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Yes, Walmart where a substantial (2-digit) percentage of their workforce requires food-stamps or other government subsidies to get by. [0] https://www.washingt

Yes, Walmart where a substantial (2-digit) percentage of their workforce requires food-stamps or other government subsidies to get by. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/we-are-spending-153-billion-a-year-to-subsidize-mcdonalds-and-walmarts-low-wage-workers/?utm_term=.014e5668b588 https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/... [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#6525d99e7cd8 http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...

aianus 10y ago
What do you expect them to do? They pay the minimum hourly wage or more, they don't have a responsibility to do any more. Frankly, if they unilaterally decided to pay more it would harm more poor people than it would help since all kinds of poor people shop at Walmart (and would have to bear the resulting higher prices) and rich people don't. Edit: added 'unilaterally'
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  We already pay the cost of them paying less because we have to subsidize those employees via. government benefits. Why should the American people subsidize the profits of a corporation for years? And do you see why I think this headline of all things is ironic?
  - smm2000 10y ago
    People making more than 76k/year (~20% of workers in US) subsidize Walmart workers. Most people making less than 76k are getting subsidized - as they should be. I would prefer people doing productive work in Walmart getting subsidized than subsidizing people watching TV at home.
    - cabinguy 10y ago
      Right. But the part you are leaving out is that the children of Walmart's founder are among the richest people in the history of the world. We are subsidizing their wealth.
      - aianus 10y ago
        So increase the tax on Walmart, Walmart's founders, and the rest of their shareholders, and rich people in general. Raising wages at Walmart (or the minimum wage across the board) is a terribly inefficient solution to wealth inequality.
        cabinguy 10y ago
        Well, that's one point of view, but I disagree. Subsidizing the wealth of ultra-rich people...and then trying to recoup it by increasing their taxes seems much more inefficient.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Not to mention much easier to remove with some strategic campaign donations.
        aianus 10y ago
        At best, raising the minimum wage results in a transfer of wealth from middle class people to poor people. Rich people don't spend any significant part of their money on the products of minimum wage labour. At worst, it would result in unemployment and recession.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    How would you do that without removing food stamps or raising the minimum wage?
  - aianus 10y ago
    > Why should the American people subsidize the profits of a corporation for years? Walmart already has extremely low profit margins, any increase in wages would be passed directly to their poor customers. In fact, the status quo is the best way of solving the wealth inequality problem. That is, let Walmart make as much profit as they can and then tax the hell out of them, their well-paid executives, and their shareholders and redistribute that tax money to the poor.
  - adventured 10y ago
    How about this: Walmart pays a 30% effective corporate income tax rate. One of the highest on earth. You have to compare them to oil companies like Exxon to find higher rates. A rate significantly higher than the corporate income tax rates you'll commonly find in Europe. Simultaneously they employ millions of worker that otherwise have few alternative job opportunities, and do so while consistently having among the lowest net income margins of any major corporation on the planet at ~3%. The mom & pop shops Walmart has often replaced were no better, they pay even higher wages than those businesses ever have.
  - orangecat 10y ago
    We already pay the cost of them paying less because we have to subsidize those employees via. government benefits. It is exactly as valid to claim WalMart is saving taxpayers money by creating jobs and paying people who we'd have to fully support otherwise.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > They pay the minimum hourly wage or more, they don't have a responsibility to do any more. They may actually have such a responsibility, they simply don't have an obligation.
- lumberjack 10y ago
  They lobby for EITC like proposals to be put in place so that they can offload part of their labor costs onto the tax payers. No wonder EITC is so popular among the usual suspects.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > They lobby for EITC like proposals to be put in place so that they can offload part of their labor costs onto the tax payers. This is a weird criticism to make, because the EITC doesn't "offload" labor costs at all. In fact, the biggest advantage of the EITC over systems like wage floors is that the EITC is completely invisible to the employer. (If you hire ten employees for the same role at the same wage, three could be receiving EITC benefits, but you may not even know, because you're paying them the same amount regardless. It just so happens that the people who receive the benefits end up taking home more of the money you give them. > No wonder EITC is so popular among the usual suspects. EITC has broad, bipartisan support not because of some conspiracy, but because it actually works. And, unlike the minimum wage, it scales gradually, and it also can be used to target people in need of different levels of assistance with zero additional overhead. In other words, take that example of ten employees. Three are on the EITC - one is a middle-aged, single mother of three children, one is a married father of two, and one is a 22-year old single mother attending college full-time (on top of work). The other seven are all upper-middle-class college students who have all of their tuition and their living expenses paid for by their parents, and are simply working a summer job to earn some extra pocket cash for the "non-essential" expenses that their parents won't cover. It's pretty clear that those three need assistance whereas the other seven don't. And it's also clear that those three don't need exactly the same levels of assistance either. But for the employer, that doesn't (and shouldn't) factor into the equation - you don't want the employer deciding that the single working mother of three needs to be paid more[0]. The EITC provides an easy way for those three to take home more money without the employer entering the equation. And all three cases result in the same amount of government overhead, regardless of how much assistance they receive. Furthermore, if they receive raises (perhaps they're promotion) or their eligibility changes (let's say the first woman gets married, and the combined incomes mean she needs less - or let's say one of them has an additional child), the assistance calculation scales smoothly with those life changes. [0] If for no other reason than the fact that, in the long run, this results in employment discrimination against women (and especially mothers).
