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Something that isn't discussed about is how Amazon is able to do this, and that is that they are using their position to pay more for jobs that involve manual l

Something that isn't discussed about is how Amazon is able to do this, and that is that they are using their position to pay more for jobs that involve manual labor work (lots of positions in that 427,000 figure) but also to pay rates that the local businesses that also utilize manual labor cannot compete with. So what ends up happening is that Amazon is placing a dent in the over all labor market of all the industries in the surrounding area, not just their direct competitors. That is a lot of manual labor being impacted. If you have worked in fields with manual labor (factories, construction, fabrication, assembly line of any sort), there is very little employee retention because those employees are just concerned about the next pay stub. Nothing else. This might come across as elitist, and it is, but that is the prevailing mentality of these sort of employees and there is very little to be done about it.

oblio 6y ago
Why should they care about more? These jobs don't pay well and are frequently not very fulfilling. Plus you frequently have crap co-workers and bosses.
1123581321 6y ago
If I understand correctly, you're saying Amazon is driving up the cost of labor. That seems like a good thing, assuming that they are hiring for work that actually needs done.
- troughway 6y ago
  I assure you, in almost every situation, driving up the cost of anything has huge ramifications. You might think "oh that's a good thing, they get paid more". Except they don't. Read on.... When the minimum wage was raised, that very same morning, all the prices of all the goods went up by that exact same amount to compensate for it. In essence, all that was was inflation. Your _actual_ "purchasing power" remained exactly the same as the day before. What Amazon is doing here, which I find to be a pretty blatant case of a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing", is they are artificially increasing manual labor salaries by shoveling in money from all their other divisions, such as AWS. The only thing you will see from this, as I had just mentioned, is a price hike to account for inflation, however in the meantime there will be a number of industries struggling to find workers at affordable salaries because companies like Amazon can just keep playing a different sort of game. To give you an analogy, it's like VCs shoveling money in to startups to prop them up and keep them on top of their advertising channels and pay for employees, even though the company itself could not possibly survive without that kind of capital. The wages here do not make sense for the labor market, but Amazon has so much money stocked up from all their other channels, and of course, the various shady government kickbacks that you are unaware of, that they just don't give a fuck.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Suffice to say I disagree. Higher wages only inflate consumer prices when they are across the board without a corresponding productivity (wealth) increase. Higher wages from one company force the others to compete, and attracts workers from other fields or unemployment, so has two contrasting effects, as what was formerly a general labor pool splits into a more highly trained group, that retains or increases its pay, and a lower paid group due to the influx of applicants. Amazon retail, considered as a whole, is not a loss leader. The nature of its business adds a peculiar wrinkle to this because its growth pushes consumer prices down further than other wage-raising businesses would, even if they were in fact paying excess wages for no reason indefinitely.

oblio 6y ago

Why should they care about more? These jobs don't pay well and are frequently not very fulfilling. Plus you frequently have crap co-workers and bosses.

1123581321 6y ago

If I understand correctly, you're saying Amazon is driving up the cost of labor. That seems like a good thing, assuming that they are hiring for work that actually needs done.

troughway 6y ago
I assure you, in almost every situation, driving up the cost of anything has huge ramifications. You might think "oh that's a good thing, they get paid more". Except they don't. Read on.... When the minimum wage was raised, that very same morning, all the prices of all the goods went up by that exact same amount to compensate for it. In essence, all that was was inflation. Your _actual_ "purchasing power" remained exactly the same as the day before. What Amazon is doing here, which I find to be a pretty blatant case of a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing", is they are artificially increasing manual labor salaries by shoveling in money from all their other divisions, such as AWS. The only thing you will see from this, as I had just mentioned, is a price hike to account for inflation, however in the meantime there will be a number of industries struggling to find workers at affordable salaries because companies like Amazon can just keep playing a different sort of game. To give you an analogy, it's like VCs shoveling money in to startups to prop them up and keep them on top of their advertising channels and pay for employees, even though the company itself could not possibly survive without that kind of capital. The wages here do not make sense for the labor market, but Amazon has so much money stocked up from all their other channels, and of course, the various shady government kickbacks that you are unaware of, that they just don't give a fuck.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Suffice to say I disagree. Higher wages only inflate consumer prices when they are across the board without a corresponding productivity (wealth) increase. Higher wages from one company force the others to compete, and attracts workers from other fields or unemployment, so has two contrasting effects, as what was formerly a general labor pool splits into a more highly trained group, that retains or increases its pay, and a lower paid group due to the influx of applicants. Amazon retail, considered as a whole, is not a loss leader. The nature of its business adds a peculiar wrinkle to this because its growth pushes consumer prices down further than other wage-raising businesses would, even if they were in fact paying excess wages for no reason indefinitely.