I don’t see any reason why Walmart should be forced to operate with unionized workers, but I am a bit suprised by some of the defense of Walmart here. Most anti-union sorts qualify their opposition to unions by accepting that in the days before workplace standards legislation, unions were an important source of bargaining power to prevent unreasonable demands on workers - unsafe workplaces, lock-ins, ridiculously long hours, etc. And here we have Walmart, where tales abound of workers being locked in overnight, forced unpaid overtime, etc. Walmart is very consciously exploiting their superior bargaining position vis a vis labour and the fact that they’re hiring out of the bottom of the labour pool to engage in labour practices that are in many cases illegal, and they get away with it. Is this not precisely the sort of employer that justifies the existence of unions in the first place?
As for the possibility of Walmart not being able to sustain its economic viability if it’s forced to treat its workforce as human beings, I say tough cookies. If the economic survival of your corporation depends on being able to force your workers to work overtime without paying them, then you bloody well deserve to go under. Get a new business model, or get out of town.
I hear you. It’s not just about the low wages–Walmart is the perpetrator of a wide array of violations including the lock-outs, forced unpaid overtime, and what I consider to be the most egregrious offense–taking out “dead peasant” insurance on their own employees. I mean this is the kind of stuff people rioted over in the thirties, it’s the reason unions were created. Is it really so important to save fifty cents on a jar of pickles that you can overlook the fact that this company profits from the deaths of its own employees?
I agree there’s instances where unions do more harm than good but trust me this situation is not one of them. Walmart employees are essentially treated like chattel. I know some people on this board have no respect for the poor but do you really think a company should be able to bilk a worker’s family out of thousands? How are workers to react to such abuse, if not through unions?
What about respect for the poor people who are the main beneficiaries of Wal-Mart’s low prices? Wal-Mart has been a huge boon to low income people. Not only through low prices, but by their intentional decisions to locate their stores near mass transit, to provide ‘all in one’ shopping so that single parents don’t have to traipse all over the city to buy the things they need.
In some locations, the opening of a Wal-Mart means an instant increase in the standard of living of the people in the area.
As for these other practices, do they not violate labor law? I’m pretty sure forced unpaid overtime would violate the labor laws in Quebec. So why not seek those remedies?
Oh, I dunno. Maybe because you’ll get fired for instigating an investigation of those violations? Of course, you won’t be fired because you lodged the complaint. You’ll be fired because you were two minutes late for work last Thursday, or because you took too long restocking the footwear section, or because you didn’t smile brightly enough at a passing customer. But look at the cost/benefit scenario facing an individual employee stuck working at Walmart. Lodge a complaint, and even if you win, you’ll lose, and since you’re working at Walmart, it’s a pretty safe bet that you need the income and you’ll have trouble finding another job.
I take it you don’t have any experience with these relationships where one party has every last shred of bargaining power, and the other party has none?
Where I am the Walmarts are nowhere near mass transit. They are located out of the town and city limits, and you have to drive to get to them. As a pedestrian who has limited access to any kind of transportation, I resent the fact that I can’t walk through my town and pick up what I need anymore–all the stores have closed because of the Walmart twenty miles away, and while twenty miles isn’t a long distance for drivers, it’s an astronomically long distance for walkers. I couldn’t shop at Walmart even if I wanted to (which I don’t of course).
Walmart helps poor people in the short run, but hurts them in the long run. Saving a quarter on cheese might seem like a good deal now, but when the median hourly wage in the area drops a dollar or two because of their influence, those low prices won’t matter. It’s all relative.
Dude, I spent most of my youth from age 14 until about 22 working in exactly places like that. I’ll tell you what - working at Wal-mart for $6/hr kicks ass over working as a day laborer swinging a sledge for the same money - something I’m all too familiar with. And my mother worked Wal-Mart type jobs her entire life, so I grew up intimately familiar with what she went through. So you really don’t want to play the “You don’t know what it’s like” card.
The fact is, I was always aware that I had walked into a voluntary relationship, and that I always had the freedom to walk out if I didn’t like it. And I did so, several times. My mother did a couple of times as well when the bullshit became unbearable.
