Class warfare summed up in a simple joke (with an accompanying cartoon)

Wal-Mart employs low-skilled, low-paid workers. It's a reality. Those workers have little leverage. It's why they are low paid. The proof of the pudding is that Wal-Mart never has trouble staffing its stores, and in most cases when a new Wal-Mart has gone in somewhere, they have gotten thousands of applications for a couple of hundred jobs.

I don't know this as a fact, but I'd venture to guess Wal-Mart employs as many low-paid workers as any company in Wisconsin.

Wal-Mart actively helps its employees get in programs like "Badger Care," unlike other companies employing low-paid workers. It's because Wal-Mart gets bashed more than those other companies, such as McDonald's, and tries to counter it.

The implication here always (it is the Wal-Mart bashing sites that mount campaigns using a stat like that to make the implications) is that Wal-Mart is somehow robbing the state's taxpayers. But Wal-Mart pays way more in revenues to the state than the subsidies required for a couple of thousand people to be enrolled in that program. So it's not a matter of Wal-Mart somehow taking from the taxpayers of a state with a program like that.

There is nothing illegal about Wal-Mart employees taking advantage of something Wisconsin's legislators set up, not Wal-Mart. And not that Wal-Mart should get pats on the back for it, but unlike any other company I know with that many low-skilled workers, Wal-Mart actively helps its employees enroll in programs like that. Then it gets bashed for it.

This will certainly be an unpopular post, as it always is. But it's just fact. The alternative the fantasy world people want would be no Wal-Mart jobs. I am not sure how that benefits anyone. The obvious fact here is that Wal-Mart has no trouble finding workers. The jobs might be crappy jobs in most people's estimation, but there is a reason why people are signing up for crappy jobs. The alternative.

And this myth that Wal-Mart workers are low paid because they are not unionized is just that. A myth. Unions don't create some magical cloak for the labor market. A union with no leverage is just a collectively bargaining group of people with no leverage. The proof that they have no leverage is that they can't unionize, because Wal-Mart can replace them with hundreds of thousands of workers all too happy to take the jobs from them.

The reason unions are near dead in this country, is that the only way they survived was from government intervention to shift the balance of power in labor negotiations. They got this by trading favors (votes and money) with politicians in return for favors. That indeed led to higher wages at one point. In the case of jobs that require no skills, labor unions are also a monopoly. They decide who can get the higher wages government forces on industries (historically unions excluding minorities from their club, by the way) and who can't. If you are not part of the club, they actively keep you out. Given those two truths, unions have COST people. The wages they "won" for their workers were not done in a marketplace. They were "won" by paying off politicians. It's a fair strategy, if not an inherently corrupt one, but it has bit organized labor in the ass. Over time, as their influence grew, the increased wages came at the price of jobs. There is nothing stopping those jobs from going to Central America or Asia. They are low skilled. And those people overseas were happy to work for way less. So now you have not only the people unions kept out of it's monopoly, who have always been hurt by their existence, but the jobs unions have cost their own workers.

I will get arguments with all that, as I have in the past on here, but it's undeniable. And I can offer oodles of proof of it. Every industry that has ever had a largely unionized workforce in the U.S. is dead. The jobs exported elsewhere. You can run them down one by one. Textiles, steel, autos, for example. The number of unionized workers in this country has plummeted as the unions lost power because of that. Private unionized workers once accounted for 35 percent of the workforce. Today it is somewhere around 5 percent and falling.

That is not entirely the fault of unions. The U.S. has largely traded manufacturing jobs for service jobs. For example, IBM's ThinkPad computers used to be manufactured in the U.S. Then IBM outsourced to China to be manufactured by Lenovo. It was cheaper. Incidentally, the loss of the manufacturing jobs cost American workers, modest-paying jobs. But Lenovo's research development is done in the U.S., mostly in the research triangle in North Carolina. And that created higher-skilled jobs in the U.S. The secondary benefit of that kind of trade up is that American goods are cheaper. China produces things cheaper and as a result our goods cost less, so consumers have more spending power and to a large degree it mitigates some inflation.

