5 ms·

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

by 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)

by aianus 10y ago

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)