
Jeff Bezos Wants to Give More Money to Charity. He Should Pay His Workers First - binarray2000
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59a7220fe4b07e81d354e6e3
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forkLding
Dont understand why this was flagged, read the article and they werent making
wild claims without citations.

Payroll and charity issues aside which is up to interpretation, I dont
understand why HN can not take the article. Maybe HuffPost isnt a credible
source?

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mustacheemperor
Could be flagged because of the back button hijack? Can someone find an
alternate source to resubmit? As you said the citations are valid and this is
a discussion I'd like to see develop here.

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krapp
>Could be flagged because of the back button hijack?

If so, that's not a valid reason for flagging an article.

It's particularly odd because as far as I know, none of the articles about
Amazon's search for a new headquarters have been flagged.

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maerF0x0
If he pays them more he also pays payroll taxes.

If he donates to charity he gets a tax credit.

Am I missing something? Else seems logical to me.

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maxxxxx
Charity also has higher PR value for each dollar.

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dvfjsdhgfv
And that's exactly this approach that is criticized in the article.

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devy
On the footnote:

    
    
       Fredrick Kunkle is a staff writer on The Washington Post’s Metro desk 
       and co-chair of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s bargaining unit 
       at the Post. The views stated here are his own.
    

It looks like WaPo labor union leader is trying to bargain a better labor
contract with their employer/WaPo owner with this piece.

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deanCommie
Bezos's wealth is based on Amazon stock value.

Amazon the company pays salaries, not Bezos. An increase in X$ to warehouse
workers may mean a decrease of X*Y$ in Bezos's wealth. It's not so simple.

Also, the workers that everyone feels bad for are less than a decade from
being entirely replaced with robots. It's sad but if your entire job consists
of walking around a warehouse picking up objects and putting them into boxes
because you have thumbs and robotic ones are not good enough yet, I don't see
why you should expect anything more than minimum wage.

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Tomminn
To a first order approximation, every $3500 he donates the against malaria
foundation would save a life.

I'm all for Jeff Bezos operating as a more ethical businessman. And you can
criticize him for that till the cows come home with no objection from me. But
lets not criticize his plans for charitable giving. Lets not discourage that.
Because at the end of the day, billions of dollars to effective charities will
save millions of lives.

I live in NZ, which has a population of 5 millions or so. It doesn't feel like
a small country at all. And yet Jeff Bezos could probably save that many
people from dying if he wanted to. He could literally create another NZ worth
of people in the world. It wouldn't quite be as cheap as $18B, but I suspect
it could be done for less than $40B. So he would still have another $40B left
to fix those worker-welfare issues.

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ithilglin909
Amazon often pays its workers top dollar. The problem is what is expected in
exchange...

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vorotato
They pay their software developers top dollar because if they weren't they'd
work elsewhere, but everyone else....

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shakestheclown
The workers are just going to waste it on stuff like food and shelter.

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krapp
I work at an Amazon fulfillment center, and I've asked my managers to just let
me live in the Kiva field because the cost of living is so much higher here
than what they pay, but they keep refusing.

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iopq
Why should he pay them more than market value? As a shareholder, I definitely
don't want this to happen. It's not Bezos' company, it's a public company.

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sp332
What's market value? Seems like a better description would be "as little as
you can get away with".

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artursapek
If he pays his workers too little, they will go work elsewhere. Nobody is
forcing anyone to work for Amazon.

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jsmeaton
That makes sense in an economy where supply (jobs) is greater than demand. If
there are no other jobs then your choice becomes work for as little as offered
or _starve_.

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MikeTaylor
What does the "[flagged]" mean in the title?

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marak830
It means someone flagged the article as not suitable for hn. You can [vouch]
for it in the hn area at the top (I think it's called vouch, and I'm not sure
the reputation requirement)

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vorotato
This is the truest article I have ever read.

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dceddia
Off topic, but did anyone else notice the sneaky back-button highjacking? I
don't know if there's a better word for it.

Open the article in a new tab, and instead of the back button being greyed-
out, it is functional -- when clicked, it redirects to the home page with a
full-screen headline.

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nayuki
Nope - the back button is grayed out for me on Firefox 56 on desktop - which
is the normal behavior.

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slowmovintarget
But Chrome swallows the hijack whole.

