. I content with this as a seasoned professional. I can’t in any honesty imagine low-wage workers would not face this problem to a larger degree. “Average worker”...OK, even worse. So there are enough workers at Amazon warehouses making making less than that to give us an average of $12,000/year. I’m sorry, I do not get your point at all.
    - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
      Possibly the implication was that this is one of several jobs they are forced to work in order eat and have housing, which is not pleasant, but common enough to approach 'average'.
    - lainga 8y ago
      I didn't see anything approaching an implication there.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
otakucode 8y ago
When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be able to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked from 96 to 40). Now with the computer revolution, society says 'theyre not even doing the work, the machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and since 1980, wages have been nearly frozen despite astronomically rising productivity due to technology. It would make sense that this continues until families are starving. There may never be another New Deal, though, because when that originally came around you couldn't shut down any discussion of helping people just by whispering the word 'socialism'.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  > When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be able to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked from 96 to 40). You are missing the part of the story where that happened in europe, and people fled europe to go to the US where those things did not happen at all, and where even Marx said that the government was not oppressing its people like they did in England. Maybe it had something to do with europe being an aristocracy back then.
  - lovich 8y ago
    Are you actually arguing that workers were not oppressed in the US during the industrial Revolution? Here's a few examples off the top of my head. Threw in a modern one with wage theft just in case you think times have changed as well [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... [3]https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-slaughters-strikers-at-ludlow-colorado https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-slaughte... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th... [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store [6]https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-th...

44 points by dsr12 8y ago

kvgr 8y ago

That makes no sense... net worth is not disposable cash. WTF is this article about.

gorbachev 8y ago
It's about how (certain types) of workers get shafted in favor of shareholders.
Shivetya 8y ago
the inane jealously used by politicians everyday when the election cycle is spinning up

infocollector 8y ago

Regulate that either investors or employees can not make more than 10X of minimum employee wage? Immaterial on how much they invest or have stocks. That way there is money available for more companies, and employees are paid fairly?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
poster123 8y ago
That just encourages companies to subcontract out low-wage work rather than doing it in-house. The low-wage workers themselves are not better off. I believe that regulations on 401(k) plan participation have already encouraged companies to shed low-wage workers.
- infocollector 8y ago
  When they game that regulation, then regulate sub-contracting. This is a cat and mouse game. The problem is, currently the mouse (regulators) - are dead.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    Wait, aren't the companies' anti-social behaviors the mouse, and the people trying to hunt down those behaviors (regulators) the cat? It may just be me; I always thought that the cat was doing the hunting in a "cat and mouse" game.

_coveredInBees 8y ago

This is an absolutely ridiculous article. There is zero substance to it, nor any meaningful discussion of any sort. I kinda expected more from an article on Time :-/

whitepoplar 8y ago

The problem isn't that some people have a lot of money. The problem (in America) is that too many people fall through the cracks. I think a healthy society would be one where there's a strong social floor, but uncapped upside potential for those who want to pursue it. However, if a company gets government support, de facto or otherwise, then I'm 100% in favor of pay caps.

lovich 8y ago
It wouldnt be a problem that people made too much money if it wasn't for the fact that those people are making too much money by taking it from others. You can grow the pie and everyone wins, but when executives go from a few multiples of an average workers pay to several hundred[1], thats a zero sum game [1]http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/ceo-pay-ratio-2016/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/ceo-pay-ratio-2016/
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
  Does that 40B translate into more innovation or production from him? I don't think so.
  - datamingle 8y ago
    There is no way Bezos could pursue Blue Origin as fast as he has without being having multiple Billions of net worth. Rockets are expensive and extremely risky. So your premise is incorrect.
    - lovich 8y ago
      Have they produced anything actually useful yet and the capital wouldn't have dissapeared from the economy if it was shared more equally. Pointing to a billionaire's hobby as a reason he deserves to keep billions instead of his workers getting a living wage seems like a weak argument
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I disagree. In America I think it’s more than just “some people fall through the cracks.” It’s a lot of people, and it’s not some unfortunate accident that befalls the occasional worker, it’s a systemic problem affecting tens of millions of Americans. The kind of poverty we have in America, the richest nation on earth per capita, is insane. And it happens because those in charge are satisfied. Who’s in charge? The people who can afford to buy the favor of politicians. They LOVE the huge supply of desperate workers we have because it means big profits. And that’s what this article is about.

