These are not your usual Republican talking points. A leading GOP senator in a span of nine days first hailed a major US union’s celebration of a 19th-century Roman Catholic papal encyclical on the rights of the working class and then called out Amazon, painting its lavish executive compensation plan as an affront to the dignity of the company’s low-paid employees.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Sept. 30 posted pictures of himself attending a unique Teamsters affair in Washington, DC, celebrating the legacy of a famous papal missive authored by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. “Published 134 years ago, Rerum Novarum was written in the rough wake of the Industrial Revolution. It reminds us that humans are not instruments meant to be ground down and discarded. The economy must exist to serve humanity, not the reverse,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said at the event.
Hawley followed this up on Oct. 8 with an X post blasting America’s favorite online retailer. “Amazon’s CEO makes at least $40.1 million a year while the average Amazon worker makes less than $38k a year,” Hawley wrote. “How is that pro-worker or pro-American? It’s time to put American workers first.”
Responses from social media critics were what you’d expect. “It is none of your business what a company pays their employees. Government shouldn't dictate pay,” one commenter wrote.
Churn and Burn at the Amazon Warehouse
But is it really that simple? What organized labor, which has been fighting a bitter battle with Amazon to unionize its employees for years, and Hawley rebel against is not an operation that pays workers the going rate for their labor value but what they assert is a deliberate business plan by an oversized corporate monolith that intentionally seeks to maintain a constantly replenished pool of unskilled laborers paid low wages as profits soar.
With its more than 1.5 million workers, Amazon is the second-largest employer in the United States. The company has long had one of the highest employee turnover rates in America. “Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate, well above industry averages,” tech news site Engadget reported in 2022, citing leaked internal company documents acknowledging the problem. “‘Regretted attrition’ – that is, workers choosing to leave the company – ‘occurs twice as often as unregretted attrition’ – people being laid off or fired – ‘across all levels and businesses,’ according to [internal Amazon corporate] research,” the site noted.
A 2021 New York Times investigation found Amazon’s turnover rate among hourly employees was around a whopping 150% annually.
There’s a reason for this.
“Amazon intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers, said [David] Niekerk, the former [Human Resources] vice president who retired in 2016 after nearly 17 years at the company,” The Times piece related.
Is it really enough to say “go find a job somewhere else then” when enormous entities like Amazon today cast an increasingly huge shadow over the employment market in town after town in America? In 2018, Liberty Nation News detailed Amazon’s growing monopsony power over local hiring pools.
What’s that word?
A monopoly occurs when there is one seller for a good or service. A monopsony, on the other hand, “comes when there is only one buyer for many sellers in a market. This is usually thought of in terms of goods or services. But with huge companies like Amazon, as they become the overwhelmingly dominant purchaser of employee labor in town, worker wages suffer,” we wrote at the time.
For too many American workers, their “somewhere else” options are evaporating.
Amazon earned a net profit of $59.2 billion in 2024. Imagine if it reinvested a good chunk of that into enhanced training for employees so they can learn skills that allow the company to justify paying them more money?
Employment as if People Mattered
Rerum Novarum calls for a just wage for the worker, but that does not mean an artificially inflated salary. Paying a McDonald’s cashier $30 an hour violates the principle of economic order, i.e., basic sound practice. You can’t stay in business providing an overly high wage to someone whose job duties don’t generate proportional value.
But you can teach employees increased skills that allow them to move up in the company to a position that does justify a living wage.
Proponents of a morality-based corporate employment environment frequently cite the example of Reell Precision Manufacturing of St. Paul, MN. Reell has produced hinges and clutches for the electronics, aviation, automotive, and office computer industries since 1970.
Its corporate “philosophy” embraces nurturing the individual growth of its employees as a goal very much equal to that of the pursuit of profit.
“From the beginning, the three partners discussed how to shape and build the company through ethical values and principles,” Reell’s website states. “The founders accepted the importance of strong financial performance, but not at the expense of employees’ health and families. They envisioned a company in which all coworkers could perform valuable and creative work in an environment that supported their physical, emotional and spiritual health.”
Instead of attempting to provide an economically untenable uniform “living” wage for all employees right off the bat, Reell instead sought to establish a “target” wage attainable over a few short years.
“When an employee is hired with no experience and no skills, the company pays the worker the market [lower] rate ... but then makes a commitment to move that employee to the target or living wage ... through training and skill development,” Michal Naughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul explained in a 2000 article in the Catholic Jesuit publication America. “As employees learn skills and gain experience, which Reell provides for employees, their pay goes up accordingly. Typically, it takes an employee two to three years to reach a target or living wage.”
Reell had an assembly line. It could easily have gone the Amazon way and melded faceless human workers into the larger corporate machinery. But that did not align with its corporate values.
“Reell redesigned the assembly line from a Command-Direct-Control style management, in which management and engineers made all the decisions concerning the assembly area, to a Teach-Equip-Trust style management, in which employees were taught inspection procedures, equipped with quality instruments and trusted to do things right on their own assembly line,” Naughton wrote.
“By restructuring the work process according to the principles of participation and subsidiarity, employees decreased set-up times for new products, reduced the need for quality inspection, increased overall quality and required less supervision. By reducing these costs, the company not only was able to pay a living wage; it also created more humane work.”
Countless articles today describe American workers as feeling “disengaged” and “unfulfilled” at their “meaningless” jobs. In creating a nation of bitter worker ants, what are we sacrificing in terms of lost human creativity and societal well-being?
