Posted on 10/25/2005 2:29:37 PM PDT by Crackingham
Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said he's urging Congress to consider raising the minimum wage so that Wal-Mart customers don't have to struggle paycheck to paycheck. Scott told Wal-Mart directors and executives in a speech Monday that he believes "it is time for Congress to take a look at the minimum wage and other legislation that can help working families."
"The U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade and we believe it is out of date with the times," Scott said. "We can see first-hand at Wal-Mart how many of our customers are struggling to get by. Our customers simply don't have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks."
Given increasing gas prices and other economic pressures on Wal-Mart customers, Scott went on to say that Wal-Mart shoppers will further be challenged to "support themselves and their families."
"While it is unusual for us to take a public position on a public policy issue of this kind, we simply believe it is time for Congress to take a responsible look at the minimum wage and other legislation that may help working families," he said.
Tracy Sefl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart Watch, a group that's been highly critical of the retailer, said Scott's comments on raising minimum wage were "laughable and out of left field."
"I find it disingenuous and laughable that Lee Scott makes these remarks while the company hires lobbyist such as Lee Culpepper who oppose raising the minimum wage," Sefl said.
"We would be the first to applaud real change. But when a comment on raising minimum wage is dashed off and it flies in the face of Wal-Mart's own corporate stance, that's laughable," she added.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Or if it wants to help out "the poor" it could lower IT'S prices.
IT'S = ITS
oops...
Then you need a better grasp of history.
The Lion tamer gets eaten by the Lion.
So, college might not be it. Like I said, not everyone is a rocket scientist. Of course, there are not that many rocket jobs either. However, NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING PREVENTS you from learning a marketable skill of some type. Something better than flipping stinking hamburgers or working the counter at 7-11. The military offers hundreds of jobs you can use on the outside. Hundreds. You get 3, 4, 6 years of experience and you are still only maybe 25 or 26 years old. Your whole life in front of you. Experience to sell to an employer. Sure beats the hell out of: "do you want to supersize those fries and coke sir?"
The minimum wage is just that -- a minimum. The gov'ment doesn't need to increase the minimum wage for Walmart to pay its employees more.
That's assuming that employers are flawless people who always do what's right by others and never try to take advantage of anyone.
True. But most all that comes with experience gained.
The reason why Walmart can't raise it's rates, is because then they would have to charge higher prices. Then they lose their competitive edge and the associated volume.
Unilaterally raising prices is an out of business strategy for Walmart. Only the government can unilaterally change the market that way.
The same logic applies to outsourcing to China. If it makes short term financial sense, even if it's bad for the country long term, you had better do it or your company won't be around to see the long term.
Again Government needs to step in with import tarriffs or technology export controls to stop the outflow of technology and manufacturing capacity, because individual firms just can't.
Local owned businesses are more likely to care whether their employees can live off what they're paid. Corporatists flatly don't care. Their interest is bottom line and only the bottom line. Whether you can eat or pay your bills is of no interest to them - even if you are living in the cheapest houseing and barest of minimums.
But they don't because they don't really care. If they did care, they'd raise their wage so their employees could afford to pay their bills. Instead, they continue to treat them like mere cattle as is the norm in the corporate mindset. Cure? The end of corporations is a start. Educating people in basic matters of morality would be another great idea.
Bunk. I worked there for 4 years and left there making 7.25 an hour. And was a good employee for them. At the time, Mcdonalds across the street was hiring at 7.50 an hour. That same McDonalds is now hiring around 6.00 an hour and is giving no full-time positions. That's what happens when you compete based on wage. And in an economy that is now largely based on consumption... You figure it out. Walmart already sees the writing on the wall. If people don't have the income to afford the consumption, then the economy is gonna reflect it. It does, which is why they're speaking. But the minimum wage isn't what needs fixed.. it's the attitudes that ran wages into the ground to begin with as a tool for competition. And those profiting from it aren't going to either care what they've wrought, nor change to fix the problem. They will raise their own wage, bail, and stick the public with the bill first.. just like Delphi, Enron, Worldcom.....
Right...
The minimum wage is practically meaningless because the market wage is at least $2 or $3 more per hour.
Don't you get tired of repeating the simplistic drivel in the face of the evidence that it is wrong, and that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison and belatedly, Thomas Jefferson, not to mention Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan ( not a free trader after your stripe )...were right. You continually ignore the fact of the national security component.
