Re:Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their ...
by adventured on Friday June 02, 2017 @03:10PM
(#14472561)
If you want Walmart to pay a "living wage" for the bottom 50% of their employees - then you're asking Walmart to fire a million people in the next decade.
Walmart's net income has been declining for years. Their sales have topped out. Their margins are razor thin. Amazon is beginning to cut deeply into their business. Some non-trivial percentage of Amazon's growth over the next ten years must come directly from Walmart.
Walmart is in trouble, Sears style circa 1990. And you want them to raise wages significantly when they already can't afford the employee base they have. Good luck.
How does this sound instead? Fire a million workers, try to get the sales to employee ratio closer to Costco by automating anything and everything they can. Then raise the salaries modestly of the remaining million employees that are higher value labor. Then the fired million people become 100% subsidized by tax payers because there are no jobs for them and are not going to be. Nothing can stop some variation of that scenario from happening, the only thing slowing it down is the low cost of the labor in question. Raise that cost, Walmart will be forced to accelerate the employee reduction as their net income continues to contract.
Your sole choice re Walmart & a living wage, is full government subsidization of the low skill employees, or partial. Besides, Canada, Australia and every European welfare state uses a public subsidization system for low value labor: the top 50% pay for the welfare (healthcare et al) for the bottom 50% that do not earn much (who do you think is paying for the welfare costs of France's perpetually high unemployment rate?). If you take a job in the UK making minimum wage, you are not covering the cost of all of your benefits such as healthcare, and the UK has a relatively low corporate income tax rate, who do you think is subsidizing that low pay rate on the labor? This is common all over the developed world.
Walmart's net income has been declining for years. Their sales have topped out. Their margins are razor thin. Amazon is beginning to cut deeply into their business. Some non-trivial percentage of Amazon's growth over the next ten years must come directly from Walmart.
Walmart is in trouble, Sears style circa 1990. And you want them to raise wages significantly when they already can't afford the employee base they have. Good luck.
How does this sound instead? Fire a million workers, try to get the sales to employee ratio closer to Costco by automating anything and everything they can. Then raise the salaries modestly of the remaining million employees that are higher value labor. Then the fired million people become 100% subsidized by tax payers because there are no jobs for them and are not going to be. Nothing can stop some variation of that scenario from happening, the only thing slowing it down is the low cost of the labor in question. Raise that cost, Walmart will be forced to accelerate the employee reduction as their net income continues to contract.
Your sole choice re Walmart & a living wage, is full government subsidization of the low skill employees, or partial. Besides, Canada, Australia and every European welfare state uses a public subsidization system for low value labor: the top 50% pay for the welfare (healthcare et al) for the bottom 50% that do not earn much (who do you think is paying for the welfare costs of France's perpetually high unemployment rate?). If you take a job in the UK making minimum wage, you are not covering the cost of all of your benefits such as healthcare, and the UK has a relatively low corporate income tax rate, who do you think is subsidizing that low pay rate on the labor? This is common all over the developed world.