Why Amazon Raised Its Minimum Wage to $15 [View all]

[ehrnst]

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” Bezos wrote in a statement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”

Thus, Amazon’s official explanation is, ostensibly, “Bernie Sanders (and our striking workers, and the Whole Foods employees who’ve been trying to unionize, and their allies in the liberal media) made us do it.”
........................................................................................


That said, it’s a little hard to believe that Sanders bill — and the broader organizing among Amazon workers that inspired it — forced Bezos to make a change that he had no other reason to implement. Amazon has not been paralyzed by any extended, nationwide strikes. Sanders’s bill never had any plausible path to becoming law. The pressure they brought to bear might have been necessary to trigger the wage hike, but it probably wasn’t sufficient.

......................................................................

There’s reason to think labor market conditions influenced Bezos’s calculus. With the unemployment rate sitting below 4 percent, and the holiday season on the horizon, U.S. retailers are in fierce competition for staff. Amazon plans to hire 100,000 seasonal employees — as does UPS, while FedEx is looking for 55,000. Meanwhile, Amazon’s retail competitors have been lifting their starting wages — with Target’s recently rising to $15, Costco’s to $14, and Walmart’s to $11.

Still, it’s unlikely that market conditions required Bezos to establish a $15, nationwide wage floor for every type of Amazon worker. The average wage for retail salespeople in the U.S. is currently $13.20 (which means that a great number of such workers earn far less than that).

.......................................................................

All this said: Even if his own mercenary interests played bigger a role in Bezos’s decision than his own statement suggests, that doesn’t mean that Amazon’s workers and critics weren’t instrumental in today’s good news. Corporations do not automatically (or even usually) sacrifice short-term profitability to their own enlightened, long-term financial interest. If bidding up wages across the retail sector makes business sense for Amazon today, then it made sense for the company a year ago. In between, the company’s workers and their political allies raised the costs of a low-wage business model. Now, they’ve earned themselves a higher paycheck.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/10/why-amazon-raised-minimum-wage-to-15-dollars-jeff-bezos-act-bernie-sanders.html