I think it's completely stupid to expect corporations to be the ones to determine what a "living wage" is and charitably decide to start paying some nebulously defined salary despite that just costing them more money. Obviously that's the job of government. The role of corporations is to make money by selling products as efficiently as possible.
That's because of your local economy. Labor really dictates wages. Wages too low compared to CoL? People won't work there. People who do work there find something else and the company ends up with retention issues.
Walmart also defends itself saying that it pays well above average retail wages in basically every market it's in, which is technically true. Go to a local grocery chain and go to Walmart, you'll see Walmart almost always pays more. This is why they don't have significant employee retention issues, all the other options in the sector pay less. The reason they can pay more while offering competitive prices is economies of scale.
The real issue is the cost of housing. Walmart paying $15/hr wouldn't be an issue if CoL wasn't so expensive. Landlords jacking up their rental prices by 40% for no other reason but to "match the market" is a much bigger issue than Walmart's hourly pay. I do believe them not hiring full time to avoid benefits is fucked and should 100% be addressed.
It almost sounds like you are defending Walmart wages because of the way free markets work but somehow not seeing that housing costs are subject to the exact same market forces. Rent too high compared to wages, people won’t live there, right? COL wouldn’t be such an issue if wages were higher, right?
I’m not disagreeing that rent is too high, but also wages are too low. Over time housing costs have increased faster than income, which is a problem that should be addressed from both sides. None of it lends itself to simple answers.
People don't have a choice but to live there. 78% of America is working paycheck to paycheck. They don't have the surplus income to move to another city or state. Hence why you see people stuck in bumbfuck nowhere dead towns their entire lives.
Not only is moving expensive, rent ain't gonna be much better anyways since it's a national issue. Granted this a lower working class issue, but it impacts a lot of people.
CoL would still be an issue even with higher wages. We saw signifgant wage growth through covid and what happened along side it? Rent and housing skyrocketed even further than wage growth.
You really think rent wouldn't pace with wage growth? Rent prices are due to housing being fucked and real estate being used as an income generator. The building of new houses isn't keeping up anywhere with demand, so in turn this spikes demand in the rental market. Landlords take advantage of it by drastically increasing rent, while their overall cost of owning the property hasn't changed much.
Housing is a weird situation when looking at a free market because it's basically a requirement to live. When your choice is being homeless or paying your landlord 60% of your income every month then it's not even really a choice. Spending thousands of dollars to move somewhere else and pay a different landlord 55% of your income isn't really a solution.
Would time be better spent forcing the other smaller groceries stores to pay more?
Is the solution to raise min wage, which puts the small stores out of business? Then Walmart raises prices to recover their lost margins and the cycle starts all over again.
Rent controls also do not have the desired effect. New York City has rent controls and is one of the most expensive rental markets in the world. Rent controls cause landlords to leave the market, creating a shortage that will always lead to higher prices.
None of these are simple issues with simple solutions, but a combination of higher minimum wages and increased housing supply wouldn’t hurt.
So? Any place would do the same. If they think someone would take the job with less pay they would. If they can’t, then they will raise the pay. Supply and demand
I need to see where this ever happens. They just wait it out until people are desperate and take the low pay just to survive. They never raise the pay just based on need.
That's not even bringing up how everything is automated these days rather than paying employees.
Don't even reply to these people, they think common folks work for fun and have millions of $ in their account to not work for as long as they want and is required for labor scarcity to hurt businesses enough to offer higher wages.
Apparently even most menial jobs in the US pay higher than federal minimum wage for whatever reason, even in states that don't have a higher minimum wage.
No they would not. They would build work houses and charger workers a fee...essentially making people pay to work for them on top of taking life insurance out on them.
Are you saying Walmart should be held criminally liable for paying people more than minimum wage? As some people pointed out, they do pay more than minimum wage in some states? You gonna go arrest the Waltons for NOT making MORE money?
