So let me get this straight: companies shouldn't be investing money into revitalizing impoverished areas?

It's complicated. When you're the only game in town you enter an ethical gray area where the community is your hostage. Things seem alright now but what happens when the mines run dry?

What a ridiculous way of looking at it. Companies are damned if they do, damned if they don't in the eyes of some, just by the very fact that they are a private entity motivated to make a profit.

Nevermind the fact that from my eyes looking at America from overseas, it seems like companies are the only institutions/organisations that are functioning even remotely in a socially optimal way.

Your government is a disaster and couldn't meaningfully manage the pandemic at all, academia is a disaster and is bankrupting your future, military is a disaster and has heavily underinvested in next generation weapons programs so they could spend more time bombing the middle East, your unions are self-serving enterprises (aren't schools in your most populous state STILL closed due to teacher's unions?), your newspaper are incredibly corrupt across the spectrum.

The only things that seem to work correctly are your companies which are still world-leading and world class. Amazon is a gem in your society, but demonised as if it is the source of all problems.

Excellent comment

Is Amazon a monopsony employer in this town? It sounds like they aren't since their warehouse created 1500 jobs and the population is 27000.

Assuming 60% of the population is employed (roughly more than the US average), that's just under a tenth of the workforce of 16k. Assuming 50% of the workforce is employed by small businesses (slightly more than national average), that makes them a fifth of all people employed by companies large enough to afford to really push local politics around. It's enough numbers to swing most controversial issues

It's not company town level of influence, though. A defining feature of which IIRC is that the company owned most or all other businesses in the town and often extracted most of the workers wage through extortionate pricing of basic goods and services.

Didn't Walmart do this in a lot of small towns? And sometimes just pack up and leave? What happens when they leave?

>> Didn't Walmart do this in a lot of small towns? And sometimes just pack up and leave? What happens when they leave?

I think a good question to ask before is what happens if they dont come in the first place? If I were a resident in a town wanting jobs, i'd probably be more excited about jobs arriving than the possibility they might eventually disappear.

Walmart doesn't go in blind, they are in the business of extraction. Typically they look to setup a regional store in an area where towns already have optometrists, florists, sporting goods stores, grocers, bakers, homegoods, electronics, hardware, autoparts, the entire town basically. What happens if they didn't come in the first place is life continues in a more decentralized and localized manner, and less of the taxable profit is carted out of the county. Presumably these optometrists and sporting goods store owners of the past paid their income and property taxes from their salaries locally in the area.

I dunno, there doesn't seem like a simple answer to this. If the choice is between starving or working for a heartless/soulless corporation doing the bare minimum, the system has failed miserably

> So let me get this straight: companies shouldn't be investing money into revitalizing impoverished areas?

No, they should do so, just not be so exploitative about it (e.g. deliberately going into areas full of desperate people, for the reason of using that desperation to exert maximum control with minimum accountability).

The lowest paid person at Amazon is earning well over the median wage in Bessemer, Alabama.

Amazon could probably have no problem staffing the center at $11/hr there, but they're paying $18-$22 instead. How on earth can you define that as 'exploitation'? It's borderline charity, given the observable labor market equilibrium there.

Paying someone more money does not make working conditions less exploitative.

Is the lowest Amazon job as easy and safe as the below median jobs in Bessemer?

Speedwalking an Amazon warehouse carrying objects, run by hyper-optimizing automation that times tasks to the second, is different from leaning on idle cash register at McDonalds, or slowly pushing a vacuum cleaner.

So your issue is specifically with the mindset of the company, not the actions themselves? Why would a company ever do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? Shouldn't we just be looking at the result of them following market incentives?

Of course companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Companies will do as much evil as they are allowed to and as much good as they are forced to.

The society should act accordingly.

You're missing my point on purpose.

I am trying to say there is a contradiction in what you are saying. You claim to want companies to move into impoverished areas, but also say doing that is evil. No company has ever moved into an impoverished area to help people, they have always done so out of self interest.

So which do you want, companies to move into impoverished areas (acting evil), or not (acting good, according to you).

I want strong labor protection laws everywhere, so that poor regions don't have to compete on allowing companies to exploit the local workforce.

You've completely changed the direction of the argument.

Like a $15 minimum wage? The one Amazon is paying?

And paying for time spent in security checkpoints, and not counting "walking from workstation to break room" as break time, and compensation for workplace injuries.

This assumes that everything that is benefits a company is evil and everything that hurts a company is good.

Luckily, this isn't true. There are absolutely areas where companies can do good and profit. Moving good jobs into a blighted area is a classic example of a win-win. The company gets low wages, and residents get some of the best jobs they have access to.

So, I think I mostly agree with your stances here, but I take major issue with this:

> Why would a company ever do anything out of the goodness of their hearts?

Because a company is made of people. I won't fault a company for following market incentives, but questions like yours sometimes imply that a company shouldn't do anything out of the goodness of their heart. Then you get people saying stuff like the company's goal must be to maximize shareholder value and stuff, and getting angry when a company does something out of the goodness of their hearts, which I take issue with. <end rant>

You're right, I could have phrased it better.

Have you ever shopped around for lower pricing? The collective population of the world does this when we chose to purchase things for cheaper prices made in countries with more lax environmental and labor laws.

> Have you ever shopped around for lower pricing?

It's one thing to shop for a lower price, it's quite another to notice someone's desperate and take advantage.

> The collective population of the world does this when we chose to purchase things for cheaper prices made in countries with more lax environmental and labor laws.

An a lot of people object to that, too, and they often lack the power to make any other decision.

When you shop around for price you are shopping around for someone to exploit with the lower price. There is no difference, zero sum, if you get a product for less, somewhere in the world someone got less money.

The economy isn't zero sum (from a capitalist PoV) and reducing someone's profit margin isn't exploiting them (from a Marxist PoV). It's important to avoid thinking partial equilibrium effects are the actual effects of something.

This isn't about the total ecconomy, this is a single transaction.

The difference is plausible deniability, I guess.

> companies shouldn't be investing money into revitalizing impoverished areas?

Isn't that what taxes are for?

Where do you think taxes come from?

Carpetbaggers carpetbagging is a story as old as time. At least they're creating jobs and distributing money into the community. It's not like there's a long list of others who would willingly pick up the slack if they went elsewhere.

The way to solve this is with Federal worker's rights reforms specifically around working conditions. It is hard to see that happening with the government very pro-corporation right now.

That's what they did in Seattle.

Amazon is situated in Seattle, and the incompetence and corruption of goverment here is well-known.

I wouldn't search for evil intent in those moves.