Jeff Bezos Wants to Give More Money to Charity. He Should Pay His Workers First

Dont understand why this was flagged, read the article and they werent making wild claims without citations.<p>Payroll and charity issues aside which is up to interpretation, I dont understand why HN can not take the article. Maybe HuffPost isnt a credible source?

If he pays them more he also pays payroll taxes.<p>If he donates to charity he gets a tax credit.<p>Am I missing something? Else seems logical to me.

On the footnote:<p><pre><code> Fredrick Kunkle is a staff writer on The Washington Post’s Metro desk and co-chair of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s bargaining unit at the Post. The views stated here are his own. </code></pre> It looks like WaPo labor union leader is trying to bargain a better labor contract with their employer&#x2F;WaPo owner with this piece.

Bezos&#x27;s wealth is based on Amazon stock value.<p>Amazon the company pays salaries, not Bezos. An increase in X$ to warehouse workers may mean a decrease of X*Y$ in Bezos&#x27;s wealth. It&#x27;s not so simple.<p>Also, the workers that everyone feels bad for are less than a decade from being entirely replaced with robots. It&#x27;s sad but if your entire job consists of walking around a warehouse picking up objects and putting them into boxes because you have thumbs and robotic ones are not good enough yet, I don&#x27;t see why you should expect anything more than minimum wage.

To a first order approximation, every $3500 he donates the against malaria foundation would save a life.<p>I&#x27;m all for Jeff Bezos operating as a more ethical businessman. And you can criticize him for that till the cows come home with no objection from me. But lets not criticize his plans for charitable giving. Lets not discourage that. Because at the end of the day, billions of dollars to effective charities will save millions of lives.<p>I live in NZ, which has a population of 5 millions or so. It doesn&#x27;t feel like a small country at all. And yet Jeff Bezos could probably save that many people from dying if he wanted to. He could literally create another NZ worth of people in the world. It wouldn&#x27;t quite be as cheap as $18B, but I suspect it could be done for less than $40B. So he would still have another $40B left to fix those worker-welfare issues.

Amazon often pays its workers top dollar. The problem is what is expected in exchange...

The workers are just going to waste it on stuff like food and shelter.

Why should he pay them more than market value? As a shareholder, I definitely don&#x27;t want this to happen. It&#x27;s not Bezos&#x27; company, it&#x27;s a public company.

What does the &quot;[flagged]&quot; mean in the title?

This is the truest article I have ever read.

Off topic, but did anyone else notice the sneaky back-button highjacking? I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s a better word for it.<p>Open the article in a new tab, and instead of the back button being greyed-out, it is functional -- when clicked, it redirects to the home page with a full-screen headline.