There's only so much budgeted for labor costs, folks, and you expressed a preference for predictability and immediacy.Amazon garnered praise for raising the minimum wage for its hourly workers to $15 yesterday, but the widely-publicized move also came at the expense of monthly bonuses and stock options. The company explained its decision to shift to a new stock purchase program in the announcement blog post yesterday, citing that hourly employees preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash to RSUs,” or restricted stock units, but the post doesn’t mention the loss of monthly incentives, which Bloomberg reported earlier today.Several Amazon warehouse employees have criticized the move, stating they would actually be losing thousands in incentive pay. Currently, warehouse workers get two shares of Amazon stock when they’re hired ($1,952.76 per share as of writing), and an additional stock option each year. After the changes take effect, the RSU program will be phased out for stocks that vest in 2020 and 2021, and it will be replaced with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of next year.An Amazon warehouse worker told The Verge via email that the news was devastating to fulfillment employees, many of whom depend on their RSU and VCP (variable compensation pay, a performance-based monthly bonus program) incentives on top of their hourly wages. VCP incentives, which are dependent on good attendance and hitting productivity targets, could get Amazon workers an 8 percent monthly bonus, and a 16 percent bonus during the peak November and December seasons.
Thursday, October 4, 2018
The downside of Amazon's new $15 / hour minimum wage
The announcement certainly got Freedom-Haters like Bernie Sanders all gooey in the britches, but are they aware of this part of it?
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Amazon is heavily into robotics and AI so they will obviously continue to reduce their reliance on that nasty human capital. It is expected that rabid few marketeers will blame the ignorant humans for being fools to make the man replace them with robots.
ReplyDeleteFree marketers, not few. I hate that variation on AI called spell check. "Sorry, Dave, but I'm afraid I cant do that. ..."
ReplyDeleteFree marketeers are not in the businesses of seeking out groups of people to call fools. They are merely concerned with observing how immutable economic principles play themselves out.
ReplyDeleteYeah corporations are persons with no heart but have freedom of speech which is how they throw their money around and disrupt democracy.
ReplyDelete