Unions Hunting Wal-Mart

redfreddy · January 21, 2006, 2:20am

[quote]coloradosteve wrote:
Hey folks, the compair the EU’s GNP to the US(minus oil) and they are kicking our ass and they are pretty much socialist. [/quote]

They also have like 160 million more people.

Zap_Branigan · January 21, 2006, 1:12pm

[quote]doogie wrote:
coloradosteve wrote:
anyway, I don’t shop at wal-mart, I shop at the safeway where the prices are a little higher and the employees make 15 dollars an hour. Wal-mart sucks. Hey folks, the compair the EU’s GNP to the US(minus oil) and they are kicking our ass and they are pretty much socialist. Unions don’t hurt corporations, and our country was at its strongest when unions were at their strongest.

If you really care, why not just shop at Wal-Mart and hand the checker an extra $20? Then she doesn’t have to pay taxes on the money, and you get cheaper goods.[/quote]

Brilliant!

coloradosteve · January 21, 2006, 1:26pm

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
doogie wrote:
coloradosteve wrote:
anyway, I don’t shop at wal-mart, I shop at the safeway where the prices are a little higher and the employees make 15 dollars an hour. Wal-mart sucks. Hey folks, the compair the EU’s GNP to the US(minus oil) and they are kicking our ass and they are pretty much socialist. Unions don’t hurt corporations, and our country was at its strongest when unions were at their strongest.

If you really care, why not just shop at Wal-Mart and hand the checker an extra $20? Then she doesn’t have to pay taxes on the money, and you get cheaper goods.

Brilliant![/quote]

I can’t afford to pay the cashier 20 dollars. Nontheless, I do care, really.
And tips are taxable. If you really care, you would have your representative increase GI Bill payments so that I could afford to give the cashier more money.

Mark_Young · January 21, 2006, 3:29pm

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
WSJ editorial board on the subject today:

HillaryCare Returns
January 16, 2006; Page A14

Readers with long memories will recall that one of the reasons HillaryCare was defeated in 1994 was because of its unpopular employer mandate. Well, its diktat that all businesses provide health insurance is making a comeback, albeit at the state level and at first only for the largest companies. But all employers are on Big Labor’s target list here.

That’s the larger meaning of last week’s events in Maryland, where the state legislature overturned the veto of GOP Governor Robert Ehrlich and passed a bill forcing any employer in the state with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8% of its payroll on health care or pay the state the difference. There are only a handful of companies that large in Maryland – Johns Hopkins University and Giant Food, a grocery chain competing with Wal-Mart, among them. Only one meets all the criteria, however, so the legislation was dubbed “The Wal-Mart Bill,” which in part it is.

But no one should think this will be an isolated political event. The state AFL-CIO threw everything it had into the bill, including a vow to withdraw support from any lawmaker who didn’t vote to override the veto. Democrats who dominate both houses of the Maryland legislature went along. The national AFL-CIO now plans to use the Maryland law as a model for legislation in other states. Union chief John Sweeney has announced a campaign to enact “Fair Share Health Care Legislation” in more than 30 states. Washington and New Hampshire will be early targets.

The details vary by state, but already it’s clear the new tax would eventually hit companies a lot smaller than Wal-Mart. In Rhode Island, proposed legislation takes aim at businesses with only 1,000 employees. In other states proposals would mandate payouts of 9% or more. Once the principle is established that employers must allocate a certain share of their payroll to health care, it becomes easier to gradually extend the mandate to all businesses.

Unions and Democrats argue that companies must be commanded to do this because employees without health insurance often turn up on Medicaid, which is busting state budgets. But rather than reform Medicaid to control its costs or stop its rampant fraud, the politicians find it easier to sock it to private business. One result will be that companies will create fewer new jobs, as in Old Europe.

As for Wal-Mart, it is hardly an ogre as an employer for 1.3 million Americans. It now offers an array of health plans to all full and part-time employees with monthly premiums as low as $23 for an individual and $65 for a family anywhere in the country (less in some areas). Employees can also choose to set up health savings accounts with Wal-Mart matching contributions up to $1,000.

