
JeffBezos Is Already $40B Richer This Year–While Typical Amazon Worker Made $12K - dsr12
http://time.com/money/5301812/jeff-bezos-net-worth-2018-amazon-worker-salary/
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whitepoplar
The problem isn't that some people have a lot of money. The problem (in
America) is that too many people fall through the cracks. I think a healthy
society would be one where there's a strong social floor, but uncapped upside
potential for those who want to pursue it. However, if a company gets
government support, de facto or otherwise, then I'm 100% in favor of pay caps.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I disagree. In America I think it’s more than just “some people fall through
the cracks.” It’s a lot of people, and it’s not some unfortunate accident that
befalls the occasional worker, it’s a systemic problem affecting tens of
millions of Americans. The kind of poverty we have in America, the richest
nation on earth per capita, is insane. And it happens because those in charge
are satisfied. Who’s in charge? The people who can afford to buy the favor of
politicians. They LOVE the huge supply of desperate workers we have because it
means big profits.

And that’s what this article is about.

~~~
whitepoplar
I never said, "some people fall through the cracks," I said "too many people
fall through the cracks." It's very systemic, hence the need for a social
floor without cracks. No person should be denied medical care, food, basic
shelter, or access to education.

It also shouldn't be surprising that the rich and powerful want to be taxed as
little as possible. I think both sides get too hot-headed and the discussions
inevitably turn to "let's take their money away!" vs "let's advance the
creation of a social floor for everyone!" I don't think it's a bad thing at
all that some people are rich, but I think poverty is a very bad thing.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Hey I’m right there with you, and sorry if I misread your comment. I strongly
advocate for a voluntary solution to the missing social floor through the use
of collectives and total automation of basic human needs. I don’t think
taxation is a good long term solution because it’s inherently not voluntary
and thus will always cause tension.

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in0v8r
_Here’s another way to look at the staggering amount of money Jeff Bezos has
made so far in 2018. Amazon has an estimated total 566,000 employees
worldwide. If the company CEO decided to pass along his $40 billion in
increased net worth in 2018 to his workers, each of them would get about
$70,000—which is more than twice the median Amazon employee’s salary._

These statements are always ridiculous to me. There is no way he could convert
$40B to cash and everything else stay the same.

~~~
MR4D
I think the point of that is to show an order of magnitude. He could always
give his stock away on a restricted basis. Same result, right?

~~~
MarkMMullin
No - as the restrictions fall off, the probable number of sellers rise and the
price falls - some of the current value of his holdings reflects the fact that
they are not at play in the market - its the old supply/demand at work

~~~
vec
I think you're getting too tangled up in the specific framing device the
article uses. There's no easy way for Jeff Bezos to conjure up $40B in cash to
hand out as bonuses, but there are plenty of ways he could have not made that
$40B in the first place.

For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire
company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash. They'd be fine. Jeff Bezos
is prioritizing growth and shareholder value but it's entirely within his
powers to prioritize other things, like paying his employees a living wage all
the way down the pay scale. Amazon would be a slightly smaller and less
important company with a somewhat lower share price and the world would be a
better place.

When he says that he doesn't have anything other than space exploration to
spend his money on what he means, in part, is there's nothing he can change
without negatively impacting the metrics he cares about. The point of this
argument is that he could choose to care about different metrics.

~~~
NathanKP
Full disclosure I am an Amazon Web Services employee. The thing to realize
about Amazon is that employees (at least on the tech side) are shareholders
too, and a large amount of our compensation comes in the form of Amazon stock.

Amazon salary isn't that amazing, its pretty average or perhaps a bit below
average for a major tech company. As the article mentions Bezos' salary is
only $80k. But the value of the stocks that you get as a tech employee is very
significant, and you know that their value is only going to increase. This is
why Amazon has a strong incentive to grow the stock price, its baked into the
culture based on the fact that so many employees get stock as part of their
total compensation package.

On the flip side if Bezos was to cause a stock price crash he'd end up with a
lot of very unhappy people on the tech side in Amazon Web Services. Amazon
would not be "fine" because they'd lose a lot of tech employees or have to
hugely increase salaries to make up for the loss of total value. Basically my
point here is that the "shareholders" who are benefiting aren't just rich
people, they are also middle class tech employees like me, and probably you
and most of the people here on Hacker News.

"Bezos makes $40 billion" is an attractive headline, but he wasn't the only
one who made money from the growth in Amazon stock price. Lots of employees at
Amazon also saw the value of their stock increase, and I don't think any of us
want to see that go down.

~~~
tnzn
Not every employee in amazon is a well off techie.

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extralego
$166/week _before_ taxes.

We consider that “employed”?

How can anybody live like that? I can’t imagine.

Housing would be out of the question, but not having housing would be every
bit as unsustainable.

Considering the variablility in different prison or slavery experiences, I
cannot help but wonder about the overlap in quality of life provided by one of
these vs. $12,000/yr wage earnings in the contemporary US. While slavery won’t
guarantee shelter, it does incentivize providing it. Prison even guarantees
it. A $12,000/yr wage makes both food and shelter into a critical compromise.

~~~
moltar
Maybe they are part time? It’s “average worker” after all

~~~
extralego
Do you mean to imply that this is their income by choice? Because they don’t
want to work more than this? This sounds like a bold accusation.