in0v8r 8y ago

Here’s another way to look at the staggering amount of money Jeff Bezos has made so far in 2018. Amazon has an estimated total 566,000 employees worldwide. If the company CEO decided to pass along his $40 billion in increased net worth in 2018 to his workers, each of them would get about $70,000—which is more than twice the median Amazon employee’s salary. These statements are always ridiculous to me. There is no way he could convert $40B to cash and everything else stay the same.

MR4D 8y ago
I think the point of that is to show an order of magnitude. He could always give his stock away on a restricted basis. Same result, right?
- MarkMMullin 8y ago
  No - as the restrictions fall off, the probable number of sellers rise and the price falls - some of the current value of his holdings reflects the fact that they are not at play in the market - its the old supply/demand at work
  - vec 8y ago
    I think you're getting too tangled up in the specific framing device the article uses. There's no easy way for Jeff Bezos to conjure up $40B in cash to hand out as bonuses, but there are plenty of ways he could have not made that $40B in the first place. For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash. They'd be fine. Jeff Bezos is prioritizing growth and shareholder value but it's entirely within his powers to prioritize other things, like paying his employees a living wage all the way down the pay scale. Amazon would be a slightly smaller and less important company with a somewhat lower share price and the world would be a better place. When he says that he doesn't have anything other than space exploration to spend his money on what he means, in part, is there's nothing he can change without negatively impacting the metrics he cares about. The point of this argument is that he could choose to care about different metrics.

extralego 8y ago

$166/week before taxes. We consider that “employed”? How can anybody live like that? I can’t imagine. Housing would be out of the question, but not having housing would be every bit as unsustainable. Considering the variablility in different prison or slavery experiences, I cannot help but wonder about the overlap in quality of life provided by one of these vs. $12,000/yr wage earnings in the contemporary US. While slavery won’t guarantee shelter, it does incentivize providing it. Prison even guarantees it. A $12,000/yr wage makes both food and shelter into a critical compromise.

moltar 8y ago
Maybe they are part time? It’s “average worker” after all
- extralego 8y ago
  Do you mean to imply that this is their income by choice? Because they don’t want to work more than this? This sounds like a bold accusation. Let’s not play dumb. Part-time work is preferred by low-wage employers because it skirts providing benefits and job security. I content with this as a seasoned professional. I can’t in any honesty imagine low-wage workers would not face this problem to a larger degree. “Average worker”...OK, even worse. So there are enough workers at Amazon warehouses making making less than that to give us an average of $12,000/year. I’m sorry, I do not get your point at all.
  - blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    Possibly the implication was that this is one of several jobs they are forced to work in order eat and have housing, which is not pleasant, but common enough to approach 'average'.
  - lainga 8y ago
    I didn't see anything approaching an implication there.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

otakucode 8y ago

When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be able to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked from 96 to 40). Now with the computer revolution, society says 'theyre not even doing the work, the machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and since 1980, wages have been nearly frozen despite astronomically rising productivity due to technology. It would make sense that this continues until families are starving. There may never be another New Deal, though, because when that originally came around you couldn't shut down any discussion of helping people just by whispering the word 'socialism'.

conanbatt 8y ago
> When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be able to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked from 96 to 40). You are missing the part of the story where that happened in europe, and people fled europe to go to the US where those things did not happen at all, and where even Marx said that the government was not oppressing its people like they did in England. Maybe it had something to do with europe being an aristocracy back then.
- lovich 8y ago
  Are you actually arguing that workers were not oppressed in the US during the industrial Revolution? Here's a few examples off the top of my head. Threw in a modern one with wage theft just in case you think times have changed as well [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... [3]https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-slaughters-strikers-at-ludlow-colorado https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-slaughte... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th... [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store [6]https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-th...