In any case, Wal-Mart doesn't want a unionized workforce, because 1) it doesn't want the potential government intervention that will skew the labor market and might drive up its costs, and 2) It is a punching bag in this country, and it doesn't need the bad PR that will come from crushing a union (if there weren't any government favors to prevent it).

But Wal-Mart is not afraid of unions in and of themselves. Unions don't magically give people more skills or better leverage to negotiate higher salaries.

Collective bargaining is great, if it actually gives you leverage to negotiate something. Collective bargaining attempted by a relatively unskilled workforce, in an economy where there are oodles of people who want their jobs, doesn't give that workforce any more leverage, though. In a marketplace, a company like Wal-Mart could laugh at that attempt and not have any problem finding equally qualified workers.

 

Azrael, If you can get off the Wal-Mart bashing sites, come back and tell us how much Wal-Mart pays in corporate income taxes, both state and federal. And come back to us with anything that approaches Wal-Mart sucking from people in this country. You can't.

Also, factor in for us, what Wal-Mart has created in jobs in this country. And what it has done in terms of lower costs. And then come back with an explanation of the Wal-Mart effect. Wal-Mart has done more than any entity to keep inflation in check in this country in the last 20 to 30 years by lowering costs through its squeeze on manufacturers.

Wal-Mart does as much as any company to try to avoid the government sucking from it. But the Wal-Mart bashing site isn't focused on GE or Northrup Grumman.

That JS story actually points out what a large percentage of revenue Wal-Mart provides to Wisconsin. The state coming back for more doesn't mitigate that.

 

By the way, for anyone who doesn't understand me, it's not some inherent love of Wal-Mart that makes me strident about this. I'm not particularly married to Wal-Mart, except that its size has made it a target, and so much of it is so obviously nonsensical.

It's a matter of knowing some people who have come up with reasoned approximations of the economic benefits Wal-Mart actually provides the economy, and it's a matter of actually seeing the crass populism that inspires Wal-Mart being the easiest target for the "us versus them" stuff. That is what gets me the most. To the extent that it has been inspired by political motivations, it really bothers me. Remember when John Edwards was hypocritically giving "two Americas speeches" and actively taking shots at Wal-Mart, for example, but when his kid wanted the new PlayStation 3, which was hard to get early on, his aids tried to snatch it with a call to Wal-Mart? The crazy part is around the same time Edwards gave a speech to a union and told a story about how his son had yelled at another kids for his Wal-Mart bought shoes (never mind the fact, that not all people can afford $500 haircuts. Lots of people in this country go to Wal-Mart to pay less, and seem to appreciate it).

The populism is exactly what those Wal-Mart bashing sites try to capitalize on. They can give an obviously cherry-picked story, paint a horrible picture, and then it gets propagated all over the place. And when I see it, I respond, because it bothers me. (Oh, and yes, I realize I have consistently misspelled Walmart. I always do it. Not intentionally. I have been corrected more than people on here can imagine, and I still can't get it right).

 

Az, You keep posting that link. I have no idea how it resolved, but the state claimed that Walmart owned $17.7 million in back taxes. I can't find a resolution on a quick search.

Among other things, the Walmart spokesman pointed out that Walmart collected $187.2 million in sales taxes for the State of Wisconsin that year, or 4.5% of all yearly sales tax collections in the state. He pointed out that Walmart was Wisconsin's largest private employer, with 28,920 workers. How does that compare to a back taxes claim of $17.7 million?

And the spokesman claimed the issue was a legal tax structure, as opposed to the state's claim. I don't know a ton about taxes, but it looks a lot like a real estate investment trust that lots of entities use to get around tax burdens.

I can't compile these numbers for a message board post, but again, come back with the numbers from the Wal-Mart bashing site about how much revenue Walmart provides state and federal coffers, and then make the case that Walmart is sucking anything out of the economy.

Maybe my perceptions about this are wrong. But how is the tax collector who goes to the newspaper with that the good guy, and the company paying the largest percentage of the taxes the bad guy? How many people who get outraged do everything they can do to avoid paying taxes?