Fox Business: Unionizing Amazon workers are driven by “anger” and “jealousy” about CEO pay
Stuart Varney claims essential workers seeking fair compensation are “what you get in a socialist society”
Published
Citation From the April 1, 2022, edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co
LAUREN SIMONETTI (FOX BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT): So, there’s been this push, you know, especially in these big companies like Amazon and Starbucks, for workers to unionize. Why is this happening? They’re paid well. It’s happening because of three things. This is my opinion, Stuart. You have a very tight job market, so you have vocal employees, they couldn't work from home when a lot of other people did, they worked through COVID, they just want more.
And there's a lot of anger out there, and I’m going to give you one number that might explain that part of the equation here. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, his total compensation last year topped $212 million. So, if you compare that pay to the average worker, it's 1-to-6,500. So there's a lot of anger that, “Hey, we're doing everything for your company, and we just want more, we want a bigger piece of the pie, we want more representation.”
STUART VARNEY (HOST): It's not anger, Lauren. It's jealousy —
SIMONETTI: What is it?
VARNEY: Jealousy, that's what it is. I've seen it before. I grew up in a jealous country — England — always worried about how much they're making up there, and how much we're not making down here. That's what you get in a socialist society.
SIMONETTI: So, then you wouldn't want to unionize. You would want, you know, to make everything possible for you to work hard and get to where you want to be, and not have a union get in the way.
VARNEY: That’s not the way they see it, obviously, but there you go.