Nope. But they do look for employees that can access other funding sources to supplement the low pay jobs. A good example is people on social security. Wal Mart offers jobs that provide supplemental income, while social security and medicare provide the main income and medical care. I think Wal Mart is unique among huge corporations in this aspect. It is usually the small businesses who pay the marginal wages.Originally posted by giff57
Inference: The dot com bubble and subsequent contraction?
Dude, I'm cheesing so hard right now.
And hiring Grandma and Grandpa is not a good thing? I look forward to the day I can retire on SS and my state plan and can become a walmart greeter.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Not really. A better example is Microsoft, where each computer buyer pays for a monopoly operating system. Each computer costs X% more than it would if there were competition. So the benefits of a free market are not realized.
Most monopolists use their monopoly to charge prices above market. Wal Mart is about different. It takes subsidies from a variety of sources to charge prices lower than "market." The low costs are achieved by aggressively getting goods and services at a below market rate, and then charging very low prices (lower than the normal "market" price) at retail. All this really means is that taxpayers and non-Wal Mart consumers are subsidizing the low price goods.
When a city condemns land for a wal mart, that's a taxpayer subsidy. When a wal mart employee gets health care from a spouse, the spouse's employer is subsidizing wal mart. When wal mart manages to buy a bunch of Sony tvs at less than wholesale, Sony makes up the difference by charging a bit higher price in other outlets, so Sony customers are subsidizing the wal mart tv purchase.
I"m often wondering why people stay in the low wage category. clearly there are various factors that influence our economic status, but I always wonder why people that are in the one state do not get education or whatever credentialing so they can move up in their income level... nickel and dimed did answer that for me partly- people that are working 2 jobs simply don't have time to take classes, or have the money for it for that matter. but I still wonder about other reasons why people can't or don't reach out for better opportunities...
another issue I wonder about is what would happen if we were at the level where even the poorest people had all of their basic physical and material needs met. wouldn't they still feel quite underprivledged psychologically in comparison with the wealthy? and would then the existence of a lower class still be a social issue?
You could read "Tell them who I am", a book about homeless women. You could check out this website (the course website for a class called "Homelessness and Public Policy" at SF State U.): http://thecity.sfsu.edu/%7Ebahp/hed_urbsf2000.htm You could also read "Riches for the Poor", "More Work for Mother", "The Women's Estate Planner"....um... if I can think of the title, there is another excellent book about women and money.
I have helped mom's on welfare get off welfare. And my efforts to escape my own situation have taken many years to begin paying off in some kind of tangible way. So, speaking as someone with a bit of "first hand" experience, here are a few of my thoughts:
First, you have to recognize that if everyone got skills, etc, there would not be high wage, high skill jobs for everyone. Second, when it comes to individual situations, their personal circumstances often involve convoluted, unresolvable problems of a very human nature. One statistic I saw some years back indicated that most women who remained on welfare long-term had a relative -- their own child or sibling or other relative -- who was disabled or a "problem" in some way and they were the primary care-taker. This person could not be left alone 40+ hours per week and could not be placed in a "program" and no other workable care situation could be arranged for them.
I have health problems -- a genetic disorder for which there is no cure. I have a son who has the same disorder and a number of other issues as well. I have homeschooled my kids for nearly 6 years now and they were a tremendous burden when they were little, particularly the child with the genetic disorder. I could not have successfully held down a normal job and I knew it. My husband is career military and my dad will soon be...um...80 years old. And my family kind of assumed that my "place" was home with the kids -- and did things to facilitate it. So although I am only 39, I have been in a situation that was highly conducive to being a homemaker. And the title "homemaker" sounds (and feels) so much better and more status-y than "I have been an unemployed bum for the last 19 years who could not have held down a job if I had tried -- and was smart enough to not bother to start down that path to sure failure". If I could not claim "homemaker" as my honorable and esteemed career, 19 years of "unemployed bum" would be so damning that I probably couldn't get a job...you know, I got halfway through that sentence and realized how stupid it was: I still cannot get a job. I am launching a business as a way to get around that little detail.
