Amazon responded to claims by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the company paid its employees “starvation wages.”
“@AOC is just wrong. Amazon is a leader on pay at $15 min wage + full benefits from day one. We also lobby to raise federal min wage,” the company said Monday on Twitter.
.@AOC is just wrong. Amazon is a leader on pay at $15 min wage + full benefits from day one. We also lobby to raise federal min wage. https://t.co/crWp5fPEzS
— Amazon News (@amazonnews) June 17, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez claimed Sunday that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was a billionaire in part because he pays workers “starvation wages.”
“[I]f his being a billionaire is predicated on paying people starvation wages, and stripping them of their ability to access healthcare, and also if his ability to be a billionaire is predicated on the fact that his workers take food stamps so I’m paying for him to be a billionaire,” the New York Democrat said.
When ABC’s Jonathan Karl followed up by asking Ocasio-Cortez to clarify if she thought Bezos was a billionaire because he pays starvation wages, Ocasio-Cortez replied that “it is certainly part of the equation when you have a very large workforce and you underpay every single person.”
The freshman representative also repeated her attack on the company for taking tax breaks, which she called “subsidies.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s latest attack on Amazon comes after her assertion that the company uses gift cards as “fake currency” to pay its employees.
“Company money is a tactic powerful corporations use to take over towns & control local workers by paying them in fake ‘currency,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s happened all over, from West Virginia coal mines to Puerto Rican sugar plantations. So what about when people get paid in … Amazon gift cards?”
The freshman congresswoman campaigned in part on her criticism of Amazon after the company initially planned on building a headquarters in New York when they were offered generous tax breaks for the move. Amazon later scrapped its plans after pressure from outside groups.
