http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/
Wal Mart wants to come to my town of Chicago, but Chicago is requiring that Wal Mart pay their employees a "LIVING WAGE" of $10 an hour plus $3 an hour of beneifts.
Are you freaking kidding me! Why can the goverment have a say in how much Wal Mart pays their employees? Shouldnt that be up to Wal Mart/the market? I believe the starting wage right now is somewhere around $7-8 for grunt level entry work.
But here is the thing. If an employee stays there a while they can move up the ladder prety quickly and get to that so called living wage. They just need to show that they are competent and willing to work.
One of the funnies parts of this article is this :
"Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon accused Wal-Mart of "holding a gun" to the Council's head. Gannon said he would "not be intimidated" by a behemoth that clearly needs Chicago more than Chicago needs Wal-Mart."
This is easily contradicted by this :
http://www.chicagobusiness.com
P.S. - Will the Government please get out of the way so people can live the lives they choose to lead. Thanks
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
We hold these truths to be self evident that walmart is evil.
I didn't know that the owners of small mom-and-pop business 'chose to lead the life' in which the are ground under the heals of a gigantic international corporation and are forced to sell their small independant businesses and take up jobs for $6/hour working for the behemoth that had destroyed them. That's a very interesting choice right there.
Alternatively, you small-government people could just accept the fact that every ounce of power over the individual's life which is taken away from the government is immediately handed over to another group. If you take power away from law enforcement, more power is handed to the criminals. If you take power away from commercial regulators, more power is given to large corporations.
This is not to say that all power should be given to the government; obviously concentrating too much power in any one sector allows that power to be abused. But any time you argue that a specific power should be taken away from the governement, you had better first think long and hard about who that power will end up going to, and whether that will be better or worse for the citizenry.
Why are they forced to sell their small business? Could they not just offer s a service that the BIG EVIL Corporation does not offer. IE better customer service, employees that know the product that is being sold.
Anyway back to the point - Why should the government be able to tell Wal Mart how much they should pay their employees. I believe their should not even be a federally mandated minumum wage.
If Wal Mart wants to pay their employees $2 an hour then they can. But guess what - target is going to open across the street and pay their employees $4. Then Wall Mart will match and so forth until a wage is found that keeps the employees happy enought to come back to work.
Why would Target pay their employeed more? Maybe if we were talking about computer programmers with PH.D.s and years of experience, there could be a bidding war over employees. But if Target opens across the street also paying $2, they're going to get more than enough applicants to stock shelves and work the register. This is because there are simply enough people who desperately need work and are applying for these types of jobs. If you disagree, look here:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=19286
Any worker who has a set of skills for which there is more demand among employers than there are available employees will be able to leverage those skills to get a reasonable wage. The minimum wage is in place to ensure that workers wihtout such skills will still have enough money to live on if they are willing to put in a full day at whatever jobs are available.
Also, I'll point out now that telling those people to get a skillset is obviously not a solution, since a. that would just flood the market for other skillsets, decreasing the demand that made good wages possible, and b. our economy simply demands a certain number of unskilled laboroers, even if half of that unskilled labor force got PH.Ds the same number of people would still end up doing unskilled labor simply because that's where there are jobs available.
Then why does Target and Walmart pay their employees more than minumum wage right now? If your theory were true all companies would be paying minumum wage.
Post a Comment