4 ms·

How come Amazon makes so much money, pays next to no tax, floods countries with Chinese junk and pay employees below living wage? How is it legal? The system is

How come Amazon makes so much money, pays next to no tax, floods countries with Chinese junk and pay employees below living wage? How is it legal? The system is broken.

danuker 5y ago
The bigger a company, the more disposable its employees. When you quit, you lose 100% of your income, but when Amazon fires you, they lose 0.0001% of their productivity. This is why I am in support of unions in general.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  I think more effective would be if salaries were tied to company revenue (Not profits, as they disappear with creative accounting), so that employee gets a fair share. Offshoring work to countries without employee protections should be illegal as well. If revenue-salaries gets company under, they could apply for tax credits. I think unions need a reform and more accountability. Often they work in their own interest instead of employees.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    That is closer to a shareholder than an employee type of relation.
  - dbrueck 5y ago
    Tying it to revenues sounds nice, but isn't feasible. Or, in order to make it feasible, the slice the employees get would have to be vanishingly small in order to mitigate the risk.
dbrueck 5y ago
Well... this perspective oversimplifies things a bit. Amazon pays little or no corporate tax, but it still pays a lot in other taxes (such as payroll taxes). See, for example, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2019/02/22/why-amazon-pays-no-corporate-taxes/?sh=7d73e47654d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2019/02/22/why.... Legal corporate tax breaks are used to encourage incentives that we (as a society) want. We can and should continually monitor and tweak them, but as a concept they are not inherently bad - I mean, Amazon is now this enormous beast, but it's also an enormous beast that created over a million jobs.

4 ms·

How come Amazon makes so much money, pays next to no tax, floods countries with Chinese junk and pay employees below living wage? How is it legal? The system is

by intricatedetail 5y ago

How come Amazon makes so much money, pays next to no tax, floods countries with Chinese junk and pay employees below living wage? How is it legal? The system is broken.

danuker 5y ago
The bigger a company, the more disposable its employees. When you quit, you lose 100% of your income, but when Amazon fires you, they lose 0.0001% of their productivity. This is why I am in support of unions in general.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  I think more effective would be if salaries were tied to company revenue (Not profits, as they disappear with creative accounting), so that employee gets a fair share. Offshoring work to countries without employee protections should be illegal as well. If revenue-salaries gets company under, they could apply for tax credits. I think unions need a reform and more accountability. Often they work in their own interest instead of employees.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    That is closer to a shareholder than an employee type of relation.
  - dbrueck 5y ago
    Tying it to revenues sounds nice, but isn't feasible. Or, in order to make it feasible, the slice the employees get would have to be vanishingly small in order to mitigate the risk.
dbrueck 5y ago
Well... this perspective oversimplifies things a bit. Amazon pays little or no corporate tax, but it still pays a lot in other taxes (such as payroll taxes). See, for example, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2019/02/22/why-amazon-pays-no-corporate-taxes/?sh=7d73e47654d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2019/02/22/why.... Legal corporate tax breaks are used to encourage incentives that we (as a society) want. We can and should continually monitor and tweak them, but as a concept they are not inherently bad - I mean, Amazon is now this enormous beast, but it's also an enormous beast that created over a million jobs.