We could also pay them (much) better and hire enough that they don't have to work so hard to maintain current delivery schedules-- which are also dependent on existing post offices, of course, not just Amazon warehouses. The revenue that Amazon employees (or "associates") generate far outstrips their wages.
Amazon hired Pinkertons to spy on workers for hints at unionization.
- Thread starter crimson5pheonix
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So, Amazon effectively doesn't pay tax in my country. When we buy, the payment goes to Amazon Luxembourg (corporation tax, approximately nil). Amazon UK is merely a distribution service with tiny revenues that consequently pays very little tax. Of course, Amazon has made a fortune due to covid-19, at a time when local shops are dying (thus helping cement Amazon's market share) and government revenues have collapsed. Add in the way it treats workers, in my view, it seems dangerously close to a societal parasite, not an advantageous service.
I am in favour of hitting Amazon with a windfall tax of billions over covid-19, and forcing it to change its tax affairs at the threat of scrapping its corporate charter and permission to operate in the UK. Amazon is very convenient, but it provides literally nothing that people in this country couldn't get somewhere else - from other shops and their websites, etc.
That the EU has not slapped this sort of tax avoidance irritates me no end. They have made aggressive noises and I think Luxembourg's policy is very unpopular in the EU, but they have not yet taken action. I'm sure a lot of the reason the UK operates a ton of minimal-regulation overseas tax havens is the knowledge that if it didn't, someone else would operate them and get the money instead. To clamp down on them, it takes unified action by developing nations to clamp down as a group. But underlying this is that everyone knows that they can get a competitive benefit from being permissive where their peers are not.
Even within countries, there's obvious and colossal abuse of the system. In the US, states have been trying to outdo each other on being ever more liberal on how to permit people to dump their money in financial trusts that are de facto tax avoidance systems, because they can make money through the administration of these trusts. And so our countries assist not only the diminution of their own tax base, and because these are disproportionately beneficial to the wealthy, increase their own wealth gaps and - perversely - increase the percentage of the economy that is owned and provides income to the people they can't effectively tax!
In a way, that many Western countries are up to their eyeballs in debt is therefore no surprise. Lots of people laughed at Greece back in 2010, but effectively countries like the USA and UK look like they are voluntarily choosing to turn themselves into the next Greece.
And there are people out there who think that Joe Biden is in the pocket of billionaires like Jeff Bezos with the ultimate goal of turning America into a socialist state...
Amazon makes most of its money from its internet services. It's their platform that is the biggest money earner for them. They take a cut of all transactions. The shipping is there to make them the most desirable marketplace. It isn't what earns them money.
The UK government introduced some sort of internet transaction tax recently - very small (a few pence), but there nonetheless.
For some incredible reason (probably the general incompetence of the UK government), that's a tax that gets paid by all the third party vendors on Amazon's platform, but not Amazon's own sales. It's enough to make you want to burn down an Amazon distribution warehouse.
There's no point at getting angry. There are tens of trillions of dollars squirrelled away in anonymous accounts in places like panama. This is nothing, and will be a distraction until those places are burnt down. They only facilitate corruption.
I see no particular reason why they can't all be dealt with in parallel. There are admittedly some limitations of public attention and political / bureaucratic bandwith, but it's fallacious to think everything but the biggest must be put on the backburner.
Don't fret, the UK Conservative Party has a plan to ensure that none of those tax-haven dollars benefit anybody except a few distant rich wankers as well. Its called Brevit, and involves leaving a regulatory framework juuuust before it introduces restrictions on tax havens.
They gotta plenty of excuses to be corrupt.
Agema is critical so much because he’s more of a Capitalist than anyone in Amazon... becuase Capitalism is based on a set of laws and ideals that Amazon just refuses to follow. Because profits
It facilitates corruption. Anonymous hoards of untraceable money, stashed someplace that exists mostly on paper...
I'm getting bad vibes from you two about the future of the UK. Your entire leadership seems hellbent on ignoring its own population.
It must be a multi-national endeavor. Same with curtailing places like Luxemburg and Switzerland.
The British population are broadly ignorant of politics or pretty much anything about how governance and the country works. As long as politicians toot the right nationalist horns and put on an entertaining enough display, they'll fall into line. Sure in ten years they might look back and realise it hasn't worked out at all, but as they have no idea what's going on and what matters, it's just a case of pacifying them with whatever superficial zeitgeist gripe is big at election time.
That shit that's been going on in the USA? The British aren't any better, it's just that the UK's about 10-20 years behind in people sucking standards into the mire. Farage started, Johnson continued, US right-wing money has been pouring in, and we'll be on track for a full-blown Trump in about decade - although the press and upper classes may decide to try to hold the line.
Where Amazon gets downright shady, is they define FC jobs as "retail" and not "warehouse" or "logistics", and compare wages to retail stores rather than warehouse or package handling jobs. So when they say they're a high-paying employer with good benefits, that's in comparison to, say, a Target or Wal-Mart employee, not what the job actually entails, and that can be a difference in pay from $2-3 bucks an hour all the way up to $10/hour or more for PIT operation or TDR.
That $15/hour corporate minimum wage was actually a pay cut for tenured employees since they nuked monthly productivity/attendance bonuses, RSU's, and re-scaled their tenure-based step plan to account for the minimum wage hike. And they did it at the start of peak, when MOT ramps up and when those monthly bonuses doubled, meaning for November and December that year tenured employees were taking as much as a $2/hour cut and even new hires were only going to break even. That's the part of the story you didn't hear a whole lot about.
The problem with that logic of just hiring more people is that there are so many people in the economy, you hire one person, that person can't be hired anywhere else for that amount of time they are working there. If everyone followed that logic of hiring more people we would run out of people to hire.
Well, it will. More likely than not, in a way that increases them. You can be absolutely, positively certain that any time Amazon or any associated person does something that looks good, it isn't and the other shoe is going to drop.
I mean, look at Bezos' "philanthropy". He's parking his stocks in DAF's to preserve control over their value like any other tech executive, then releases a drip-feed of them onto the market as stock prices dictate. And it's still a tax write-off.
This is another example of how ridiculous Amazon gets: until peak 2017, one minor perk of the job was they actually did provide snacks, beverages, meals, and other minor goodies as morale levels (as determined by employee surveys) dictated. And more than that, they'd hand out small-value gift cards (usually $10) for Amazon or other local businesses, or they'd spot employees food and drink from the snack machines ("vendor bucks" if you heard the term), for good quality or productivity, or good conduct. Depending on which FC you worked in and its management, it wasn't a bad little perk all things considered.
Come peak 2017, all that ended. Well, changed. Instead of just handing out vendor bucks or comping employees stuff, they'd hand out vouchers or little scratchers which you could then exchange for the items with HR reps. Massive pain in the ass, really obnoxious, they acted like it was this big huge increase of perks when it really wasn't. Why?
Well, when you went to turn in the vouchers or scratchers, HR would take your name and badge number...so they could itemize $1 vending machine coupons as taxable income. Because Trump's tax bill cut deductibility of de minimis fringe benefits.
Oh no, wages might then increase naturally. Horrors. Probably not, but that's the worst case scenario. (Which is an improvement!)
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... Or people would be able to leverage that demand for workers for higher wages.
Anywho, fuck amazon, fuck Bezos. The man is scum.
Jeff Bezos could not give every Amazon employee $105,000 period. That man is an idiot who doesn't understand how net worth gets evaluated.