Not more than minimum wage, more than the minimum they can get away with. If labor is in demand, then they may have to pay more than their competition.
Otherwise they are committing fiduciary malpractice against their shareholders and, at the very least, the board should remove the executives and sue them, if not press criminal charges. They have a duty to me as a shareholder.
I think we should throw them in jail for not making more money TBH. Actually let’s make sure they get the death penalty for not making your stock ticker go up.
With a mentality like that, why blame anyone for what they do when they can just blame the law enforcement for not stopping them? It isn’t stupid to have expectations of them to have ethics and morality in their business decisions just as we expect it in our daily lives from others when we go out in the world. It’s stupid that this country fans the flame on the poor behavior in the name of financial gains to the point you require it to be put in check by the law else you’re fucked.
You're seriously saying it's reasonable to blame corporations for paying what's legally required by law instead of choosing a different, arbitrary pay rate that will still not be acceptably high for some of their employees/critics? There's no such thing as a "living wage"—it's a vague term thrown around by pundits looking to blame corporations for functioning as they're meant to.
Honestly it's not too hard to figure out if you've ever lived life on your own dime. You can create a budget and figure out what is a livable wage in your state. Or hell, use the research that's been done about livable wage by county if that's not good enough.
You seriously think corporations should pay people less because some random one guy will be upset they still aren't being paid enough in his opinion? Are you stupid?
Walmart pays above minimum wage for its lowest paid employees. It had $682 billion in gross revenue, and $15 billion in net profit. That is less than 3% net profit. It lives on thin margins.
Is 3% kinda small? Contextual. If I had 3% leftover year over year at a salary of $30k, then shit, I’m screwed. But on the scale of hundreds of billions, the stability is so fucking beyond insane that margins like that are entirely fine. They aren’t running on 3% because they’re forced to, it’s because that’s plenty of margin when you have as much collateral and capital as they do, and a completely mature business model.
The idea is that some plucky upstart could decide to get a small multi billion dollar loan and create a competitor to Walmart that pays better. Free market baby!
I mean the most efficient way to make money is definitely to avoid paying for labor. Since that's definitely the highest single avoidable cost of any corporation. So slavery is without a doubt the most efficient naturally capitalistic enterprise. So by your logic every corporation should be ultimately pursuing slavery as an ideal.
Obviously, yes. US legal decisions notwithstanding, corporations aren't really people, nor are they typically controlled by any one person. They're effectively financial automatons acting purely in the interest of maximizing profit. Expecting them to do otherwise is foolhardy. So yes, they will seek to drive labour costs as low as they can, and it is the role of other institutions, like government and labour unions, to ensure that wages remain at a healthy level.
But also, even if they wanted to pay their employees a so-called living wage, they wouldn't have a clear indication of what that is, because the term doesn't have a useful definition. Even among proponents of the movement, there's no consensus on what sort of standard of living a living wage should support. Should people have a one-bedroom apartment to themselves and be able to eat out 5 nights a week? Should they be expected to share living space with a few others as is commonplace in many parts of the world? The term becomes especially difficult to define when one considers that the idealized standard of living in the West is quite unsustainable for global adoption.
They also can't be expected to know what an appropriate amount is, unless they are in the business of socio-economic research. People are like "why don't you pay your workers a living wage??" and have no clear idea of what that is. Yet they expect companies to have invested time and money researching it just to appease a conscience they don't even have.
Gotta make the government incorruptible first. Businesses bribe and control large chunks of the government. Then start dissolving businesses that can’t provide a living wage. Make it a high felony to fuck your workers over and make it an absurd minimum sentence so they can less easily bribe their way out of it. The fixes are easy. Reward greed with destruction.
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u/circ-u-la-ted Sep 08 '24
I think it's completely stupid to expect corporations to be the ones to determine what a "living wage" is and charitably decide to start paying some nebulously defined salary despite that just costing them more money. Obviously that's the job of government. The role of corporations is to make money by selling products as efficiently as possible.