I don't think the detail of Bezos' actual salary of $81K plus benefits is really relevant to the argument. Would a $1 per month raise for the workers persuade you to give up most of your salary? Most of the Bezos fortune came from stock. Before Amazon raised the minimum wage to $15, warehouse employees received two shares of stock on hiring, and an additional option every year.Would you act differently if you ran a corporation? Let’s say [random big corporation] offers you the CEO position tomorrow. It comes with a $10 million annual salary. (I’m making that up — I don’t know how much the actual salary is. But that’s realistic for a big corporation.) You have the option of reducing your salary and giving the remaining money to your employees. You could cut your salary by, say, $9.9 million (who needs more than 100k a year?), distribute that money to the employees, and in doing this, raise each of their annual salaries by $13... Would you do that?
You could argue that, and you or someone else could start a company under those principles. Margins in online retail are thin, typically under 5%, so there isn't a lot of extra money floating around to cover additional expenses. The average Amazon salary is about $29,000. With about half a million employees, total salary is about $14 billion. Even if Jeff covers out of pocket, doubled salaries would bankrupt him after a decade, not that we should feel sorry for him. Amazon would have to make other adjustments to stay in business. Employees might be trained to work harder, but those who do not generate $30 worth of revenue in an hour would be dismissed and replaced with more automation. If Amazon raises prices much, customers will go to other retailers and Amazon won't receive enough revenue to make payroll, and the $30 salaries will turn to zero when Amazon folds.
So the only people allowed to work are those who have enough capital to open their own business. If you don't have much money to start with, you can't afford to open a business and you can't work at another business because you're not an owner. No job for you!all companies that are owned by anyone other than the workers should not exist
This will allow existing businesses to continue, but people without jobs or means still have no way to enter the labor market. So the employees seize the factory. A thousand workers now each own a 0.1% stake. Who decides when to upgrade the machinery? Who decides how much to produce? Who decides when to take out a loan and expand? Who makes the difficult decision in lean times to reduce the size of the business to survive, rather than keeping everyone on payroll and risking bankruptcy? What if a worker decides to stop working and count on getting income by eventually selling their ownership stake? In theory, these questions could be decided by voting and volunteering. In practice, some people are better qualified to make these kind of decisions, and businesses run by more competent leaders have a better chance of success. Imagine an army that decided on tactics and strategy by voting. Most worker cooperatives appear to be quite small, but it's possible that their worker/owners are happy. As a consumer, I am happy to buy flour from a benefit corporation, but I wouldn't want to give up automobiles or broadband internet.
Free software projects are managed by the programmers working on them, and most critical infrastructure is running on them. Microsoft is even supporting Linux on Azure and open sourcing developer tools after a couple of decades propagandizing about the superiority of proprietary software and throwing every technical hurdle it could out into the ecosystem. It isn't uncommon for all the worthwhile work someone does to be done behind their employer's back because the stuff they get paid for is trivial bullshit that's really an ad platform and it doesn't take all that much effort, while there's always something interesting and worthwhile to do in the time not filled by profitable bullshit. If tech workers had management competent enough to notice most of what they're paying us to do has nothing to do with making the graphs in their quarterly reports go up the whole industry would collapse.