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My responses are bracketed. Message: 3 Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 15:28:37 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Mitch Berg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [StPaul] Wal-mart profits by externalizing costs At 02:52 PM 12/27/2003, Bob Spaulding wrote: >St. Paul E-Democracy Links >http://www.e-democracy.org/stpaul/links.html >_____________________________________________ > >I'd be fine with Wal-Mart if it competed fairly, and >got where it is on its own two feet. But is Wal-Mart >successful because it is well managed, or because they >pass their costs onto someone else ("externalize their >costs")? To some extent, fobbing your costs off on someone else IS good management. But there are limits, as we shall see. [where?] >Here are a few ways Wal-Mart itself externalizes its >costs, often passing the bill to taxpayers: > > > MAKE EMPLOYEES WORK FOR FREE. A Dakota County >district court judge recently certified a class-action >lawsuit against Wal-Mart. Several Twin Citians say >Wal-Mart routinely made them skip meal and rest >breaks, and required them to clock out and then work >without pay. Right. This is a noxious, tin-horn work practice, and the people who are filing suit are doing the right thing. Think Walmart is the only entity doing this? [No. If there were I would suspect that it would be WalMarts first line of defense: Everybody does it�! ] > > DON'T PAY EMPLOYEES ENOUGH FOR FOOD AND HOUSING. >Someone unlucky people are going to work at Wal-Mart. >But the biggest company in the world can't seem to pay >them a living wage. Food and housing aren't luxuries. No, but neither are they entitlements. Whether they should be or not is an argument we could no doubt have, but there is no moral case to be made that ANY employer should be made to pay more for an employee's services than it is worth. It is to some extent incumbent on the worker to maximize their value to whomever is buying their services, whether by selling a more valueable work product (learning to be WalMart's manager or bookkeeper or maintenance engineer rather than shelf-stocker or cashier) or by banding together to raise the value of the work product (unionizing). [Many people are FORCED to provide their employers with a more valuable work product and they're not paid one thin dime for it. It's a little trick that employers do to their workers, and this practice is wide spread and I would wonder how many working people, right here in this group are subjected to it everyday. It's done with the job description that's says that you are subject to be assigned duties AS DIRECTED by your supervisor. (or something to that effect) This is the way that a truck driver, is anything any supervisor says they are, on any given day! Check your job descriptions out there and see if does / doesn't say that.] >Wal-Mart is successful because it is shortchanging >thousands of employees. Really? Please substantiate how Wallyworld is "Shortchanging" people by paying them the going, WalMart wage for working their jobs? If their skills are more valuable than WalMart is willing to pay for, they can (and should!) go elsewhere! [easy answer, but this answer is just a sound bite rather than a solution. The real answer is : They can't�just go elsewhere. There is no elsewhere to go. All the good paying jobs get pulverized by the introduction of the Wal-Mart philosophy into a given area. If there was an "elsewhere", what are they doing at Wally World to begin with? But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores, at least they�re creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it creates�and a store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain a community�s middle-class living standard. Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas). It�s our world Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies�or theirs? Wal-Mart�s radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof�there goes another local business. Poof�there goes our middle-class wages. Poof�there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it�s an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public�s "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart�s "cheap" goods�and if we actually had a chance to vote.] The answer from the anti-market forces is "but all labor is equally valuable". Fine. Next time you have emergency surgery, offer your surgeon $15 an hour. [If the surgeons didn't have a union�ah..er�"Professional Association" representing them, they WOULD BE working for $15/hr.!] >The average full-time >Wal-Mart employee would earn about $17,000 per year. >Well below anyone's definition of a living wage. First: Averages like this are meaningless. Does it account for all the part-time employees who don't depend on WalMart for their entire income? Does it figure in high school kids? People who are their households' second incomes? If someone enters the job market with skills that are worth $17K a year (about 8.50 an hour), whose fault is that? Wal-Mart's, for paying an $8.50/hour employee - perhaps training them to the point where their labor is even worth THAT? The unions, for abandoning the service economy (and all those poor people who can't pay much in dues, and all those immigrants that the unions hate anyway)? The employee him/herself, for making the life decisions that led them to the job market with skills that might not even be worth $8.50 an hour to anyone BUT Walmart? [If the minimum wage kept up to ceo salary and corporate profits, according to the CBO, it would be well over $20/hr.! I wonder how the Wal-Mart fatcats are making out, or is that an insult to a conservative these days? So whose fault is it? It's the republicans in congress that won't allow the minimum wage to be adjusted for any reason, whatsoever. Apparently, they understand the fact, that capitalism cannot exist without a certain segment of the population existing as LOW WAGE SLAVES. The "market" only works for people who have the money to make it work. Additionally�Life decisions are at fault here? That's like calling them "fat and lazy" but, I'll let that pass. There are many people who worked hard and played by the rules, as Rush likes say it, and have changed their careers many times, just to see their efforts flushed down the ol' toilet of cheaper foreign labor. Many of these people are forced into their situation because of the way capitalism works�"He who gots the gold���] I would wonder how fast this situation would change, if, it was the fatcats jobs that were being to handed out to people who will work for nothing? ] > > DIRECT EMPLOYEES TO TAXPAYER-FUNDED SOCIAL SERVICES. > If Wal-Mart doesn't pay enough to cover basic living >expenses, you and I will. Store managers are given >trainings that teach them how to refer employees to >social service agencies (Though Wal-Mart, of course, >denies this). Employees are directly told how to >apply. Larry Allen, a former employee described a >flyer found in his Wal-Mart pay envelope. Labelled >"Instructions for associates," it provides