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It may be too easy to award Amazon's new minimum wage at $ 15 Bernie Sanders, Although the Democrat-Socialist Senator did not hesitate to take a credit. For months, Sanders has been engaged in a populist campaign against the e-commerce giant and its founder, the billionaire. Jeff Bezos, for what he described as a "crazy" failure to pay a decent wage to the workers. "It is totally unacceptable that ordinary Americans subsidize the world's richest people, like Jeff Bezos, when they pay their employees such low wages," he said. tweeted in August. "Count to ten", he wrote in another tweet. "In those ten seconds, Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, has just made more money than Amazon's median employee wins in a whole year." . "
Amazon's rapid capitulation suggests a cautious calculation of political risk. Although Amazon initially reacted against Sanders, breaking with its tradition of refuting rumors that working conditions in its more than 100 order processing centers have proliferated across the country, the company seemed to change the position, confirming that his minimum wage would increase by November 1. This change affects more than 250,000 full-time and part-time employees in the United States and the United Kingdom, Whole Foods workers and more than 100,000 seasonal employees hired during the holidays. "We listened to our critics, thought about what we wanted to do and decided to lead," Bezos said in a statement. "We are excited about this change and are encouraging our competitors and other major employers to join us."
Sanders made a victorious turn and shouted at Bezos, whom he had already ridiculed as a man who earns $ 260 million a day while his subordinates sleep in their car. "What Mr. Bezos has done today is not only extremely important to the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees, it could also be a shot heard around the world," he said. wrote on Twitter. "I urge the country's business leaders to follow Mr. Bezos's example." Bezos replied in kind: "Thanks @SenSanders. We are excited about this and hope others will participate. "
Turning to the spectacle of Love Day, market analysts quickly turned to the real motivations that motivated the moment when Jesus arrived at Jesus. First, Bezos probably wanted to rule out the "techlash" that weighed on the FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Bezos was particularly aware of the political dangers that permeate Donald Trump Washington. In recent years he has bought a house in Kalorama, near Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and increased Amazon's lobbying expenses by more than 400%. Yet his purchase of The Washington Post in 2013, he became an irresistible target for Trump, who went to war with Bezos, tweeting baseless theories about how Amazon receives special treatment from the US Postal Service ("Only fools, or the worst , say that our money with Amazon, "he writes in a tweet) and derisory the To post like "nothing more than an expensive lobbyist (the newspaper loses a fortune) for Amazon".
With Amazon pressed on both sides of the political spectrum – Bernie left and Trump right – Bezos would have been stupid do not make peace with one of the two barbarian tribes at his door. Last month, senator Elizabeth Warren said it was concerned about Amazon's anticompetitive practices and called on lawmakers to address the company's issues related to aggregation and monetization of user data "now". During the summer, Rohit Chopra, the new Democratic leader of the Federal Trade Commission, retained as temporary adviser Lina Khan, A 29-year-old student, a relatively unknown law student, published a viral article entitled "The Antitrust Paradigm of Amazon". (Anti-trust issues have recently become a nuisance on the right too, although they are mostly related to alleged anger.Things on Twitter and Facebook.) Now, the leftist forces seem pacified – or at least soothed for the moment.
Bezos might also have more prosaic business imperatives. This summer, Amazon workers abroad participated in a series of high profile strikes. Whole Foods workers tried to unionize as a result of mergers and layoffs. At the same time, Amazon's competitors such as Target have given their employees significant benefits by raising the minimum wage to $ 11 or $ 12 an hour. And while Amazon is approaching a vacation, with a national unemployment rate of less than 4% and employers vying for seasonal employees, a minimum wage of $ 15 gives it an additional edge to recruit its 100,000 seasonal regular employees. . attractive workplace for a few months compared to another less well-paid employer.
If the ultimate goal of Amazon and Bezos is to exchange short-term profitability versus a long-term market share, this decision makes perfect sense. Amazon has the resources to cope with a pay rise and the tradeoff is familiar to society: in the 90s and 2000s, as it conquered the world of e-commerce, Amazon has survived without much margin. Now that it has a dominant position in the market, a valuation approaching trillions of dollars and the richest man in the world at the helm, Amazon is well positioned to get around its competitors by raising the price of labor and, in doing so, , perhaps inadvertently doing an indispensable good for its workers.
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