A few weeks ago, I posted something here about the fact that increasingly states, having had their budgets squeezed to the point of breaking, were beginning to turn toward Wal-Mart, asking the retailer start to pay for its fair share of the social services by its people. Fortunately, in the subsequent weeks, the attention hasn’t abated. People are, now more than ever, looking at our nation’s largest employer, and asking, “Why is it that we the tax-payers are having to insure your employees when you take in over $10 billion a year in profits?” Well, here’s a related story from the New York Times:
With most of Wal-Mart’s workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.
A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company’s low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called “Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart,” five members of Congress joined women’s advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more…
You can find the rest of the article here… And, if you haven’t called your Governor’s office yet, why not look up the number tonight and leave a message asking why it is that you’re having to subsidize Wal-Mart with your hard-earned tax dollars?
5 Comments
One of the worries I have about writing to my elected officials about how I am not happy to be subsidizing walmart employees is that such feeling might be used as an excuse to cut benefits to people. Then, they would just have their crappy Walmart job and no benefits.
What we need to figure out how to do is to tax both Walmart the business and the rich executives more in order to pay for all the benefits the poorer Walmart employees use.
I suppose you might have a valid concern, Lynne, but I think that somehow the people of America need to be made aware of the fact that the inexpensive toilet paper they’re using isn’t as inexpensive as they thought that it was. Jobs left this country in order to provide that inexpensive two-ply toilet paper, and we’re subsidizing the Wal-Mart business model with our taxes… There’s no such thing as a five gallon jar of pickles for $3. Believe me, we’re paying for it somehow.
For those among us who are very cost conscious, might I suggest that if you were to use the toilet paper before reaching the cashier, it would not only be inexpensive, but free.
Same goes for pickles.
i think that trying to choke down five gallons of pickles on your way to the register would make the toilet paper useage sort of a given.
it’s a pleasant image, to be sure.
If only you could work some santorum into the mix as well.
Cockeyed has an informal random price comparison between Target and Walmart. It’s not the blow out you would think it is.