6 Members of Walton Family Have More Money Than The Bottom 30% of Americans
When you consider how these folks have gotten this obscenely rich it is past obscene. They have built this wealth off exploiting their workers, small businesses, cheap foreign labor, attacking the middle class, and generally turning us into a LCD (lowest common denominator) society. Have I mentioned that they hate puppies, apple pie, and the American way?
Just a few of things I can think of off the top of head:
Wal*Mart has consistently underpaid its workers. This is especially troubling as they are the largest private employer in the United States, employing some 2.2 million souls as of the latest data. To give some perspective, the Federal government employs 2,823,777 which include 296,628 part-timers. If you total up the employment of all 50 state governments you come up with 4,283,597 FTEs. The next closest private employer to Wal-Mart, IBM, employs 436,000.
See chart below for listing of the top 10 private employers in the U.S.A.
It seems hard to get the exact number of part-time employees at Wal-Mart, even the NY Times was unsure. I’ve seen figures between 20 and 40%. I would tend to believe the higher number. We as taxpayers, not customers, as taxpayers subsidize the low wages at Wal-Mart
“Wal-Mart has thousands of associates who qualify for Medicaid and other publicly subsidized care, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. For instance in Ohio Wal-Mart has more associates and associate dependents on Medicaid than any other employer, costing taxpayers $44.8 million in 2009.” 6
Here is one amazing fact from the same paper,
“Wal-Mart’s 2010 health care offerings have a high annual deductible of $4,400 which means a family would have to spend $5,102 of their own money on health care before Wal-Mart’s insurance pays anything. Based on the average salary of a Wal-Mart employee this payment represents almost 25% of their annual income. “
It is estimated that if Wal-Mart would pay a living wage of $12 an hour, it would bring thousands of its employees above the poverty line and off of government subsidies. The annual cost to Wal-Mart customers…less than $13 a year. This is about a 1% bump in prices. 5 I would gladly pay this to help my fellow citizens.
Wal-Mart has been fatal to small businesses wherever it opens. Small towns with many local shops are now full of deserted buildings due to Wal-Mart under pricing them. It is sad that we lost the diversity of businesses that this brought as well as the entrepreneurial spirit in small towns.
Wherever they open a store there is always the promise of more jobs. The reality is that there is a net job loss, and the remaining jobs are lower paying.
Now add in their head first rush to offshore our manufacturing. I am still trying to figure out if Wal-Mart was the lead lemming in this or the paid Pied Piper of the Chinese. A few reasons for off-shoring manufacturing are lower (really low) wages, avoidance of strict labor laws, and less (or none) environmental regulation. Positives for your bottom line I am sure, but negatives for real people and the planet.
Fact is in study after study, in location after location, Wal-Mart is not a positive force. In my opinion, it can be said they are a negative force.
The Waltons have gotten this filthy ( and I do believe filthy really applies here) rich on the backs of the American people. They are a wonderful example of capitalism run amok.
As long as we tolerate it they will continue to fleece their workers and the American tax payer. Question is…why do we let them. Why do we as consumers continue to shop there. And yes I am guilty. As they grow bigger, it seems our choices of where to shop and what to buy become smaller and smaller. Why does our government allow them to get away with such egregious employment practices?
A recent article Presenting the Ten Greediest Americans of 2011 had this to say about Wal-Mart and their CEO Michael Duke (why do I always want to read that as David Duke?).
How do CEOs end up making so much? Ask Michael Duke, the chief exec at retail colossus Wal-Mart. Duke takes home his millions — $18.7 million in his company’s latest fiscal year alone — the old-fashioned way. He squeezes workers.
But sometimes squeezing just can’t get the job done. No big deal for Michael Duke. He just moves the goal posts that determine his “pay for performance.”
Duke moved into Wal-Mart’s CEO suite in 2009. Since then, he has ended“premium pay” for hours worked on Sundays, eliminated profit-sharing,sheared health care benefits, and cut staffing so low, Retailing Today reports, that customers sometimes can’t find shopping carts because the store where they’re shopping has no employees available to collect carts from the parking lot.
This sort of chronic understaffing may help explain why Wal-Mart’s “same-store sales” — the business “metric” that compares a retail chain’s sales at the same group of stores from one quarter to the next — started tumbling soon after Duke took over as CEO and didn’t stop sinking until this past fall.
This same-store nosedive should have cost CEO Duke big time at pay time, since same-store sales, explains a New York Times analysis, accounted for 30 percent of the factors that Wal-Mart used to calculate Duke’s bonus.
