Not sure how accurate any of it is. My wife is an hourly employee, has worked at Walmart for 14 years and makes about $16 per hour, which is well above other jobs in the area for equivalent work. The healthcare is great, although it is getting more expensive now that Odeathcare is in effect.
Yes, there is plenty of BS at the job. However, you can find that at any job.
I don’t understand people, when I started working I was earning $3.35 an hour with no benefits. I worked at a low skill entry level job, and did that for several years as I got my education.
There is no doubt the country has changed, and sadly many jobs on the lower end of education and skill are no longer there, and cheap foreign labor and free trade has depressed wages in the US... Anyone who says otherwise is just flat out ignorant of the facts.
Some folks have benefited greatly by these policies, others have been destroyed by them.
That being said, today, about 26 years later, I make many times the minimum wage, but it wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter, I started out at minimum wage, I cleaned up all kinds of $hit both figuratively and literally, over the course of my career... But every time I have had a disagreement with my employer over my compensation rate, if they couldn’t or wouldn’t come around to my way of thinking, went out into the marketplace and was told quite quickly if what I wanted was fair or not... Most often I wound up changing jobs and got the compensation I desired and sometimes a good bit more.
I never thought my employer was evil because they didn’t pay me what I wanted... stupid perhaps.. but never evil. I presented my case for why I thought I deserved more, sometimes the employer agreed, others they didn’t but never did I think it was their obligation to pay me more... If they didn’t agree, I moved on.
I am not going to argue Wal Mart or Home Depot are the higest payers on the planet, but in MOST parts of the country, people can indeed live off the wages they pay. Even if you have 2 people working for $10 an hour, you are making 40k a year... Not rich, but that’s not poverty in most of America... Yes in some high dollar markets (urban centers) that’s not much, but given the median household income in America is about 50k, that’s not poverty.
Like it or not, that’s the reality of America today, manufacturing of 2 generations ago that let someone with just a high school education walk into a job that could support a family one 1 income are long gone and they aren’t coming back... We live in the age where 2 incomes are needed at that level to make it if you are raising a family... The problems come in when you wind up with just 1 income but have children or dependents. The income is enough for 1 person to survive, but not enough to raise a family on.