- pattisapu 10y ago
  One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money, since those workers need tax-funded assistance like food stamps just to survive.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    How does Walmart cost that money? If the company was to disappear, how would the tax-funded assistance drop? Is there evidence that Walmart prevents those employees from getting higher wages?
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money, If you want to defend wage floors, going back to the "original purpose" of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act is probably a bad strategy. "People employed at the lowest wages" was, at the time, a very strong dog-whistle for "immigrants and black people". The FLSA was passed with broad support from unions like the AFL, but that's because they wanted to ensure that their (largely white) members were employed and didn't have their jobs "stolen" by poorer immigrants and black people who were willing to work for less. In other words, unions were betting that wage floors would mean "employees getting paid more, but fewer people employed", and they (correctly) assumed that discrimination against black people and immigrants would ensure that the white union members would still be among the group of people who remained employed. > “The Caucasians . . . are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others - Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor
    - gohrt 10y ago
      The racism is ugly and fitting for its time, but this is actually a case where it comes from a legitimate concern, not just competitive hatred -- If immigrants work for lower wages, society overall suffers. Someone else being willing to work for less than is a legitimate concern. When white natives decided to work for less, they got hateful slurs too. They were called "scabs", and their was no racial motivation to it. Gompers took us halfway -- to wage floors, and the Equal Rights / Anti-Discrimination laws took us the other half, to a comprehensive platform of support for the entire working class. (Of course, that platform still has holes and erosions and needs repairs)
jsmith0295 10y ago
In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employer. The current regulations around that sort of thing make it so the people who want to avoid needing government assistance have to get two jobs and deal with potential scheduling conflicts between them. When I worked minimum wage jobs there were a lot of people who couldn't work out a situation where they could easily get a second job like this partly because they were dependent on slow public transportation. You'd likely have significantly less people on government assistance if they were free to work more
- jcrawfordor 10y ago
  This kind of runs against the philosophical ideal of the limited workweek though. The idea is that people should never have to work more than 40 hours to make ends meet, and so when working 40 hours is not enough, the government will close the gap. Sure, we could probably reduce welfare dependence by allowing people to work 60h a week, but that would be abandoning one of the most important principles of the fair labor standards act and greatest achievements of the labor movement.
  - jsmith0295 10y ago
    You can survive on 40h a week, but that's about it. I don't think it's worth limiting people who want to do better than that just to try and get people to work less on average. So I guess their achievement just doesn't go far enough in my mind because it hinders economic mobility. If it were possible to succeed on 40h a week of minimum wage, then it might be different. I don't think that's really possible to achieve universally though federal policy, though. I'd prefer to just get rid of the overtime pay requirement and health care requirements included in the ACA (or probably most of the ACA. The mandate and tax is really terrible for young working people.) Edit: Just to clarify a bit, when I was working 2 minimum wage jobs it was because I wanted to be able to build some savings. I could have actually lived more comfortably (and had health insurance) had I opted to only work one job and apply for benefits, but then I just would have been getting by. Had I not had the extra money saved up I wouldn't have been able to replace my car when it's transmission went out, or be able to take the risk to work at a startup which is how I started my career as a software engineer.
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JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Are you assigning blame to Walmart for this?
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  Are you holding them blameless? If so, why? This is the largest employer in the US and to not hold them responsible would imply they don't have the leverage to change the playing field. Of course they do.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Change what playing field? Are you saying that in order to do business, a company must pay each employee enough to keep them off food stamps?
    - jellicle 10y ago
      That would be an excellent requirement to add to U.S. law, yes.
      - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        Really? Oh do please explain how you would see that playing out in real life.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Absolutely. We've somehow decided that businesses are entitled to enjoy the benefits of workers having enough money to live (i.e. large pool of willing, living employees, who are probably not going to die for lack of basic necessities before their shift tomorrow), with the public picking up a good chunk of the tab. That's a subsidy. Every welfare dollar that helps a Walmart employee stay alive and go to work tomorrow is a gift from the taxpayer to Walmart shareholders: they'd have to pay for it if we didn't.
      - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
paulcole 10y ago
>substantial (2-digit) percentage A substantial (2-digit) number of percentages are substantial (2-digit) percentages.
STRiDEX 10y ago
They have competition. Dollar tree, one of walmarts biggest competitors in many areas has a similarly high percentage of their workforce on food stamps.
gozur88 10y ago
I never found this a very compelling observation. So what? If Walmart had to pay enough to cover other benefits a substantial number of them wouldn't have jobs.

