This despot now employs nearly 600,000 people worldwide and that's a bad thing? The average pay for an Amazon warehouse worker in the UK is £8.28 per hour against the national minimum wage of £7.28, so he's paying more than he needs to which seems to fly in the face of your reported rampant avoidance and lobbying techniques he employs to reduce his outgoings. By the way I believe every word you wrote.
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In the UK, as I've already proven, he is paying people above the minimum rate.
Amazon is far from alone in this, but they are definitely part of the problem, not part of the solution.
You are in the UK, and the UK has better worker protection laws, and more resistance to corporate lobbying, from what I understand. However, that is definitely not the case in the US where the bulk of his employees are, or in some other countries where he has bases.
Yes, he pays above minimum wage in the US as well, but in the US, minimum wage is a joke, and it's effectively impossible to live on it without substantial outside assistance. It's a well-below-poverty-line wage. Even double minimum wage is difficult to survive on even at the best of times in much of the US, particularly around Amazon's office and warehouse bases, where their presence has driven up local prices and greatly increased competition for housing and jobs.
The man has given nearly $107m to various charities,
Wow, really? A whole $107 million? For a man worth over $140
billion, that amounts to little more than a rounding error on his yearly income statement. His net worth rose $40 billion last year. That's over $109 million
per day. His contributions are less than he makes in a single day. Pardon me if I don't bow down and kiss his feet because he can afford to throw away a bit less than one day's pay on PR and tax writeoffs. I wish I could afford to spend a full day's pay on charitable contributions.
Meanwhile many of his warehouse and other low-level employees are living in cars because they cannot afford housing on what they're being paid, depend on government handouts in order to eat, have minimal healthcare benefits, work mandatory 50+ hour weeks regularly (60+ during holiday seasons), and are afraid to take government-mandated breaks because in doing so they risk failing to meet insanely stringent productivity requirements and thereby risk termination.
Again, as noted, the US government is
subsidizing a huge percentage of his employees, at the same time he's effectively not paying taxes into the system that subsidizes them. His company is receiving corporate welfare at a time when they are hugely profitable and paying practically nothing in taxes.
I worked at Amazon twice, for a combined total of about seven and a half years. I would not go back. In most non-executive and non-developer positions, Amazon sets the bottom boundary of the pay scale for equivalent jobs. I make 50% more doing an equivalent job at a much smaller employer than I made there.
At $107 million per day, he could have afforded to pay each of his roughly 600,000 workers an
additional $22 a day. Above and beyond what they make now. That's more than I ever made working for Amazon, and I was definitely not at the bottom of the food chain. Of course, that means he wouldn't have gotten the additional $40 billion last year, and would only be worth $100 billion today. The poor guy.
UK workers have it better, good for them, but that doesn't excuse what's happening to US and other workers.
It's pathetic to see how these multi-billionaires like Bezos and the Waltons and Zuckerberg and Page and Brin and so on can abuse their workers, keeping them effectively indentured servants, take huge amounts of wealth out of the economy and hoard it, demand that governments they're not funding pay to support their workers rather than provide a living wage themselves, live in insane luxury compared to nearly all of their employees, and then watch how people will dance around and praise them for letting fall a few crumbs from their table.
not to mention his plans to benefit the following good causes: health care, education, workplace rights, and environmentalism and you cannot find it within yourself to acknowledge this as in any way an act of generosity and use it to denigrate him? You are in no position to "guarantee" what his motivation is.
If he has "plans" to "benefit" those causes, then why does he rely on the US government to provide those benefits for so many of his employees, instead of providing them himself? Why does he take so much money out of the economy and refuse to pay taxes that could be used to support those causes?
Generosity would be making sure his employees are well-paid, healthy, and not overworked to the point where they have little to no personal life. Generosity would be setting the bar for remuneration and benefits and corporate culture higher than his peers, and well above the poverty line and into comfortable middle-class. Generosity is not spreading a pittance around in an obvious PR move, to benefit himself with the tax write-off. It's profoundly depressing that too many people don't get that, that they're happy to kiss the feet of robber-barons who drop a few pennies in their overstuffed pockets.
I get it that this is a big corporation and I can clearly see where your personal politics lie and by dint of this feel that we may just have to agree to differ.
Don't apply for the million yet, you have no clue what my personal politics are.
And the problem is, this wasn't always the case. For the couple of decades before the post-war period, the US had the highest prosperity, one of the fastest growing economies, and even the working class had one of the highest overall standards of living in the world (unless you were black, but that's a different issue). Home ownership was at its peak, and unemployment was low. We also had some of the highest tax rates in our history. It's only relatively recently that we've begun sliding back into this sort of quasi-feudalism, where wealth is remaining concentrated in the hand of a tiny percent of the population.
We're in a state right now where the overall economy is growing, but the amount of wealth in the hands of the bottom 99% of the population
is shrinking. For the first time since the Great Depression, the current generation is less well off, less financially secure, than their parents. Personal wealth is dropping, the middle class is rapidly shrinking, and the divide between the haves and have-nots is growing wider at an alarming rate. Millions of
gainfully employed people cannot afford basic healthcare, cannot afford to pay rent and buy food in the same month, cannot afford post-grammar-school education or vocational training.
Unless something changes, this country is looking at a serious socio-economic crisis looming on the horizon, and megacorporations, multi-billionaires like Bezos, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and the people who are too ignorant and short-sighted to call them on their practices and vote for better worker protections, are the cause of that crisis.
: When the deplorable lower classes forget their place and start arguing with their betters to keep a larger share of what they produce. Such rudeness is to be discouraged at all costs, as it's ever so unseemly.