The company doesn’t disclose its health care spending. But last year officials told Maryland’s legislature that Wal-Mart typically spends between 7% and 8% of its payroll on health care. In the fiscal year ending this month, the company expects to have spent $4.7 billion on all benefits (including health, dental, retirement and more) while turning a profit of about $10 billion. One perverse aspect of the Maryland bill is that Wal-Mart won’t be able to count any savings from negotiating lower prices with doctors and hospitals toward the 8% threshold. So the bill works against the oft-invoked liberal goal of reducing the nation’s overall health-care costs.

Wal-Mart hasn’t said how it will respond to the new Maryland law, but we’d suggest at a minimum that it cancel its plans for a new regional distribution center in the state that would create about 800 jobs. Maryland’s politicians need to understand that policies punishing business have bad economic consequences. Let a more enlightened state benefit from Wal-Mart’s prosperity.

What’s really going on here is an attempt to pass the runaway burdens of the welfare state on to private American employers. As we’re learning from Old Europe and General Motors, this is bad news for both business and workers in the long run. The U.S. doesn’t need a revival of HillaryCare on the installment plan.

Ha. Now that they have to put more money into healthcare, the bourgeois will run around like their wallets are on fire screaming, “But what about MORE JOBS! Wal Mart is going to be poorer than Africa because of this!”

Same old bullshit that they spew. They have plenty of revenue, and there is no reason that they can’t provide for their workers. Here’s a different view of poor Wal-Mart and the attacks:

Spin Control at Wal-Mart

Liza Featherstone

Today marks the premiere of Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and Wal-Mart is ready with a “war room” led by Robert McAdam, who is, charmingly, the former strategist for the tobacco industry.

Wal-Mart’s spin machine is being sorely tested. Just last week, a secret internal memo recommending that the company curb healthcare costs by “dissuad[ing] unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart” was leaked to the advocacy group Wal-Mart Watch. The memo’s suggestions included designing “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”

This amounts to nothing less than a plan to discriminate against the disabled, sick and elderly. It’s contemptible, of course, but it also has serious legal implications; Wal-Mart has been forced to settle lawsuits from disabled workers in the past, and this memo will almost definitely strengthen the case of any who wish to sue the company in the future.

In the memo, whose contents were first revealed in the New York Times, Wal-Mart admits that criticism of its meager, unaffordable healthcare plan is contributing to the decline of Wal-Mart’s overall reputation and that “our critics are correct in some of their observations…our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of Associates and their children on public assistance.” The memo acknowledges that 46 percent of Wal-Mart workers’ children are either on Medicaid or uninsured.

It’s very clear that criticism and public pressure are bothering Wal-Mart’s leaders. So far, they are mostly investing in spin and devising harebrained–and inhumane–schemes like those outlined in the memo.

But the same memo does contain a glimmer of hope that the company could respond to pressure by doing something good–in particular, a suggestion that the company “refram[e] the debate” on healthcare, emphasizing that “this is everybody’s problem, not just Wal-Mart’s” and “establishing Wal-Mart as a leader on this critical issue.” We couldn’t agree more. The best way for Wal-Mart to curb its healthcare costs–and improve its image–would be to lobby for single-payer national health insurance; for its activist critics, all this pressure on the company to improve its health benefits should be a means to that end.

As unrealistic as that might sound–after all, Wal-Mart is a right-wing company, whose campaign contributions tend to favor antigovernment Republicans, not European-style social democracy–there is no telling what people might do when under enough political and economic pressure.

A recent study commissioned by Wal-Mart showed that from 2 percent to 8 percent of its customers had stopped shopping there because of “negative press.” All of this is having some surprising effects, including unpredictable policy recommendations from the company’s leadership.

Last week, CEO Lee Scott called for increasing the minimum wage, a suggestion that drew howls of wounded betrayal from the company’s usual defenders on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but which Scott rightly pointed out would help the company’s customers, many of whom are low-wage workers. National health insurance would do the same, while allowing the company to save money on benefits–and on spin. Paying former tobacco lobbyists to convince the public that Wal-Mart is a good corporate citizen is going to get expensive. "

This just brings a tear to my eye, all this unjust criticism of a good ole’ American company who really helps the working class.