Here is one severe hazard element that your blindly followed policies enables:
Posted 11/07/05 15:43
Facing China’s Quiet Juggernaut
By MARY C. FITZGERALD, Defense News
Early this year, Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan called on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to harness cutting-edge military technologies, to enhance strategic and basic research, and to make breakthroughs in key technologies in a bid to "leap forward in the armaments development drive."
Comrade Cao also was announcing to the world that China’s economy had advanced sufficiently in technological sophistication to ensure that it could focus on 21st-century weaponry. We are now on notice, as Russian military officials have warned, that China's ultimate objective is to achieve global military-economic dominance by 2050. This must be reflected in the current U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review.
China's gross domestic product is expected to double between 2000 and 2010. The defense budget continues to increase annually by double-digit margins. In his new book, "The Emerging Chinese Advanced Technology Superstate," Ernest Preeg has forecast that China will become "an advanced technology superstate: A fundamental restructuring of Chinese defense industry in 1997 to 1999 shifted control of defense enterprises from the military to the civilian government, and integrated their operations with commercial advanced technology enterprises ... The result has been a more rapid rate of military system modernization, particularly for the navy and defense electronic systems."
This is the linchpin of China’s prospects for emerging as America’s "peer competitor" in high-tech warfare.
In the late 1990s, China revamped its military research and development program. The PLA is currently pursuing — by both the Sino-Russian multibillion-dollar arms pact and by incorporating other critical foreign technologies — systems of its own.
Besides modernizing its conventional armed forces, today’s China focuses on three military priorities:
• Aerospace.
• Nuclear weapons.
• "New-concept" weapons, such as laser, electromagnetic, plasma, climatic, genetic and biotechnological.
The central principle driving the modernization of national defense is reliance on science and technology to strengthen the armed forces.
The ultimate objective of this particular revolution in military affairs, say the Chinese, is to build a capacity to win the future “information war” — which can only be won by achieving space dominance. The core of ongoing Chinese military reforms thus consists of developing those specific symmetrical and asymmetrical systems designed to neutralize today’s U.S. technological superiority in the space-information continuum.
China already is striving to offset the military advantages of America’s existing aerospace systems, seeking especially to challenge the air dominance that the United States must continue to maintain over the Taiwan Strait if it wants to deter and, if need be, counter any major Chinese attack against Taiwan.
Chinese military thinkers have offered their notions of how to deal with Taiwan’s “independence elements.” Beijing is said to have earmarked an annual military budget of 500 billion yuan ($61.9 billion) to accelerate production of the required armaments. PLA leaders, who have pledged that they can capture Taiwan within seven days, appear bent on conducting an anti-carrier campaign against the United States if it comes to that. As Chinese President Hu Jintao has boasted, this war “will not obstruct the holding of the 2008 Olympic games.”
China foresees a time when it can push back American air power, first, farther away from its own coasts, and then even farther out from critical areas like the South China Sea. Russian officials concur with this assessment. They warn that a Chinese “Monroe doctrine” is quietly at work: “All of Asia belongs to the Chinese — and not only Asia.”
Since 2001, we have been challenged by the need to transform our forces to deal with a cunning, soulless, but essentially low-tech predator — the terrorist. Yet those other realms of warfare that occupied us prior to 9/11 — information, naval and above all, aerospace — still constitute the nucleus of the new revolution in military affairs. If we neglect the timely development of weaponry in these arenas, then China could catch America like a deer in the proverbial headlights, precisely where we caught them after the 1991 victory in Desert Storm.
History has taught all generations that maintaining technological superiority, not to mention a nation itself, requires a policy, persistence and (sadly) a price. But at least two recent U.S. technological initiatives, “Air-Land Battle” and “Star Wars,” have already helped smash the bloody concrete of the Berlin Wall.
The Quadrennial Defense Review is due next year. It must address the evolving Chinese military, economic and — lest we forget — totalitarian juggernaut.
Mary C. FitzGerald is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, which is preparing a report on advanced technology and Chinese military power.
So how do you react then to a situation where one nation is large enough and their government totalitarian power over its people is sufficient to game the free market, so as to coerce away (playing unprotected Western companies against each other) all the "comparative advantages" the West has...all by "peaceful" competition.
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