Let’s not play dumb. Part-time work is preferred by low-wage employers because
it skirts providing benefits and job security. I content with this as a
seasoned professional. I can’t in any honesty imagine low-wage workers would
not face this problem to a larger degree.

“Average worker”...OK, even worse. So there are enough workers at Amazon
warehouses making making less than that to give us an _average_ of
$12,000/year. I’m sorry, I do not get your point at all.

~~~
asdfman123
Let's read the article first?

> Meanwhile, the median Amazon employee’s salary in 2017 was $28,446. During
> the first five months of this year... that median-earning Amazon worker
> worldwide has made around $12,000 before taxes, assuming salaries have
> stayed more or less the same this year.

This article just has a slightly dishonest headline to catch people's
attention. It's $28k, and it's a median, and it's worldwide.

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_coveredInBees
This is an absolutely ridiculous article. There is zero substance to it, nor
any meaningful discussion of any sort. I kinda expected more from an article
on Time :-/

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kvgr
That makes no sense... net worth is not disposable cash. WTF is this article
about.

~~~
gorbachev
It's about how (certain types) of workers get shafted in favor of
shareholders.

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otakucode
When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even
doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and
employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire
families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be able
to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced
employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough
numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked
from 96 to 40).

Now with the computer revolution, society says 'theyre not even doing the
work, the machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and since 1980,
wages have been nearly frozen despite astronomically rising productivity due
to technology. It would make sense that this continues until families are
starving. There may never be another New Deal, though, because when that
originally came around you couldn't shut down any discussion of helping people
just by whispering the word 'socialism'.

~~~
conanbatt
> When the Industrial Revolution came around, society said 'theyre not even
> doing the work, machines are! The workers don't deserve more pay!' and
> employers were more than willing to progress to the point where entire
> families, children included, worked 16 hour days 6 days a week just to be
> able to feed themselves. Then there was the New Deal which basically forced
> employers to pay 600% more for their workers practically overnight (rough
> numbers, reducing number of workers per family from 4 to 1 and hours worked
> from 96 to 40).

You are missing the part of the story where that happened in europe, and
people fled europe to go to the US where those things did not happen at all,
and where even Marx said that the government was not oppressing its people
like they did in England.

Maybe it had something to do with europe being an aristocracy back then.

~~~
lovich
Are you actually arguing that workers were not oppressed in the US during the
industrial Revolution? Here's a few examples off the top of my head. Threw in
a modern one with wage theft just in case you think times have changed as well

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire)
[3][https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-
slaughte...](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/militia-slaughters-
strikers-at-ludlow-colorado)
[4][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States)
[5][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store)
[6][https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-
th...](https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-
protect/)

~~~
Turing_Machine
> Are you actually arguing that workers were not oppressed in the US during
> the industrial Revolution?

Compared to the manual subsistence farm labor they were doing before, you
mean?

Rural workers flocked to the new factories because it was _better than what
they had before_. You see the exact same process playing out in China right
now.

Most of the Amazon warehouses are located in semi-rural areas that didn't have
available jobs of any sort before.

~~~
lovich
It may have been less oppressing but it was still oppression. Also I'd argue
that they _thought_ it would be better, not that it was. We don't have perfect
information to make rational choices and they certainly didn't have it back
before a global communications system existed. The factory owners routinely
lied and changed the deal on employees.

Regardless you stated that none of the opression that happened in Europe to
workers happened in the US and that is probably false. If you had a source for
that quote from Marx, I would like to see it

~~~
Turing_Machine
> It may have been less oppressing but it was still oppression.

Well, by that argument anything short of perfection is unacceptable.

> Also I'd argue that they _thought_ it would be better, not that it was.

It was demonstrably better. Median income (measured in constant dollars),
lifespan, and education levels all took a dramatic jump over the course of the
19th Century, both in the U.K. and the United States.

> Regardless you stated that none of the opression that happened in Europe to
> workers happened in the US and that is probably false.

I stated nothing of the sort. You're confusing me with another poster.

~~~
lovich
You are correct on me confusing you with the poster I originally replied to,
my bad

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infocollector
Regulate that either investors or employees can not make more than 10X of
minimum employee wage? Immaterial on how much they invest or have stocks. That
way there is money available for more companies, and employees are paid
fairly?

~~~
poster123
That just encourages companies to subcontract out low-wage work rather than
doing it in-house. The low-wage workers themselves are not better off. I
believe that regulations on 401(k) plan participation have already encouraged
companies to shed low-wage workers.

~~~
infocollector
When they game that regulation, then regulate sub-contracting. This is a cat
and mouse game. The problem is, currently the mouse (regulators) - are dead.

~~~
InitialLastName
Wait, aren't the companies' anti-social behaviors the mouse, and the people
trying to hunt down those behaviors (regulators) the cat?

It may just be me; I always thought that the cat was doing the hunting in a
"cat and mouse" game.