Ha. Yea, sure.[/quote]

I have rarely heard such drivel anywhere. If Walmart closes who is going to replace the jobs that are lost? I haven’t seen anyone talk about the disproportionate share of employees Walmart hires that are elderly, insured by Medicare and work at Walmart simply to supplement their income or because they want to work. What will they do when Walmart starts further mechanizing their supply chain. Doubt it will happen? I carry no brief for Wal-Mart – I don’t own its stock, I will always go to Target given the choice, and I am not unmindful of the impact that it has had on small towns across America (pro and con) – but there are several virtually inevitable consequences of this legislation that will not work out well for Maryland’s workers. When they unfold, there will be nobody to blame but the Democrats and “labor and liberal groups” of Maryland. Since, according to the Times, the Maryland law is considered to be an important precedent that “labor and liberal groups” hope to enact in other states, expect these consequences to compound with the reproduction of the Maryland law elsewhere.

First, this is a significant incremental tax on the wages Wal-Mart pays. What happens when you tax something? You get less of it. Wal-Mart has a new and powerful incentive to keep wages down, because it will pay this new tax on any wage increase in the state. What’s the best way to keep wages down? Find ways to do without the employee at all.

Second, by increasing the payroll tax on Wal-Mart, Maryland has increased the rate of return (and therefore lowered the investment hurdle) on strategies to shift labor expenses to employers with, er, fewer than 10,000 employees in the state. Who might these employers be? Wal-Mart’s vendors, meathead (meathead being a generic term to describe the Maryland legislators who voted for this law). The Wal-Mart dream is to put little RF tags into every product. That way, people can just wander around filling up their cart, and when they leave they walk under a scanner that dings their credit or debit card. You get the vendors to stock the shelves, and then you fire all the employees except for a couple of security guards. Wal-Mart will have reached its apotheosis as a logistics system. The day is coming, but the speed with which it comes depends on two things, really: the costs of RF tags, and the costs of labor. If the first goes down enough and the second goes up enough, it will be more lucrative for Wal-Mart to get to the future faster.

Third, this tax amounts to a new subsidy to the health care system, and reduces the incentive for the state’s largest employer to control health benefit costs (at least up to 8% of payroll). This will have the tendency to push up health care costs throughout the system – why should hospitals and doctors cut their fees if Wal-Mart’s benefits administrator is no longer motivated to beat up on them? Without Wal-Mart’s bargaining power, smaller employers are likely to face at least some incremental cost-push from providers.

If I were an economist, I could probably think of other problems with this law. Unfortunately, I am a mere corporate tool, armed with nothing but common sense.
Can’t get a job anywhere but Walmart because you didn’t pay enough attention to your education or you are waiting for the worker’s paradise to arrive? You just shoved the only job you were qualified to do out of your state or helped decrease the ROI to mechanizing into being an attractive alternative so that Walmart stays in the state but decreases its employee base by optimizing its supply chain and labor costs.

Welcome to the unemployment line. Now, say again who is evil? Goverment can cause you to lose your job but is not likely to supply you with one.

Mark_Young · January 21, 2006, 4:43pm

[quote]malonetd wrote:
doogie wrote:
I didn’t realize people were forced at gunpoint to work in Wal-Marts. That’s horrible. These poor victims were sitting in college classrooms trying to better themselves when suddenly armed Wal-Mart managers kicked in the doors, rounded them up and chained them behind the registers forcing them to work 40 hours a week for minimum wage. The horror!!!

The people working at Wal-Mart aren’t usually the college type.

If I do not have a college education and I need a job, I can work at any of the grocery stores, convenience stores, clothing stores, auto parts stores, oil change and tune up garages, or electronic stores. And I have a choice to work at the one that will give me the best pay and benefits.

Then Wal-Mart moves in the neighborhood, with their one-stop shopping convenience, and drives most or all of the other businesses out. I no longer have a choice where to work. I have to work at Wal-Mart and accept whatever shitty wage and benefit package they give me.[/quote]

For all you dumbasses who think that there is no income mobility across generations or within a persons life time I hope you can read.
Here is a little tidbit from Econopundit.

