I’m a college-educated office worker for Amazon who makes $x; you’re an Amazon warehouse / delivery drone who only makes $y but who now makes $y + $20,000 which is close to, or exceeds my $x. Why would I stay there in my position if I dont get a raise? I might not need $20,000 like you got but I better get my fair share. Maybe I only get $10,000 or $15,000.
Dewey_Finn (the last poster before you) is in my department & made more than I did…until I got my raise. You’re going to need to give him $z more to keep him from becoming disgruntled & either doing less work or leaving.
There’s gonna be a trickle up effect or a lot of people who are harder to replace are gonna leave
I’ve been through that trickle-mess twice, once in the military and once at an airline.
In each case for decades they’d slowly let wages at the very bottom stagnate and wages farther up move only a little, while inflation did its dirty work, slowing painting everyone into penury, but the bottommost first.
Eventually they had to significantly raise wages for the bottom ~1/3rd of workers. And gave relatively desultory wage increases all the way up the food chain to prevent outright inversions like you suggest.
But with the net effect that wages became distinctly compressed. Especially in the low-mid ranks. Which is another way of saying income inequality had been reduced. One of those sounds pretty nice; the other does not. Especially when it happens to you or me.
The screaming from everyone other than the bottommost was the stuff of legend.
And so it has gone, and will always go. When considering our social or economic status, most of us are far more concerned with how far above the lower classes we are than how far below the fatcats we are.
Maybe there’s a progressive distribution. The point is Amazon can afford to pay their workers more. Which is not to say that applies to the entire economy. A lot of minimum wage workers work for companies that don’t have high margins.
I personally would not want to work in some distribution center in the middle of nowhere, regardless of how much they paid me.
the issue is people like yourself pay a huge amount in taxes. I’m assuming you pay income taxes and aren’t living off dividends and capital gains. its very easy for someone who makes 6 or 7 figures in income to pay ~50% of their income in taxes in between the federal income tax, state income taxes, and 3.8% Medicare tax, property taxes, etc.
America squeezes the upper class heavily. highly paid medical professionals, lawyers, business executives, entertainers, etc pay a huge % of their income in taxes.
but if your income comes from dividends and capital gains it is taxed much more lightly. Also the system is designed to let super rich people borrow-buy-die and avoid taxes on wealth.
there has to be an alternative system, even if it requires global cooperation to enforce.
This is one of my biggest areas of frustration with this issue. For whatever reason, when poor and working class people do manage to get on board the “tax the rich” bandwagon, they almost always mean those people that you mention (doctors, lawyers, entertainers, etc.). IMHO those people deserve their high level of compensation. They have a specialized set of skills that are rare and in high demand, which is the sort of thing that is, IMHO, worthy of being well compensated. What isn’t worthy of being well compensated, and (unfortunately) where the real money is, is being what is essentially an overpaid middle man (and they are almost all men) between the customers of a business and the workers who provide whatever good or service those customers are paying for.
The famed trumply tax cuts and jobs act of 2019 gave Joe Sixpack a $200 tax cut, gave Joe Fatcat a multimillion dollar tax cut, and stuck the $150K & up W2 wage worker or small biz owner with the bill.
Yup, and its a good idea. A lot of nations have signed onto it.
There are also efforts to do the same thing with a wealth tax, to create a global coalition to prevent capital flight from a 2% annual wealth tax. If you only applied the tax to billionaires, it would raise 250 billion a year. If you applied it to everyone worth over 100 million, it would raise 500 billion a year in global revenue.
Amazon does treat their techies well, but the grunts are way more than a third of their workforce.
The highest pay rate in the military is about eight times the lowest. Less than that, even, when you factor in food and housing. Corporate America could use that sort of wage compression.
Just making a play on words, not intending to infantilize anyone.
From Google IA: a rhetorical idiom used to express a sense of helplessness, resignation, or the need to figure out a path forward when facing a difficult, uncertain, or tricky situation.