If Walmart employees can't support themselves and wind up taking advantage of charity - either privately or through the state - isn't this also the system working as intended? Systems are in place to help low income individuals. These are low income individuals. It strikes me as strange moral reasoning to say the low market price of unskilled labor is Walmart's fault.
It strikes me as particularly strange moral reasoning to charge the use of welfare in this case to Walmart's account and call it a subsidy. That would only make sense to me if the people earning that wage would do better if Walmart wasn't there. I don't think that's the case, though. Unskilled labor doesn't pay that well whether you're flipping burgers, delivering pizzas, stocking shelves, or waiting tables. It's not the fault of the companies offering those jobs - it's just what that sort of labor is worth.
But Walmart should just pay them more, everyone deserves a living wage? I don't think I agree. I think there is room in the economy for second incomes, for student jobs, for seasonal work. Not everyone is a single head of household, and if you don't have the skills to be one, often you just - don't move out. We have no shortage of help - private charities that do vocational training, societal safety nets to keep things from getting too bad, most people get by with help from friends and family until they can make it on their own. I think there's nothing wrong with that.
One of the things I would be concerned with is insisting that Walmart pay its employees more. That will surely come in the form of raising prices, and the very low prices at Walmart are a boon to low income folks - both those who work at Walmart and those who don't. I am skeptical that making Walmart less efficient will help the communities it's in, compared with the social safety nets and private charity - generally provided by the better off. Forcing Walmart to pay higher wages strikes me as taking from the poor to give to the poor.
On the contrary - the folks I know who work at Walmart are content with the situation and doing ok. They know they could go get a vocational degree or something and make better money as a welder or something. They don't want to. It's an odd job between stages of life, not a career, and good enough for the moment. If there are enough people like this to run a whole business that hugely benefits the poor by offering goods at low prices, isn't that system on the whole a good thing?
Alternatively, we keep it as is and more and more people's labor goes to zero (eg. driverless cars). One way or another, the wealth needs to flow to the people or there will be unrest. With unrest, people may elect someone with radical changes in mind and then you really won't like your situation (eg. a fascist government like Russia where the top guy simply takes your stuff on behalf of the people - but the people never actually see a dime of it). A little course correction here to balance things out will go a long way to keeping the social fabric together.
So it seems possible to give each worker an extra $100/month. But now you have to sell this to the shareholders, which may include institutional investors managing retirement accounts. Good luck figuring out that mess.
Having a job and being stuck on charity is not the system working as designed. A system working as designed wouldn't need charity at all, and certainly would be needed for those that are working and are still indigent.
I really find it odd that you think paying more would be "taking from the poor to give to the poor". Walmart and the Walton family are extremely profitable and wealthy. They can easily absorb the the cost with negligible real impact. They could even start by not paying a stock dividend.
The question isn't about some teenager. It's about the person that isn't. It's about the person working two or three jobs. You can't say that Walmart benefits the poor when they famously pay just enough to shop only there.
I suggest you get out of your bubble, because the people I know that work at Walmart, Dollar General (do you even know that store?) are heads of households. These people are screwed. Not just by Walmart but by the entire economy.
That's a rather aggressive and insulting way to attempt to make your point.
Disclosure -- I am married to Dove. We live in 80219 [0]. Median income here is a little under half of the state average. More than a third of the adult population has less than high school education; less than one third has ever been to college.
In the last four years, in addition to our nuclear family, we've had the following live in our house:
- a fresh college graduate, working as a tutor in the public schools
- teen parents and their infant; the mom worked at WalMart and the dad at another grocery store
- my divorced sister and her elementary-aged son; she worked part time as a substitute paraprofessional in special ed classrooms
- my sister who was doing just fine on her own until her building was bought out from under her, and couldn't find an affordable place where she was able to practice her religion (can't find roommates who keep kosher; here she has room to set up her own mini-kitchen.)
My parents live one zip code over, in a slightly less poor but still very poor area. My mom works at WalMart; my dad is disabled; they also have two adult children and two non-relatives living with them, including one who prefers the pronoun "they" and one who goes by the nickname "Hobo Joe".
Why am I saying all of this? Because this is the "bubble" we live in. And when well-meaning people look in from the outside and say "minimum wage should be a living wage" and "people shouldn't be able to be partially government-subsidized and partially earning a wage", I think they don't realize what that approach actually entails. It basically guarantees my mom would be unemployed and 100% on government benefits, because nobody is going to hire a 66 year old woman who spent 30 years out of the workforce raising children. It means that people like "Hobo Joe" can't get an entry-level job and are therefore going to live their entire lives on government benefits, instead of slowly becoming more independent. Yes, these people are screwed by the economy -- but trying to make entry-level employers like WalMart pay more makes them even more screwed.
You don't help people climb the ladder by kicking out the bottom rung. You help them by making the transition from unemployed to entry level as smooth as possible, by making it so that a person can make a partial transition where they have a mix of both, and by eliminating "cliffs" that they have to jump over in order to improve their situation.
We know that Walmart forces employees to work off the clock. They've settled multiple class-action lawsuits about this. This of course, goes by a name. It's called wage theft. Even before the theft, we know that Walmart pays their employee literally poverty wages. This is evident this time a year, when you go to a Walmart and see a barrel sitting out front marked for food donations for Walmart employees. On top of that, Walmart is essentially government subsidized, because they encourage their employees to sign up for welfare as part of their on-boarding process.[0]
So now of course, why would anyone put up with this? Quite simply, there's no other choice. Yeah, these people are unskilled and left far behind in the economy, but that doesn't mean that someone with a full time job should live in poverty. This doesn't mean that a multibillion dollar multinational megacorp, should be getting 6 billion dollars a year in taxpayer payroll subsidies.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...