Billionaire Bezos and the warehouse workers: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?

We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com Inc. is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?

“Both” is the obvious answer, but to this Amazon aficionado that answer is incomplete.

The pay figure, which was disclosed for the first time in Amazon’s annual proxy statement, reflects the large number of low-paid retail and warehouse employees who work for the company. The proxy also disclosed that Bezos was paid $1.68 million, making the ratio of what Bezos was paid and the median pay 59-to-1.

What does that ratio tell us? Really, not very much. Bezos, according to the proxy, had a salary of $81,840 in 2017. The rest was in the form of perks, much of it for "security arrangements" and travel. But Bezos's pay, which seems rather modest when stacked up against the obscene earnings of many other corporate chiefs, is almost irrelevant. That's because Bezos is the world’s wealthiest person, with a fortune now estimated at about $129 billion (depending upon the price for Amazon's stock).

So that ratio, although accurate, means next to nothing. If you really want to understand the gap between CEO and worker, consider instead the ratio between the net worth of the boss and his employees: I did, and it's beyond measure. Seriously, 100 billion-to-1 is not an outlandish estimate.

Here's how I came up with that ratio. Let's begin with the very realistic assumption that the median net worth of all of those thousands of Amazon warehouse serfs is -- like that of the rest of hand-to-mouth America -- somewhere between negative and a little more than zero. As Gizmodo reported yesterday, Amazon’s warehouse workers are among the top 20 recipients of food stamps. These people are borderline impoverished, and the only way they make ends meet is by turning to government subsidies.

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