Employee wages are often the largest expense for a business and they’re always trying to have fewer employees, squeezed harder for more work and less pay.
It really undermines their whole “oh they’re just unskilled labor and drones, they don’t deserve a living wage” rhetoric. If Amazon didn’t need warehouse workers and delivery drivers, they wouldn’t have them. They could be working for $1 a day and they’d still be fired the instant that role was no longer needed.
They get away with it because they just need somebody doing the work and there’s no shortage of desperate, exploited people. Unions and collective bargining definitely help but ultimately the government needs to advocate for workers and simply say things like “If you use slaves at any step in your supply chain, you and everyone you report to is going to jail and your assets will be stripped to cover the pay you owe them”.
It’s such a low fucking bar. Almost every law we have boils down to “don’t be a piece of shit” but we don’t make them for rich people or use them to cover foreign workers.
