Bezos told the senator’s spokesperson, Mike Casca, that he is not able to attend but does support changing the minimum wage to $15 per hour, a rate Amazon began paying its employees as a starting hourly rate, according to Casca, per CNN.
“We fully endorse Sen. Sanders’s efforts to reduce income inequality with legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers, like we did for ours in 2018,” Casca told CNN.
“Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world, is in many respects emblematic of the unfettered capitalism that we are seeing in America today,” Sanders said in a statement to CNN prior to the announcement by Bezos that he couldn’t attend.
Sanders said the search giant’s founder and chief executive officer was invited to testify “to explain to the American people why he believes it is appropriate for him to be spending a whole lot of money denying economic dignity to Amazon workers in Bessemer who want to form a union, while he has become $78 billion richer during the pandemic and is now worth $183 billion,” Sanders said, per CNN.
The attempt to unionize warehouses was launched by Amazon employee Jennifer Bates in Bessemer, Alabama. President Joe Biden’s election and ensuing support for the organizers in Alabama have given unions new confidence to expand.
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Sen. Sanders has stayed steadfast in his attempts to tackle corporate America’s opposition to unions and to challenge c-suite executives. He traveled to Bentonville, Arkansas during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president and told Walmart shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting that the company treated its employees dismally.
As Budget Committee chairman — a new post for Sanders — he now has the power to bring economic inequality to the forefront. He had attempted to add the $15 per hour minimum wage provision to the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill but it was ultimately defeated.
Despite the defeat for a federal $15 per hour minimum wage, a record 52 cities, counties, and states upped minimum wage requirements in 2020. The federal minimum wage is still at the 2009 minimum of $7.25 per hour.
