It's a good cause that would the increase of welfare his workers. It would additionally empower others to unionize and improve their quality of life as well.
I'd say countries with strong unions like France have seen the detrimental effects of such unions (ongoing strikes for no reason except asking for more holidays and higher waves even though the said professions are already well above the median in all metrics). At the same time, such strikes disrupt everyone's else business and comes as a net cost for society.
Median wage is meaningless against systems with long term stagnant wage growth against a rising cost of living. Strikes don't have an effect unless they disrupt something, that's why they work. If you see a minor inconvenience to your morning commute instead of a collective work for your rights as a worker then I'm not really sure where your priorities lie.
It's not a minor inconvenience to your commute when you can't get a train or a bus at all to go to work, several times a month. It makes you need to purchase a car and all the trouble that goes with it.
That presumes that Amazon can't substantially automate their labor away, which is exactly what they'll aggressively do if you raise said cost of labor a lot.
The actual end result will be far greater tax payer cost for fully subsidizing people that no longer have any employment, versus partial subsidization.
There isn't an advanced economy in all of Europe for example that doesn't use heavy government (aka the top 50% of income earners) subsidization for the benefit of the bottom 50% of earners. The healthcare systems in Britain and France? The bottom 50% of employed persons are not primarily paying for those very expensive benefits, they're receiving large government subsidies that help offset their terrible pay, in the form of all sorts of welfare benefits. Britain for example has such a low median wage, it barely qualifies them as the 50th poorest US state, how do you think their bottom 50% of workers get by if not through huge subsidies via the government to offset that terrible pay? For some reason when companies in the US do the same exact thing, it's evil.
I think the base economic theory is that companies will pay for labor exactly what that labor is worth to them. Analogous to the concepts of full-time and part-time employment, is the concept of full-coverage pay or partial coverage where the government picks up the rest.
The problem I have with the system is that everyone who is actually paying receives the least benefits. It's just wealth redistribution. But inevitably it also disincentives work the more the subsides increase in value, and the sharper the drop-off as additional work is performed.
So how do you structure a system which encourages work? The obvious solution is that benefits should increase as tax payments increase. The makes working super-incentivized, and provides a massive boost to productivity.
Aside from technology improvements, which the economists tell us aren't really providing bang for the buck anymore, increasing the size of the workforce increases GDP growth.
It's a problem because universal basic income can't even remotely work mathematically and is wildly regressive. That leaves only the option of taxing the new robotic labor to offset the FICA tax losses from millions of unemployed persons at the exact time when entitlement costs are exploding upwards. There's no other means to fill in the gap that will be left in the tax revenue from any meaningful leap in automation near-term (next 10-20 years). Will those new taxes come to be, and will they make sense (ie not cause chaos and or economic disaster)? At least in the US, one would have to bet against it working out well given the extreme government dysfunction and inability to solve even simple problems; even just the odds of any such taxes getting implemented is a long shot (the Republican Party will oppose it for better or worse).
Basic income at what level can't even remotely work? Of course there are funding levels where basic income does work, and then everyone is then free to go to work and earn any additional amount they desire.
One key point is that being able to work to subsidize the basic income makes the income much more powerful than "phantom" dollars that disappear as soon as you start to work.
The trick is that the funding level of basic income doesn't have to "fully cover" a family of four. The family of four will be able to supplement the income, rather than today being locked into receiving it. Also, it doesn't mean that programs like SSDI go away, you still can provide national disability insurance.
I think that's a fair response. Allowing unions isn't really philanthropy, but it's certainly related. He wouldn't have so much money to be "generous" with if all Amazon employees were treated fairly.
Well, it's giving something... In any case, workers' wages have been stagnant, jobs have been lost to automation, wealth has been pooling up at the top. Things would probably be better off if Amazon's employees had had more of a share in the wealth that was created and he wasn't in such a position.
I don't really think Unions are the solution to this problem, but it is a real, and important, problem to solve.