And why does a worker have to lodge a complaint to fix this? If this problem is as widespread as you claim, why don’t activist groups lobby the government to do something? Why doesn’t some clever lawyer file a class action suit on behalf of wronged workers? Why doesn’t the government, which is supposed to regulate these things, take action on its own?
Or perhaps a lot of these stories are a lot more ubiquitous than the practices they claim to describe. I’ve worked a lot of crap jobs, and I’ve had managers ask me to ‘stick around for a bit’ for no extra pay (with a very generous definition of ‘a bit’), so it happens. But you know what? It happens in every job. I’m a software developer now, and I make good money with no complaints. But do you know how much free overtime me and others like me give our companies? In the software industry, it’s common for managers to underestimate the time it takes to build software, and make it up by demanding that their employees work 12-18 hour days for the last couple of months of a release to push it out the door. If we’re lucky, our hundreds of hours of free overtime might be rewarded with a free pizza dinner or a T-shirt ‘in recognition of our efforts’.
The thing is, on balance Wal-Mart is a huge boon to the poor. I know the anti-corporate types hate to hear it, but it’s true. Wal-Mart is the largest employer of people in North America, and perhaps in the world. Its clientele is largely made up of the poor and lower middle class. It has grown into one of the largest companies in the world because it provides a service that poor people desperately want, and it does it better than anyone else. Not only that, but Wal-Mart’s aggressive tactics are employed for the benefit of the poor as well - they put the screws to their suppliers and force them to operate on razor-thin margins. Those savings are largely passed on to customers.
In addition, your assertion that Wal-Mart has ‘all the power’ is just not correct. Wal-Mart staffers are often young single people who are much more likely to tell their employer to shove it.
So let’s be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater while we seek to ‘punish’ Wal-Mart for having the nerve to offer jobs to people under conditions you don’t approve of.
By the way, did you know that Wal-Mart is on Forbe’s list of the top 100 companies to work for in America?
Hmnn. That’s not the case around here. All the Wal-Marts I know of are on major roads with significant mass-transit access. One is located a block away from an LRT station. One of them actually has a major bus transfer point in their parking lot. All are on major bus routes.
I just flat-out disagree. You may think that saving 25 cents on cheese is no big deal, but multiply those savings across all the staples a family needs in a month, and you’re talking about serious money. Saving $40 on a $300 grocery bill is a big, big deal for someone who only makes $800/mo. $40 might be their entire entertainment budget for a month, or it might be the difference between the kids getting a nourishing lunch every day or not.
Wal-Mart is an economic juggernaught. Wal-Mart alone is responsible for something like 12 points of GDP growth for the U.S. over the past ten years. Wal-Mart has had a significant effect on keeping inflation low, and its effect disproportionately helps poor people (i.e. prices have dropped for poor people due to Wal-Mart, while prices on other goods that are targeted at more wealthy people have increased). So if you believe in progressivity, you might consider that Wal-Mart has done a lot to move wealth from rich to poor.
Too often people on the left allow their reflexive anti-business attitudes to blind them to the good that many corporations due for the poor. Wal-Mart, in my opinion, is a case in point. I would argue that on balance, the poor are much better off living in a world with Wal-Mart than without it.
The Walmart here just moved from a major bus tranfer point (Circle & 8th) to a location accessible only by car (the new Preston Crossing mall at Attridge/Preston and the Circle). You can’t get there by foot unless you plan on walking across the freeway. I was actually commenting on this the other day, since it struck me as moving them away from their clientele. The new location appeals mostly to the new subdivisions out to the northeast of Sutherland, which are anything but low rent districts. Anecdotal, not evidence of anything. I just found it curious.
What about the effect Walmart’s low wages have on the other businesses in the area? It’s been shown that when a Walmart is introduced into an area, the median hourly wage drops. What happens when someone’s $800/mo job suddenly turns into a $750/mo job? That’s going to affect their budget too.