I have more willpower or stamina or something than average. So the fact that it is taking Decades doesn't change my goal to resolve these issues in my life. It would stop a lot of people, who would get discouraged and give up. And I began life with a strong academic record. With the advent of the Internet and changes in demographics such that colleges cater more and more to adult learners and other 'non-traditional' students, I have been able to return to college in spite of health problems, special-needs kids, and a husband in the military. But not everyone can do what I can do on the academic front: I can be sick, overwhelmed with dealing with my kids, etc, etc, etc, and slap something together at the last minute and still get an A or B for a grade most of the time. People who didn't get the basics from the crummy school they grew up in or who just aren't that great at studying or performing academically and actually need to do more than just kind of skim the textbook, well, they need a lot more time than I do in order to be successful in the academic arena. And people working two jobs not only lack time they also lack mental focus -- they are TIRED. It is not conducive to studying.
Sigh. As much as I would love to go on, I really need to scat and go do other stuff. So, at the risk of being accused of arrogance and snobbery, I will end it there.
I think with Wal Mart you need to put it in context. The main reason that their employees are using more state money for social services is because they are probably the largest retail employer. I can guarantee that they are not the only company in California that has sub-standard wages. Why should Wal Mart feel compelled to pay back the state when all they are doing is providing jobs at a wage that many workers find acceptable?
I also think we cannot lose sight of the fact that nobody forces anyone to work at Wal Mart and nobody forces anyone to shop at Wal Mart. You can argue the many reasons that people are “forced” to take jobs at Wal Mart such as lack of higher paying jobs, lack of educational opportunity, lack of skills, and welfare reform. Well if that is the case I would rather have people working at Wal Mart and making some money than have them not working at all and using up even more state resources.
I agree with boiker, higher minimum wages are long overdue. If people are making more money they will likely require less governmental aid.
"I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are."
- Homer Simpson
But if there was no Wal-Mart would these people necessarily be less well off and drawing more public resources? I don't know if you can honestly make that assumption.
Story was on CBS News Saturday Aug. 7, 2004
Wal-Mart: No Bargain?
also links to additional stories:
- Wal-Mart Faces Massive Bias Suit
- Illegal Workers Sue Wal-Mart
- Feds Target Wal-Mart On Illegals
- Feds: Wal-Mart Knew About Illegals
- One Town Says No To Wal-Mart
- Angry Workers Up The Ante At Wal-Mart
Oddball
Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?
Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here?
Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?
From Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Are you sure you're not hurt ?
No. Just some parts wake up faster than others.
Broke parts take a little longer, though.
From Electric Horseman (1979)
The last time we did a lower income housing rehab grant program, the majority ot the lower income households worked for the city, county, school district, and hospital...No WalMart employees were among the applicants.
Someone should do a study. I would guess WalMart has no more of these folks than any other non skilled service sector employer. Earlier in the thread I asked for solutions, but apparently everone just wants to bash walmart.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
By "solutions", what do you mean? Solutions to what, exactly? To Walmart's statistical data? To poverty?
Since the new thing is to cite the subsidizing of wages and benefits, I am wanting to hear some ideas on how to solve that. I noticed the Berkley study left those out as well.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Well, I don't quite know what you mean by "cite" the subsidizing...etc.
But, some thoughts anyway
First, some points brought up in this thread have made me step back and think a little more. It reminds me of a book I read years ago. The book was written kind of on the premise that women working from home were being "abused" by their employers because they weren't getting medical benefits, etc. But when I read the data in the book, I had a different take on it. Most of the women in the study did not need medical benefits because they were married and their husband's job provided medical benefits. So, all cash was more valuable to them than bennies would have been. (And that is the short version.)
So, I think you would first need to look at how much Walmart is creating underpaid "wage slaves" and how much Walmart is creating a job market for elderly folks on Social Security who view their retirement benefits as their main income and a part-time job as supplemental income, rather than the other way around. Given that Social Security was invented when the average life expectancy was (I think) 67, setting retirement age for SS at 65 was never intended to milk the system for two decades. It was intended to let "the REALLY old" rest on their laurels for a couple of years. With life expectancy up in the 70's and 80's in most countries, and elderly people increasingly able-bodied and healthy compared to what people of those ages used to be like, it is a reality that we need a paradigm shift: old people NEED to keep working. But they generally need jobs that are different from the "full-time with benefits" situation that younger folks are more in need of.
