What redistribution? According to this, the family has more wealth than the bottom 40%…
Even reading your slightly slanted news story I’m not seeing how this shows ‘nerve’. One store in Cleveland, Ohio puts out a bin for employees who are down on their luck for Thanksgiving and this is a bad thing?
Your choice, but out of curiosity, where do you shop that treats employees better? My son has worked at both the local Walmart and the local Smiths and Albertson’s and I can’t say there is much difference between them to be honest…nor between the Walmart and most of the fast food places either.
Do you live in Cleveland? It’s pretty grim there atm from what I’ve read. And this is a single Walmart. Again, I’m not seeing why this is a bad thing…sounds to me like a pretty good idea.
I guess I don’t see the issue or the distinction.
Yeah, it’s just like slavery…well, except the whole ‘free to leave any time’ and ‘free choice to take the job or take your services elsewhere’ and ‘you get a beating by the bosses if you don’t work hard enough’, plus all the ‘raped or murdered at the whim of the masters’ and ‘can be bought and sold any time, as well as their children’. Other than that though it’s just like slavery with no real difference in principal. Or, maybe it’s like the gulag! Or a concentration camp! Perhaps its the same, in principal to the Holocaust! The leaders of Walmart are just like Nazis…or like Communist dictators!
What a ridiculous statement for you to make. Really sets the tone for the discussion and really makes things like ‘slavery’ meaningless when you make such a ridiculous comparison.
And not shop at Walmart. But I doubt where ever you DO shop is markedly better. You do understand that most places that hire no skilled labor pay a minimum wage, right? Walmart does too…the exact same minimum wage as all the other businesses in your area. And most of the workers in that Walmart are kids, such as my son. The older workers probably aren’t making minimum wage, though they aren’t being paid as well as semi-skilled or skilled labor makes…because, you know, they aren’t semi-skilled or skilled labor. Anyone who doesn’t like the wage or the environment they are working in at Walmart or anywhere else are free to take their skills elsewhere. Oh, but they can’t because in principal this is JUST like slavery…forgot about that.
Yes, I believe that a serious effort should be undertaken to abolish slavery in Cleveland. Other than that, no…I don’t see anything wrong with this and it seems to me that it’s not that bad an idea to allow for employees to donate food for the more needy employees in a city that’s economically hard pressed and for special holidays like Thanksgiving.
Talking about big numbers, Walmart has about 1.4 million employees. Do you have any idea how much money it would take to give them a raise of even a dollar per hour?
About 2.9 billion assuming 40 hr/wk(which we know doesn’t happen) 52 weeks a year.
Leaving the poor Walmart family with only 12.1 billion.
It is terrible that Walmart doesn’t compensate its employees more than what their labor is worth. Or buy them turkeys. Or houses for that matter.
Walmart has rated near or at the bottom of customer service for several years due to cutbacks on staff and hours. Seems they have a pretty shitty track record of determining the value of their employees.
I don’t get the hate for walmart. They aren’t paying their employees a living wage. They are paying them a legal wage. I think the minimum wage should be much higher, but it shouldn’t come as a shock that a company is doing this. I seriously doubt that they had some evil motive in running this food drive (which looks like it isn’t very organized).
Many businesses run with profit as their pretty much only objective. They pay their employees the least amount they can to get the workforce they want. They also pay their suppliers the least amount they can - and everyone else. I have no idea about the strike thing, but the woman I saw on MSNBC that claims she was fired in retaliation for organizing was taking more than 2x the amount of break time she was allowed.
This would have gotten you fired at any retail job I ever worked at.
Well, you said it, not me.
If the company isn’t paying employees enough to eat, then they would have starved long before Thanksgiving. Your article says this is for employees “when they face extreme hardships”. Now, people who are gainfully employed can “face extreme hardship” and since the vast majority of Walmart employees don’t, then it would seem that it isn’t Walmart that is the cause. It’s a huge employer, and some people who work there are going to be down on their luck.
How many employees are part time, second wage earners in a household where the primary wage earner lost his/her job? I for one am not going to disparage people for being charitable and helping out their fellow workers who need help.
Or (assuming you have your facts straight), they have an excellent track record of determining what their customers value most-- low prices over good customer service. They’re not in business to make you happy. They’re in business to make money. And seeing as how they are one of the most successful companies in the country, I’ll figure they know what their business practices need to be better than some anonymous poster on a message board.
Yes, the idea that companies have no obligation, moral, ethical, or otherwise, to anyone or anything other than profits and shareholder value is one of those things that’s definitely GD territory.
Based on a 40hr work week that’s 2.912 billion. Which would leave them with about 12 billion and change. (Per year)
And yet they’re people. With free speech rights. Who are immune to basically any punishment regardless of which laws they break. Nice.
While it is plural, it is also ‘funded’ through existing WalMart employee compensation, not through outside donations.
This indicates to me that this donation bin is not (in and of itself) proof that WalMart is mistreating their employees, as a group.
I’d say that 15 billion in profits would suggest that Walmart has accurately gauged the balance between how much a customer wants good service and how much the prefer lower prices and is paying in the right range to meet that balance.
I choose not to shop at Walmart “as much as possible” (which in practice is almost never), because they do provide the absolute shittiest customer experience possible. Paying a few bucks more for toilet paper or whatever is well worth it to me if I get even a modicum of friendliness from the staff.
Good prices matter of course, but so does having a nice experience in the store, too.
That being said, Walmart pays their employees shit and doesn’t often give full time schedules but that’s just par for the course for major retailers. Costco excepted, evidently.
I would like to see the Catholic Church make a big stink about this, start denying the sacraments to Walmart executives who are Catholic. It is against Catholic doctrine for profitable companies not to pay their employees a living wage.
Immune to punishment? That’s news to Wal-Mart:
A $50 million settlement in Colorado.
They settle these suits to avoid potentially-crushing punitive damages, which could have been up to $2 billion in the Minnesota case alone. And now the NLRB is pondering a lawsuit.
Yeah, every few years, WalMart pays off a lawsuit for fifty million or so.
WalMart’s last quarterly report was for $4.07 billion in sales in the previous quarter.
And I don’t get why you don’t get the hate. What you describe right ther is exactly enough for people to hate them. People don’t expect someone to just do what the law allows.
And, no, it’s not the same as other retailers. The ones I am familiar with have much better pricing structures. All of them around here at the very least have people working full time.
Remember, this is the Walmart that championed Medicaid expansion specifically because they knew their employees would not make enough money to qualify for healthcare, and could get it from the government.
The idea of “passing around the hat” as you call it has the fatal flaw that no one working at Walmart makes enough money to help out anyone else. And the point is that, if Walmart knows there are a lot of people who can’t make ends meet, why aren’t they hiring them full time so that they can make ends meet? They can then not have to hire so many people.
If the employees were doing this, it would be one thing. But, with Walmart doing it, what they are essentially doing is saying “We know you are in need, so we’re going to arrange for other people to be able to help you out.” In other words, it looks like charity, but it’s really just Walmart mooching off its employees.