step by >step instructions to employees applying for social >services and lists a Web site and 1-800 number. If true, this is pretty slimy. Not that I accept Bill Moyers or NOW (all of them relentless pro-statists) as reputable sources, but let's take it at face value for now. So - when KMart locked its doors last year, how many people were thrown out of work, in the lousy economy of the day? A couple hundred? Where did THEY go to make ends meet? Where are they today? Where will they - and many like them - find work if so many of you have your way and WalMart doesn't occupy the building? Say you exclude WalMart, and they open - oh, MoonRabbit's Sustainable Vegan Chakra Realignment Center, employing three dotty middle-aged women and a couple of goths from MacAlester - OK, fine for them, but where are the rest of those displaced by KMart's closing going to go? Who knows? [ Who knows? I do. (But it's really nice for you to call it "slimy"! ) All those unemployed people got jobs from another "slimy" employer that will treat them just as unfairly as the last one did. As for the MoonRabbit's Sustainable Vegan Chakra Realignment Center, you can bet that it's probably unionized or simply doesn't need a union, because the employers and owners are not of the "slimy" variety.] > > MAKE TAXPAYERS PAY FOR EMPLOYEE HEALTH CARE. >According to the Institute for Labor and Employment at >the University of California/Berkeley, in 2002, >Wal-Mart workers in California relied on 50% more >taxpayer funded health care per employee than those at >other large retail companies. Fine - but out of context. What would those same employees be doing if they weren't Walmart employees? The question seems to assume that if they weren't working at WalMart, they'd all be riding mass transit to their unionized, benefit-providing, democrat-supporting jobs in big smokestack factories. It assumes none of them would be working at jobs WORSE than WalMart - hustling temp jobs at Manpower (or the even sleazier day-labor temp shops), with all of those attendant transportation and daycare problems, or waiting tables or cocktails for tips, pouring coffee at Caribou, working at convenience stores......which is usually no better. [It' not out of context, your answer is what's out of context here. The original poster is not talking about unemployed people who need state / city benefits, but employed people that should have basic benefits that would provide for them and not have to rely on anything else. Riding mass transit to their unionized, benefit-providing, democrat-supporting jobs in big smokestack factories, is going to more beneficial, than working without a collective bargaining agreement, bar none. Additionally, because of tricky job descriptions, all these jobs are worse and shouldn't be. We need the government to stop these "slimy" practices.] > Put another way, >taxpayers subsidized $20.5 million worth of medical >care for Wal-Mart in California in one year alone >(NOW/Bill Moyers 12.19.03). Ask NOW and Moyers my question above, if you would please. > > And then there are the externalized costs >attributable to their product producers. Let's talk >about the environmental degradation that results from >making many of Wal-Mart's products. Who is cleaning >up Superfund sites in the US? What makes paying for cleanup of pollution possible? Economic growth. The only economies in the world that can attend to their own cleanup are the ones that generate enough economic growth to be able to afford that luxury. [Nonsense. This country is awash in money and creates more pollution per capita than any industrialized nation. I'll flood ya with your beloved statistics, as I have a hard drive full and I know where the send button is. Cleanup is not a luxury, it's a necessity, if we're going to try to hold down health care costs. It's cheaper to clean up the environment, than it is to pay for the ever increasing cost of medicine.] >I could talk about >underpaying or forcing labor from workers in other >countries. Human rights abuses. And economic growth is also one of the only two engines in the world for rolling back those abuses. And that's presuming that the "underpaid" "sweatshop" labor isn't doing better, in balance, than the rest of a given nation's labor pool. Blanket statements on either side are probably wrong. [Mitch, we have had "economic growth, and some of the most outrageous economic growth that the world has ever seen, and it doesn't stop beast from bentonville, does it? What's the other one?] >I'd be happy with a competitive free-market economy. >If you are tired of paying taxes, remember you're the >one who is footing the bill for Wal-Mart's >externalized costs. Not that a "market" dominated by >this kind of goliath is at all competitive in any >reasonable sense of the word. Yes, it is. Let's say for a moment that WalMart DOES drive EVERY other massmarket retailer from Target on down out of business - which will never happen, but work with me. So who supplies them with their goods and services? Other companies. And they compete with each other - hard - for that business. Just the way that companies compete hard for business with any other monopoly - say, the government. Toss in the fact that WalMart will not, CAN not, gain a monopoly, even in its own market niche. [In a unrestrained capitalistic world, �He, who gots the gold��� The businesses that supply Wal-Mart, are NOT COMPETING AT ALL. They are CONSPIRING with Wal-Mart to provide the beast with lower costs, that are borne by underpaying and otherwise, abusing the workforce(s) of the world. These workers are the source of the "everyday low prices" the Wally touts and demands. It's a collusion. FYI, Wal-Mart does create a monopoly and does drive every other retailer out. There are cities around the country that won't let the beast in because they will lose their main street businesses in the process. It lowers the tax base and usually Wal-Mart demands and gets subsidized tax situations from the town they invade. Wal-Mart is a bad deal for the populace as well as the government. ] >No matter how unresponsive labor is, whether or not >the store is a done deal, I have three words for >everyone: organize, organize, organize! Today, >tomorrow, and next year! Or, better yet, learn a trade. [Learning a trade will not help you, in fact, nothing will help the average Joe, except strong, fearless union backed by the full force and power of the U.S. Government, like it used to be, and the total repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.] Mitch Berg Da Midway! Ain't it the Truth? Russ (The Truth)Hanson. The Real Truth on "bid-ness". __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/ _____________________________________________ NEW ADDRESS FOR LIST: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, modify subscription, or get your password - visit: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/listinfo/stpaul Archive Address: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/private/stpaul/ _____________________________________________ For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract
