So the basic gist is that because of Obama, poor old Walmart, a company of 2.2 million employees with revenes of almost half a trillion USD and an operating income of $27 billion, owned by a family worth more than the aggregate wealth of the bottom 30% of people in the US has been “forced” to adopt a policy of shifting workers to part time or temp status.
So my question is this. What does such an action prompt such hatred for Obama and the “liberals” while you never hear them say something like “wow that company is certainly screwing it’s employees”.
Another example would be people I know “liking” BP shortly after the big oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years back. Like “yeah…great job cleaning up that fucking mess you created through your own incompetence.”
I’m pretty pro business and all that. But I simply don’t grasp how regular middle class people (not CEOs and billionares with vested interests in these companies) seem content to allow companies to do whatever they please. Indeed they seem to resent the very idea of any corporate oversight or accountability.
You put “liking” in quotes (otherwise I wouldn’t have replied). Do you, perhaps, mean “liking” in the Facebook sense? If so, that doesn’t mean you like or appreciate the topic in question; it means you want to follow that topic. I wish they’d change that button to “Interested”.
Walmart’s prices appear to have very little to do with their actual costs, and much more to do with how badly they want to undercut other local businesses. So in this case, I doubt they’d care.
I don’t get it either. I think the concept of business regulation has become a culture war topic like abortion or gun control. Some people are just anti it because people they don’t like are in favor of it.
I’m also baffled by this. Not so much by the ‘right’, but by the people who vote for them. Also, the ‘right’ may use this as part of their political philosophy, but there’s no shortage of politicans on the ‘left’ who are willing to take the bribes and act against the interests of those who elected them.
Well, I think as long as people have access to cheap crap, they don’t really care where it comes from or how it’s made. At least not until their jobs are the ones that are outsourced.
I think it has become less about any particular issue and more about what “team” you root for.
“Jobs” is probably the general answer to the OP. Corporations employ lots of people, so when the government attacks, or tries to place restrictions on them, the general public might be inclined to take the business’ side. When Walmart opened in my hometown, the most important issues were that it created X amount of jobs and that prices would be low – issues of wages or the impact on small businesses were not on the radar.
It’s also an issue of branding and customer loyalty. When people have been shopping at Walmart for years, watching happy commercials on TV (their logo was a freakin’ smiley face for a while), talking to so-and-so whose brother works at the local store – they might very likely put their trust in the corporation rather than the government of the guy they voted against in the last election.
It’s not just a right-wing phenomenon, I don’t think. When Apple was dragged into a congressional hearing not too long ago for tax issues, even some of my liberal friends were outraged that their favorite company was being dragged through the mud.
This isn’t really true though, is it? Walmart doesn’t set prices (OK, OK, let’s pretend for the moment that oligopolisitc qualms that might attach to Walmart particularly don’t apply. In other words, let’s pretend we’re dealing with a conventional retailer).
Well, Walmart doesn’t set prices in the long term. Yes, Walmart can put a sticker for whatever price it wants on its merchandise, but if Walmart errs (in the direction of higher prices), it’s just going to end up with backlogs of inventory.
Or you can cut hours (or in general, reduce the supply-side). But my guess is that the Walton family is a lot more interested in making money, which you can’t do when you close your doors, than it is in proving a point to Mr. Obama.
If Obamacare is causing industry-wide (in grocers and other retailers) cost increases, then yes, prices will go up and consumers will by and large pay it (because demand for groceries tends to be pretty price-inelastic). Or we will see industry-wide reliance on part-time labor (which probably isn’t unlikely, I think that’s basically the case now).
So, I am perplexed by the tendencies of both the right and the left to see these corporations as unfettered actors who are doing good or ill. Walmart, and all the other retailers, aren’t moving to more temp workers out of any animus for Obamacare. And Walmart is not doing us any favors by doing so (i.e., the misguided sentiment behind, “Well, would you prefer they raised prices, hmmmm?”). Instead, the retail industry is responding to a supply-side structural increase in the cost of full-time labor, guided only by considerations of what will maximize its profit (or in other words, what will get the most “dollar votes” from society (apart from whatever rhetoric these “dollar voters” might engage in)).
And with one post, therein lies the heart of what the OP is talking about. There is a third choice, however much you want to pretend it doesn’t exist, John. Walmart can keep staff hours, keep the same prices, and just make less profit. That’s what I expect a good company to do instead of screwing the poor who shop there or the poor non-unionized workers that make up its staff. However, it seems that some people simply cannot conceive of option 3
Except for one thing: The purpose of Walmart’s existence is not to provide jobs for people or to provide great products at low prices. The purpose of Walmart’s existence is to make as much money as possible. The trick, of course, is to do all three.