aianus 10y ago

What do you expect them to do? They pay the minimum hourly wage or more, they don't have a responsibility to do any more. Frankly, if they unilaterally decided to pay more it would harm more poor people than it would help since all kinds of poor people shop at Walmart (and would have to bear the resulting higher prices) and rich people don't. Edit: added 'unilaterally'

forgotpwtomain 10y ago
We already pay the cost of them paying less because we have to subsidize those employees via. government benefits. Why should the American people subsidize the profits of a corporation for years? And do you see why I think this headline of all things is ironic?
- smm2000 10y ago
  People making more than 76k/year (~20% of workers in US) subsidize Walmart workers. Most people making less than 76k are getting subsidized - as they should be. I would prefer people doing productive work in Walmart getting subsidized than subsidizing people watching TV at home.
  - cabinguy 10y ago
    Right. But the part you are leaving out is that the children of Walmart's founder are among the richest people in the history of the world. We are subsidizing their wealth.
    - aianus 10y ago
      So increase the tax on Walmart, Walmart's founders, and the rest of their shareholders, and rich people in general. Raising wages at Walmart (or the minimum wage across the board) is a terribly inefficient solution to wealth inequality.
      - cabinguy 10y ago
        Well, that's one point of view, but I disagree. Subsidizing the wealth of ultra-rich people...and then trying to recoup it by increasing their taxes seems much more inefficient.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Not to mention much easier to remove with some strategic campaign donations.
        aianus 10y ago
        At best, raising the minimum wage results in a transfer of wealth from middle class people to poor people. Rich people don't spend any significant part of their money on the products of minimum wage labour. At worst, it would result in unemployment and recession.
- witty_username 10y ago
  How would you do that without removing food stamps or raising the minimum wage?
- aianus 10y ago
  > Why should the American people subsidize the profits of a corporation for years? Walmart already has extremely low profit margins, any increase in wages would be passed directly to their poor customers. In fact, the status quo is the best way of solving the wealth inequality problem. That is, let Walmart make as much profit as they can and then tax the hell out of them, their well-paid executives, and their shareholders and redistribute that tax money to the poor.
- adventured 10y ago
  How about this: Walmart pays a 30% effective corporate income tax rate. One of the highest on earth. You have to compare them to oil companies like Exxon to find higher rates. A rate significantly higher than the corporate income tax rates you'll commonly find in Europe. Simultaneously they employ millions of worker that otherwise have few alternative job opportunities, and do so while consistently having among the lowest net income margins of any major corporation on the planet at ~3%. The mom & pop shops Walmart has often replaced were no better, they pay even higher wages than those businesses ever have.
- orangecat 10y ago
  We already pay the cost of them paying less because we have to subsidize those employees via. government benefits. It is exactly as valid to claim WalMart is saving taxpayers money by creating jobs and paying people who we'd have to fully support otherwise.
jacquesm 10y ago
> They pay the minimum hourly wage or more, they don't have a responsibility to do any more. They may actually have such a responsibility, they simply don't have an obligation.
lumberjack 10y ago
