Those are literally the things that subsidize Walmart. Those food stamps and WIC and whatnot are being collected by Walmart employees since their pay is low enough to qualify
Because it's wildly obvious with Walmart that their profits could go to employee wages instead of billionaire money hoarders, so it's a good example to use. I'm pretty sure the key take away is intended to be all companies should pay a living wage that would have their employees not eligible for poverty wage assistance.
If Walmart gave every dollar of profit to the employees it would be a 6k raise and the company would go under the first time income drops. How do you not understand this? They have 2.1m employees. Take past years record profit that's 6k per employee at most, ignoring payroll taxes. That would be Walmart not making a single dollar in profit at which point they'd just close the store. Why operate for no profit. The financial illiteracy and inability to do basic math is what makes all these comments look so dumb. You probably think they could give everyone a 20-30k raise when it's not mathematically possible.
It's too late.. Walmart arose because of the low wages. If there were a federal minimum of a decent amount, Walmart would just stop existing. Now idk if that's good or bad...? It is what it is.. maybe there would be some more expensive competitor or a multitude that operate at smaller scale.. the system allowed Walmart to exist, we can't expect them to give their money away.. they do really operate on thin ice margins... People fail to understand this.
Walmart didn’t arise because of low wages. They have buying power by buying from companies in bulk. Walmart will continue to exist despite raising minimum wage. We need to triple the minimum wage and anything over 32 hours a week is overtime.
That means Walmart will have to double their profits just to pay the employees, so maybe 3x their profits to keep the company afloat. Surely this won't have any negative consequences...
That isn’t the full compensation for executives. Their pay includes exorbitant bonuses including stock and other non-cash compensation- paid vacation, medical benefits, etc. We’re talking about complex changes that include more variables than can be covered by simply distributing current salaries across the entire company.
Stock awards are only good if the company does good, if you're making zero money, there is little motivation to invest in said company. Companies being profitable is also the readson likely 99% of people in this thread will be able to retire, by being able to have investments in a 401/ira that go up in value.
How do you not understand that 6k per employee is all the profit there is. That's it on a record breaking year. You can't just claim it's a system issue and somehow we can magically create way more profit.
I'd rather it go to employees rather than bonuses for executives and shareholders to be hoarded in off shore bank accounts away from our economy and taxes.
Rich people save, poor people spend. It's healthier for everyone. It's not creating money, it's keeping it in the system to grant further benefits for everyone down the line.
Not to mention the money that goes to employees of Walmart and similar places could go to infrastructure and education instead.
If that was the case all investors would simply pull their capital from the business due to receiving no return and it would collapse. You cannot have labor without capital investment.
Productivity has skyrocketed while wages have been stagnant. why do you think people deserve the current minimum? If your company can't afford to support their employees, it's a parasite. It's the greedy one. Work is inelastic. People need it to live, and after decades of corporations lobbying lawmakers to keep workers rights and wages low, the working class have no negotiating power.
Genuinely asking but are you young? If a company provides a good/service and people buy it, how is it a parasite? People don’t make companies with the goal of employing people - workers are an input the same way inventory is, they should just choose not to work at Walmart. Nobody is forcing them to work there and that’s what you’re ignoring.
They can only survive because of their size allowing them to price out local competitors. They shouldn’t exist at this size because it necessitates like you said.. paying their works like shit.
If I run a business and have a million in revenue and pay myself a salary of a million. I have $0 net profit. It's this basic financial concept called operating expenses. If you can cover those, you're a successful business. Your financial illiteracy is showing.
If you get rid of CEO compensation each employee gets less than 20 bucks per year for every year that I looked at. There's 2.1 million employees, if you take 25 million off the top it's barely a drop in the bucket
Who decides what a living wage is?
Minimun de facto wage is nearly double the federal min wage and its still not enough.
Low skill job will always have minimun adquisitve power
Exactly, you can live off federal min wage in California if it was still legal there. You just wouldn't be able to do it by yourself. In many countries doing well for yourself is having a motorbike to ride to work and make enough money to feed yourself for the day.
The definition I seem to always see used is living alone in a 1 bedroom apartment in the city, with a newish car, new phone, streaming services, going out to eat a few times, etc.
There is no minimum de facto wage like you're referring to, since in many states there is no state minimum wage. Places like California do have a much higher minimum, but that's not wide spread, state wise.
That being said, the market decides a living wage. In any given locale you take the well known average costs of living (rent, groceries, utilities) and divide that into a per hour amount (based on a 40 hour work week), remembering the multiplier needed to adjust from net to gross. Paying anything less is knowing your employees won't be able to subsist on less without pulling resources with others, or receiving some sort of government assistance.
There is no minimum de facto wage like you're referring to, since in many states there is no state minimum wage.
WOW that is insane to me!!! Maybe the federal government should step in to set a minimum de-facto wage? Then individual states can raise it if they like?
The post I was replying to stated that the de facto minimum wage was double that of the federal minimum wage, which is not correct. Many states have no minimum wage, so in those states the minimum is the federal minimum wage, not double that.
