VertigoGal said:
I'm willing to bet the thousands of people getting laid off from the GM plant a few miles from here will be shopping at Wal-Mart for a while.
And I'm sure GM will still end up in bankruptcy court someday. After all, selling people ugly gas guzzlers isn't the ticket to profitability. That's not the union workers fault, since they just build whatever they're told to build, but the executives. And I'm sure the bankruptcy court judge will reward its overpaid, inept management with multi-million dollar bonuses as a reward for driving the company into the ground (as is standard with most bankruptcies of major corporations). The only thing it's workers get is an unemployment check.
melon, would the Wal-Mart employees on food stamps and welfare magically have no need for social programs if they didn't even have the Wal-Mart job? (I mean, you could argue they'd be in a better position at some quaint Mom & Pop Shop if Wal-Mart never existed in the first place, but what's done is done and all that...)
That's not the point. These people are working. Now if you believe that only college-educated people deserve a reasonable wage, just say so. Then we'll have to figure what to do with the 75% of the U.S. population that doesn't have a college degree, and then wonder why our crime rate keeps on going up, and why our economy collapses because nobody is spending. And then you'll wonder why you're unemployed too when your company has to layoff half its labor force to make up for the lack of revenue.
Prior to 1986, across the board, we had something called the "Windfall Profits Tax." Whether one believes it to have been applied rather repressively or extremely is up for debate, but what it was intended to do was to force large corporations to duck the tax by reinvesting "excessive profits" either into the business or its labor. In practice, it achieved both. Once the tax was repealed, all the benefits of the tax ended. Blue-collar wages started to get slashed and businesses started to become more unstable. With less cash on-hand and more dependency on stock investment, you then ended up with companies declaring bankruptcy when a rumor destroyed their stock value.
For reference's sake, those $10 billion in Wal-Mart profits are $1 billion more than Exxon's profits this year from the high oil prices. We also happen to have a system where health coverage is dependent on the employer providing it. Now if you'd like to change that system, you'd have my support. We are inevitably careening towards nationalized healthcare. GM, prior to laying off 30,000 jobs here, mentioned that Canada is very desirable to them for growth. Their labor is all well-paid union labor like in America, but there's one difference: with Canada's national healthcare, GMs labor costs are slashed. If we are to be competitive, we are going to have to go to national healthcare. Period.
But since we have pea-brained Republicans running the show, let's get down to the hard facts. When Wal-Mart's employees are on welfare, your money is paying for it. When Wal-Mart's employees don't contribute to the health insurance superstructure, your health care premiums go up, because there are less people contributing. Wal-Mart has $10 billion in profit, and you're paying for their employees' basic needs.
Now if corporations have no responsibilities to their employees, fine. But our current economic system is predicated on the premise that corporations will, indeed, pay their employees living wages, and that corporations will, indeed, provide their full-time employees with adequate benefits. And Wal-Mart is not living up to its end of the bargain, while raking in more profits than price-gouging oil companies.
Goddamn it...why can't the Democratic Party publically say this when we need them?
Melon
(I tried to get a summer job though, with no success...I should sue for ageism.)
