Pointing the Finger at Jeff Bezos Worked

Jeff Bezos raised Amazon’s starting wage to $15 because of pressure from workers and Bernie Sanders — showing how, even when workers and socialists are weak, we can win against the most powerful people in the world.

Jeff Bezos Speaks At Economic Club Of Washington With Club President David Rubenstein

CEO and founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos participates in a discussion during a Milestone Celebration dinner September 13, 2018 in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong / Getty


Last month, Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith argued that Sanders’s recent agitation against Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, specifically his “Stop BEZOS Act,” “seems to be much more about grandstanding and pointing fingers than about actual solutions to help vulnerable American workers.”

The internet never forgets, and after Amazon’s announcement today that it would raise its workers’ starting wages across the board to $15 — affecting over 250,000 employees plus 100,000 seasonal workers — people were also happy to note that Smith had been proven extremely wrong.

The raise comes after Sanders has waged a campaign of publicly shaming Bezos and Amazon. Bezos is the world’s richest man, worth $165 billion. Bezos might become a trillionaire in our lifetimes. The city of Flint still doesn’t have clean drinking water and Jeff Bezos might not be bothered to pick up a billion dollars if he found it lying in the street.

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