[gagege]

Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.

The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc."

Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."

So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.

[zippzom]

The issue is not that the employee is being underpaid (although that is a problem), it's that the underpayment is only possible because the government (i.e. taxpayers) is also giving money to that employee. If that safety net weren't in place then Amazon wouldn't be able to employee these people at these rates since it wouldn't be enough for people to survive on. Essentially, the government is subsidizing Amazon.

Also I'm not sure that someone accepting a specific salary or hourly wage is evidence that they thought it was fair. Employers (especially ones as large as Amazon) can afford to wait far longer for employees than most employees can afford to wait for an employer. I certainly don't think getting paid $20k a year to be a programmer would be fair, but if there no other jobs available to me at that rate then I would be forced to accept it, since I wouldn't survive otherwise.

And if I made $7.25 an hour, I highly doubt I would be able to build up a financial cushion large enough to allow me to quit a job because it didn't pay enough. Even a couple weeks without working probably isn't feasible for somebody trying to support children on $7.25. Leaving a job because it's underpaid and taking the time to find a better one is feasible for professionals, but almost definitely not for many service workers.

[gagege]

I think your first paragraph is saying the same thing I said. Amazon-like companies can pay less because of the safety-nets.

I get what you're saying in the rest of your comment and I can confirm that it's easy to take less pay because of time constraints. Maybe "fair" isn't the right word exactly, but I will stand by it being voluntary.

[zippzom]

My point in the first paragraph is more that Amazon is only able to pay that amount because the government steps in. If there were no government aid, then they would need to pay more or not hire people. I'm skeptical that the jobs are worth less than $7.25 an hour to them. It's just in their interest to extract as much value as possible from the employees. If they couldn't find people to do it for 7.25, I suspect they would pay more, not that they would cut the jobs.

[dragonwriter]

> My point in the first paragraph is more that Amazon is only able to pay that amount because the government steps in. If there were no government aid, then they would need to pay more or not hire people.

No, if there was no government aid then people would be even more desperate for whatever pittance Amazon was offering; government aid increases wage demands two ways:

(1) moving people's starting income up increases wage demands because the declining marginal utility of money means that it takes more money to offset the disutility of performing servile labor.

(2) Means testing of aid programs (loss of benefits for outside income) means that it takes more than $1 of take home pay to net whatever the utility of $1 is, since some utility is lost to lost aid.

It's possible the total (not just wage) cost for labor would be higher without government aid, because the aid provides increased stability which makes it easier to hire and easier to retain workers, by enough to offset the higher wage demands. But that's, at best, a non-obvious conclusion.

[archagon]

"Why does everyone ignore the fact that <selling your kidneys> is voluntary?"

Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they are "fair".

[LyndsySimon]

I'll take that bait.

What exactly is immoral about selling one's kidneys? Do individuals not own themselves? Are they capable of using or disposing of their own property as they see fit?

If your argument is that people who are forced into such decisions by economic necessity are not capable of making rational decisions, then what criteria do you use to determine if someone is able to make such decisions for themselves? If they fail to meet that bar... who makes those decisions for them?

[jahaja]

Why do you think it matters if a forced decision is rational or not?

[gagege]

Working at Amazon != selling your body parts.

Some things are immoral and necessarily harmful, working for Amazon is not one of them.

[s73v3r_]

"Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary?"

Because it absolutely does not matter.

"then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain."

This makes a whole lot of assumptions about things, namely that the employee has the ability to go somewhere else, and that Amazon is entitled to treat their workers like shit.

"So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps."

And for a company of their size, with their resources, this is entirely unacceptable and pure evil.

[mikestew]

If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.

It's as if you've willingly chosen to ignore over 100 years of collective bargaining, and the reasons for it, just to poorly make a point. If it were as facile as you make it out to be, we would have never had unions.