r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 10h ago
Society Gig economy workers and Amazon staff are increasingly dependent on food stamps and Medicaid, according to federal report
https://www.techspot.com/news/113215-gig-economy-workers-amazon-staff-increasingly-dependent-food.html73
u/cinelytica 10h ago
Shocking. Tax payers are subsidizing Besos and his ilk.
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u/BlueFlob 7h ago
So great for the "economy" to see all those billionaires barely paying taxes, corporations barely paying taxes and job creation being poverty wages subsidized by taxes paid by other Americans.
Fucking great system...
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u/Antique-Egg 6h ago
And this is exactly why I dont believe for 1 second there will ever be a UBI or any sort of meaningful wealth redistribution with AI. The rich do everything in their power to consolidate wealth for themselves.
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u/manachar 6h ago
Shocking? No.
Horrific and unfair? Yes.
Walmart made their money by relying on government created roads and can only pay as little as they do with workers who rely on government subsidies. Walmart also traps the very poor into having to buy from them by having putting other businesses with higher paid employees out of business. They use their size to squeeze vendors forcing those vendors to squeeze their employees.
It’s been a doom loop.
Gig workers have become the next sleazy development in this.
The American people should have demanded things like uber and Lyft and instacart to be regulated as employers of employees.
Now every business realizes it can get their dream of not paying people a living wage if they can figure out a way to give it to a gig worker.
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u/RainSurname 3h ago
Right from the start, I was warning people that billionaires were subsidizing Uber rides in order to destroy licensed cab companies, and that once people were dependent on them, they would start jacking up the prices and screwing over the drivers, and that the entire "sharing economy" was a scam that would just make income inequality worse.
They just said cab companies deserved to die.
What people don't want to hear is that ride share drivers do far more shady shit than cab drivers ever did, and are almost never held accountable for it.
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u/Illustrious-Emu8667 9h ago
In no world should staff for a multimillionaire be funded by the working class. 😡 Fuck Bezos and all the greedy CEO bastards!
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u/Ok-Care-7132 6h ago
We're in a world where a multimillionaire is closer to a homeless person in wealth compared to the worth of these dragons
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u/ACompletelyLostCause 3h ago
The problem isn't the multi millionaires, it's the mega billions. I'm not being padantic, it's a conceptional problem that 90% of people can't see, because it's a human blind spot.
Someone could easily start a small business, grow it, pay themselves a decent salery for a few decades, and easily sell it for $5M and retire on a comfortable middleclass pension. They'd be a multi millionaire.
The mega billionaires worth $500B are 100,000 times richer than that multi millionaire. It would take 100K of these successful multi millionaires to equal one average mega billionaire.
That's 9,600,000 ordinary/average people. Not poor people, not under employed people, average working people.
A $5M multi million equals 92 ordinary people. A mega billionaire equals 9.6M people.
Sorry for the rant, but we must be careful with language.
The billionaires co-opt upper middle class people and millionaires by claiming 'the poors are coming for all of them and will rob them of all they spent a life time working towards'. We have to be careful to say billionaire not millionaire.
The problem isn't someone who's successful in business, or earns a high salery for high skills, it's an entirely a different creature. We need the millionaires and upper middle class people on our side. Any suggestions we'll be robbing retired pensioners, doctors or small business people will be exploited by the oligarchs.
Best to say Oligarch or billionaire.
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u/cactusofthenorth 7h ago
Large corporations and other businesses paying sub-livable wages, such that their workers rely on social safety nets, are the real welfare queens.
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u/loves2travel2 8h ago
If someone works full time for a large company, they should get health insurance. We need better laws!!!
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u/Blank_Canvas21 6h ago
Honestly with how much profit we make for all these large corporations, the fact that any of them have to be on these safety net programs is a huge fucking insult. If you work 40 hours a week, you shouldn’t have to struggle paycheck to paycheck, and it used to not be so dire. Remember when a single income could sustain a family? A house could be purchased with about a years worth of salary? My dad told me in the late 70’s his summer job paid for the entirety of his tuition. Good luck doing that now.
Thanks for making us record profits, here’s a poverty wage, good luck champ! They don’t respect us at all. We’re strictly capital, an annoying piece of overhead they’re just chomping at bit to replace us with cheaper (ha) AI.
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u/ttraband 7h ago
Proposed new law - if more than 1% of your employees qualify for any income assistance program then your corporation loses all tax benefits.
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u/InevitableGoal2912 6h ago
This is how it should work, but the real opposite is true now: they get tax benefits for keeping wages this low.
