The Norwegian oil fund has been instructed to boycott Walmart, the US Senate has shown an unusual amount of intelligence and rejected the FMA, and turnout in San Mateo was low, so my girlfriend's vote counted considerably, which is good because she voted sensibly. Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
I don't understand why people are treating the FMA as something that was ever intended to pass. No one expected it to go anywhere. It was just for drumming up votes.
Posted by The Pixiest (Member # 1863) on :
KoM: You're in the bay area? Or is this a different San Mateo?
Why is boycotting Wal*Mart a good thing? They help poor people by providing extremely low prices.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
Well, they do drive product quality down.
Posted by vonk (Member # 9027) on :
I myself am conflicted over the pros and cons of Wal-Mart, and the issue is not a simple one.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
quote:Why is boycotting Wal*Mart a good thing? They help poor people by providing extremely low prices.
They also, arguably, create poor people by dislodging smaller businesses and replacing those jobs with fewer, lower paying ones, often with worse or no benefits. Non-trans-national economies are not simple linear supply and demand things. They are an interconnected web and Walmart and similar businesses have complex effects on this web, many of which are not beneficial. Lower prices are not the end all be all standard of judging economic benefit.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
The decision was apparently based on the child labour, discrimination of women, forced unpaid overtime, and locking employees in after work hours. The economic aspects were irrelevant.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
You know, Target doesn't provide health benefits for their part-time and floor employees either.
Wal*Mart isn't alone in their coporate "sins." It's fun to be upset about it, but don't pretend that they are an anomoly. Those vaunted Mom and Pop shops didn't provide health insurance and $13/hour wages for their cashiers either.
Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
That's true, Kat, plenty of corporations are lacking in compassion for their workforce. But Walmart is among the worst offenders, and the largest employer in the US. What's sad is that Costco is the anomoly.
quote: ON ITS CRITICS BEING CORRECT … Our healthcare offering is also vulnerable to attack ...Wal-Mart’s critics can also easily exploit some aspects of our benefits offering to make their case; in other words, our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of Associates and their children on public assistance."---Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart Executive Vice President for Benefits, for the Wal-Mart Board of Directors. (freshly promoted, after her memo was leaked) [Wal-Mart Secret Memo, Page 5, http://walmartwatch.com/memo; New York Times, 10/26/05, emphasis added]
quote:Health Care
Hindery: We now know more than just anecdotally about the painful comparison of Wal-Mart to Costco, and we do know about the company’s miserly health care plan. Thanks to a leaked memo, we actually know of its attempts to make the plan more miserly and more discriminatory.… There are great comparisons for Wal-Mart. At Costco, 82% of its employees receive a fulsome medical plan versus 48% at Wal-Mart that receive by every measure a miserly plan. We know that the effective coverage of the Wal-Mart plan is about 59%; at Costco, it’s 92%.
The Wage Question
Hindery: We know about the extreme subsidization, in effect, of the company’s workers by state welfare plans. $86 million last year was spent in the state of California alone to give full-time Wal-Mart employees welfare benefits.
Dube: We need to account for the fact that Wal-Mart might be located in different areas than other retailers, so this weights each state by the state’s average wage by Wal-Mart’s share of employment in that state. I find about a 16% gap in average wages between Wal-Mart and large retailers. If you just look at retail overall, it’s 12%. If that’s in the same order of magnitude, it’s not gigantic, but it’s sizeable. If you compare in a cross-sectional sense Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits with other retailers, they’re lower overall.
Hindery: Costco pays its average employee $16 an hour, Wal-Mart sits there at $9.68. Wal-Mart gets out of bed by design in the morning, and they go to bed at night by design. It is a practice of the company that they have embraced.
Did y'all see that article in the Atlantic in June? It argued that Wal*Mart isn't doing anything worse than general industry practice. However, the wisdom in harassing Wal*Mart is actually in hopes of getting Wal*Mart to bring its lobbying forces to bear on the crappy health care system itself.
In other words, Wal*Mart can't fix it itself, but if it is finally in its interest to lobby Congress for sweeping reform, then sweeping reform may actually happen.
The problem isn't Wal*Mart. It's health care and insurance costs rising in the double digits every year. The reason the United States does not have socialized medicine is because when it came up for a vote in the 1930's, the AMA lobbied as hard as it could to kill it, because it would adversely affect the salary of doctors. Maybe that's a legislative decision we should reconsider.
I think the ire against Wal*Mart is misplaced - if Wal*Mart matched Costco's numbers, it would either go out of business or change it's business model radically.
On the other hand, if the plan is to enlist Wal*Mart's firepower in the pursuit of health care reformation, then by all means, carry on. I still think you're vilifying the wrong beast.
Posted by martha (Member # 141) on :
Pixiest, here's an example of why WalMart deserves to be boycotted. It's from the book Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist who decided to see first-hand what it's like to be poor. She worked as a waitress, a cleaning lady, and finally at WalMart.
Ehrenreich reports that WalMart requires its employees to wear collared shirts (as opposed to t-shirts) for work. But when she figured her budget, she found that she couldn't afford to pay her rent, eat, and also buy collared shirts from WalMart at its lowest-discounted prices.
That's quite apart from what WalMart systematically does to local businesses: another kettle of fish I'm not even gonna start ranting about. If you want to know more, read How Walmart Is Destroying the America, by Bill Quinn.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
That's not a confidence-inspiring title.
Posted by erosomniac (Member # 6834) on :
quote:Pixiest, here's an example of why WalMart deserves to be boycotted. It's from the book Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist who decided to see first-hand what it's like to be poor. She worked as a waitress, a cleaning lady, and finally at WalMart.
In the interest of fairness, I have to point out that this book is completely and totally useless as an unbiased viewpoint. The woman who wrote it gives a slanted, uneven account by any standards.
Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
Wal-Mart does not require collared shirts. They even let the cashiers wear jeans now, and t-shirts with words on them (which were banned when I worked there 6 years ago).
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