But lo and behold, all of a sudden this past spring, Wal-Mart’s board of directors compensation committee eliminated same-store sales from Duke’s bonus calculations. The immediate result: Duke would receive $16 million in “performance” pay — despite Wal-Mart’s stunning same-store sales tailspin.
Duke’s total $18.7 million paycheck for the year would represent 750 times the annual pay of a Wal-Mart worker making $12 an hour, working 40 hours a week.
Some 75 percent of Wal-Mart workers make less than $12 an hour, notes a new report on Wal-Mart’s business model, and few Wal-Mart workers get 40 hours.
Just by way of comparison the average ratio of CEO to worker in the US is 475:1. In Canada and Italy it is 20:1, in France it is 15:1. In the economic powerhouses of Germany and Japan it is 12:1 and 11:1, respectively. The next closest to the US ratio is Venezuela at 50:1.
| Top 10 Private Employers in US | |
|---|---|
| Company | Employees |
| Wal*Mart | 2,100,000 |
| IBM | 436,00 |
| UPS | 400,00 |
| McDonalds | 400,000 |
| Kroger | 388,000 |
| Target | 355,00 |
| HP | 324,000 |
| Sears | 312,000 |
| Pepsi | 294,00 |
| BOA | 288,00 |
Sources:
- Federal employment data
- http://www.census.gov/govs/apes/historical_data_2009.html
- State employment data
- http://www.census.gov/govs/apes/
- Private employment data
- Somewhat dated, but an interesting read
- Report by Representative George Miller on Wal-Mart’s Labor Record
- Wal-Mart Could Easily Pay $12 an Hour
- Ratio of CEO Pay to Average Worker by Country
Wal-Mart didn’t make HP/MS/IBM/thousands of other companies, move their Help Desks abroad. Wal-Mart didn’t make thousands of companies outsource their IT departments to India. Wal-Mart didn’t make Nike/thousands of other companies find lower cost labor elsewhere on the globe.
Don’t blame Wal-Mart, or the thousands of other companies, for working within the ‘system’. Blame the ‘system’. And blame Congress for the system. The system has been driving businesses abroad for years. Congress writes the rules for the system.
Stop re-electing the same morons that are destroying our economy by writing system rules benefiting themselves and their campaign donors.
We are in a global economy, and we are the highest cost supplier, labor-wise. Something has to change. And instead of Congress staying ahead of the ball, Wal-Mart and thousands of companies have played by the corrupted system rules to drive their bottom line, which is the main objective of the ‘system.
My 2 cents worth, which after the few minutes to write this, is now only worth 1.8326 cents.
No charge for the adrenaline rush. And thanks for acting like somebody may actually read my blog.
Is it really a global economy? The overstretched supply lines are breaking down. These supply lines are dependent on fossil fuels that are running out and ruining our planet. Countries are realizing that to be dependent on food supplies from outside their own borders is a huge security threat. While in many ways we have become more commercially dependent on each other, we do not act in unison to solve those problems that can only be approached globally.
IMHO, no company should be allowed to get as big and as dominant as Wal-Mart. When they do their agenda starts to dominate over the good of the many (thanks Spock). I do not think we really have a “choice” on who gets it elected. Money controls our politics and that money comes from corporations and the very rich that have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo. It generally does matter if you choose one from column A or one from column B, the end result is the same…corporate puppets.
There are many faults of capitalism. One is that it is generally one-dimensional. The bottom line is god, and nothing else matters. Another fault is the belief, actually a guiding principle, that all is fair in business. There is a reason that business ethics is used as an example of an oxymoron. Many of these corporations are nothing more than modern day Vikings raping and pillaging as they seek to maximize quarterly profits at any cost. Until corporations and governments begin to think socially responsibly in a global manner, the demise of our planet and our society will continue. I hold out little hope for the future of my grandchildren and great grandchildren. It strikes me that greed always triumphs in the short run resulting in decay in the long run.
Capitalism is an economic system based on greed and fear, two of the worst human emotions. It is a system only sustainable with continued growth. In biological systems unchecked growth is called cancer. I think this is an appropriate analogy for our economic model, diseased and cancerous. I do not know what it is, but we need to move beyond this model. We need to move to model that is not based on continual growth. We need to move to model that incorporates the better impulses of our species.
Sigh…
Cancer is a great diagnosis, but there is also another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnE8D3tgZ5c
Enjoy.