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Pretty funny how Amazon spun this for publicity while at the same time behind closed doors they calculated how it would actually save them money. Pay them more per hour but take away the incentives resulting in paying them less. They are probably still laughing in the corporate office.
My former company was forced by Washington law to pay us $11.50 per hour. So, they did it and took away our vac/sick pay unless we were at tech level....
Production dropped off so much with people quitting they lost renewal of their contract and now are being forced out...YAY!!!!
If you don't meet their work requirements you'll be let go at Amazon. That $15hr is nothing when they work you like a robot. Amazon makes workers compete with their robotic machines.
They have 350,000 employees making under the $15/hr new minimum wage.
It is way more important for Amazon to be able to attract a mass amount of people, than keep the few high performers happy with bonuses and stock options.
Those low wage employees are everything to Amazon. They need 100s of thousands of low wage people to get the product out the door. Without those people, Amazon is done for, at least until automation/robotics takes over more.
Basically the high performers subsidized everyone else, but Amazon really didn't have much choice. They don't need a small handful of high performers, they need massive amounts of people to just show up, and what they where paying wasn't cutting it.
The play is the stock. Bezos was probably looking at what all that stock would be worth in 10 years and decided to give a front end raise to "ease the pain" of taking it away.
I know 4 of their former warehouse workers including one that was at those Allentown warehouses where they parked ambulances to take away heat stroke victims rather than shut them for the duration of the heat wave. They did install AC after but shows you what they think of the peons.
Pretty funny how Amazon spun this for publicity while at the same time behind closed doors they calculated how it would actually save them money. Pay them more per hour but take away the incentives resulting in paying them less. They are probably still laughing in the corporate office.
Doubtful. Worker turnover is ridiculous in that field. I bet the vast majority of workers there would take the $15 instead of destroying their health and wellbeing working there for decades.
I have a friend who is in personnel management at Amazon. He is a hardass marine officer combat veteran with very limited patience for failure, so his perspective might be slightly skewed. He loves the performance incentives amazon offers but he predicted years ago that they wouldn't last long because people tend to sue when they don't get them and the lawsuits are expensive and stressful for management. I was stunned when he told me that he gets sued (named on a lawsuit) about a dozen times a month. In addition, stock options and vesting are a massive headache to handle due to the unusually high incidences of extended medical and mental health absences that employees tend to suffer from. Amazon found out that it is very hard to find people who reliably show up and do their job for less than $15 an hour. I am guessing that the increased cost of wages will end up being less than the legal and insurance costs associated with high turnover and administering stock options. It is clearly a business decision, not senior management going soft.
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