
Cutting Health Benefits of 1,900 Workers Saved Bezos What He Makes in Six Hours - benologist
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/17/cutting-health-benefits-1900-whole-food-workers-saved-worlds-richest-man-jeff-bezos
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amayne
Moral and ethical argument aside. The numbers are extremely wrong here. This
is based upon the claim that Jeff Bezos makes on average $78 billion a year.
He doesn't. That was the jump in the Amazon stock price two years ago. It's
actually gone down in year over year valuation since last September (~$1,900 a
share then, $1,839 a share today.)

Using this metric, Bezos currently makes negative money per hour.

Appropriate compensation is an important discussion. But bad and/or misleading
math to prove a point undermines the argument. If the person making the point
is clearly wrong about this simple matter of economics, it should make you
wonder what else they don't understand or are misleading you about.

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ummonk
Comparing stock appreciation to benefits expenses is plain ridiculous. Are
they saying Bezos should be continuously selling shares in Amazon to subsidize
workers’ benefits?

And will workers start paying him when Amazon stock happens to run into bad
luck and he loses billions one year?

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icpmacdo
How about taxing him and others to pay for universal healthcare?

~~~
gridlockd
If you believe you can just tax the rich for universal healthcare, you better
do the math. It doesn't work.

Taking the European model, _everybody_ will have to pay for it, on the order
of 15% of income.

~~~
me_me_me
Funny you should say that.

But the actual numbers don't lie, Europeans on average pay less for healthcare
(combined taxes + paid procedures), than Americans, yet we have an access to
public healthcare and Americans need to buy priv insurance.

I'd rather pay my taxes, then hear stories of people who are afraid to call an
ambulance in case they are actually not going through a heart attack.

~~~
gridlockd
> But the actual numbers don't lie, Europeans on average pay less for
> healthcare

That's besides my point, which is that you can't just tax the rich to pay for
universal healthcare. It has to come out of everyone's paycheck.

The other side of the coin is that Europeans earn less and that healthcare
workers _especially_ earn less. Yet, systems such as the NHS are at the brink
of financial collapse.

You couldn't achieve the same "savings" in the US without massive forced wage
cuts to health care workers.

> I'd rather pay my taxes...

That's a fair opinion to have. Saying that you'd rather "tax the rich" isn't,
it's dishonest (or uninformed).

~~~
me_me_me
> Yet, systems such as the NHS are at the brink of financial collapse.

The reason for this is the Tories are defunding it and taking stabs at it. So
that NHS becomes unpopular with public and could be privatized into US style
healthcare.

Its straight out of neo-liberal playbook, de-fund/cripple public institution,
replace management with 'your' people who further japerdise the institution.
Start PR campaign against institution to ridicule it and when people buy the
PR, cut it up and sell it off.

~~~
gridlockd
By "defunding" you must mean a lower increase in year-over-year spending.

[https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-
nhs/](https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/)

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grecy
Time and time again we see the mega corporations and the mega rich in America
make life for the common person worse, while their fortunes continue to rise.

McDonalds, Amazon, WalMart, etc. These companies make billions in revenue, and
plenty of profit, yet they keep paying their employees worse and worse
compensation packages - packages that are completely illegal in every other
developed country.

Why do Americans let this happen?

How bad does it have to get before something changes?

~~~
SllX
There is no gun to your head telling you to buy anything from McDonalds,
Amazon or Walmart.

But you won’t find that small profitable businesses automatically have better
compensation packages either, nor even those rising star hipster burger,
coffee and grilled cheese joints that are smaller than the big players but
still you know, corporate chains. If you want some modicum of independence
from modern American consumerism, to take a fully principled stand against the
way we do business in this country, take out a loan with your morally
scrupulous bank and/or credit union and start a farm with the goal of feeding
yourself and your family first and foremost. Or start a small business, but
then see what you can afford to pay your workers when it turns out that what
you would need to charge to pay them a living wage will drive people away from
your business. $15 sandwiches or whatever might be delicious, but short of
some very expensive areas with very expensive leases, they won’t sell in the
quantities you need them to because it turns out, Americans do take a stand
when it is their dollar or even just their time on the line. Which is why many
of them shop at either Walmart or Amazon or even both.

They made themselves appealing by being cheaper and/or getting stuff to your
door quicker than the competition. The market selected for these types of
companies, and as a result they are incredibly profitable enterprises!

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awakeasleep
I guess this is what people mean by something that 'turns your stomach'?

After reading this I am literally feeling a nausea like I want to throw up!
I've never had this kind of reaction to the written word before.

~~~
microcolonel
You ought to question your health, if hearing of a change in the lawful
employment agreement of some part time grocery retail workers, juxtaposed with
the increasing valuation of Amazon, induces nausea.

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gridlockd
Jeff Bezos doesn't "make" 19 million dollars per hour. That's just the rate of
change of his net worth calculated at some point in time. It's not income.

For most of 2018, that rate of change was negative. Yet, we don't see a
headline like "Jeff Bezos lost 19 million in the past six hours".

------
microcolonel
Keeping in mind that those employees are already making more money than the
average person doing a similar job part time.

People shouldn't automatically be expected to pay different prices for the
same thing because they have more money.

The back-of-the-napkin calculation from BI they cite to arrive at what Jeff
Bezos' "makes" in an hour is tied largely to Jeff's equity in Amazon, which is
not really liquid.

You can make all sorts of comparisons of this or that number to another, what
matters to me is the principle of it.

If Jeff is being treated to some ill-gotten advantage, let me be the first to
criticize it, but the price of part-time retail labour is up to those involved
in that transaction, and to a certain extent, up to the law; and both seem to
agree with the state of things.

By the same token, we are all entitled to our fair say in what the law has to
say about that transaction, and if you believe the minimum price of labour
should be arbitrarily increased, that's something you can argue just the same
as anyone else. I just won't buy it if the argument is "Jeff's rich, so any
company he operates should pay more for labour."

~~~
dlp211
If the ability to sell $1.8Billion of your stock 3 days day isn't liquid, I
don't know what is.

    
    
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-bezos/amazon-chief-bezos-cashes-in-1-8-billion-of-share-pile-idUSKCN1UR4ZR

~~~
microcolonel
He has to tell people it's for his other company, so they don't get worried;
that's what I mean by _not really liquid_. If Jeff Bezos attempted to sell a
million shares without any indication of a purpose, it would degrade the value
of the rest.

