That choice doesn’t exist. It’s a choice between “working at any place that will hire you, experience or no” and “living on the street.” Only when the economy is gang busters can you drop your employment at WalMart and go to 7-11 or whatever and compete with them. These days, you have hundreds of applications for each job opening because there simply too many people of all skill levels out of work. Any agitation you give your supervisor at WalMart means you can be out on the street. And yet, somehow, you’re supposed to compete for labor?
The exacerbates the issue because you have skilled people working minimum wage until they can find a job. And going from “Senior Chief Head Programmer” to “WalMart Stocker” doesn’t exactly help you when you are looking for a way out of your six pence per day job.
So for all of these people that are down on their luck…what? Shrug? Harken back to the olden days with a completely different playing field and pretend that it still applies?
As for the assistance aspect, that’s what we want. People both working AND getting assistance. If they keep at it, they will get promoted (eventually) and get off of assistance. That’s how the programs were redesigned in the 90s.
As for whether the workers are worth it - well duh. Pay crap, have terrible working conditions, and the good workers, who are go getters and who will generate more sales per employee are going to go to Costco or someplace else decent. If a guy is stuck working at WalMart because of the bad economy (due in no small part to record profits and stagnant wages) he is not going to be gungho. (See the big difference in turnover.)
BTW, does anyone else see the irony of WalMart expecting employees to donate food bought at retail when there is a ton of food sitting on the shelves bought at wholesale?
TANF is different from the others, though, much like SSDI, as it’s an alternative to having no employment, rather than a supplement to a low income. And it’s another one that varies quite a bit by state, which makes it a pain to research.
Right, I concede SNAP, at least for your average able-bodied adult.
[QUOTE=Farin]
That choice doesn’t exist. It’s a choice between “working at any place that will hire you, experience or no” and “living on the street.” Only when the economy is gang busters can you drop your employment at WalMart and go to 7-11 or whatever and compete with them. These days, you have hundreds of applications for each job opening because there simply too many people of all skill levels out of work. Any agitation you give your supervisor at WalMart means you can be out on the street. And yet, somehow, you’re supposed to compete for labor?
[/QUOTE]
Even if all of this is true, it still shows that LinusK’s point was wrong (i.e. that Walmart is paying less than the labor is worth), which is the question I was responding to from andros. And, of course, the choice does exist…like I said, even if there are only two choices between working and not working it’s still a choice.
I’d say the number of skilled people working minimum wage is pretty small, but if you want to back up your assertion with a cite I’m all ears. Even the number of unskilled people making minimum wage is small…IIRC it’s less than 5% of the work force making that level of wages.
Um, no…that’s why we have government assistance programs. Which we pay a fairly large percentage of our budget towards. Is it enough? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it has zero to do with what Walmart or any other company pays their employees. We have minimum wage laws to set the bottom bar. You can argue if the bar is set high enough or not, but it IS set. If Walmart is able to find workers willing to work for wages that are legally at that bar then they are doing nothing wrong, and, again to get back to the point I was addressing, by definition the labor is worth what the company is willing to pay and the pay is worth the labor to the workers since they (both sides) voluntarily accept the exchange.
We as a society have decided to set a minimum bar for both pay and for assistance. If you wish to change that, or argue for it’s change then that’s fine. But Walmart and every other company legally operating is free, within those minimum constraints to purchase labor for what THEY think it’s worth…and the workers are free to sell their labor within those constraints as well.
False dichotomy. There are other employers. We have a social safety net.
If the social safety net is insufficient, then we need to improve it. If that means tax increases, then they should be progressive (that is, not property, wealth, parcel, nor sales taxes).
Walmart raising its wages above the market does not solve the problem. Either Walmart reduces its profits, which reduces its return on investment and increases its costs to raise capital, which ultimately helps investment bankers. Or it raises prices and its customers (who are mostly poor) get less for what they pay. Messing with the market generally hurts the small guys and helps the big guys.
The assumption that you can just pick up and go to another employer is the falsehood here. Saying “You can go work at non-WalMarts!” is like saying “You can live on other plants than just Earth.” Yes, it’s technically true. But not feasible for most.
You work where you get hired and survive (along with, in some cases, government assistance) or you don’t survive. Government assistance doesn’t provide you enough to live on in most cases. You NEED a job to go with it.
As I said, though, this is how the services were redesigned in the 90s. To supplement people’s employment.
[QUOTE=Farin]
The assumption that you can just pick up and go to another employer is the falsehood here. Saying “You can go work at non-WalMarts!” is like saying “You can live on other plants than just Earth.” Yes, it’s technically true. But not feasible for most.
[/QUOTE]
Oh good…you must have a cite to demonstrate this. Can you show that ‘for most’ it’s not feasible for Walmart employees to find other employment?
Yet literally millions of Americans do live on it. How is that possible? Or are they secretly burying them all at a government facility and we just aren’t noticing?
This is a great example of simplistic management. Your model is that every employee is alike, and that raising wages will do nothing except cut profits. But we know that WalMart’s bottom line is impacted by its poor store quality and customer experience. If they paid employees more, and these happier employees stocked the shelves faster, and this led to an increase in sales and inventory turns, the improvement in sales and profitability would more than pay for the increase in wages. If they can get sales per employee up anywhere near Costco levels they’d do much better. And they wouldn’t have to increase prices a bit. In fact, if they set a new floor for pay, their customers might have more money and might buy more - WalMart is always complaining that the poor economy hurts sales without admitting that they are in some part responsible for the lack of money in the hands of consumers.