They lobby for EITC like proposals to be put in place so that they can offload part of their labor costs onto the tax payers. No wonder EITC is so popular among the usual suspects.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > They lobby for EITC like proposals to be put in place so that they can offload part of their labor costs onto the tax payers. This is a weird criticism to make, because the EITC doesn't "offload" labor costs at all. In fact, the biggest advantage of the EITC over systems like wage floors is that the EITC is completely invisible to the employer. (If you hire ten employees for the same role at the same wage, three could be receiving EITC benefits, but you may not even know, because you're paying them the same amount regardless. It just so happens that the people who receive the benefits end up taking home more of the money you give them. > No wonder EITC is so popular among the usual suspects. EITC has broad, bipartisan support not because of some conspiracy, but because it actually works. And, unlike the minimum wage, it scales gradually, and it also can be used to target people in need of different levels of assistance with zero additional overhead. In other words, take that example of ten employees. Three are on the EITC - one is a middle-aged, single mother of three children, one is a married father of two, and one is a 22-year old single mother attending college full-time (on top of work). The other seven are all upper-middle-class college students who have all of their tuition and their living expenses paid for by their parents, and are simply working a summer job to earn some extra pocket cash for the "non-essential" expenses that their parents won't cover. It's pretty clear that those three need assistance whereas the other seven don't. And it's also clear that those three don't need exactly the same levels of assistance either. But for the employer, that doesn't (and shouldn't) factor into the equation - you don't want the employer deciding that the single working mother of three needs to be paid more[0]. The EITC provides an easy way for those three to take home more money without the employer entering the equation. And all three cases result in the same amount of government overhead, regardless of how much assistance they receive. Furthermore, if they receive raises (perhaps they're promotion) or their eligibility changes (let's say the first woman gets married, and the combined incomes mean she needs less - or let's say one of them has an additional child), the assistance calculation scales smoothly with those life changes. [0] If for no other reason than the fact that, in the long run, this results in employment discrimination against women (and especially mothers).
pattisapu 10y ago
One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money, since those workers need tax-funded assistance like food stamps just to survive.
- icebraining 10y ago
  How does Walmart cost that money? If the company was to disappear, how would the tax-funded assistance drop? Is there evidence that Walmart prevents those employees from getting higher wages?
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money, If you want to defend wage floors, going back to the "original purpose" of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act is probably a bad strategy. "People employed at the lowest wages" was, at the time, a very strong dog-whistle for "immigrants and black people". The FLSA was passed with broad support from unions like the AFL, but that's because they wanted to ensure that their (largely white) members were employed and didn't have their jobs "stolen" by poorer immigrants and black people who were willing to work for less. In other words, unions were betting that wage floors would mean "employees getting paid more, but fewer people employed", and they (correctly) assumed that discrimination against black people and immigrants would ensure that the white union members would still be among the group of people who remained employed. > “The Caucasians . . . are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others - Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor
  - gohrt 10y ago
    The racism is ugly and fitting for its time, but this is actually a case where it comes from a legitimate concern, not just competitive hatred -- If immigrants work for lower wages, society overall suffers. Someone else being willing to work for less than is a legitimate concern. When white natives decided to work for less, they got hateful slurs too. They were called "scabs", and their was no racial motivation to it. Gompers took us halfway -- to wage floors, and the Equal Rights / Anti-Discrimination laws took us the other half, to a comprehensive platform of support for the entire working class. (Of course, that platform still has holes and erosions and needs repairs)

