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I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive to

I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location. After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need. It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.

drewcoo 4y ago
> this article might bury the lede That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.
dionian 4y ago
> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr. If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help
- SecondTimeAgain 4y ago
  So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're comment.
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    My understanding is that yes if their growth cannot be maintained because of labor shortages they will have to begin shrinking down to the size the labormarket can bear.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The comment was insightful. One part of the company raises wages the other fires to increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get culled. Welcome to 2022
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      But then the warehouses are understaffed... Not sure that's a win
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        That only matter for the productivity team and that group gets fired because they are below their metrics. The hiring group just raised wages and they are doing all they can. The profitability group needs to get the numbers back on track and does the firing. Isolated the decisions make sense.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost […] Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
  - surement 4y ago
    While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't bother to prove that there are real-world benefits beyond the fact that a higher minimum wage sounds good. Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
    - Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
      I tend to agree with this conventional Econ 101 wisdom, but your comment got me wondering if raising the minimum wage would have an effect of driving people to build skills and push harder. I.e. think of a minimum wage as the government saying to workers, ‘Hey, if you want to be part of this economy, you better be at least X productive.’
      - cbsmith 4y ago
        It can also drive businesses to develop models where people are more productive. Productivity isn't just a function of skills and how much people "push", but also how businesses operate.
      - surement 4y ago
        What about teenagers and young adults with no work experience? They are the age groups with the highest levels of unemployment. https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm In fact, very few people earn minimum wage past early adulthood. I don't remember where I got this figure but it was something like 93% of people over the age of 24 make higher than minimum wage. In any case, income is highly correlated with age until retirement ages. https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-income-in-the-united-states-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-... The motivation to earn skills to make more money is there regardless of minimum wage laws.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago, makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is literally all around us right now.
  - fugalfervor 4y ago
    Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing. The number of deaths is probably also higher among those who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of death from COVID was correlated with poverty.
    - jimmaswell 4y ago
      How many 80 year olds were working in fast food in 2019?
      - irrational 4y ago
        Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were not old people. I literally did not know of any old people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat Covid in the 2020s, and she did.
      - fugalfervor 4y ago
        This kind of response is why I asked the question, I guess. I don't know the answer!
      - 4y ago
SoftTalker 4y ago
Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.
- munk-a 4y ago
  That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent extreme abuse of employees.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.
  - esaym 4y ago
    >The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line. I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half. That is not "self regulation".
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      It makes sense, kinda. When your public and private social programs are numerous and disconnected, getting a job can mean losing a lot of benefits while qualifying for others. e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in how everything works. It would have been nice if they had a session on our national pension scheme since I was now obligated to start paying into that.
blagie 4y ago
Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses. This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).
- bsedlm 4y ago
  It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side. Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...
  - abakker 4y ago
    Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
    - ruined 4y ago
      i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation. maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.
efitz 4y ago
> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr. Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
- glmdev 4y ago
  It's not needed right _now_, perhaps, but wait a few months or a few years. Next time the job market shifts back to the employers, the incentives will align the other way.
cameroncf 4y ago
> I think this article might bury the lede a bit: When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour. Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.
FFRefresh 4y ago
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist. 1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr 2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful clarification about how those two statements relate, but the part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political meme. You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school. Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...
  - FFRefresh 4y ago
    Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the journalist (which may or may not be there). Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist, I do hope that we can find leaders (whether people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information environment to improve shared sensemaking. In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared. That's the world of today, and it leads to a very muddied/confused information environment, but I don't believe it's the only possibility for us.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
brightball 4y ago
I guess Walmart decided to become a better employer.
burlesona 4y ago
There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k). If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

drewcoo 4y ago

> this article might bury the lede That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.

dionian 4y ago

> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr. If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help

SecondTimeAgain 4y ago
So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're comment.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  My understanding is that yes if their growth cannot be maintained because of labor shortages they will have to begin shrinking down to the size the labormarket can bear.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  The comment was insightful. One part of the company raises wages the other fires to increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get culled. Welcome to 2022
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    But then the warehouses are understaffed... Not sure that's a win
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      That only matter for the productivity team and that group gets fired because they are below their metrics. The hiring group just raised wages and they are doing all they can. The profitability group needs to get the numbers back on track and does the firing. Isolated the decisions make sense.
throw0101a 4y ago
> If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost […] Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
- surement 4y ago
  While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't bother to prove that there are real-world benefits beyond the fact that a higher minimum wage sounds good. Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
  - Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
    I tend to agree with this conventional Econ 101 wisdom, but your comment got me wondering if raising the minimum wage would have an effect of driving people to build skills and push harder. I.e. think of a minimum wage as the government saying to workers, ‘Hey, if you want to be part of this economy, you better be at least X productive.’
    - cbsmith 4y ago
      It can also drive businesses to develop models where people are more productive. Productivity isn't just a function of skills and how much people "push", but also how businesses operate.
    - surement 4y ago
      What about teenagers and young adults with no work experience? They are the age groups with the highest levels of unemployment. https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm In fact, very few people earn minimum wage past early adulthood. I don't remember where I got this figure but it was something like 93% of people over the age of 24 make higher than minimum wage. In any case, income is highly correlated with age until retirement ages. https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-income-in-the-united-states-by-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-... The motivation to earn skills to make more money is there regardless of minimum wage laws.
idiotsecant 4y ago
When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago, makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is literally all around us right now.
- fugalfervor 4y ago
  Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing. The number of deaths is probably also higher among those who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of death from COVID was correlated with poverty.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    How many 80 year olds were working in fast food in 2019?
    - irrational 4y ago
      Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were not old people. I literally did not know of any old people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat Covid in the 2020s, and she did.
    - fugalfervor 4y ago
      This kind of response is why I asked the question, I guess. I don't know the answer!
    - 4y ago

SoftTalker 4y ago

Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.

munk-a 4y ago
That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent extreme abuse of employees.
kzrdude 4y ago
The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.
- esaym 4y ago
  >The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line. I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half. That is not "self regulation".
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    It makes sense, kinda. When your public and private social programs are numerous and disconnected, getting a job can mean losing a lot of benefits while qualifying for others. e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in how everything works. It would have been nice if they had a session on our national pension scheme since I was now obligated to start paying into that.

blagie 4y ago

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses. This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).

bsedlm 4y ago
It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side. Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...
- abakker 4y ago
  Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures? look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions. All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
  - ruined 4y ago
    i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material. how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it. it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation. maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.

efitz 4y ago

> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr. Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.

glmdev 4y ago
It's not needed right _now_, perhaps, but wait a few months or a few years. Next time the job market shifts back to the employers, the incentives will align the other way.

cameroncf 4y ago

> I think this article might bury the lede a bit: When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour. Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.

FFRefresh 4y ago

>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist. 1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr 2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.

swatcoder 4y ago
I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful clarification about how those two statements relate, but the part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political meme. You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school. Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...
- FFRefresh 4y ago
  Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the journalist (which may or may not be there). Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist, I do hope that we can find leaders (whether people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information environment to improve shared sensemaking. In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared. That's the world of today, and it leads to a very muddied/confused information environment, but I don't believe it's the only possibility for us.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago

brightball 4y ago

I guess Walmart decided to become a better employer.

burlesona 4y ago

There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k). If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]