The Chair Out From Under Them (NYT on Walmart)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/opinion/03tue3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Editorial
The Chair Out From Under Them

Published: October 3, 2006

Wal-Mart is famous for trimming, squeezing, and slashing costs relentlessly. While the company would like the world to focus on the benefits derived from its low prices, we cannot ignore how the nation’s largest private employer often grinds up its hourly workers in the same machine.

There are distressing signs that Wal-Mart may be acting on many of the ideas outlined in an internal document — leaked last year — to rid its payroll of full-time and less-healthy employees who are more expensive for the company to retain. For instance, Steven Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro reported yesterday in The Times that employees at several Florida stores say that managers are barring older employees with back and leg problems from using stools they had sat on for years.

Other employees are complaining of sudden scheduling changes they say are skewed to chase out long-term employees, and wage caps that act as a disincentive for those longer-tenured workers. In a stunning deployment of corporate doublespeak, a memo to store managers describes the wage caps as a way to maintain “internally equitable pay levels.” It is true that if everyone is making the same everyday low wages, a perverse form of equality is established among them.

The company says it is not trying to encourage long-term employees to leave, and that the caps encourage them to move up if they want higher pay. Other retailers impose wage caps, the company argues. It is true that Wal-Mart falls under particular scrutiny, but it is in no small measure because it the largest private employer in the country. And, as that internal document last year noted, poorly compensated part-time workers lacking benefits will turn to government programs for the needy instead, a form of backdoor taxpayer subsidy.

But Costco has shown that better wages for workers don’t preclude low prices for customers. If Wal-Mart wants to avoid increasingly onerous legislation, regulation and scrutiny, company executives are going to have to learn that human beings are not machines that can be turned on and off, that parents can’t always reshuffle their lives on short notice.

As a business, Wal-Mart minimizes costs and maximizes profits. Society says what is fair, sets the rules of the game through government, and imposes minimum standards. Congress must act to raise the minimum wage, which has sat at a paltry $5.15 an hour since 1997, and reform the teetering health- insurance system. Right now, it’s sending the wrong message to companies like Wal-Mart.

[BlueJazz]

1. As my Father always said:"The Fish rots from the head down"

Companies are either good or evil depending on who is at the top.

Assholes/Good People hire assholes/good people who hire assholes/good people who hire assholes/good people who hire.........

[indepat]

2. I pledge to find another place to spend the $40 per year spent at WalMart

so help me God.