But that brings up this point: we need a paradigm shift concerning "work" that is larger than just the "right to work" for the elderly. Women and their children (and families as a whole) would benefit enormously from redefining how many hours per week you have to work to get bennies. Part-time work is a kind of "pink collar ghetto" right now. Right now, for the most part, if you do not work full time, you cannot opt into the retirement plan, get medical benefits, etc. Yet some folks are in no position to put in 40 hours per week on a regular basis. A "pro rated" system where you can participate in retirment and other benefits programs if you work part time would do a lot to alleviate financial stresses on a number of impacted populations.
Additionally, the last time I looked at the statistics, we are seeing higher rates of unemployment combined with longer hours for those folks whe are working. The last time this country had a situation like that, a movement pushed and got the 40 hour work week laws passed in order to distribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the nation as a whole. A new overarching set of principles needs to be put into place to allow "all" (or the vast majority -- whatever is humanly possible) people to work between 20 and 35 hours per week and make enough to live on. Universal health care coverage might be a big piece of the puzzle. It has the potential to eliminate disincentives to provide bennies to part-time workers.
I know the stories of Walmart going in to small towns and killing the downtown off and replacing living wage jobs with poverty-creating jobs. So I do think they are doing something really wrong to this country. But if the overall context in which it was done was somewhat different, it might not be nearly so tragic. So I don't think we can lay the entire thing on Walmart -- and I think they should be given credit for beginning to provide a job market for segments of the population that historically have a lot of trouble finding jobs at all, such as retirees who need part-time work, cannot handle full-time work, and would lose part of their social security benefits if they took full-time work.
Ok, so we know that in a lot of cases, Wal-Mart hurts or closes downtown businesses. Do we really believe that mom and pop pay high wages and benefits for their employees?
I also know that in some cases, where the local downtown owners are flexible, they can do better with a Wal-Mart in town. The trouble is, that many of these folks try to continue doing business they same way as they always have.
My ultimate point is why spend so much time and money trying to prove that Wal-Mart is satan? Why didn't the researchers look at poverty as a whole, and title their article, "Government Subsidation of Low wage service sector jobs" and give some recommendations of what we can do as a society to improve things?
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Here is a possible solution and at least 2 examples that I am aware of.
Spend the money that the public has spent on installing infrastrucuture to lure these types of employers on education and training opportunities for the same levels of people that they will be employing. At a time when teh province cut funding of post secondary education they spent $750 k on building a new off ramp and infrastrucuture for walmart and Home Depot. Just imagine how many people that could have helped pay for tuition.
Same thing in another community, they are looking at spending $3-5 million on infrastructure and quoting that this is good because it is going to create jobs. That would pay for a lot of trade school places and education opportunities in a community with a trade school and that needs skilled trades (electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics etc). This is also a community that has boil orders, so putting that money into infrastructure for the entire community might attract new employers also.
Too lazy to beat myself up for being to lazy to beat myself up for being too lazy to... well you get the point....
[elitist snob hat] Giff, most folks just aren't that bright or that emotionally mature. You have to have a view of the bigger picture to design a better study and they just don't have that. Most folks I meet think in black-and-white terms and fuel the "conspiracy theory" crap because they want a nice, clean, simple story-line with a good-versus-evil plot for Life, The Universe, and Everything -- and never mind that there are 6 billion-ish people on planet earth so NOTHING is that simple.[/elitist snob hat]
If you paint Walmart as Satan, then you have a SIMPLE answer: Kill Walmart and all of our social problems will conveniently Go Away. In contrast, if you deal with the complexity of social problems as arising out of human nature, life, the universe, and everything, etc, etc...you have to face ugly facts like "Some folks never will be able to live the so-called 'American Dream' and some folks never will be able to completely stand on their own two feet and some folks are oppressed and some folks have problems too difficult to overcome without enormous resources and life is messy.....etc etc" It is enough to make most folks throw their hands up in the air and stop looking for a way to improve things.
Painting life in "good versus evil" terms and naming a Villain lets a lot of people label themselves as "the good guys"....and promptly rush out to try to murder the bad guys, like the good people they are. Sigh. Actually doing the right thing in the face of that icky thing called Reality is not so nice and simple and clean. Doing the right thing is hard work, it often puts blood on your hands (frquently, your own -- which isn't the most fun you will ever have), it requires you to be willing to really suffer for the cause and it means accepting that there is no villain who can conveniently have all the blame laid at their feet. As big as Walmart is and as intimidating as it is to try to imagine bringing it down, it is small potatoes compared to the issues I have brought up.
