I would like to see people not post bullshit on this message board.
runner pat: I’m not really surprised. I don’t shop at Walmart, but then I don’t expect them to be Nordstorm’s or Macy’s either. But whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working.
Here’s the thing: If you want to argue for a higher MW, that’s fine. Make your argument. But I don’t see why any company should have to pay workers more than what the market says they are worth. And if you don’t want to be a MW worker at Walmart, then acquire a skill that the market values more than MW. You don’t need to go to college to make a decent living as a barber, a plumber, an electrician a painter, or any other number of tradesman jobs.
I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, imagine you work for Wal-Mart and have no kids, and imagine someone else works for Wal-Mart and has four kids; is it possible that you make enough money to help out your fellow employee?
If Wal-Mart insists on not paying people enough to feed themselves, it would have been a better PR move for the store to donate food to the especially needy employees itself instead of asking the nearly-needy employees to do it. Employees get fed, Wal-Mart (regretting it can’t pay its employees more because… Well it’s not so they can have $15 billion instead of $12 billion! No, it’s a complicated economic… thing.) looks like a Good Guy because it cares enough to feed their own (it mightn’t even have made the news, so no downside), and they get to write the donation off of their taxes.
I mean, this is God & Country business! You didn’t see Jesus going around feeding people out of the goodness of his heart!
Consider an unemployed man named Jim. He is young, has a GED, and no job skills to speak of. He sees in the paper two companies are hiring, Google and Walmart. He sends Google a resume and fills out an application at Walmart. His resume is quickly discarded and deleted at Google and he gets the job at Walmart for 9 bucks an hour. Why is Walmart the villain in the story? They provided Jim with a job and a place that he can acquire job skills so in the future he can make more. He took the offer because it was the best he could do for himself. No one else, not Google, not the Chicago Reader, or anyone else is providing him anything, yet only the company that gives him a job and has made him better off is singled out for moral opprobrium.
Getting a job does not make your employer your parent. It is not their job to provide for you, only to pay you what you have agreed upon.
That sounds a lot like volunteering to help out employees in hardship to me, and “not recieving a livable wage” strikes me as hardship. Now, of course, this isn’t what the spokesperson meant - what they meant was some empty PR-speak to make Walmart look nice. But they still said it. Either it should be retracted, or we are well within our rights to castigate Walmart for declaiming on their all-in-it-together company culture while making no actual effort by themselves to alleviate that hardship.
I suppose they might have let the sign for the basket be printed free, though, I guess.
A livable wage based on what? Should the number of kids that I have figure into what my employer pays me? Should the fact that I have a wife who cannot work for whatever reason entitle me to an extra 2 bucks an hour? How about the fact that I don’t want to share a 3 bedroom apt with 5 other people to save rent and want a bedroom of my own? Should that mean that my employer should shell out an extra buck or two?
Not really. For a hardship to “come up”, implies that something out of the ordinary has happened. I would not consider someone’s pay check to be “out of the ordinary”. In fact, it is practically the definition of “ordinary”.
Now, I can conceive of lots of hardships that might “come up” and make things a bit tight around the holidays and where a little extra help might do some good. But the OP is saying that employees are literally starving if they don’t get food out of the bins. That is not what I would call a fair reading of the article.
If Walmart went out of business tomorrow the employees would be worse off. Hardship is defined as something that causes suffering or deprivation. Working at Walmart alleviates suffering it does not cause it.
I can’t tell really… Is this an argument against minimum wage OR an argument against Wal-Mart?
Every job I have worked at prior to my current occupation (which I acquired only because of my University education in math/chemistry/biology) has paid minimum wage or close to it. And those jobs didn’t do crap for me for Thanksgiving.
Why are we specifically picking out Wal-Mart? What about every other minimum wage job ever? If you forgot that these jobs existed, ask anyone you know under the age of 22 without a college degree how much they get paid.
How many Costco employees are on food stamps? How many Starbucks employees? The idea that *everyone *who employs nonskilled labor is paying them just more than minimum wage for less than 20 hours a week isn’t borne out by looking at help wanted ads. Even the KFC down the street starts at around $11/hr and most of them work 28-38 hours a week. Is that still a shit wage? Of course. But it’s a shit wage that, when combined with another household member making a shit wage, means they can buy their own food.
My 20 year old kid without a full college education (he’s in his senior year) makes nearly $15 an hour at an unskilled office job. His peers in unskilled retail are making anywhere from $11-13. Thankfully, Walmart isn’t the only option for work in our city.
So, yeah, I’m going to call Cite? on the claim that “everyone” pays minimum wage for nonskilled labor. Not in my world, they don’t.
It’s an argument against employers paying minimum wage, or close to it, for employees who are then forced to take advantage of a series of “safety net” programs designed to be short term assistance while someone is working to improve their situation, by, for example, finding a job. Walmart is a convenient whipping boy, because there’s so much information out there about how they do this a lot, but I’d feel the same way if my local Mom and Pop was paying minimum wage and putting out donation bins for their employees on food stamps. It just burns more with Walmart because we also know their annual profits, which are far above a Mom and Pop.
Walmart should just give away all of its profits to deflect the criticism that they are a profit driven company. Oh, not all of it you say? How much should they be allowed to earn free from scorn?
Enough so that their employees do not have to rely on public assistance.
Look: You can not-pay people a living wage and they can get their food through public assistance paid for with tax revenues; OR you can cut public assistance to the bone so as to not have to pay for them, but you have to pay people a living wage. You can’t eat your cake and have it at the same time. Choose.
If you are making billions in profits, and your employees have to accept public assistance, then you are not paying your fair share to support our society.
Not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that people with low paying jobs should not be eligible for food stamps? I’m OK with it. We, as a society, don’t want Americans to starve so we, as a society, should be willing to pay for that. I see no reason hand off that responsibility to the subset of Americans called “employers”.
Middle, I exclude thee!
Perhaps, just perhaps, some of the scorn comes not from their being profit-driven, but by the fact that they appear to be exclusively profit-driven, possibly to societal detriment. WhyNot just mentioned Costco; they’re very certainly profit-driven…and yet manage to make a ton of money with a corporate culture of employee well-being. Odd, that.