And I think there’s a big difference between a salaried employee (which I assume you are) being asked to stay after hours and an hourly employee being asked to. You presumably have the opportunity for upward mobility, you’ll profit via bonuses if your software makes money, you have a skill which they can profit from. Most Walmart workers don’t have mobility, they don’t profit when the stock rises, and they don’t have a skill which ensures their job safety. It’s not “helping out the team” to make them stay after hours for no pay, it’s slavery.
If Wal-Mart’s wages are lower than the median for an area, of course it’s going to pull down the median wage. That doesn’t mean that all the businesses in the area suddenly pay their own employees less. The only businesses that are going to pay less are the ones who are losing business to Wal-Mart. And why are they losing business to Wal-Mart? Because they charge more. So those jobs become leaner because Wal-Mart is better at giving poor people what they need. That’s what competition is all about, and isn’t wonderful to see a store that competes to see who can satisfy poor people the most, rather than another one catering to obnoxious boomers and yuppies?
Your argument is that Walmart is good because they have low prices, and that it’s okay if Walmart-like stores have to lower their wages to compete because it’s all about who can satisfy poor people the most. But if wages drop so far that poor people have no option but to shop at Walmart (because their prices are the lowest), then how is that fair to them? Limiting their range of affordable stores isn’t “competition,” it’s a monopoly.
To take my point to an absurd level, suppose that Walmart drops their wages by fifty percent, and drops all their prices to fifty percent. Now the people who work at Walmart can shop at no other place but Walmart–they can’t afford anything else. Is this fair to them, to limit their range of affordable stores? Now suppose that Safeway, in order to compete, drops their wages and prices by thirty percent. Suddenly, the people who work at Safeway have no choice but to shop at either Safeway or Walmart, and since Walmart is cheaper and they can conserve more of their money by shopping there, they do that. Safeway starts to fail. So they drop their prices/wages to Walmart’s level. Walmart responds in kind by making the average hourly wage 10c/hour, and charging a half-cent for blocks of cheese. There’s no way Safeway can compete with that, so they close and all workers migrate to the Walmart. So you have a workforce that pays almost nothing for their food, but also makes almost nothing, and because of that they can’t afford to shop anywhere else in the area. My fictional absurd Walmart is providing low prices, but they’re limiting the range of affordable stores for people in the area. They’re essentially forcing them to shop at Walmart. Would you consider this setup to be a fair one?
Eh, it’s late and my math might be screwed up but I still think that Walmart hurts poor people in the long run. It’s also been documented that they start ratcheting up their prices as soon as they drive all other businesses out of the area, so in the end it might not be any cheaper than shopping at a local store. Maybe you live in an area where there’s lots of choice in retailers, but here in my poor-ass part of the country Walmart has driven everyone out. Again: how is it “competition” if they’re fixing it so they’re the only store that poor people can shop at?
That’s absurd. People aren’t “forced” to shop somewhere because its prices are the lowest; they shop there because they like paying low prices.
If Walmart pays unreasonably low wages, less than people could get from other jobs in the area, how do they convince anyone to work for them?
If you claim it’s because they drive competitors out of business, then how can they do that unless they first get people to work for the wages they offer?
Your argument is a typical anti-corporate fear which has little basis in reality. You can’t simply throw out hypothetical scenarios without addressing the myriad reasons why they don’t happen in the real world. It’s like an anti-government libertarian arguing that every government expansion will lead to totalitarianism.
In short, if Wal-Mart suddenly lowers its wages in half, it will lose its work force. Why do you think Wal-Mart offers the higher wage in the first place? Out of the goodness of their hearts? No, because that’s what they have to do to attract the labor they need to operate. There is no monopoly here because no one is being forced to work at or shop at Wal-Mart. People choose to work there because for them it’s the best alternative. People choose to shop there because for them, Wal-Mart offers the value they can’t get elsewhere. Change that equation, and Wal-Mart loses its strength.
As for dropping its wage to 10c an hour - even if there were no minimum wage laws, no one in our society is going to work for that money. It wouldn’t even pay for their work clothes and transportation to work. So you’re just being silly.
