Enough Is Enough

 "Did you know Amazon starts its full-time employees at $15 per hour?" This is an essentially rhetorical question asked by Amazon themselves. Itself. It's part of an ad campaign promoting the just and kind robot overlords, Minions of Bezos. It has become increasingly invested in letting us all know that they care about us and they or it or whatever Amazon is or might be that they are not evil. Amazon is not just a river in South America. Amazon is our savior.

So please don't make them allow unions in their shop. They're already paying the princely sum of fifteen dollars an hour to their full-time employees. Okay, so nobody's getting rich, but at least you can afford to live on what you make for dragging other people's value-paks of Crest and the like around their warehouses and loading them into cardboard boxes so they can get it the very next day.

Nobody except Jeff Bezos. Jeff is making more than thirteen million dollars an hour. More than two hundred thousand dollars a second. The folks at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on whether or not to unionize. However that vote turns out, there are likely to be protracted legal battles to determine just how, when or whether that group of workers will ever be allowed to unionize. Which means that there will be some large billable hours for some law firms operating on both sides of the courtroom. Meanwhile, full-time employees of Amazon will continue to earn fifteen dollars an hour. If you happen to be a software engineer who is fortunate enough to catch on with the world's largest retailer, you can expect to drop in around one hundred twenty thousand dollars a year. These are not the folks who want to unionize. If you made fifteen dollars an hour, your salary would be about a quarter of that.

Amazon has doubled its profits since the onset of COVID-19. If you needed toothpaste and didn't want to take a chance on visiting your local Rite-Aid, click on Amazon. And stream their movies while your local theater is closed. If you needed a job because yours had disappeared?

Amazon is paying their full-time employees fifteen dollars an hour.

Isn't that enough?