[snowwrestler]

The journalist did their job by offering these statements with all the qualifiers that you used to make your comparison.

Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.

[FFRefresh]

There are plenty of websites where employees share their wages/salaries, which enable direct comparisons between companies. A simple google search reveals such data. Also, for a lot of these jobs, the companies post the pay ranges on the actual job description.

These wages aren't some super secret data point. Referencing a 2021 Reuters article as the source for Amazon wage data is an interesting choice, when you can find better comparable data by spending 5 minutes on Google.

[simonw]

When you're working as a professional journalist, a "simple google search" isn't enough: how can you be sure that the information you are seeing on those kinds of wage comparison websites is accurate, and comes from people who genuinely worked at those companies?

[FFRefresh]

Yours is a broad epistemic question. How can you be sure of anything? How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?

We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My position is that it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty.

If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation against each other", I would have loved it, because it'd show transparency/honesty/authenticity. Or if they did an analysis using data from job postings or wage sites and were very transparent on their methodology and admitted what you stated "These figures were taken from job postings on X.com, which can often have ranges. Consider there to be some degree of imprecision."

I totally get that it's not a norm in the media today to do that, and there are a lot of structural incentives that create that situation. I can empathize with each actor/individual within the broader system, and that they're doing their best within the world they live in.

[simonw]

"How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?"

You can't. That's why the article says "An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour" - rather than stating as fact that "in 2021 the company bumped the average starting wage...".

[FFRefresh]

My comment was rhetorical in response to your prior comment on saying you can't use certain data points because of uncertainty. It was about that principle. The citation of the source of data here is okay, I'm not suggesting they were wrong to indicate where the quote/data point came from.

The greater point is about source/data selection. MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) is a weird comparison to make. And choosing to quote two completely different sources for both the MAX(Walmart) data point [resolves to $25] and the MIN(Amazon) data point [resolves to $18] is strange, and I feel should have been explained if they're going to use quotes to communicate what might be happening in objective reality.

How was Sheheryar Kaoosji, of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, able to communicate what the max wage for a Walmart worker was, but unable to provide any comparable data point for Amazon (or it was provided, and an editor/journalist excluded it)?

[tomnipotent]

> it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty

Why is it best? I'm not interested in reading a bunch of gibberish disclaimer that I already know, and that all readers should know when consuming media. People can be wrong, facts are not black and white, and truth is a spectrum. It's not the job of a journalist on a deadline to spoon feed you critical thinking.