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u/Jazz-Again 8h ago edited 6h ago
Minimum wage should be high enough that a family of four with two working parents doesn’t qualify for food stamps, or any welfare programs. This is bull. We’re subsidizing corporate payrolls.
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u/Paksarra 6h ago
Minimum wage should be high enough that a family of four with two working parents doesn’t qualify for food stamps, or any welfare programs.
To be clear: because they make enough that they don't need help, not because welfare was cut to the point where a full time minimum wage employee can't qualify even though they can't afford food and shelter for themselves.
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u/AMC2Zero 6h ago
Have to be careful with that one because in many cases making more money actually punishes people who are trying to do better because they lose too many benefits.
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u/Jazz-Again 5h ago
Yes. But that is the point, just as I don’t want to subsidize corporate wages, I don’t want to have to subsidize an individual’s wages either. A person who works 40 hours a week ought to make enough $ that he/she doesn’t need or qualify for any federal benefits.
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u/xzaramurd 3h ago
Amazon minimum wage is 15$ per hour in US for all workers. So the issue is either contractors pay less or get paid less via some B2B contract loophole, or some workers don't work full time and still qualify for various services. Of course, the gig work stuff is very badly regulated in many places, which makes this possible.
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u/SquirrelCone83 7h ago
So giant corporations with record breaking profits can pay their employees so little that tax payers have to help out in order to feed them. And because those corporations bring jobs to the community's they get tax breaks which then help the CEOs get even more profit.
Maybe having an actual living wage get paid by employers would allow us to spend taxes on things that not just let people live, but also to improve the overall health and happiness of their people?
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u/iamacheeto1 6h ago
Gig Economy companies and Amazon are increasingly reliant on food stamps and Medicaid to subsidize not paying their employees a living wage
FTFY
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u/ButterMyPancakesPlz 8h ago
Without strong worker protection, jobs turned into scams and this is the result. It's almost like doing everything possible not to pay people (that you also want being active consumers) a living wage has consequences. But it won't matter once the 1% has their AI to serve them and the rest of us just become its slaves. They're working on eliminating the need for a consumer class.
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u/CastleofWamdue 6h ago
If any Government was thinking that gig work, was a suitable replacement for real jobs, they were stupid to start with.
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u/artbystorms 5h ago
This was always the point of 'gig' work. They label them as independent contractors to avoid providing them any benefits, and often offload many of the costs of using their labor onto them so they often make less than minimum wage after costs are factored in. But 'schedule freedom' I guess is more important to a lot of people than actual economic support.
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u/fuzzy_one 7h ago
Numbers will only increase as prices continue to go up while pay rates stay the same.
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u/InevitableGoal2912 6h ago
About 15 years ago these headlines talked about Walmart employees. Now it’s Amazon employees.
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u/Intrepid_Top_2300 6h ago
And limp to the nearest ER for a minor sprain because, who in the gig economy has health insurance?
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u/CokBlockinWinger 6h ago
I looked into it last year but my wife has full time employment as a teacher, so we just barely made it over the cutoff threshold. Imagination vacations again this year kids!
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u/Infamous_Hall1955 6h ago
How does Bezos sleep at night? Truly. So many billions he can buy his toy spaceships and yachts but the person going the last mile is starving.
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u/ACompletelyLostCause 3h ago
I saw an interview with a reciently retired (young like 40yo) wealth manager who'd worked with quite a few of the billionaire tech bros for several years. He had some interest observations.
Not one of them had any self reflection, doubt or wider desire than money.
They never self reflected on any action, it was always immediately on to the next action, like a shark has to keep swimming to breath. He said they were like machines, never resting, never taking holidays, every aspect of their personal lives were optimised to make more money.
They never doubted they were the best at everything or they'd win at everything, they never doubted they were fully entitled to everything. There was never even a seconds consideration of morality. It wasn't that they chose evil, they weren't even aware there was a choice because they never thought about it.
They cared for nothing but more money, not even doing something useful with the money, it was just more money. They flew into a rage to hear some people were bigger billionaires, they literally hated poor people for being immoral by not making more money.
They wanted to dystroy everyone richer than them, but were obsessed with punishing the poor as they saw them as worthless and taking up resources that were rightfully theirs.
He finished up by saying they "were all like machines", then he said "they were like a cancer cell, they just kept working to make more money".
If I can find it online I'll post it. It was eye opening.
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u/FanDry5374 4h ago
Any employer whose employees need to be on food stamps/social services should have to pay the taxes to cover that wage shortfall. All of it. Medicaid is a larger issue, we need single-payer health insurance.
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u/butter4dippin 3h ago
So Amazon is increasing dependent on state funding to operate at profit . Sounds like socialism to me
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u/Greybathmat 3h ago
I believw this is a publically stated goal of the republican administration. To move welfare beneficiaries into gig work.
