Amazon workers walk off , $26 per hr is bad??!

Yes and how much do they pay for insurance and what is their deductible?

My daughter worked for Whole Foods about 5-6 years ago. She made $18 an hour and had an excellent health insurance plan.

Amazon bought WH and she started paying $300 a month for health insurance with a $3500 deductible. $7100.00 a year before insurance kicks in. For 3 years, she had about $3000.00 in health care bills.

Bezos is cruel and cares nothing about us people.

$26/hr in San Bernardino, CA is different from $26/hr in Jackson, MS.

They are eventually gonna run out of potential employees because their turnover is absurdly high.

Remember when McDonalds said they would replace all humans with kiosks if they had to pay &15/hr? they are now starting at $18 and can’t find enough for full staff! So I bet there is room to ask for $30 at Amazon

Actually, union membership fell to a record low of only 10% in 2019. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/share-of-union-workers-in-the-us-falls-to-a-record-low-in-2019-2020-01-22 I'm not sure what's happened in the 3 years since then, but real power is coming not from unionization but from record low unemployment. I personally have experienced this in my own profession - I'm making more and have way more bargaining power because it's so hard to hire right now.

Unionization stopped working when globalization happened. A union can't be effective when the job can be moved either overseas or to a different state.

Amazon warehouse workers are one of the few exceptions to this rule, since their jobs can't be moved overseas, and I wish them luck and high wages. My guess is that low unemployment will give them better pay and treatment than a union, but who knows. The enemy of Amazon warehouse workers is the robot. Luckily for the warehouse workers, they've probably got a couple decades before robots begin to destroy their bargaining power.

Indeed. I think $26 sounds pretty good for an unskilled worker, but that's independent of whether Amazon workers should advocate for more. Of course they should! Given low unemployment right now, every worker from minimum wage on up should be asking for raises or other perks. Get it while the getting's good.

The working conditions at Amazon warehouses are horrible. Their injury rates are ridiculously high for the industry, for example. This coupled with the fact that $26 dollars/hour anywhere in California is simply not enough to meet basic needs.

After reading the posts over the first three pages, I can say that most people do not understand economics. Sure, anyone can ask for more money at anytime, but that doesn't mean they deserve it or will get it. Some jobs are not intended to be living wages and if you don't like it then go find a better job. Companies don't typically pay what someone is "worth" (which of course is hard to define). Companies pay what they feel the market dictates. And when the market dictates more than their business model allows, they do things to reduce those wages (lay-offs, automation, closing/moving to cheaper labor markets). How many of these employees would be happy with a 10 percent raise if it meant a 15% worker lay-off. I'm 64 and have noticed a lot of employee reductions and/or service reductions and self-service as wages have increased. Here are just a few examples: self pumping gas, no more automatic checking of oil and cleaning windows when getting gas, no more paper order slips at McDonalds, self checkout (tyipcally one monitor instead of 4 to 6 cashiers), no more checking a book (published weekly) to see if a credit card is stolen, self checkouts, ATM's, highway toll collectors being eliminated, elimination of operated assisted telephone calls, check you flight on-line or by an automated answering program, cash registers that calculate your change, checkout scanners instead of entering the price, booking your own travel arrangements. Many people would say that many of the previous things increased service but the more important thing to notice in this discussion is that they reduced the number of employees or changed the job to maintaining new technology. The push for higher wages usually results in higher wages for some and a reduction to zero wages for others. Capitalism is not evil. It allows freedom of choice and without the profit motive, most of us would still be working on a farm which I can assure you (without any technology) is not an enjoyable job and there is almost no real chance for advancement.

It is not backbreaking work. It's actually a pretty easy job. Anyone that tells you its hard work is simply lazy and wants to get paid to not do anything. I've worked for the company for 5 years. It's the younger generation that complains about doing real world work.

You dont understand economics you chump. You believe the common beliefs spoonfed to fox news viewers. Your examples are dumb as hell. Sorry self-pumping gas is not your speed, grandpa.

The company isn't successful because of the talents of their warehouse workers. They can plug in any other person to those jobs and it will still be a successful company. They should get paid the same as any warehouse worker, be it Target, Best Buy, Walmart, you name it. Being able to drive a forklift or organize boxes onto the right trucks isn't magically way more different working for Amazon instead of a different company. If you were paid by the success of a company then only the big companies like Amazon would exist because people would only work for those companies. Other companies can't afford to pay their warehouse workers more than $26 so they would not exist anymore.

Then they should move from California to a more affordable part of the country. Apparently Amazon isn't having difficulty finding people who are willing to work for $26/hour. If they can't find enough people to work for that rate they will either close down that warehouse and move it to an affordable area where people can live on that wage, or they will be forced to increase the pay to find workers.

The people that work their are intellectual lightweights and should be happy they're getting anything at all!

That's not bad. You can buy 3 $8 beers for jamin and give a $2 tip to the cute waitress

The typical warehouse worker is a fundamental cog in the machine. The VALUE OF THEIR LABOR is far more than 26$/hr regardless of whether or not they are replaceable by some other worker.

YOU adeptly state the problem that companies want to use your replaceability as a cudgel to pay you far less than the value of the labor you performed. That's why workers are more effective when they stick together and not challenge the system individually. 100x more difficult to replace 50 people than 1.

It all depends on a lot of things: state, number of family members, multiple cars in the family, tax payments, rent or mortgage...and more. Some people have enough to live from paycheck to paycheck, and some people don't have enough for a week. Everyone has different expenses so everyone has to judge for themselves. In my state, my salary seems average, but I sometimes don't have enough for necessities like things I don't really need from Amazon. I occasionally buy and resell things from Amazon. It's a great distraction from my routine, especially when I use a resource like... Read here

Personally, I think all basic pay at jobs today sucks. I make solid income at my job $122K a year and my wife's contribution is $65K. However, as gamblers and poker players I was at the Bellagio watching a poker game in which the blinds were $100 Big and $50 small. Some of the pot sizes were between $10K and $50K which is some people's annual income. The thing with income if you only rely on what you make and don't understand other ways to make income you will always be miserable. I have had some days rolling in which I have make close to $20K playing poker or blackjack or even high limit slots. Like running a race and trying to break away from the field that takes a risk and so does making money!