Riech suggested wages are about 2 billion. Bezos is already spending between 1 billion to 700 million (I'd have to guess there are managers so they wouldn't be on the lowest wages). Amazon is worth 1.7 trillion.... those extra wages would be an extra 1.3 billion. Less than .001% of the net worth.
Amazon hired Pinkertons to spy on workers for hints at unionization.
- Thread starter crimson5pheonix
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Yeah, Robert Reich is an idiot. I forgot that you guys only accept great minds like Sydney Powell.
But that worth doesn't exist. It isn't real money. It's a pure hypothetical, based only what someone might pay to own the business. If you own property worth $1000, you can't pay people with that property, at least without selling it. For Bezos to do as described, he'd have to find imaginary buyers to liquidate the wealth to distribute. Amazon being worth 1.7 trillion doesn't necessarily mean it has any money to give away. You can own trillions in property and infrastructure and still not have a dime.
Like, could Amazon afford to give all its workers a healthy bonus right now? Almost assuredly. But not based on imaginary numbers like stock evaluations or non-liquid assets like property values. That sort of math exists only to piss people off.
A lot of his "net worth" will be in non-liquid assets, sure. But do you really believe he doesn't have even 0.001% of his wealth in bank accounts? That defies credulity.
Oh yes he could. Just not necessarily in cash and/or immediately.
Athought of course implicitly, Robert Reich obviously means that Amazon could give all its employees $105,000, not Jeff Bezos personally. Amazon absolutely could do that easily - if it didn't have the cash to hand, it could secure a loan up to the ~$100 billion necessary without much trouble, or do it via a share giveaway. It's just that it won't do that, because there are billionaire shareholders who think they should have the money instead, and woe betide a corporate board that offends its powerful shareholders.
Sure does piss people off. ‘We can’t possibly give our workers more money because we have plenty of money.’ There is a reason why Reich was looking at such a small percentage of net worth. He is ALREADY AWARE about having assests tied up etc, took this into account and spat out a number that was achievable
We aren’t talking about a mum and pop store here. We’re talking about a place with 280 billion in revenue but ‘1 billion is just too much.’ Is that the math your so worried about? That’s like 0.4%. You can’t look at profits because they always artificially deflate them dramatically. I wouldn’t doubt they can hide plenty of revenue as well but it’s more likely to be accurate
FYI, globally, Amazon has just over a million employees (according to the site I checked), so $105,000 to each employee is more like $130 billion.
Australian minimum wage is $20ish dollars. So already higher than the US. But the Australian dollar fluctuates, so it’s not worth as much as the US. $75k is a good wage here. There was a reason we were keeping it US. It gets more complicated. personally, I would have thought $105k would be very good wage in the US but I dare say he choose this number as thought experiment. He’d probably would, as you suggest, spread the wealth across countries.
A whole helps of that $130b you are talking about is already being paid to employees. I’ve been looking at the difference between the current pay rate and the one Reich quoted
edit: he’s also only looking at the warehouse employees. So he’s not even looking at all American Amazon workers
Edit 2: FYI the $280b revenue I quoted is the US number. Also the total number of US workers is almost 800k
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Don't you know the law of supply and demand only works when you're rich?
Or you could just be bootlicking again.
Bezos owns 55.5 million shares of Amazon stock and there just shy of a million blue badges, so let's round that up to a million. Going off Amazon's current stock price, $105,000 per employee would be 33 shares each, and he could divest 30-odd million shares as a one-time bonus in RSU's to Amazon employees and still retain plurality shareholder status while still retaining his pre-pandemic net worth because AMZN is that overvalued on the market. Amazon has 500 million shares outstanding, so divesting that amount even if the total value could be sold immediately wouldn't even be a blip in its price per share, especially given the fact those shares would be immediately gobbled up by institutional shareholders and price instability wouldn't last longer than a 48-hour period.
Taxes would be a *****, but hey, not Jeff-O's or Amazon's problem, because as I said earlier, Amazon has zero compunction offloading its tax burden to its own employees any and every time it gets half an opportunity. Even if Morgan Stanley sold to cover, Amazon employees would still retain approximately 22-23 shares per person.
In fact, if those RSU's were set to vest over a two- to five-year period, AMZN's value per share would likely go up just like it did year over year in Q2 and Q3, when blue badge RSU's vested and entered the market as employees sold off (because RSU vestment happens in April) granting a temporary increase in the velocity of Amazon shares to smooth over quarters in which online sales tend to be slow (case in point, Amazon's Q3 earnings calls in which the corporation perennially underperforms on paper). But more likely, Amazon employees would go long on their newfound shares in anticipation of the now-inevitable split the board seems determined to forestall as long as humanly possible in their Sisyphean quest to turn Amazon into the next Berkshire Hathaway, meaning those shares would be effectively parked for a 5-10 year period at minimum.
