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Both have full-time employees on public assistance programs, too.

• prepend 9y ago
  This is a good point. But I expect that any large corporation has employees on public assistance programs. Walmart in particular has really high rates of employees on public assistance. Amazon seems to have quite a few as well. I think both are due to having lots of employees near minimum wage. It’s important to judge this clearly as it may not be the employer’s fault or responsibility for employees being on assistance programs. I think this is because assistance programs calculate based on family size and employers pay based on an individual. I’ll give an example with national numbers. The actual values vary quite a bit by state, but the spirit of the example stands. The national poverty threshold for a single person household is $12k. For the same household with a child it is $16k. Three kids is $25k. And it keeps increasing. Federal minimum wage is $7.25. That comes out to $15k of full time work or $12k for part time work. A single person can’t make minimum wage and work full time. But add in a few kids or a dependent relative and they drop under poverty. But employers don’t change your pay. So to tell how unjust Walmart or Amazon is, you need to evaluate what assistance programs employees are on and for what reasons. Or I suppose we could shift to a society where employers pay you based on your household need. But that will likely be really sucky for people who aren’t healthy and young. Source: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...