It’s not really that strange when you look at it from a right wing (or perhaps simply capitalist) perspective. The philosophy of the right is generally (in this respect) about a free market driven by profits, supply, demand etc. In that philosophy, there’s nothing wrong with a business doing whatever it can to maximize profits.* The point is that they don’t see why Walmart should eat the costs of their employees’ healthcare. Perhaps you might take the same view if you employed someone to cut your grass now and then, and were suddenly told you have extra expenses on top of their wages. I’m not saying those situations are analogous, but it’s the same reasoning in both cases.
*This is, of course, a simplification. Everyone has a line they don’t want businesses to cross - even if that line is only at murder - but that tends to go without saying.
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Well, I think as long as people have access to cheap crap, they don’t really care where it comes from or how it’s made. At least not until their jobs are the ones that are outsourced.
[/QUOTE]
Is your heart burn over the fact that people DO seem to like ‘cheap crap’? Here’s the other part of the equation…if WalMart wasn’t paying enough in wages they wouldn’t be able to have enough employees to run their stores or do the work. But the truth is that, at least in the WalMarts in my area, there is a waiting list to get jobs there, and they don’t even have to advertise. You and others in this thread seem to think that it’s on WalMart to cut their profits AND raise their wages, but I can’t for the life of me see why they should do anything of the kind, to be honest. There are already a pool of people who are willing to work at WalMart for the agreed upon wages, yet you want them to just ignore that and cut profits (I don’t see anyone advocating raising prices, which is the actual, real world alternative to using temp workers, as opposed to the pie in the sky alternative).
Let’s turn this question around. If this is a very bad thing for corporations to do, is it also a bad thing for city governments to do? Because some cities are doing it.
As a conservative, I expect that people will react rationally to laws affecting their income. If taxes are high, we’ll avoid them. If regulations require us to pay for health insurance for our workers under certain circumstances, we’ll try to stay on the side of the regulations that don’t require us to.
What Wal-mart and the city of Long Beach are doing isn’t “damaging corporate behavior”, it’s a rational response to damaging government behavior. And frankly, kudos to Wal-mart for not passing Obamacare costs onto me and you.
You expect a “good company” to reduce its profits? Really?
If we, the people. decide that companies must provide new benefits for employees, then we, the people should not be surprised when the company responds by either raising prices or cutting pay. Companies have learned that most people don’t respond well to rises in prices, so they decide to cut pay in some way.
Economics is dynamic, not static. Change x, and you shouldn’t be shocked when y and z also change.
Well, except that they are passing healthcare costs on to me and you. It’s not like those part time workers don’t get sick or injured. They just have to postpone preventative care and wait until they need the emergency room. How do you suppose those costs get paid?
The most important part of the market is it’s ability to convey pricing information. If you want to be able to impose costs on employers, but be immune to the effect that has on prices, then you don’t want a market economy and you should just say so.
Anyway, the OP’s example is pretty stupid. “Damaging corporate behavior” is now defined as passing along the cost of regulations to the consumer, the very people who, through their elected offices, demanded the new regulation? I think you are blaming the wrong actor here.
The June Atlantic has an article (“Death of the Salesmen”) which may answer a question from an earlier thread:
(The article treats technology, not the Walton family, as the main cause of a decline in retail jobs.)
Another frequent debate at SDMB is: Do the super-rich create new wealth, or is the economy a zero-sum game? Both extreme positions are wrong: each case must be judged on its merits and “wealth” is very ambiguous. But the zero-sum model gives informative answers far far more often than right-wingers imagine.
In the case of Walmart, the answers seem pretty clear. Consumers get lower prices because of that 30% of the workforce no longer needed. Good for Alice. Not so good for her cousin Bob who was one of the retail clerks laid off. Bob has a lot more leisure time now, but the money he’d need to enjoy that leisure is sitting in the pockets of the Walton family.
As a society, the U.S. needs to decide what is appropriate if Alice, or her cousin Bob, or one of their children, sustains an injury or infection. Should taxpayers pay for their health care? Walmart customers? The Walmart stockholder? Or should the infections be allowed to fester?
SDMB is far more intelligent than most message boards, yet even here the issue ends up framed as good versus evil, superior people versus inferior, or hatred of government. The U.S. needs a new Enlightenment.
I’d also add that if we, the people decide everyone should have health care, we the people should pay for it, not fob the cost off on someone else and then pat ourselves on the back for our generosity.