On May 2, 2018, Julia Glum writes on Time Money:
Well, let’s put it this way: According to MONEY’s calculations, it takes him just under nine seconds to earn what Amazon’s median worker does in a year.
This revelation comes courtesy of a new federal rule that requires public companies to disclose the pay ratio between their employees and executives. It’s led to some shocking disclosures in recent weeks, and Amazon is no exception. The commerce giant confirmed in an SEC filing last month that its median worker — the person who makes more than half of the staff and less than half of the staff — earned $28,446 in 2017. For comparison, Bezos’ annual compensation last year was over $1.6 million.
But although Bezos’ salary may technically be low, he’s not called the richest man in the world for no reason. His net worth is skyrocketing, mostly due to the fact that he owns about 80 million shares of Amazon stock.
Here’s where we have to do some math. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos’ net worth on Jan. 1 was $99 billion. On May 1, it was $132 billion, meaning it rose $33 billion. If you divide that difference by the 120 days in that period, you find that he made $275 million a day. Divide that by 24 hours in a day to get about $11.5 million per hour, the equivalent of roughly $191,000 per minute or — the clincher — $3,182 every second.
(That’s enough to buy 26 Prime subscriptions or 379 paperback copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, Amazon’s best-selling book of all time. Every second.)
Now take that $28,446 sum we found out the median employee gets and divide it by $3,182 to find out how long it takes Bezos to pocket the same sum. There’s your answer: 8.93 seconds.
Amazon has more than 560,000 employees when you include full- and part-time workers, which the company did when it calculated its median employee pay. An Amazon representative told CNN that “in the U.S., the average hourly wage for a full-time associate in our fulfillment centers, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses, is over $15/hour before overtime.”
However, several Amazon employees have recently come out to condemn the working conditions in the company’s warehouses abroad. In November, an undercover reporter for the Mirror found that workers in the United Kingdom weren’t allowed to sit, needed to package products every 30 seconds and dealt with timed bathroom breaks. This past March, about 1,000 Amazon employees in Spain organized a demonstration to protest their low wages.
Stateside, the company is preparing to build its second headquarters, nicknamed HQ2. The new offices will go in one of 20 cities Amazon selected from a wide applicant pool earlier this year. HQ2 will cost $5 billion and come with 50,000 high-paying jobs because, at this point, nothing can stop Bezos.
http://time.com/money/5262923/amazon-employee-median-salary-jeff-bezos/
Gary Reber Comments:
Jeff Bezos is a “laughing/smiling hogish” who seeks to concentrate the ownership of productive capital asset wealth to his exclusion. The problem with “hoists” is that they were never taught as children to share. Instead, they have grown to be greedy.
Bozos, as with all those who are concentrating capital asset wealth, does have the option to empower his employees to become owner participants in Amazon by financing the corporation’s future growth using a justice-managed Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). An ESOP provides widespread access to capital credit to each employee in a company on a systematic basis. The workers make no cash outlay from payroll deductions or their savings, and none of their present savings is at risk.
According to the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org), technically, the ESOP uses a legal trust that is “qualified” under specific U.S. tax laws encouraging employee ownership. (In some countries, an Employee Shareholders’ Association is used instead of a trust.) Fortunately, these laws are extremely flexible, so that each plan can be tailored to fit the circumstances and needs of each enterprise, and deficiencies in the design of an ESOP can easily be corrected.
Over twenty U.S. laws have passed Congress since late 1973 to make ESOPs more attractive to workers and owners. More are on their way. While less than a dozen ESOPs existed in the United States in 1965, today over 10,000 companies, mostly highly profitable small and medium-size firms, have already adopted the ESOP in one form or another, creating over 11 million employee-owners. In 1500 companies, employees hold the majority of stock. A number of Fortune 500 companies have adopted ESOPs, including Proctor & Gamble, Texaco, General Mills, Hallmark Cards, and American Standard, thus planting the seed for significant expansion of worker ownership within the giant multinationals.
But “hogists” are greedy people and it would take a union workers to bring about employee ownership. Yet, broadening individual ownership is what is needed to occur in every industry if we are to solve economic inequality and the displacement of workers by increasingly non-human means of producing goods, products, and services.
For information on ESOPs see http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/employee-stock-ownership-plans-esops/.