EconoPundit is writing an academic paper on the POUM (prospects of upward mobility) hypothesis put forward by Roland Benabou and Efe A. Ok in a
Quarterly Journal of Economics article in May of 2001.

Let me try out a short version of the introduction on all the readers of this blog. Tell me if the following is (a) crystal clear, (b) partly muddy, or (c) obscure chipmunk chatter.

VERY ROUGH DRAFT OF THE INTRODUCTION
According to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) median total family income of all households reporting for years 1993 and 2002 was (when averaged over the two years in question) $42,499. By “median” income, of course, we mean 50% of all households in the study earned income above $42,499, 50% below.

Average income was different. The 2002-1993 average of this datum was substantially higher – a whopping $57,187. Only a minority of the 4,427 households in this sample earned income at average or higher.

Why wasn’t this minority “outvoted” by households favoring redistribution (in the form of progressive taxation, continuation of the estate tax, whatever) rather than tax cuts?

To answer the question we’re particularly interested in a relatively small subset of households within this panel, namely, all the households with incomes between median and average. If households with above average income support tax cuts (because, for example, their higher-than average income status would be diminished by redistributive taxation) their voting status remains minority unless they are joined by “coalition households” who feel they enjoy POUM – the prospect of upward mobility.

As of 1993 there were a total of 621 households whose income was between median and average. We know from the numbers cited above that the 1993-2002 average difference between median and average was $14,688.

So the “rational” average household in this group of 621 will vote for (or otherwise favor) the tax cut if it expects its household income will rise by $14,688 or more between 1993 and 2003. It will vote against the tax cut, on the other hand, if it feels it cannot make enough economic progress to get itself up to average.

So how did this group of 621 households fare between 1993 and 2002? According to PSID numbers this particular group’s income increase during the nine years in question averaged $19,394. In effect, the average swing voter household received a “bribe” of $4,706 – a bribe from the economy itself, in the form of upward economic mobility – to vote for or otherwise feel favorably disposed to the Bush tax cut.

These numbers are easily calculated by anyone with enough knowledge to access the PSID, read a dataset into Microsoft Access, carry out a few intermediate processing steps in Excel, and run a few simple queries in Access.

So you really have a choice. You can educate yourself in ways that make you a desirable candidate for higher paying jobs or get the skills you need to be a successful entrepeneur. The last alternative is to remain in low paying jobs and remain poorly educated in ways that matter in the labor market place.

Also, spending your time reading Marx,Castro, Guevara, et al. and waiting for the coming “worker’s paradise” will not help you here. Time is wasting every day.

For all you bitches who complain about how it can’t be done, it took me over 8 years to get that undergrad. degree. No government help. GED to start. Couple of jobs at a time plus school plus family. No whining about how I would rather have more time to do the things I wanted to do instead of working my ass off and doing what I had to do. I did if for my family and kids. I will get a post-graduate degree one day as well.

You can either grind it out day-to-day by working your ass off or sit on the internet and complain about how “unfair” life is. Meanwhile some Indian or Chinese or other foriegn national is studying so he can take your job. He or she already knows life is unfair and he or she knows what it takes to make his life better. You can study the things that support your view of how “unfair” the world is or you can dig into the things that will help you.

My kids will have it better than I did. Where are yours going to end up…?

anon31651765 · January 21, 2006, 8:53pm

[quote]Mark Young wrote:
malonetd wrote:
doogie wrote:
I didn’t realize people were forced at gunpoint to work in Wal-Marts. That’s horrible. These poor victims were sitting in college classrooms trying to better themselves when suddenly armed Wal-Mart managers kicked in the doors, rounded them up and chained them behind the registers forcing them to work 40 hours a week for minimum wage. The horror!!!

The people working at Wal-Mart aren’t usually the college type.

If I do not have a college education and I need a job, I can work at any of the grocery stores, convenience stores, clothing stores, auto parts stores, oil change and tune up garages, or electronic stores. And I have a choice to work at the one that will give me the best pay and benefits.

Then Wal-Mart moves in the neighborhood, with their one-stop shopping convenience, and drives most or all of the other businesses out. I no longer have a choice where to work. I have to work at Wal-Mart and accept whatever shitty wage and benefit package they give me.