At one point I was trying to hire someone for my group at a major silicon valley company. My boss didn’t like paying much (not because it was his money) so my and HR’s offers got cut. That and poor project reputation meant I could only hire very junior people. Did that help? Nope - especially because it was one of the reasons I left.
Decent management practices are a bit more subtle than you might think. And are not charity.
I don’t understand the Costco argument. Surely a much smaller and newer company focusing on a different market segment would be expected to have a different financial profile. Is there some other evidence that Wal-Mart would be more profitable if it paid its employees more?
While I certainly don’t believe shareholders and boards are perfect, I find it hard to believe they’re passing up free money without a pretty good argument as to the specific mistake in analysis they are making, and the Costco comparison seems wildly too simplistic to qualify.
Is that the family’s annual income? I’d have guessed less than that, since the entire corporation makes a mere $18 billion or so, after taxes.
If you’re referring to net worth, you’re almost an order of magnitude too low.
[QUOTE=from link above]
That’s a grand total of $102.7 billion for the [six richest members of the Walton] family.
…
In 2010, the [six richest] Waltons’ share [of U.S. wealth] equaled the entire bottom 41.5 percent of families.
[/QUOTE]
It’s a plain fact that corporate profits have been soaring in the U.S., while lowest incomes stagnate. (I’ll bet the 2013 statistic is higher than 41.5%.) You’d never know it though, reading SDMB. Whenever I hear Board members lament that this is a “liberal” board I have to laugh.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Costco grew 8%. WalMart grew 1.2%. And they figured out that cutting employees saves money
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure you realize this, but even leaving aside that they are in different markets and have different business models (thus different cost models for labor), it’s like saying that the US only grew 2-3% in a year while China grew 7-8% and then drawing the erroneous conclusion that China is better, stronger, more powerful than the US based on this. Walmarts annual income is nearly half a trillion dollars, while Costco is less than a hundred billion. Operating expenses wise, Walmart is nearly $30 billion dollars while Costco is less than $3 billion.
It’s as if you’ve solved the problem that the largest retailer in the world could not figure out - how to maximize profits! Of course, if they did this, they would be engaging in evil because profit maximization is evil.
This is the first report I’ve seen which break’s out Sam’s Club which is a better comparison.
And of course Costco is big enough so that you wouldn’t expect such high growth unless they were doing something right. And WalMart is opening lots of new stores also.
Not working, sadly, isn’t a choice in our society. Homelessness isn’t something you can live with. Pun intended.
I didn’t say they were a huge number, I said they were exacerbating the situation by dropping down to where they aren’t normally.
Look at it this way: The lower-end of the skilled workers will dip into the semi-skilled worker employment opportunities. Not ALL of them, but enough of them to make a difference. The semi-skilled workers will then depress into the unskilled worker employment opportunities. The unskilled workers…have no where to go. They are the bottom. Leading into:
Government assistance programs pay just enough to keep food in your stomach. And it’s incredibly hard to keep your benefits for any length of time, even as the prospects of finding a job became hard to impossible during the worst of the recession.
But remember that the people who weathered it and are now slowly rising from the ashes aren’t the workers at WalMart. The bottom half of the middle class are the ones that are recovering right now (in small fits and starts). The people at the bottom are still suffering. This is my argument. That simply “finding another job” isn’t feasible right now for the bottom rungs. They can look, but it takes a long time. In the mean time, they are being ground under a tread. WalMart blows.
I’m not disputing that. I’m focusing on the idea that you can just jump to another job because your current job blows. That’s currently only true for the upper middle class and above. There’s still several years to go before the bottom rungs get that sort of mobility again.
It’s hard for the bottom rung right now. As hard as it was for most of us several years ago.
Workers put out several dozen applications and get nothing. And then they get a job at WalMart. They can continue putting out their applications, but if they don’t get a call because others are inundated with resumes…where are they supposed to go?
WalMart, alone, received 5 million applications last year. They have 2.2 million employees and apparently about 15,000 open jobs at a time. Hm. Seems to me that it may be hard to get low-pay work.
Really? Live on it? In California, the average payout is about $584 a month. In my state, the maximum is about $480 a month. You definition of life doesn’t seem to include Rent. Just food to take back to a cardboard box.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you like life that way.
Gee, Costco seems to be doing a better job of profit maximization, so I must be calling them evil, right? :rolleyes:
WalMart seems to have figured out that they screwed up, and are hiring people. It is not like successful companies can’t screw up - look at Microsoft. Look at HP. If their management is as convinced as some people here that the only way to high profits is screwing their staff, that could explain it.
You heard about the bribery scandal in Mexico, right?
I admit they do an excellent job in data mining. That is a win-win. In fact they set up a center in Silicon Valley and advertised openings by billboard. I wonder how they did in hiring. Google, WalMart - not much of a choice. But they do pay more than minimum wage there, like it or not.
I have a friend who used to work in the Hughes Research Center in Malibu, and she got a turkey from Uncle Howard also. They worked on grants - I’m pretty sure turkeys were not a line item. So it came out of profit.
