Posted on 12/03/2013 9:34:29 AM PST by Kaslin
On Friday, Salon reported Breaking: Massive Black Friday strike and arrests planned, as workers defy Wal-Mart.
Defying the nation’s top employer and a business model that defines the new U.S. economy, Wal-Mart employees and allies will try to oust shopping headlines with strike stories, and throw a retail giant off its heels on what should be its happiest day of the year. By day’s end, organizers expect 1,500 total protests in cities ranging from Los Angeles, Calif., to Wasilla, Alaska, including arrests in nine cities: Seacaucus, New Jersey; Alexandria, Virginia; Dallas; Minneapolis; Chicago; Seattle; and Ontario, San Leandro, and Sacramento, California.
On December 1, the New York Times reported Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets.
Seeking to increase pressure on McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants, organizers of a movement demanding a $15-an-hour wage for fast-food workers say they will sponsor one-day strikes in 100 cities on Thursday and protest activities in 100 additional cities.
The movement, which includes the groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, is part of a growing union-backed effort by low-paid workers — including many Walmart workers and workers for federal contractors — that seeks to focus attention on what the groups say are inadequate wages.
The fast-food effort is backed by the Service Employees International Union and is also demanding that restaurants allow workers to unionize without the threat of retaliation.
Officials with the National Restaurant Association have said the one-day strikes are publicity stunts. They warn that increasing pay to $15 an hour when the federal minimum wage is $7.25 would cause restaurants to rely more on automation and hire fewer workers.
On Aug. 29, fast-food strikes took place in more than 50 cities. This week’s expanded protests will be joined by numerous community, faith and student groups, including USAction and United Students against Sweatshops.
Fight For 15
Inquiring minds are investigating the Fight for 15 website. Here is a snip.
Stand with striking Chicago fast food and retail workers!
We, hundreds of fast food and retail workers, went on strike at 30 stores in the Loop and the Magnificent Mile to demand $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. Employers like McDonalds, Whole Foods, and Sears are raking in enormous profits while workers like us, mostly adults with families, don’t get paid enough to cover basic needs like food, rent, health care and transportation.
We are risking our jobs as we continue to stand up and say ENOUGH. And we need everyone who supports us to join us. It’s time to give every worker a chance to survive and thrive – and strengthen Chicago’s economy.
Applicants a Mile Long
Whenever Wal-Mart opens up a store it gets tens of thousands of applicants for a couple hundred openings. People want the jobs.
Here's the deal. If you don't like the job, then don't take it.
It really is as simple as that.
Should Companies Pay Workers More?
The economic illiterates think companies should be forced to pay $15 per hour. Is it even possible?
Let's do the math.
Wikipedia reports Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world as well as the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees.
In its last annual report, for the 12 months ending January 31, 2013, Wal-Mart had $16.999 billion in net income.
That sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but not as much as you might think. I do not have a breakdown in headcounts, pay scales, or number of part-time employees, but let's assume that half of the 2 million workers make $8 an hour (75 cents above above minimum wage) and work 30 hours a week.
$15 an hour would be an increase of $7 per hour. $7 multiplied by 30 hours per week, multiplied by 52 weeks a year, multiplied by 1 million workers is $10.92 billion, well over half Wal-Mart's profit.
There would also be a large number of full-time employees making above $10 per hour but less than $15 per hour.
Bump up those employees to $15 per hour and the company would not even be profitable at $15 per hour minimum. Moreover, sales would plunge at Wal-Mart, as would sales at McDonald's and Wendy's.
The pressure to automate would be great, and marginal stores would surely close. Yet, prices across the board would soar, and so would yields on US Treasuries (and of course interest on the national debt would skyrocket).
Then, how long would it take to discover that $15 was not a "living wage"? Less than a year?
Wal-Mart a Savior or a Pariah?
The idea that raising the minimum wage to $15 would fix anything is ridiculous.
I am not totally unsympathetic to the plight of those struggling, but I am totally unsympathetic about minimum wages because the problem is the Fed, not minimum wage laws.
Cheap money coupled with rising minimum wages encourages investment into automation as opposed to hiring of individuals. Cheap money also drives up costs of goods and services.
