Oh, this comes to mind, and I’m sure our Trumpanzies out there will appreciate it.
This is the same argument that the TGOP make about all wage earners…
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Cutting profit to compensate employees fairly and keep prices competitive is never considered as an option.
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Have your serfs been particularly uppity as of late, m’lord?
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It is when market forces require it.
Just dogmatically stating that it’s never considered is not an argument.
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I’ve said it before, social programs are artificially keeping wages down. What would happen if too many people couldn’t live on a full time job? They unionize and make wage agreements or strike. So it is a fair point that the gov is subsidizing many large companies. But I am not 100% sure this will work. It is possible there will be a push to just remove those jobs. Self check outs all around. Place your order with a touch pad, pick up in window. Or maybe not, guess we will see.
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You guys always do this. There is no way that number is true. Wal-Mart made over 482 billion in 2016
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Because what those companies are doing is called theft. They are stealing from taxpayers so they can have employees on poverty level wages.
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Walmart’s net income in 2016 was $14.694 billion. But yeah @Lord_Blagger appears to have pulled that out of his ass.
You do realize that as a publicly traded company, the real figures are readily available for people to check right? You only hurt your argument when you fib about them.
Here…
(And read the header at the top of the spreadsheet.)
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mmm, yes, it’s so much nicer to just be roughly coerced in the dark by an invisible hand.
Labor regulations create a level playing field for businesses, which allows them to act in a socially responsible way without having to “sacrifice” the competitive advantage of exploitative cruelty… Cooperatives are great, and I’d be even happier if they’d take over the world, but fair labor policies are the least we can do.
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Walmart reported a pretax income of 15 billion last year, so about $7,000 per employee.
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Its not the social programs doing that. It is the death of organized labor. Labor law protections for employees have been eroding away for a generation as is the power to even organize into unions. The reason employers are allowed to grossly underpay employees making public assistance necessary is due to the lack of regulations and lack of labor law enforcement. Its not public assistance that is the problem, it is the notion that deregulation serves the nation.
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Nope. Sometimes they need to be forced to do what is necessary and right. Discrimination needs to be costly, workplaces need to be safe…
Libertarian arguments always devolve into “might makes right”. Nonsense which has no place in a modern, free society.
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What’s that quote? “If you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage, you’ve got a bad business model” or something?
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Income means profit. As in after they’ve paid the CEO
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You’re both way off. Well, your $482B was the total amount MADE, but the actual profit was $14.7B, for about a 3% profit. 3% is pretty thin, but Walmart is huge, so the result is huge.
But wait, even though his numbers were waaaaaaay off, he has a point. $2.3 million is A LOT of people. So let’s say we gave everyone a $3 raise per hour. That’s $3 x 40hs/wk + 52/wk/yr = $6240. Now apply that to everyone in the company, that’s $14.3B - boom - you just about broke even (on a good year) with out really significantly raising the wage of the worker. (The average person won’t be at the often quoted $15 with only a $3/hr raise.) Thought it MIGHT raise it enough to get them off welfare.
So yeah, for this to work, you would also have to raise prices on stuff at least some. And given how much people buy stuff from Walmart (and everywhere else) it is going to affect peoples spending power SOME, though they will probably come out ahead. It’s a complex issue with a lot of stuff tied to it.
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Income means profit. As in, after they’ve paid the CEO. Sorry for the repost but I wanted to reply directly.
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There’s a lot of necessary things I need that $6240 I put back into the economy could buy…
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I agree some deregulation has had some effects. Organized labor isn’t dead, but it is weaker and limited to certain sectors.
But I still contend if people couldn’t live because they didn’t have government help, then there would be protests and pushes to revise laws and create more unions. This is exactly what happened back when labor reform first started. There were no social safety nets and when people were pushed to the point of breaking, they pushed back.
Now they may have to go on gov. assistance, but they make enough that they aren’t willing to rock the boat via protest and organization (some people are, but not enough).
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You and me both. I am not saying that we all couldn’t use more. But I am putting it in perspective. In Walmarts case if they gave all of their profit back in wages, it still wouldn’t be where people think we need to be, would it? So if the goal is $15/hr, prices would have to go up. Or they are going to go to all self check out and reduce the work force number.
And there are many companies not making as healthy of a profit as Walmart. Heck most people don’t view 3% has “healthy”.
Some effect? Most labor laws have been gutted to the point of irrelevance. Thanks to “Right to Work” laws, Organized labor is scaled back to only a few professions. Whereas in the past, most blue collar work was unionized.
I think expecting unions to spring up out of necessity is naive and misses the point. What we are seeing is the result of the weakness and limitations of organizing labor. We didn’t get to this point until the power of unions was vastly diminished.
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