"Wal-to-Wal Marts" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Wal-to-Wal Marts

The esteemed columnist Nicholas Kristoff writes in The New York Times that "The Wal-Martization of America" is on the line with a grocery clerks strike in Southern California. He says that 70,000 people are on the verge of being pushed from middle to lower class if the supermarkets insist on holding wage levels for two years, lowering new-hire wages and requiring employees to contribute more to their health insurance. He points out that Wal-Mart is aggressively non-union, pays their workers lower wages and makes them cover their own health insurance.

I think it is noble to want everyone to be able to earn a living wage, but suggest that we have arrived at a situation where circumstances now muddle the overall economic picture. We need to step back, strip the issues down to basics and reconsider exactly what are the problems and what are the solutions. To proceed along the current course ratifies and compounds the problems because it doesn’t deal with the core issues, only the results after various interventions.

For instance, the workers have now been on strike for weeks and the amount of money they didn’t earn is enormous, far more than would have been gained had they stayed at work and won all their demands. One must wonder, too, how much they would saved in time, energy, and money if they were working for a company that treated them so well they would never think to belong to a union.

This doesn’t appear as a current alternative to their situation; I put it out as a hypothetical. But not one so far-fetched. There are many companies in the United States that recognize the importance of their workers and show it. And by the way, doesn’t it make sense to compensate people for the value of their work, and to reward them for initiative and extra effort?

Unions have an important history in our country and have improved millions of lives here and elsewhere. But any company that is conflicted with its workers is operating at a lower productivity level than is possible. If the workers truly desire that their company succeed, and put all of themselves into achieving that success...well, it’s hard to imagine what they couldn’t accomplish. That’s not likely to happen where the workers are treated badly and/or there are unions.

A second issue is workers comp and health insurance. These systems are grossly ineptly operated. Lawyers and insurance companies are pulling out a third of what the companies and workers pay in premiums for basic health coverage. By acquiescing to this anachronistic, greed-wracked system, they only make medical care more expensive and less accessible. The solution, of course, is a single-payer system, and if the workers and companies raised their heads above their scrimmage line, they’d see the light, perhaps.

And finally, there is the matter of personal responsibility. Kristoff cites numbers about what it takes to float a family of three above the poverty line, $15,600 a year. Indeed, supporting three people on that kind of money would be an awesome challenge. The solution, however, is not to raise the pay for people who take cans out of boxes and put them on shelves. Rather, the two adults should work and put off having children until they can afford them.

Wal-Mart is notorious for the way they squeeze their workers, but the only reason they are in business is because people spend money in their stores. Many of their customers don’t have a lot of money -- many are their own employees -- and can only shop where they find the low prices. In fact, supporters of Wal-Mart’s expansion into the supermarket business celebrate the corporate hero who would make more available to many for less.

In truth, a substantial percentage of the money spent in Wal-Marts is for non-essentials. People with low-incomes -- and often the corollary low intelligence -- are driven by advertising to buy more expensive brand name items and things that they don’t need and can’t afford. The cycle continues.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.