https://themilitant.com/2018/10/13/as-bosses-face-labor-shortage-amazon-raises-pay-to-15/
As bosses face labor shortage, Amazon raises pay to $15
By Brian Williams
Vol. 82/No. 39
October 22, 2018
Amazon, the second-largest employer in the U.S. after Walmart, and the
richest, valued at over $1 trillion, announced Oct. 2 that it’s
increasing its minimum wage to $15 an hour starting in November. The
move comes in face of a shortage of workers to hire for its huge
warehouses and growing discontent by those currently employed there over
working conditions — and discussions over unionization.
The move will affect 250,000 full-time Amazon employees and more than
100,000 temporary workers in the U.S. as well as some 37,000 full-time
and seasonal workers in the U.K. The raise for U.K. workers will be to
$12.50 an hour and in London, $13.80.
In praising the decision as something “new” and “different,” Amazon
chief executive Jeff Bezos, currently the richest person in the world
and the owner of the Washington Post, didn’t mention the fact that he
makes $4 million an hour, a product of the huge profits the company
makes off exploiting its workforce.
Competition has been intensifying more broadly over getting and keeping
workers to fill lower-paid retail, warehouse and other blue-collar jobs.
Earlier this year Walmart increased its minimum wage in the U.S. from $9
to $11.
“It’s no longer enough to post jobs on websites,” Chris Beckage, a vice
president of staffing firm Acara Solutions told the Wall Street Journal,
to attract workers for warehouse jobs. “We’re going to bowling alleys,
churches, community centers.” And some employers are dispensing with
marijuana tests and criminal background checks to more quickly get
workers on the job, he said.
Amazon’s move follows widespread strikes by workers at the company’s
warehouses in Germany and Spain this summer over low pay and working
conditions. A one-day strike at six facilities in Germany July 17
coincided with Amazon’s Prime Day, when the company offers big
discounts. Workers in Spain went out for three days, and in Poland
workers staged a “work-to-rule.”
Amazon Prime, the company’s two-day delivery option, currently costing
$119 a year, “has triggered an arms race among the largest retailers,”
noted the Wall Street Journal Sept. 20, as sharpening competition has
forced many of them to take similar steps. In the past year, Target,
Walmart and many vendors on Google Express have started offering similar
two-day delivery.
Amazon employs over 560,000 workers worldwide, operating over 140
fulfillment centers — about 75 of them in the U.S. Some of these
distribution centers are gargantuan, exceeding a million square feet.
And inside its Rube Goldberg-like conveyer systems, speedup and unsafe
conditions for the workers increases amid intense boss pressure to “make
rate.” Workers also have to contend with the more than 100,000 robots
buzzing around Amazon’s distribution centers.
At an Amazon fulfillment center in Pennsylvania, for example, one worker
was fired five weeks after getting injured on the job, reported the
Guardian. “I was on a ladder and someone came flying into the area I was
in, hit the ladder causing me to fall, and I landed on my back and left
leg,” Christina Miano-Wilburn told the paper. “They refused to give me
paperwork for workmen’s comp.” She had worked at Amazon for two years.
Lindsai Johnson quit her job at a California warehouse last May after
having to be taken away in an ambulance over dehydration and dizziness.
“Not all people report injuries because they are scared to get taken off
their job,” she told the Guardian. “I have many times come home with
bruises from work at Amazon and experienced my first hernia there.”
Despite the current expansion in the U.S. capitalist economy, wage
raises have been hard to come by. In August wages rose 2.9 percent from
a year earlier, but after adjusting for inflation, the increase was just
0.2 percent, the Labor Department reported.
Many bosses instead have opted for offering bonuses or some benefits,
something much easier than wages for them to cut when the inevitable
capitalist downturn arrives. “The average worker received 32 percent of
total compensation in benefits,” reported the New York Times Sept 26,
“including bonuses, paid leave and company contributions to insurance
and retirement plans in the second quarter of 2018. That was up from 27
percent in 2000.”
But not Jeff Bezos. After announcing the wage hike at Amazon, he said
all worker bonuses and stock options were being eliminated to free up
money to cover the increase. When workers heard of the cuts, many said
they expected they would actually get less over all.
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Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst
out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how
wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous
something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
