Amazon Announces Minimum Wage Scam
From the USW
Activists around the country applauded Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos for announcing their plan this week to raise the minimum wage of all employees to $15 an hour. At first glance, celebrations were in fact appropriate. The company is now worth $1 trillion, as of September 2018, yet they’ve been paying their workers pennies in comparison. For several years now, labor activists, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, have been calling upon the online retail giant to do the right thing and raise their minimum wage.
However, the way Bezos plans to pay for these raises has come to light, and there is no applauding to follow.
According to Bloomberg News, Amazon, which employs 575,000 people worldwide, is eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for warehouse workers and other hourly employees. And what many people don’t realize is a large chunk of the Seattle-based company’s workers, including their delivery drivers, are contracted out, meaning they will not benefit at all from the supposed raises as they are not “employees.”
It appears this announcement was merely a ruse for Amazon to give itself a pat on the back, not a genuine commitment to pay people a real living wage. Instead of sharing his mass wealth built for him by his workers, Bezos chose to steal from one group of them merely for show.
This sick display of corporate greed shows why activists must continue to fight for a national living wage and unions to protect workers from this kind of back door theft. Corporations will not do this on their own, because even when they do, they don’t.
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