And given that cheap money primarily benefits those with first access to it (the banks and the already wealthy), it is not surprising that people are struggling.
Rather than protest Wal-Mart (a company that does the world a service by providing over 2 million direct jobs and millions more indirect ones), people ought to be protesting the Fed.
The Federal Reserve: a case study in institutionalized fraud and irresponsibility.
A minimum wage is a bar on low skilled workers from being hired at all.
Pay more or prepare yourself for a skilled job? Im sure it isnt quite that simple but likely no more complex for those complaining.
The minimum is nothing is nothing more than Communism that is enacted in America. It is a method of control of business and employees. It started back in the 1940’s.
Walmart and McD’s could double their employee salaries. Then raise prices. Then lose consumers. Then lose profits. Then close facilities. Then lay off employees.
Try telling that to a low-info zombie in the protest line and see how he does.
Double the minimum wage and here’s what will happen: companies will hire half the entry-labor workers, who at double the wage will consist of more-capable, better-educated people to whom those jobs will now be attractive. The marginal worker will remain unemployed, and will probably never know why.
The minimum wage should be $1000 per hour.
Then let them live with it...................
One issue seldom discussed is that these minimum wage jobs are not supposed to be jobs which someone stays in long term. People with individual initiative and ambition will gain education, better job skills, etc., and move up the job ladder to higher paying jobs.
Another important issue is that, while it might be worth it to a business to pay someone $8 per hour to do some job, it might not be worth it to pay someone $15 an hour to do the same task. Many businesses may simply eliminate or consolidate tasks and positions, rather than employ the same number of workers and pay them all $15 an hour, if $15 became the minimum wage.
Finally, the biggesr single expense of running a business for most businesses, is simply paying the hired help. If those costs rise drastically, and the business has to try to cut expenses, labor and personnel costs are going to be akey area for cuts. Which in turn means eliminating some jobs.
Companies should only pay the value of labor. Government dictated private pay is nonsense.
The end goal is complete control over wages by the government. They can’t admit that quite yet, so they do it a little at a time.
If someone is dumb enough to “strike” for a position that can be replaced and trained in 3 hours, they deserve what they get....
Buy some Walmart Stock
Want a higher wage, make yourself more valuable!
I have to laugh and sneer when tech industry doesn’t want to pay $15 per hour for experienced degreed professionals. HP is trying to top out R&D testing at $17-19/hour (and that may be a lead role) for contract labor. Others are offshoring the work for even less.
Yet some burger builder wants $15/hour minimum.
These people are so ridiculous! Obviously none of them are considering that at $15 per hour minimum wage, the price of everything will skyrocket! Employers can’t absorb that kind of hit, nor will they. Restaurant prices, gasoline, food, everything will rise and then minimum wage earners will be no better off and everyone, no matter what they earn will be much worse off! Idiots, total idiots.
Want to cause a riot?
Ask the rent-a-mobsters if THEY are getting $15/hour plus health benefits to picket Wally-World.
If one insists on being irrational and emotionalistic, then why stop at $15? Why not raise the minimum wage to $100 or $500?
Not only do minimum wage laws lead to higher unemployment, but the extent to which they do so depends on the extent of union activity in the economic system. The more the unions close off employment opportunities, the greater is the number of workers forced to seek employment elsewhere, and thus the greater in the downward pressure on wage rates elsewhere.
They also deny many people the opportunity of acquiring work experience, knowledge, and skills they might have acquired by means of working. The least-skilled, most-disadvantaged members of society will be less able to compete. Thus, they tend to exert a lifelong depressing effect on people. It both stops them from working and prevents them from becoming qualified for anything better than the kind of low-skilled jobs to which a minimum-wage law tends to apply. Many blacks will be condemned to a life of poverty, where the choice is between either looting parasitism of savages, or mooching parasitism of beggars on the welfare rolls, in order to survive in a modern developed market economy, where incomes are generated by a process of mutual voluntary exchange.
Finally, businesses that do not layoff workers will have to raise prices, which leads to a lower real wage rates for non minimum-wage workers, and a lower standard of living for the average wage earner.
Actually I think Sears is losing money. In any event they aren't make enormous profits.
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