After I logged off, I thought some about the kinds of points you are bringing up. It occurred to me that the origin of Walmart is in small town America. Sam Walton lived in a small town and he noticed that all the stores closed up evenings and weekends and that locals drove to larger nearby cities to spend their money on evening and weekends. He tried to get the local businesses to band together and stay open a bit longer and they basically told him to drop dead. So he, alone, began staying open longer hours for the convenience of his customers. So, as a small business owner myself, trying to carve out a niche for myself in a global economy, I think one element of this is that we also need a new paradigm for the mom and pop operation. Walmart is not the reason for that. Walmart may just be "the presenting problem" -- and small town America may be so vulnerable precisely because that IS where Walmart began. Walmart was more friendly to small town folks than the other local shops were -- who were oblivious to the fact that their customers also worked during the day and really needed to be able to shop on evenings and weekends. But mom and pop didn't want to hear that -- they wanted to go home.
I have never supported the public paying for such infrastructure. Using TIF to get one is fine, since the taxpayers are not paying for it. I think this is the way it works much of the time in the States. If they are using public funds, I would agree with your idea.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Which is why, as a planner trained to look at the big picture, I get annoyed by these type of studies and the media's clipping of the most damning sections of them.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Not to pile on---but TIF isn't always free money. Our TIF districts cover a lot of the city and are rarely allowed to expire. With tight budgets, frozen property tax rates (written into the state constitution no less) a cap on the growth of assessments, and no sales taxes, we may be cutting into what's available for other public purposes...e.g. Social services and police have been cut in recent years while new TIF districts have been formed and old ones extended. So I'm not saying that TIF hasn't given us a great downtown among a lot of things over the years and we're probably "better off" than if TIF had never been put in place, but its definitely not free money.
I think this might be a good takeaway from this whole thread----nothing comes without some cost. Its really hard (have you ever tried to explain TIF to real people???) but you should just get all the costs out on the table in a way that people can understand and have a serious discussion about.
Check out these guys for more on that mantra---http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/
Sounds like where you are the trouble is not TIF, but the other constraints forcing the governments to use TIF for things it is not designed for. TIF even with its drawbacks is better than using all public funds for such projects.
Yes there should be more support for better jobs. We do need the lower paying jobs as well though. Like I alluded to earlier, those jobs are important for retirees and young people. So throwing out all support for them is not the answer.
I agree, that more information is better for the citizens and that is what our jobs are.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Well, that is why we have that song "Dirty Laundry". I rarely watch The News because "news" is almost exclusively BAD news. And we wonder why we have so many drug addicts in the world. Even I get sucked in if I listen to enough of that hype, as proven by my first post in this thread.Really, I work very hard to remain naive and preserve my ability to follow a vision and pursue goals.
Well, having pointed out that the American potato industry does exactly the same thing as Wal-Mart, I guess I am qualified to say that I don't worry about Wal-Mart as "Satan." I also remember going to an economic development seminar in a small Idaho town where one speaker pointed out that 75% plus of all retail sales in the US are made after 5 PM or on week-ends and seeing all the local merchants who closed at 5:30 not even blink. So, Wal-Mart is by no means alone, and some of the reason for its success is the competitive liability of the "mom and pop" approach to doing business. I also acknowledge that some of the people working at Wal-Mart are in a position to be content with their lot.
None of that excuses unfair labor practices, including the failure to provide a living wage and adequate benefits, the systematic raising of prices after the competition is driven out of town, the abuse of market power, or the intentional flauting of local regulations. The fact that Wal-Mart isn't alone in doing it, isn't an excuse either. So, Wal-Mart is a highly visible symbol of what Adam Smith knew and feared when he published The Wealth of Nations: that capitalism would not be constrained by ethical behavior.
The lack of restraint is now deeply rooted. Forget Wal-Mart. How many of us, given the opportunity to sell a house that we bought for $100k for $400k would not take it? And how long after closing would it take to hear us complaining about the lack of affordable housing?
Well said as usual Lee.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fair enough. I certainly don't think that we should or could do away with the low skill segment of our labor markets---but one thing that's missing from low wage work that we had just a generation ago is meaningful internal career ladders within firms. The debate on this thread has largely been posed as a choice between people working at Wal-Mart and at Mom and Pop retail---that's probably the choice right in front of our faces more often than not, but I'm just not sure that exhausts our options.
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