jsmith0295 10y ago

In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employer. The current regulations around that sort of thing make it so the people who want to avoid needing government assistance have to get two jobs and deal with potential scheduling conflicts between them. When I worked minimum wage jobs there were a lot of people who couldn't work out a situation where they could easily get a second job like this partly because they were dependent on slow public transportation. You'd likely have significantly less people on government assistance if they were free to work more

jcrawfordor 10y ago
This kind of runs against the philosophical ideal of the limited workweek though. The idea is that people should never have to work more than 40 hours to make ends meet, and so when working 40 hours is not enough, the government will close the gap. Sure, we could probably reduce welfare dependence by allowing people to work 60h a week, but that would be abandoning one of the most important principles of the fair labor standards act and greatest achievements of the labor movement.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  You can survive on 40h a week, but that's about it. I don't think it's worth limiting people who want to do better than that just to try and get people to work less on average. So I guess their achievement just doesn't go far enough in my mind because it hinders economic mobility. If it were possible to succeed on 40h a week of minimum wage, then it might be different. I don't think that's really possible to achieve universally though federal policy, though. I'd prefer to just get rid of the overtime pay requirement and health care requirements included in the ACA (or probably most of the ACA. The mandate and tax is really terrible for young working people.) Edit: Just to clarify a bit, when I was working 2 minimum wage jobs it was because I wanted to be able to build some savings. I could have actually lived more comfortably (and had health insurance) had I opted to only work one job and apply for benefits, but then I just would have been getting by. Had I not had the extra money saved up I wouldn't have been able to replace my car when it's transmission went out, or be able to take the risk to work at a startup which is how I started my career as a software engineer.

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

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JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Are you assigning blame to Walmart for this?

1_2__3 10y ago
Are you holding them blameless? If so, why? This is the largest employer in the US and to not hold them responsible would imply they don't have the leverage to change the playing field. Of course they do.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Change what playing field? Are you saying that in order to do business, a company must pay each employee enough to keep them off food stamps?
  - jellicle 10y ago
    That would be an excellent requirement to add to U.S. law, yes.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Really? Oh do please explain how you would see that playing out in real life.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Absolutely. We've somehow decided that businesses are entitled to enjoy the benefits of workers having enough money to live (i.e. large pool of willing, living employees, who are probably not going to die for lack of basic necessities before their shift tomorrow), with the public picking up a good chunk of the tab. That's a subsidy. Every welfare dollar that helps a Walmart employee stay alive and go to work tomorrow is a gift from the taxpayer to Walmart shareholders: they'd have to pay for it if we didn't.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago

paulcole 10y ago

>substantial (2-digit) percentage A substantial (2-digit) number of percentages are substantial (2-digit) percentages.

STRiDEX 10y ago

They have competition. Dollar tree, one of walmarts biggest competitors in many areas has a similarly high percentage of their workforce on food stamps.

gozur88 10y ago

I never found this a very compelling observation. So what? If Walmart had to pay enough to cover other benefits a substantial number of them wouldn't have jobs.