Meaning, the move would increase Bezos' net worth over time.
I'd suggest you shill your nonsense in a thread that doesn't include someone who used to work at Amazon, was an Amazon shareholder and therefore cognizant of Amazon's financials, and knows how Amazon RSU's work.
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Reason for this can be explained with government welfare. Had the US government not provided basic welfare (food stamps, for example) then the employer couldn't rely on it for his employees not to literally starve to death. It was a long time ago, but companies used to run entire towns just for their employees.
en.wikipedia.org
I remember reading that Walmart treats its employees awfully, and it relies on them taking government welfare in their wage calculations.
Company town - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
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I mean, you just suggested Bezos could give away the majority of his net worth and end up being worth more, and you're arguing against me who is saying those numbers are absolutely freaking meaningless. I don't feel like you saying a bunch of words has made my claims any weaker. You seem proud of a bunch of knowledge that didn't help you understand the point in the least.
But you are absolutely right: the way they measure worth in these instances, a person can give their wealth away and end up "richer", or they can sell their property for cash and end up "poorer". They aren't numbers that represent anything real. That's my point. What do you think happens if they try to turn the increase in company value from the last year into cash to give it away? (Hint: Jeff Bezos' worth goes down a lot more than what he'd be giving people.)
If net worth is meaningless, why do we give a shit if it's taken away? Oh no, you vicious socialists stole somebody's imaginary money?
I think you missed the point. The Capitalists stole the money first. They didn’t compensate the average properly so they can make bank. All this is doing is giving the money to those who did most of the work.
if Capitalists just followed their own rules, we wouldn’t be here. Funny how property rights are writtten in such a way to make this happen. It’s almost like it’s been rigged from the start.
Yeah, it was a comment on the absurdity of "net wealth" as a concept. I'm in favor of liquidating folks like Bezos, in as many was as you can take that statement
The bald bastard's net worth went from $157 billion to approximately $110 billion and he lost 25% of his stock assets in his divorce a year and a half ago. He's worth twice as much now as he was immediately after the divorce. You are spouting counterfactual garbage to try to make a point reality itself stands as testament against. The reason you think those numbers, facts, and figures like shares outstanding, velocity of stock trades, RSU's, plurality shareholder status, the unusual importance of Amazon's Q3 earnings call, and the impact of sales to cover on short-term Amazon stock value, I just listed are meaningless, is because you don't know the first damn thing about what you're discussing.
Go make impotent noises elsewhere.
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Umm...they didn't run those towns out of any sort of kindness of their hearts. It's just a great way to have a good portion (if not all) of your employees' paychecks come right back to you (not to mention the amount of control you get over a worker who just so happens to rely on you entirely for shelter).Company town - Wikipedia
You know reading that I can’t help but think of that Churchill quote about Hitler invading Hell and speaking up for Satan. I dunno why I thought of it, but I did.
That is an important point. As is often noted, about half the USA receives more in Federal benefits than it pays in Federal income tax, and it's not dissimilar in plenty of other countries. In effect, the government has been subsidising incomes for a long time - and this essentially means subsidising employers, who otherwise would be compelled to raise wages.Reason for this can be explained with government welfare. Had the US government not provided basic welfare (food stamps, for example) then the employer couldn't rely on it for his employees not to literally starve to death. It was a long time ago, but companies used to run entire towns just for their employees.
I remember reading that Walmart treats its employees awfully, and it relies on them taking government welfare in their wage calculations.Company town - Wikipedia
Companies like Amazon, when they want to build new centres, effectively get local governments to bid against each other with ever more generous grants and offers to build Amazon's infrastructure for it, in the hope they can snaffle those jobs for their towns. And thus public money is hoovered up by obscenely rich corporations that don't need it so that they can pad their shareholders' dividends - also maintaining competitive advantages over smaller firms without that clout. The system is rotten.
Company towns of course exist in another era. Companies back in the day were much more rooted in a community - that place was a "home" for the company as well as the workers. It was not unusual for workers to dedicate their entire career to their company. Big companies aren't remotely like that these days: a work site like a factory, communications centre or even HQ is just a place that can be shut down or moved as required. They're hardly going to build a town to support something they may shutter in a few years if they can save money moving production to China. Workers aren't like that nowadays either - although I dare say that's got plenty to do with increasing job insecurity. Early industrialists had a more paternalistic attitude. Around 1900 the concept that a corporation's highest legal and ethical duty was to its shareholders was enshrined, and the 20th century was essentially decades of transition towards the neoliberal corporation where workers became nothing but a resource like steel, wood, stationery and IT equipment. It's one of the things that always enrages me about corporations who talk about their personnel in terms like "family". Even "community" makes me bristle as the reality is nothing like the comforting connotations of the term, although I accept that is at least true in the broader sense.