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Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion. So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion. So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years. If you expand consideration from just him to all of Amazon's major shareholders, top management, board members, etc., and then compare to the warehouse workers, "contractor" delivery drivers, etc., it's plain to see that a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards. The way the power relations work is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles, though thankfully it's quite a bit less physically violent.

astrange 2y ago
> So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years. He was paid that by Amazon investors, who basically want to give him money because he's Jeff Bezos. If the warehouse workers owned the shares, those investors would have to want to give just as much money to them, but it doesn't seem like they do. (Clearer case is Elon, who is pretty obviously super rich entirely because a lot of people want to specifically give him money. They're investor celebrities.)
gottorf 2y ago
> Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion Computing someone's net worth by multiplying the number of shares he holds by the last-traded price of that share yields a theoretical number that's only good for placing people on Forbes rich lists and as fodder for demagogues. It is not possible for him to actually convert all of his shares to $200B. > gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years If anyone could be blamed for this, blame the Fed for endless ZIRP, QE, and other asset-inflationary policies that made it so that capital had to pour into companies like AMZN. > a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards A large group of people who are compensated for the work they do and are free to choose to work for a different employer. > is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles Is it valid to compare someone who started a company in and then benefited from a system of (mostly) voluntary exchange of goods and services to feudal lords who extracted rents from their peasants under the threat of violence?
- jacobolus 2y ago
  Amazon has been incredibly hostile to labor rights for their employees, including worker safety, fair compensation, parental leave, provision of basic benefits, reasonable schedules, collective bargaining, etc. They've been cited by federal labor judges for systematic unlawful behavior, and are under congressional investigation. Hopefully there will be some real consequences sometime soon. I'm not holding my breath though. In the markets for package delivery and warehouse logistics, Amazon's uncompetitive and worker-abusive business practices and basic design have been putting systematic pressure on other firms to similarly mistreat their own workers to compete. In the more general retail market, Amazon's unlawful (but thus far substantially unpunished) anti-competitive business practices drive smaller competitors out of business and extract rents not just from Amazon's own workers/contractors and suppliers but from the economy broadly. > are free to choose to work for a different employer This is certainly more true than in a feudal economy where peasants are literally considered the personal property of the lord, but in many of the relevant local labor markets Amazon is a disproportionately large and influential employer without enough local employer competition that employees can easily switch jobs. The only real way for employees to get a fair bargain in such situations is collective bargaining via a union, but Amazon is notoriously opposed to union formation at its facilities, which it blocks unlawfully wherever it can. Amazon doesn't use systematic physical brutality or murder to maintain their power, as done by e.g. feudal lords or drug gangs, but they do routinely (unlawfully) threaten workers with loss of pay/benefits or termination when those workers exercise their legally protected rights, and unlawfully follow through on those threats when workers persist. Since most people need to collect a paycheck to survive, this kind of violence is not entirely dissimilar to more direct physical attack.
  - nomel 2y ago
    > Amazon's uncompetitive Could you expand on this? If they were uncompetitive, from a worker perspective, they wouldn't have any workers. Having workers means they are the best choice out of all the other companies competing for those workers. It, quite literally, means all the other choices were even worse!
    - 2y ago

astrange 2y ago

> So he has personally gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years. He was paid that by Amazon investors, who basically want to give him money because he's Jeff Bezos. If the warehouse workers owned the shares, those investors would have to want to give just as much money to them, but it doesn't seem like they do. (Clearer case is Elon, who is pretty obviously super rich entirely because a lot of people want to specifically give him money. They're investor celebrities.)

gottorf 2y ago

> Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 30 years ago and is now worth more than $200 billion Computing someone's net worth by multiplying the number of shares he holds by the last-traded price of that share yields a theoretical number that's only good for placing people on Forbes rich lists and as fodder for demagogues. It is not possible for him to actually convert all of his shares to $200B. > gained about $7 billion per year on average, heavily loaded toward more recent years If anyone could be blamed for this, blame the Fed for endless ZIRP, QE, and other asset-inflationary policies that made it so that capital had to pour into companies like AMZN. > a large group who does most of the work ends up begging for scraps while a small owner elite collects the lion's share of the rewards A large group of people who are compensated for the work they do and are free to choose to work for a different employer. > is not fundamentally all that different from a feudal peasant society divided between peasants and nobles Is it valid to compare someone who started a company in and then benefited from a system of (mostly) voluntary exchange of goods and services to feudal lords who extracted rents from their peasants under the threat of violence?

jacobolus 2y ago
Amazon has been incredibly hostile to labor rights for their employees, including worker safety, fair compensation, parental leave, provision of basic benefits, reasonable schedules, collective bargaining, etc. They've been cited by federal labor judges for systematic unlawful behavior, and are under congressional investigation. Hopefully there will be some real consequences sometime soon. I'm not holding my breath though. In the markets for package delivery and warehouse logistics, Amazon's uncompetitive and worker-abusive business practices and basic design have been putting systematic pressure on other firms to similarly mistreat their own workers to compete. In the more general retail market, Amazon's unlawful (but thus far substantially unpunished) anti-competitive business practices drive smaller competitors out of business and extract rents not just from Amazon's own workers/contractors and suppliers but from the economy broadly. > are free to choose to work for a different employer This is certainly more true than in a feudal economy where peasants are literally considered the personal property of the lord, but in many of the relevant local labor markets Amazon is a disproportionately large and influential employer without enough local employer competition that employees can easily switch jobs. The only real way for employees to get a fair bargain in such situations is collective bargaining via a union, but Amazon is notoriously opposed to union formation at its facilities, which it blocks unlawfully wherever it can. Amazon doesn't use systematic physical brutality or murder to maintain their power, as done by e.g. feudal lords or drug gangs, but they do routinely (unlawfully) threaten workers with loss of pay/benefits or termination when those workers exercise their legally protected rights, and unlawfully follow through on those threats when workers persist. Since most people need to collect a paycheck to survive, this kind of violence is not entirely dissimilar to more direct physical attack.
- nomel 2y ago
  > Amazon's uncompetitive Could you expand on this? If they were uncompetitive, from a worker perspective, they wouldn't have any workers. Having workers means they are the best choice out of all the other companies competing for those workers. It, quite literally, means all the other choices were even worse!
  - 2y ago