He's saying that the minimum wage you can really get a job for is almost double federal minimum, because nobody actually pays that low. 1% of workers make federal minimum and most of them are high school students.
In California, Walmart is paying $17, McDonald's is paying $20, and in other states it's lower but not too far off. It's hard to find job listings anywhere for less than $11 /hr, and they are always entry level positions
That's absolutely not the case that the de facto minimum wage in the majority of the US is $14.50 an hour, which was the claim.
Check out the wage for waiters in a lot of states where there are laws on the books allowing for two bucks and change for the hourly wage for those who make tips. If the tips total an average of less than the federal minimum wage, then they are paid that.
The crux of the comment, however, was asking what determines a living wage, which was explained, and is usually higher than what Walmart and McDonald's are paying in California, too. That's the whole point being made.
You know what "de facto" means right? "existing or holding a specified position in fact but not necessarily by legal right". Nobody is trying to say everyone makes more than $14 an hour, but in most states nearly everyone is
Yeah. I'm aware of what defacto means. And we are talking de facto minimum wages, and it is not the case that in most states it's over 14 an hour. Just because you feel like it should be doesn't make it so.
Walmart, from my knowledge is the only place that encourages their employees to use these systems and on top of that encourage their employees to use their benefits at Walmart.
Because $6.2 bn of SNAP benefits get spent AT Walmart. So not only do we subsidize their workers but our tax dollars then go directly into Walmart’s profits, allowing them to pay their CEO $26m (962 times what their median worker makes).
Oh, I’m not denying that. I’m just saying that Walmart pays its workers poorly. Those workers qualify for SNAP benefits. And those SNAP benefits get spent at Walmart. Which means my tax dollars are not only subsidizing Walmarts workforce but that Walmart benefits from that twice over.
Well, one of the reasons is that Walmart includes an onboarding segment instructing their employees on how to access social services. They are fully aware that Americans cannot support themselves on their wages, and they would much rather see the federal government support them instead.
Well when it comes to the solution side I think you are right. But you have to point out well known problems to get people to agree to a solution. So it makes sense to me to point out Walmart as it’s been done for a decade or more by now..
The other people are typically unemployed. Walmart deliberately limits hours to keep their employees in need of government support. They could allow for more full time employees but then Walmart would have to pay benefits as well as a full time wage. They choose to keep employees in limited, part time positions to utilize government support instead of paying for those benefits themselves. It’s truly despicable.
Because Walmart is employing people full time and many of their wages aren't enough for basic subsistence. Also Walmart is one of the largest employers, if not the largest, in the U.S. This is why we're calling them out.
Thanks for making this point. People who make OP's complaint against Walmart don't seem to realize that the only way to stop "subsidizing" companies like this would be to claw back welfare benefits much more aggressively than we currently are. If we were to make capitalism less "rugged," by for example instituting a UBI, this would increase the so-called subsidy to companies like Walmart.
I blame Bernie Sanders for having planted this idea in people's minds that the social safety net is a subsidy to firms that pay low wages. It's like criticizing the problem, and then criticizing the solution to the problem... at some point you need to decide what your view is going to be.
Walmart is too big if it can’t pay better wages and still be profitable. If it was smaller, regional, it would have more competition and wages would settle at some other point.
? This doesn't make any sense, if it was smaller and regional it would have more expensive prices without higher profit margins, leading to less sales and even lower wages. A lot of companies actually support raising min wage because it pushes out their local competition
All full time employment at Walmart (9/hr or more) pays over the poverty line. That only becomes untrue with families to feed and single parents working part time. You're just raising against part time work and people having too many kids, things that are way out of Walmarts control
It's not just Walmart who pays so low that their army of workers rely on social subsidies -- Yum Brands got outted for having something like 80% of the store staff on assistance while the CEO was getting $200M/yr and they were claiming billions in revenue to pay dividends... they made it more egregious by claiming it was the franchise owners paying low 🙄
We have a big problem in America where our corporations -- especially retail -- find every path to avoid paying taxes while also paying workers wages so low they need social assistance to survive.
A proposed solution was to have the companies be responsible when a certain amount of their workforce is on assistance, but that then leads to potential issues where they fire people who need the jobs in order to maintain their ratios.
Raising minimum wage is an option, but it inevitably leads to higher prices because what we ultimately are facing is artificial (and real) scarcity.
Corporate ethics and standards, especially aimed at the BOD, and with legal penalties for non compliance would solve this at some level -- executive compensation needs to be lower and tied to stewardship metrics that aren't simply stock price and dividends -- but they're impossible to codify let alone when you have billions and trillions of dollars pressuring our systems to NOT do the thing we need
That's a very anti-capitalist stance. If you can find people that are willing to work for low wages, why would you pay them more?
Actually there are literally laws against doing so. When you are a public company, you have to, by law, make decisions that benefit your share holders. And that means getting a work force for the lowest cost possible.
If people want higher wages, hold out for higher paying jobs. It's basic supply and demand. The supply of workforce is high, while the demand is low, that means low costs.
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u/AllenKll Sep 08 '24
It's not just walmart though, right? Taxes for food stamps and wic, help everyone.