On Tuesday, Amazon made headlines around the world as they announced a new $15 minimum wage for all employees. But heaping praise on the trillion dollar company and celebrating victory is both premature and short sighted. The very next day it was reported that Amazon is paying for these raises, at least in part, by taking monthly bonuses and stock awards away from warehouse workers and others. In response to mounting public pressure, it seems that this raise is more about publicity than fair treatment of workers.
Like many companies, Amazon has consistently shown that they do not actually care about their employees. They care about their bottom line and maximizing profits.
- We’ve seen Amazon workers “treated in ways that leave them homeless, unable to work or bereft of income after workplace accidents.”
- It’s been reported that “Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high.”
- This summer, employees in Minnesota said “they have experienced exhaustion, dehydration and injuries while working without air conditioning. Workers said the conditions are particularly difficult for Muslim workers who are celebrating Ramadan and observing a strict fast.”
Wages have been stagnant in the United States since 1973, up just 9% over the past 45 years, while productivity is up 74% during that same period. The movement for a $15 an hour minimum wage is not radical, but simply seeking to keep pace with the costs of the modern world.
To put it simply, paying workers $15 an hour is the BARE MINIMUM we should expect from a responsible and moral company.
So while we applaud Amazon for taking this step in the right direction, we also recognize that wages are only one facet of a complicated fight for workers’ rights. We push back against the celebratory praise being heaped upon any company doing the BARE MINIMUM to support workers.
We want credit to go where credit is due for this recent victory, and the credit does not go to Amazon. It has taken Amazon 24 years to pay their workers a marginally living wage. This company has been leveraging cheap labor and poor working conditions for two decades in order to become a trillion dollar company whose founder and CEO is worth $40 billion.
So why raise the minimum wage now? Because of pressure from the labor movement.
Amazon has not come to this decision because it is the right thing to do. They’ve come to this decision because the labor movement has applied so much pressure that they had no other choice.
Workers cannot rely on a benevolent boss to have their best interests in mind. The power of collective bargaining is the only way that workers can successfully have their voices heard and respected by this Goliath of a company. Amazon knows this, and fears it. They’ve been using anti-union propaganda and union-busting practices for years in an attempt to stop workers from having a voice in their own working conditions.
“Fight for $15” makes for a catchy twitter hashtag, but from the beginning it has been only half of the movement’s slogan: “Fight for $15 and Unions for All”. We should be thrilled with a huge short term win, but there is work to be done to get Amazon workers to the bargaining table and make their gains sustainable! All workers deserve to be paid a fair wage and to have a say in their working conditions and benefits.
