"Walmart's big lie: no it doesn't create jobs."

[applegrove]

Walmart's big lie: no it doesn't create jobs.

By Kathleen Geier at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/05/walmart%E2%80%99s_big_lie_no_it_doesnt_create_jobs/

"SNIP................................


First, let’s look at the impact of Walmart on local labor markets. The largest, most rigorous study conducted on the subject is this peer-reviewed article from 2008. Its lead author is economist David Neumark, who is no wild-eyed liberal. (See, for example, this anti-minimum wage op-ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal).

Earlier studies did not adequately deal with selection bias: i.e., the problem that when and where Walmart chooses to open new stores is not random, but tends to be correlated with other variables. Those confounding variables make it difficult to determine whether local employment outcomes are causally related to Walmart‘s entry, or to something else. I’ll skip the technical details, but suffice it to say Neumark and his co-authors devised a sophisticated methodology that accounts for the selection bias. Using data from over 3,000 counties, their results show that when a Walmart store opens, it kills an average 150 retail jobs at the county level, with each Walmart worker replacing about 1.4 retail workers. These results are robust under a variety of models and tests.

Other strong studies found similar results. A 2008 peer-reviewed study that looked at Maryland concluded that Walmart’s presence significantly decreased retail employment, by up to 414 jobs. And a 2009 study by Loyola University found that the opening of a Chicago Walmart store was “a wash,” destroying as many jobs as it created: “There is no evidence that Wal-Mart sparked any significant net growth in economic activity or employment in the area,” according to the report. In short, when Walmart comes to town, it doesn’t “create” anything. All it does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business.

But the local studies tell only part of the story. To get a full picture of Walmart’s disemployment effect, you need to look at the whole economy, not just local labor markets. Walmart is a vast and enormously powerful organization: it’s the biggest company in the country (in terms of revenue), as well as the largest private employer not only in America, but in the world. As such, it has the power to make and break labor markets.




..............................SNIP"

[onehandle]

1. Amazon will make them look like amateurs, job killing-wise.

Instead of centralizing jobs in dozens of big boxes across a state, Amazon will centralize jobs in one or two giant warehouses in each state.

[mick063]

2. Walmart creates a welfare state

Walmart is "the foodstamp President".


Everything that Mitt said in his campaign, is true about Walmart.

I plan to hold Hillary's feet to the fire about Walmart.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Not news, unfortunately. Back in 2003 in SoCal....

When they started making big inroads, there were plenty of studies published. Many of them revealed statistics such as every Wal-Mart job created meant the death of two others in the local community.