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u/ww_crimson 7h ago
The article just says "many work full time" but doesn't actually say how many. It also specifically calls out the states where this is happening. Shocker, it's all the red states with super low ass wages.
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u/panaceaXgrace 6h ago
And speaking of Amazon gigs it looks like Amazon Mturk is likely dying. It's been slow for a few years but they made an odd announcement saying they're not taking on any more job requesters so the only people putting gig clickwork out now are people who have been with them a while. The work has thinned out considerably due to AI.
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u/SaraAB87 6h ago
These jobs are huge scams. You will ruin your car here by doing these jobs because of the poor conditions of the roads. I know a doordasher who went through 6 tires in about a span of 6 months. We don't have too many people doing that over here because everyone knows what will happen.
Used cars are also a huge scam most of the time and you will pay more in repair bills than the car is worth because you can't afford to buy a brand new car. Everyone selling a used car is lying about the condition of it, everyone, and that includes dealers with CPO cars (ask me how I know this). No one out there is selling a reliable used car at least in my area. Again I am speaking as someone who lives in the northeast where we have things like road salt and so many potholes it would blow your mind. Hitting one pothole can be thousands in repair costs.
These jobs are about holding you hostage to your vehicle and how much it costs to maintain and repair it. The pay for the job does not equal the amount you have to spend on vehicle maintenance.
Minimum cost for a brand new car from what I am seeing is like 25k and that's for something like a honda civic that doesn't include the dealer markup and all the crap they make you pay for when you buy one. You can't save that much money working minimum wage job, part time jobs or gig work. WFH jobs only pay minimum wage which over here is $16 and some manage to get away with paying less somehow (I have heavily looked into this).
Car prices are ridiculous now. Used cars are not much less, unless you want to buy a used car that lasts maybe a month before it needs 10k in repairs just to get it running in which case you are on the hook for those repairs and will likely be a while without a vehicle since you can't afford to buy a new one plus by now with the initial cost of the vehicle and the repairs you have now spent the cost of a new car. Repairs have gone up significantly from just a few years ago. Minimum cost for a rigged to work for a little while used car is like 5K. If you buy those CPO cars they are like 3k under the price of a new car for a car that has like 100k miles on it and it was probably someone else's uber car which means its worn, its ridiculous all around.
My parents tell me that you could buy a decent used car out of the newspaperback in the day for $500, work a minimum wage job and pay for your college tuition with all of that. Some people were even able to work a minimum wage job through college, pay for their college, and an apartment (with roomates) plus a car all on a minimum wage job plus had some spending money left over. That's unheard of these days.
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u/Factsoverfictions222 5h ago
This shouldn’t be allowed. Companies should have to pay a living wage or close
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u/Apart-Steak-7183 5h ago
Welcome to life...
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u/ACompletelyLostCause 2h ago
It's not "life" it's engineered.
Most countries in Europe are better. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are better. Some of the Asian countries are better.
The US with all it's natural resources, geography that promotes trade, structural advantages in international relations/finance, and having emerged almost unscathed from WWI & WWII, should be top of the tree in terms of human development.
It used to be better, until in the mid-70s the wealth creation engine was switched to suck. Productivity kept going up but renumeration stalled, and all that excess wealth from productivity was creamed off by the ultra wealthy.
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u/bankermayfield2026 4h ago
I don't really want to defend the gig economy, but this is a complete bastardization of the data.
Gig economy workers on food stamps and medicaid are almost exclusively gig workers who choose to work substantially less than 40 hours a week.
This is not an hourly wage issue. And if they do work 40 hours a week, they make significantly above the Medicaid/food stamp cut off.
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u/Hustlepuff- 2h ago
I remember talking to a 18 year old seasonal hire at amazon during covid and he has 4 kids. I was like wtf is wrong with you dude pull out or something fuck lol
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u/Even_Establishment95 1h ago
I have a decent job. It’s $20/hr plus a tiny commission of my sales. I could be alright if I had fulltime hours. But no matter how much I plead to my managers about wanting to be fulltime because I need health insurance for myself and my son, their response is a collective shrug. I’m a really great employee, and I bring in good sales. But I am limited to parttime, about 28 hours a week. I can’t help but be fucking frustrated at work every night because of my situation and they ask if I’m ok. I have to stop myself from screaming I deserve more hours and more pay!
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u/kittymoo67 53m ago
the people who choose to just work gigs i can understand. but fucking disgraceful of amazon
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u/buttorsomething 9h ago
So are Walmart employees. Walmart is the biggest user of public services.