[astrange]

It's not, it's mostly a sign that benefits are working.

Giving workers benefits /increases/ their compensation because it increases their negotiating power. This means they're earning more than they otherwise would. Not less.

If it was less, that would mean benefits are bad and we should take them away!

[ketralnis]

It's incrementally better for them to be making $20 instead of $10, sure. But it's worse for the world for that to be footed by the tax payer instead of by the trillion dollar company that they work for. In effect the tax payers are lining Amazon's pockets.

[astrange]

The tax payers are /taking money from/ Amazon, because giving the workers money means that Amazon has to pay them more money to compete.

You can set a minimum wage too if you want, and it usually has positive effects in practice, but these two things are not opposed to each other.

[abigail95]

Of course it should be footed by the taxpayer, ie you and me. If you don't want to pay the tax, then you hire these wokers for more than Amazon pays them.

Why is Amazon the bad guy here? If these workers are productive at $30/hr why hasn't someone hired them already?

I'm the one that should be taxed. I'm not sure I could make them productive in my business for $10/hr, or even $1.

[drozycki]

You seem to think that healthcare is just like any other fringe benefit that employers and employees may mutually agree to in the employment market. But the US has a (deeply flawed) form of “universal healthcare” where the employer is required to provide the benefit. This mandate goes back to the New Deal era when capitalists were willing to accept such provisions if it allowed them to avoid a communist revolution, which was in fashion at the time. The mandate has been reaffirmed more recently with the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. So the story is not a sign that benefits are working, but that there are loopholes being exploited.

[astrange]

Aren't we talking about Medicaid and food stamps here? Middle class health insurance is indeed an employer subsidy in the US (and it's bad), but Medicaid isn't.

Part of the reason we still have this system is that unions like being able to provide healthcare as a benefit though.

[drozycki]

The spirit of the policy as understood by most is that employers pay most of the cost of healthcare for their employees, middle class or not. So it comes as a surprise to learn that Medicaid, a program meant for children, the disabled and unemployed, is covering the benefit for employees at taxpayer expense. Amazon can’t have it both ways: lower corporate taxes based on the assumption that they directly provide health care, and the benefit of offloading the health care burden to the state. Can you see why people are concerned about this?

[Vespasian]

I assume Amazon pushes down wages accordingly and is happy that the public subsidizes their margins.

Why would they give someone more because they come to them with no alternative and under pressure from the government to take any Job.

[astrange]

No, wages are set by negotiating with workers; Amazon is not purely a price setter of wages. That means giving workers money lets them get better wages. (They would be one if they were a monopsony though. But mostly they aren't.)

> under pressure from the government to take any Job.

Work requirements for welfare can indeed hurt workers this way by making them take worse jobs.

[giraffe_lady]

It's essentially just a subsidy to large employers? So they can not pay their employees enough? Is this what these programs are intended for? I didn't understand it that way but maybe I'm wrong.

[astrange]

If it was a subsidy to large employers it would be paid to the employer. Those are called wage subsidies. (Health insurance in the US works like this, obviously it's not great.)

These are paid to the worker though. That means it's a subsidy against the employer! It makes them worse off, not better.

[devmor]

It is in effect a subsidy to employers, while still being a benefit to employees.

As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to. As such, the only real solution to the issue that does not make the economic situation worse for employees is to punish corporations for paying so little that their employees need benefits from the government.

Anything else only hurts the employees or provides greater subsidy to the employer.

[astrange]

> As prior evidence shows, there is always someone willing to work for less, if they have to.

Such people are not particularly easy to find right now. The employment situation in the US is the best for workers it has been in decades.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

[devmor]

These datapoints strengthen my argument. More Americans are in the workforce than ever before, because every household requires more laborers to do work for less compensation.

Federal employment data also does not paint a cohesive picture of the situation.

For one, it does not include undocumented labor - the labor that makes up the vast majority of incredibly low paid positions. Secondly, it is inflated by the fact that so many people are forced to work part-time positions - usually multiple at once.

[astrange]

> More Americans are in the workforce than ever before, because every household requires more laborers to do work for less compensation.

That isn't what they show. Actually what they show is that households have gotten smaller over time, because people have gotten richer/older and no longer live with their parents.

> Federal employment data also does not paint a cohesive picture of the situation.

These numbers come from a monthly household survey and don't have this issue. They know what they're doing.

> For one, it does not include undocumented labor - the labor that makes up the vast majority of incredibly low paid positions.

Such people have, since 2019, actually gotten the most pay increases of any part of the working population.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

> Secondly, it is inflated by the fact that so many people are forced to work part-time positions - usually multiple at once.

Only 5% of Americans report working multiple jobs, and that's not particularly historically high.

Your idea of how the economy works is just a decade out of date. In the ways you think it's bad it is specifically the best it's been in decades, or in fact ever.

This is a common issue though: https://x.com/dkthomp/status/1793270876550398329

The cause of this issue is that the US media believes their job is to avoid reporting good news, unless they can do it ironically.

[devmor]

No, unfortunately you are mistaken - the US media does not inform my worldview as I generally do not consume it without supplement.

My idea of how the economy works is informed by the state of the economy for real people - unlike yours, which relies entirely on federal data manipulated to present the picture that the federal government is succeeding in its economic policy. They do “know what they’re doing”, certainly. You on the other hand, do not seem to.

Every single thing you have said here is wrong or a misunderstanding of what data has actually been gathered and where it comes from.