Twenty First Century Slavery By: SpiceZ Written on June 11th, 2013 Slavery is alive and well in the 21st Century! New Study Finds Wal-Mart Could Easily Afford to Pay 12$ an Hour, So Why Don’t They? Omar Rivero It’s no secret that after Sam Walton’s death, his heirs that took over Wal-Mart have skirted all sense of corporate social responsibility by paying their workers peanuts and forcing them to rely on taxpayer funded government assistance in order to make ends meet and ensure their general welfare. Now, we have irrefutable proof that their lack of concern for their worker’s quality-of-life isn’t even solely related to their bottom line, raising the question of whether their refusal to pay above the minimum wage is more related to a general ideology of self-centered Ayn Rand-ish capitalist greed than a simple concern over profit margins. A new bombshell study by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education has found that even if Wal-Mart went to pay their American workers a minimum of $12 an hour, it would cost their average consumer, at most, only $12.49 per year. Currently, or 66% of Wal-Mart workers – about 900,000 employees – earn less than four dollars an hour, while more than 20% earn less than $9. The study also found that, in general, Wal-Mart’s hourly workers earned about 12.4% less than retail workers as a whole. The American taxpayer that subsidizes the profits of low-wage/benefits employers like Wal-Mart through food stamps and Medicaid. Wal-Mart’s poverty wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store. In state after state, Wal-Mart employees are the top recipients of Medicaid. As many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps. This costs the American taxpayer about $1 billion per year! Boosting these employees’ pay to a healthy $12 an hour would boost their annual income by $1670-$6500, depending on whether they are full or part-time workers. That amounts to an average pay increase of 37% for those earning less than $9, and a 14-16% increase on average for those making $9-$12 an hour. The study also found that 41% of this added income would go to families at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, ensuring that America’s largest employer would stop subsidizing so much of its profits off the backs the American taxpayers. While setting a $12 minimum wage at Wal-Mart would increase the company’s payroll costs by about $3.2 billion a year, a large portion of the increase is likely to be offset by the increased labor productivity due to higher employee moral, lower turnover, and less absenteeism, while the rest would be absorbed through slightly reduced profits. This is unlikely to make a difference in the Walton family’s bank accounts, given that the company posted a $16.4 billion profit in 2010 alone. Even if Wal-Mart chose to pass along 100% of the added cost to consumers, it would only have to raise its prices by 1.1%. According to the study, 28% of the price increase would be born by families at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. The additional cost per family would be manageable, ask the average consumer spent $1187 a year at Wal-Mart and would only pay an additional $12.49! Is this $12.49 yearly “price increase ” really the driving force behind Wal-Mart’s refusal to lift many of their workers out of poverty and reduce their reliance on public assistance? It is safe to assume that Wal-Mart executives know full well that this negligible price increase would improve the life of their many employees while funneling millions of taxpayer dollars out of Wal-Mart balance sheets and into areas where they are urgently needed. YES! If they can do the right thing by the American people, the taxpayer, and their own employees without hurting their company’s bottom line, why don’t they just do it? The truth is, Wal-Mart is so vastly infected by greedy corporate ideology of vulture capitalism that the Walton heirs (who have a combined wealth larger than the bottom 40% of all Americans combined) and Wal-Mart executives don’t see the glaring hypocrisy in the fact that they are America’s biggest “welfare queen” while refusing to provide adequate pay and benefits for their own full-time employees. While Wal-Mart executives and the media choose to sweep this hypocrisy under the rug, it is up to liberals, progressives, and compassionate conservatives to make some noise about it in order to effect a change in their greedy behavior. Please do your part by sharing this and other related articles on social media forums.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 22:09:27 +0000
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