![]() An Amazon warehouse’s presence in a given county, NELP says, drives wages down, just like monopsony theory says it should.Īmazon is, after Walmart, the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer, employing roughly one million people in the United States. Now a fascinating new report from the National Employment Law Project, or NELP, argues that Amazon’s warehouse wages aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. But I qualified that by saying workers’ beef with Bezos was typically not about wages but working conditions. Writing last week about the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, I observed that Bezos was playing Monopsony against Amazon’s sellers and against Amazon’s mostly nonunion warehouse employees. His right eye would be disconcertingly smaller than his left. Monopsony would be slender and fit, bald, and clad in a black leather jacket. The top hat would obviously have to go as well, and also the mustache, because mustaches are now a rarity among the Forbes 400. Monopsony wouldn’t be fat, because girth is no longer a signifier of great wealth. Morgan that’s why he looks just like him. Monopoly has Milburn “Rich Uncle” Pennybags, a top-hatted, mustachioed, portly old gent you probably know as Mr. Monopsony would need a mascot, of course. ![]() So it falls to Hasbro to create a new game called Monopsony. In a choice example of life imitating board games, Parker Brothers was gobbled up by Kenner in 1985, Kenner was gobbled up by Tonka in 1987, and Tonka was gobbled up by Hasbro in 1991. As with Monopoly, the game would end when a last losing player or players declared the winning player an asshole and, in a fury, turned the board over, sending all the pieces flying.Īlas, Parker Brothers no longer exists. That would be true regardless of whether the property your game piece landed on was owned by a player who was winning the game or losing it monopsony lowers wages paid by everyone within a given industry (in this instance, real estate). But as the game progressed and other players either dropped out or fell behind in the purchase of properties, surplus value would rise in $50 increments, reflecting a shrinking number of competitors for labor. You don’t have to be a Marxist to recognize that the property owner isn’t going to hire the new employee unless doing so will increase revenues and, ultimately, profits.Īt the start of the game, a new employee’s surplus value would be low-let’s say, $50-reflecting a competitive market for labor among the other Monopsony players. In Monopsony, the employee forks over the surplus value of his labor, i.e., the difference between the wages he receives from the property owner and a higher figure representing what the employee’s labor is really worth. ![]() If you think that, you don’t know your Marx. You might think the next move would be for the property owner to pay some amount to his new employee.
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