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Well, no. If they could, they wouldn't be receiving assistance. Walmart has turned, e.g., food assistance programs into a subsidy for themselves.

• Consultant32452 9y ago
  If you can imagine a world in which food assistance programs suddenly came to an end, would Wal-Mart raise its wages? Perhaps the workers would demand more. Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate. Sure it is, if they are willing to accept more rapid turnover and the workers they are competing for have no better offers.
    • Consultant32452 9y ago
      How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?
      • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        Is walmart not proof that the answer to your question is quite a long time?
        • Consultant32452 9y ago
          No, and this is exactly the point I was trying to drive home when I made my original post about over 80% of the all humans living on less than $10/day. When the OP asked if "anyone can live on $40/day" what they really meant was, "Can people live a lifestyle reasonably close to mine on $40/day." The answer to that is obviously not. The question is being asked by someone who is almost certainly in the top 1% of incomes across the globe (which is about $34k/yr). But the real answer is that a person can live incredibly well by global standards on $40/day.
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        That depends on how big the available labor force with no better offers is, and what the rate is at which people from outside that group move into it; potentially indefinitely, under the right (or very wrong, depending on your perspective) conditions.
        • Consultant32452 9y ago
          I'd be interested in any examples you have.
          • dllthomas 9y ago
            Unpaid internships?
            • Consultant32452 9y ago
              Well, you got me there so I gave you an upvote. Temporarily bartering labor for skills training is a complexity I hadn't accounted for.
              • dllthomas 9y ago
                Yeah, a rather extreme example, and of course we hope they are being sufficiently well compensated in experience, though we know that's not always the case. As another example, there's the people working 70 hour weeks across 3 jobs - no one of those is paying what's necessary to sustain the employee. Moreover, if you're okay with high turnover, there may be people willing to work for you unsustainably for a time just to lower their burn rate.
      • __jal 9y ago
        You are attempting to recast the question to looking at median subsistence-rates worldwide. The Walmart workers we are discussing work in communities in the U.S. Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S. We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids. Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy to Walmart.
        • Consultant32452 9y ago
          The point of this discussion is to shine a light on how ignorant the OP's question was. The original question was whether a person could live off $40/day. But that's not what OP really meant was it? What they meant to ask was whether or not a person could live OP's approximate standard of living on $40/day. And the answer to that is obviously not. If you make more than $34k/yr you're in the global 1%. Virtually no one on the planet lives at the OP's standard of living. The question only shows the OP's hubris. SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.
          • __jal 9y ago
            > SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase You're missing my point. SNAP is a direct subsidy to Walmart not because they sell food, but because many of their workers cannot live where they live without being enrolled in SNAP due to the low pay. SNAP subsidizes Walmart by supplementing workers' paychecks.
            • aey 9y ago
              It sounds like you are suggesting that wages should be set at a minimum level that is strictly above any government assistance. So if you have a job, you are disqualified from any assistance what so ever, and all the government assistance should be focused on people without jobs, essentially to bring them to that minimum. That's similar to what welfare was like before welfare reform in 96 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_...