Another fear I always hear from the left is that corporations will routinely engage in ‘predatory pricing’ - lowering their prices below cost to force competitors out of business, then once they have a monopoly jacking their prices up and forcing people to pay a monopolistic rate. The problem with this theory is that there is virtually no evidence that this practice is widespread, and it is also a violation of anti-trust law. Companies that try this usually find that they lose their shirts on the loss leaders, and if they do manage to force their competitors out of business, the competitors flock right back in and eat their market share as soon as they try to raise their prices. Today, with Fed-Ex and the Internet, this is even less likely because people are no longer stuck with one retailer due to geographic isolation.
Now some data NOT from the horse’s ass, I mean, mouth:
In 2003 Wal-Mart revenues were $259 billion. So they donate about .05% of their annual sales (and it’s all tax deductible, of course). Hoo haa. Here’s a fun game - take your own pre-tax salary and multiply by .0005 so you can see just how much you need to donate to be as generous as Wal-Mart! For me it’s $13.
From N.O.W.:
And of course Wal-Mart chose the Boston region as an example - we’ve got one of the highest costs of living in the country here! Not to mention one of the highest minimum wages. I wonder why they didn’t choose to cite their, say, Mississippi workers wages?
From NewStandard News:
I don’t know if I’d call that affordable. Although, to be fair, health insurance costs are pretty ridiculous anywhere.
And just for fun, I’ll mention that in 2003 Wal-Mart’s president and CEO took in over 500 times the salary of one of those average Boston workers mentioned above. Apples and oranges, of course, but I think Wal-Mart can probably afford to have all their full-time workers live above the poverty line without tanking the company. But that’s just me.
Your employers are effectively stealing from you just becuase most of them do it doesn’t make it legal or right. How long would you have lasted if you took money from the till or swiped a few items? Its wrong for both employers and employees to steal from each other but the unfortunate reality is that the employer can get away with it while the employee can’t.
Well, I did say it was an absurd example. However, my point is that Walmart perpetuates a cycle of poverty by which they profit. Keep wages in the area low, so that people have no choice but to shop at the place that has the lowest prices in town. True, people may want to shop there anyway, but my point is that by altering the economic reality of an area Walmart is tailoring the situation to their own benefit. Keep people poor, and they have no choice but to shop at Walmart.
And people would work for absurdly low wages if Walmart (or other low-paying business) was the only game in town. What about company towns? People used to work for slave wages because their houses and food were paid for by the company; their basic needs were met but there was no hope for advancement and no way to succeed outside of the ghetto in which they were housed. Don’t think that can’t happen again. I can easily see Walmart erecting little Waltowns across America, housing people and giving them just enough food to live in exchange for their labor at the cost of $2/hr or so. I’m sure if it was still legal to do that it would already have happened.
Can you cite actual evidence that this is the case? On the contrary, the existence of Wal-Mart is adding to the wealth of our society, and it’s doing so mainly by increasing the economic efficiency of the lower classes. It is giving them a channel to cheaper goods than they could otherwise get, and this is a good thing. It is just a fact of life that this business model only works if you can keep labor costs down, so they hire people from the same group that they provide benefits to. Why you think this is a bad thing baffles me. In fact, Wal-Mart is a great resource. It has made the transfer of goods in society more efficient, which has increased our aggregate wealth.
For one thing, it limits consumer choice. Say that Walmart chooses not to carry a certain magazine, or a type of food. If Walmart is the only store in town you can afford to shop at, or the only store period, you’re not able to get those items. By forcing out all competition Walmart has become a monopoly in certain areas; therefore, poor people have little choice but to shop there. If Walmart chooses not to carry something, then the people in that area aren’t able to get all the goods they want. Isn’t that kind of a bad thing?
So, Walmart will close stores that unionize. Does anyone else see a solution to the existence of Walmart right there?
Seriously. Small businesses would be able to reopen (and hire), suppliers would not be so damaged by the demands of this monstrosity, the ex-employees would be able to make better money in the re-opened stores.