Scenes from an American trainwreck, Part 2

A number of years ago, when I worked for the Sears Holding Corp., the decision was made to stop giving paid vacations to part-time workers.  One of the women who had worked for the company for more than thirty years as a part-timer was very unahppy with this decision, and as she had nothing to lose, she decided to call our corporate office to express her unhappiness and ask the rationale for this decision.  The answer she got was as simple as it was straightforward:  Sorry, but Wal-Mart doesn't do it.

There was once a time, boys and girls, before the Reagan Devolution, when there wasn't a race to the bottom in what was offered to employees in terms of wages and benefits.  Wise business leaders heeded the mantra of Henry Ford that you had to pay your employees enough to be able to afford to buy the products they made.

Wal-Mart makes $35,000 in profit every minute.  They have annual nets sales of over $405 billion.  The Walton family is estimated to be worth $115 billion, which is more than 42% of Americans combined.  We further subsidize their business with tax cuts and incentives worth even more billions.  Yet the average Wal-Mart worker makes $9.00 an hour and has no health benefits.

Wal-Mart workers are the number one recipients of Medicaid.  Wal-Mart workers are forced onto food stamps because of their low pay.  As if it isn't bad enough our taxpaying largesse goes to give even more billions to the moneyed elite, we're also subsidizing Wal-Mart's refusal to pay its workers a living wage by using tax dollars that could be spent on infrastructure or education to keep their employees healthy and fed.

It's one thing to give small business owners a hand to start a business or a leg up to hire more employees, and completely another to pour countless billions into a fabulously successful corporation that also expects us to keep its employees out of poverty while its billionaire owners pile even more money in their bank accounts.

Peace,
emaycee