yolland
Forum Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2004
- Messages
- 7,471
I also find the statement ethically unacceptable on many levels. djfeelgood is correct in his analysis of what Wal-Mart would likely do if actually forced to raise wages and/or benefits. In principle, it's what any business would do, really; but people who take home less than $20,000 a year and don't possess many "marketable skills" are more vulnerable than salaried professionals to such "adjustments", particularly when they have dependents. If low-end-paying service jobs played a more minor role in our economy than they do, I might not see this as such a dilemma, but in fact it's a huge sector and growing proportionally all the time. Which means we ultimately wind up effectively saying that if you are "just" a cashier, if you are "just" a line cook, if you are "just" a filing clerk, then really you deserve to constantly live one crisis away from financial disaster.nbcrusader said:
Also, from my own experience (a decade ago now, admittedly) of working in retail for several years--some of them as a clerk, some of them as a manager--I'm inclined to be dismissive of the assumption that a retail employee who stays where they are must therefore be a content employee who feels satisfied with their wages. There really isn't a whole lot of significant variation in how much different retailers pay, so most see their options as pretty limited. Also like anyone else, retail workers attach a lot of value to working with a group of people whose company they enjoy, so if they're socially content in a particular workplace environment, they're not likely to jump ship and start over again from square one if there isn't significant financial gain to be had. (Or perhaps access to employee discounts on particularly needed or desired merchandise.) And again, much though I hate this phrase, these are generally folks without a lot of "marketable skills"--they really would need at least a couple more years of training and/or schooling to increase their earning prospects significantly, and a great many of them have neither the money nor the time for that. Yes, a lucky few do stumble across lucrative opportunities that require no further outside training, but they're the exception, and even then they're often folks with above-average networking and self-promotional skills. Finally, retailers in general have drastically scaled back their salaried middle-management tiers over the past decade, so it's increasingly rarer for employees to advance to salaried positions through internal promotion--outside hires with MBAs and prior management experience tend to get those jobs instead.
I can't say I personally have good alternatives to offer, but neither can I say I find this situation acceptable. I'm fine with more highly skilled/educated workers commanding higher pay as far as it goes, but not to the degree that millions must go chronically uninsured, unable to build up a savings account, or unable to send their children to college. If clearly government handouts aren't an adequate solution, then clearly neither is de facto subsidization through a race to the supply-chain bottom.
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hence making him have to wait the 6 months all over again (i think it was 6) to get fully insured. i saw on some documentary (not sure which one) that this is a common policy for them.
