[mikestew]

Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder??

Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.

[andrestan]

Citation needed. This makes no sense. There's always going to be heterogeneity in output per worker in every role. Amazon pays for a baseline of expected output and wants to ensure that within a role they can manage to capture those workers whose productivity will exceed that. To do so, they provide performance bonuses. Not everyone will get the performance bonuses. Amazon is willing to pay the bonuses because the increased output is worth the increased cost. This race to the bottom isn't at all aligned with reasoning and could only happen in a monopsony which Amazon is obviously not.

For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?