I don't see why this would be a meaningful comparison. Employees make wages, not profits. They do not expect to share profit with their employer. If the company made a loss, they would rightfully not share the loss either.
Amazon has hired 400k new employees this year. 400k. Plus overtime for existing workers. [1]<p>They also paid covid bonuses until (I think) June.<p>Oh, and they raised their minimum wage from 11 to 15usd/h. [2]<p>Oh, and they are paying Christmas bonuses of 500mUSD [3]<p>That sounds like a company making real strides and helping a shit tonne of it's employees exactly at a time it could just yawn and not do anything.<p>[1]. <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazons-hires-248500-people-q3-jeff-bezos-challenges-large-employers-raise-minimum-wage/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazons-hires-248500-people-q3...</a><p>[2]. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/why-amazon-really-raised-minimum-wage/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/why-amazon-really-raised-minimum...</a><p>[3]. <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55093821" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55093821</a>
The Brookings Institute who published this have $435,964,000 in net assets. <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020-annual-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020-an...</a> Couldn't they pay their people more?
The awesome thing about Amazon shares (or public equity) is you can be a B&N, McDonald’s, government employee or even unemployed, and still share in the profits
This article confuses stock price with profits.<p>Additionally in a single year Amazon almost <i>doubled</i> the number of employees they have. Does that not count as sharing profits with people?<p>With companies going bust left and right, Amazon has been one bright spot to give people jobs. Yes, I know they are warehouse jobs, but when over a million people accepted such jobs I think reports of how bad they are are overblown.
Edtech companies have faired well in the pandemic (in theory and in stock price), should the students receive a cut of the profit? Teachers?<p>Not trolling, simply restatong the problem in another domain, which has actually left me feeling even more unsure of the answer.
Not true. Amazon created thousands more jobs and Walmart is paying $5 more base than local grocery chains. Thousands of unemployed small retail/restaurant paid $10 now have at least $15/h jobs.
It's almost like they think that people get primarily paid based on the dollar amount of revenue they generate. The salary of employees is conditioned on a multitude of factors, mostly relating to supply and demand, industry norms, the quality of their work, how much better they are than the median employee, etc etc. Profits made are obviously a factor, but less so when there's a high supply of potential workers.<p>tl;dr: You get paid based on what you can demand. Money and power are never given, they are only taken. I have been both in a position as an employer and an employee and people who worked for me didn't get raises unless a couple things were true: they were good at their job (i.e I valued and needed their labor) and they went to me to demand more money. If you don't demand more money (or are not in a position to demand more money, like many low-skilled employees), you're (probably) not going to be paid more.