By almost any account Amazon pays well and has good benefits.
>That Amazon pays so little in tax only shows, to me, that the company Amazon's only concern is to get money and that they don't care about society or humans.
Businesses are always going to spend maximum effort to reduce their tax bills. Perhaps instead of an infinite game of cat and mouse we should consider revamping the tax code to eliminate business taxes. We're not getting the money, we likely never will, and because of the corporate taxes we have special capital gains tax rates. Trying to get Amazon to "pay their fair share" is equivalent to pissing into the wind.
Have you considered that it might be propaganda? Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the employees choose to work at Amazon, right? What are the other jobs like, if people still choose Amazon over the alternatives?
This comment you’ve made is propaganda at best and an intentional lie at worst.
How do you square this with the huge proportion of their employees who rely on food stamps? [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-on-food-sta...
1) Obama (in the ACA) expands food stamp access by making it available to households with an income of <=133% of the poverty line.
2) food stamp enrollment rises significantly.
3) Progressives, clutching their pearls, cite "high" food stamp enrollment as an indication of the need for more Progressive policies!
Amazon can't alter their wage scale based on your family situation. They aren't even allowed to ask about your family situation, it's a protected class.
That is more than double the US Federal minimum wage.
~$31K per year.
Amazon would absolutely burn their entire infrastructure to the ground, salt the earth and piss on the ashes before giving an inch of power to their employees that they couldn't take a mile of back at their leisure, a power dynamic which unions would deny them. That's just who they are.
But yes, the benefits are nice.
No, I'm arguing that corporations aren't moralistic entities, but legalistic entities, and will make decisions based on profit risk versus legal risk instead of morality versus immorality. I never said I thought it was ok.
Amazon pays better than many jobs in their market, and they have a generous health and insurance package. They constantly give training and tutorials about wellness and safety, and they're fastidious about following regulations, sometimes to a Kafkaesque degree. And when no one is looking they'll push you in front of a bus to get to a dime on the sidewalk.
>It’s easy to talk about statistics when you’re not the one at the bottom of this thing you’re so eloquently dismissing
I'm closer to the bottom than you might think. Not everyone here is a SV bubble baby making six figures.
But they are, aren't they?
Don't you understand that corporations are a bunch of person organized into a hierarchy?
Why would anyone claim that people working within a hierarchy are free to make any immoral decision because they manage some people but answer to other?
At most, you're only arguing that some hierarchies refuse to respect morals or legalities because no one is held accountable and were found to have zero consequences.
Companies like Amazon and Facebook re-write the norms of individual consumer and worker dignities in their favor, and then push to make them global. Because people will dismiss objections to these changes as contrivances.
Isn't the propensity to violate basic human rights in such a casual and nonchalant way albeit not systematic... Extremely damning and concerning?
I mean, what is there to say about the sentence "I know they commit crimes that hurt people and society, but not on a regular basis"
Absolutely, and Amazon has some blood on their hands in that regard. But let's not forget that in a capitalist society, incentives start with the consumer. The market doesn't fit for employee quality of life, but consumer quality of life. If people cared as much about labor rights in the US as they do getting their stuff a day earlier and a dollar cheaper, their wallets and their votes would speak for themselves.
>I mean, what is there to say about the sentence "I know they commit crimes that hurt people and society, but not on a regular basis"
You want to know what I really think?
Agriculture and service industries depend on the maintenance of a permanent illegal labor underclass, militias wielding machetes and AK-47s conscript slaves for the mines that supply the world with gemstones and components for the electronics, and those electronics are assembled by children in factories that have no labor laws, but plenty of nets to catch suicides. Every branch of the entertainment industry is lubricated by prostitution and pedophilia. The tech industry exploits neurodivergent people and grinds temp workers and foreign labor into dust to make billionaires out of whatever sociopath can best figure out how to consume the minds, lives and freedoms of the public this week, and it will fight to the death to preserve the ego of a single pedophile apologist and serial harasser rather than be corrupted by the influence of women, people of color and any other marginalized group that would dare take offense, because its puerile morals were founded on and have never matured beyond 4chan.
And then there's the stuff governments get into, legally and with public consent. And then there's the illegal stuff they get away with. And then there's Maude.
What is there to say? For the most part, we're ok with all of it, because we have to be. We wanted these evils, we created them, nurtured them and praised the brutal elegance with which they rent the flesh, and now we're all caught inside the belly of Moloch and there's nothing to do in here but complain about the weather. Hot today, isn't it?
This comment will probably be flagged, and I'm OK with that. I understand.
1. https://gizmodo.com/inspired-by-alabama-coworkers-amazon-wor...
This cannot POSSIBLY go wrong in any way, can it? I'm struggling to understand how that could ever have been approved.