
Why Some Amazon Workers Aren’t Happy About Their Raise - extraterra
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/technology/amazon-workers-pay-raise.html
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ruler88
I have no doubt that a certain portion of workers benefitted from the new
policy while some portion of workers did not. It is too early for anyone to
judge the policy without the numbers being published from Amazon. My issue
with the article is that it presents a single story of a person who was hurt
by the policy and extrapolate that to be the overall tone at Amazon. This
article relies on sensational and emotional aspects of one story, rather than
facts and statistics.

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zeroname
> This article relies on sensational and emotional aspects of one story,
> rather than facts and statistics.

...just like every single campaign for minimum wage.

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lozenge
Campaigns use what's effective, that doesn't mean you can't find facts and
statistics if you actually go looking.

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zacharytelschow
No such thing as a free lunch. Shocker. Why not push for $25/hour and watch
Amazon drop health insurance?

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coldtea
> _No such thing as a free lunch. Shocker_

No, but there's such a thing as making trillions of the backs of hard working
peasants. No shocker either.

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mactrey
If a $15/hr wage is apparently a pay decrease for these "peasants" then they
were previously making a very livable wage. So what exactly is Amazon doing
that every local cafe or retail store isn't?

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downrightmike
It was livable because they'd get 2 shares of amazon stock, worth about a 10%
boost to their earnings per year and in non holiday seasons, they could make
an additional 8% on performance, with that doubling in the holiday seasons. So
instead of making an additional 18% to 26%, the bump to long term workers is
as stated in the article from $14 to $15, where the previous performance
program in the off season was $1.28, before the extra 10% from the stock
grant. So amazon just saved ~20% on this holiday's logistics costs.

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philwelch
If you give performance bonuses and people work too hard to meet them people
complain about work conditions, and if you just pay everyone more instead,
people complain that you took away the performance bonuses.

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coldtea
And they are right in both cases.

How about having regular wages for regular work AND performance bonuses to
reward great performance (what they're meant to be)?

As opposed to low wages for regular work, thus making performance "bonuses" a
necessity (and thus using them to force people to overworking) OR having
regular wages and not compensating those working more.

If I pay you $8/hour, and have "performance bonus" of $16 for those who work
their asses off, people will be forced to work 2-3 hours more per day to get
those just to get by.

If I then start paying you $10/hour and drop the bonuses, those working
regular hours would be ok, but others who are still made to work overtime
would still like to be compensated extra for what they do. They might still
make the same as before, but now their colleagues who go off a 8 hours or have
lower performance get the same too. So what's to compensate for their extra
effort?

That's what performance bonuses are about, to compensate for extra effort.

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Brockenstein
I really thought this was going to be a case of someone who spent years
getting raises up to $15 an hour was having a fit because now everyone makes
as much.

OK, so the complaint is a little more legitimate than that. But whenever you
overhaul a system, some people gain, some people lose. Could amazon afford to
raise wages and keep legacy programs around? Probably. Do they have to? No.
And if Amazon is crippled by an exodus of workers then we'll learn something.
And the way I hear it, unemployment is really low, seems like a workers job
market to me.

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zeroname
If it's a worker's market then minimum wage is both pointless and meaningless
to begin with.

The people who pulled this PR stunt off probably are laughing at the fact that
they get to pander to liberals whining about minimum wage while cutting
overall labor costs at the same time.

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Bucephalus355
Oh come on this looks like it was written by corporate shareholder activists
from the mid-1990s.

When did the New York Times become so conservative?

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mikestew
Writing a completely factual story that might appeal to a conservative mindset
is not the same as a conservative bias. Now, putting aside your emotion for a
moment, which part of the story did you feel was reported in a lopsided
manner?

