> Amazon's profit went up by 84% in 2020. Why shouldn't workers seek for their wages to go up 84% instead?
Amazon’s moneymaker is AWS, not the warehouse. At least in my city, AWS salaries have went up a fair amount in the last year or two, which makes sense given that AWS generates lots of profit.
The warehouse on the other hand has much thinner margins and if they largely increased warehouse worker salaries they might not be profitable.
Amazon is made into separate business units, so increasing salaries in one business unit which isn’t very profitable because the other business unit is profitable is just bad business.
I doubt warehouse salaries are a significant percentage of costs for Amazon outside AWS. And the non-AWS part of Amazon is still significantly larger than AWS (revenue ~346 billion dollars vs ~40 billion for AWS) even if it is indeed less profitable. Warehousing is of course not that profitable, but it is a significant enabler for the sales of the rest of the business (perhaps even for AWS infrastructure).
Amazon’s moneymaker is AWS, not the warehouse. At least in my city, AWS salaries have went up a fair amount in the last year or two, which makes sense given that AWS generates lots of profit.
The warehouse on the other hand has much thinner margins and if they largely increased warehouse worker salaries they might not be profitable.
Amazon is made into separate business units, so increasing salaries in one business unit which isn’t very profitable because the other business unit is profitable is just bad business.