No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or its competitors.
> No one who can hold down a job and is currently employed should need government assistance to survive.
The outcome of absolutes like these is that we would remove government assistance to those who are employed (excluding those who are handicapped, etc). You could fix it by raising the minimum wage higher - up to a point where government assistance is unnecessary. And it's on the government and the voters that they don't do that, not on Amazon.
Absolutes come with hard boundaries, and collectively, we've decided that those hard boundaries are suboptimal. Hence the status quo.
Companies exist by paying market wages. The whole point of the minimum wage is to eliminate jobs whose market pay would be below the minimum wage.
Lots of anti-Amazon ranting in the comments, but no one's outlining a clear solution beyond raising the minimum wage. (Yes, it's hopelessly naive to expect a large, powerful company to pay above market wages just out of principle - when their competitors don't need to).
Anti-disclaimers: I dislike Amazon. I avoid shopping there. I avoid working there. Yet, my biases aren't going to let me discount the fact that I personally know two people who've worked for Amazon - one also at other warehouses - and they liked the job more than the other places they've worked at.
Obviously I don’t mean my comment as a hardline absolute.
But I do mean that able-bodied people with what we would consider a substantial means of employment shouldn’t need government assistance. I’m obviously not talking about edge cases.
You need to apply marginal thinking here. They are better off with welfare benefits, which means it's a good thing that they have them. If you gave them more benefits, they would have more negotiating power and be able to become even more employed[0], and then would you complain more?
The lowest skilled workers at the bottom of the productivity scale don't generate enough value to justify paying them a living wage. If the company is forced to pay a living wage to such workers then management will send the work offshore, or automate it, or just not do it at all. The worker will then have zero wage.
Instead of artificially raising the minimum wage we should put more funding into job training. Help those marginal workers build the skills they need to earn higher wages.
It's not the government assistance that's the problem (that shouldn't carry a stigma per se) - it's the fact that Amazon doesn't pay for it's own externalities (if you can call workforce exploitation an "externality")
Imagine a scenario where "assistance" wasn't stigmatized and Amazon had to pay higher taxes fully proportionate with the cost of paying it's employees properly?
I mean - at that point they might as well pay people properly!
Smartass question: how is it Amazon's externality when they would have been on food stamps without Amazon's job? It is clear that ideally they wouldn't be on food stamps with the job, sure but crediting preexisting problems towards whomever doesn't solve them fully sounds like a recipe for just making things worse.
