Wal-Mart workers threaten Black Friday walk-out

[angelatc]

That is what I was getting at.
If your take home pay is $1000 a month, and a 1 bedroom in the slums cost $600/mo, you are forcing your employees onto state aid..
Trust me, it sucks. I went from making $800-$1100 a week to $238 on unemployment..
I am trying to get by a month on what I used to make in a week, it aint happening.. I been through 5k in savings over the last year..

Oh well. It's apparently a job that a monkey could do. Either get two jobs, or go back to school and make yourself more valuable to your employer. You get paid exactly what you're worth in the current market and position, and nobody owes you a single penny more.

And guess what - after 30 years in the workforce, my husband and I are both unemployed, and have been for over a year. He's gone from making 6 figures to making nothing. We've gone through a lot more of our retirement than you've gone through savings, and we have a lot less time to replace it, since we're in our 50's. I'd love to have a job at WalMart, partly because I know if I got my foot in the door I'd work my way up in no time. I've done it before, and I can do it again.

We aren't exactly thrilled with the situation, but neither of us are hanging around blaming some random corporation for our problems, and pretending the world or the government owes us a living.

Minimum wage isn't supposed to provide a comfortable living for a family of 4. If you can't live on it, get a roommate, or 3.

[thequietkid10]

I would imagine it would depend a bit on where you live... I have always done very well for myself, so maybe my compass is skewed a bit. But from a sheer math point of view:

Federal Min. Wage = $7.25
Hours in a full work week = 40
Weeks in a year = 52

7.25*40*52 = $15,080 / year. Take out payroll tax and weekly youre probably seeing about $250 dollars... thats roughly my weekly grocery bill and we dont get much beyond fruits, veggies, milk, whatever meats were having that week and stuff to make my son his school lunch.

That doesnt factor in rent and utilities.

Again, I've been very blessed and fortunate in my work life - but I couldnt even fathom living on 250/week by myself, nevermind with my wife and 2 sons. I made more than that at 16 waiting tables...

...not to say anything about what Walmart should or shouldnt pay their employees, if they cant live on that, dont work there...but I think its a bit of a misnomer to assume someone will live comfortably on minimum wage.

Are you sure you didn't mean 250 a month? Because if you are paying 250 a week on groceries, and your crying poverty, your doing something wrong. I'm not even sure how you can do that, unless your shopping at a local chain in a small town on the outskirts of society.

[MelissaWV]

Are you sure you didn't mean 250 a month? Because if you are paying 250 a week on groceries, and your crying poverty, your doing something wrong. I'm not even sure how you can do that, unless your shopping at a local chain in a small town on the outskirts of society.

Family of four, including school lunches?

That's not out of line, though it's certainly not what people who are really trying to stretch a dollar spend.

Incidentally, I'm wondering about the math as well. $1256.67/mo is purely minimum wage, though most jobs do not pay min wage anymore so this whole argument is kind of funny. Let's estimate that you pay 1/3 of your income to rent. Your rent would come to $418.89/month. Depending on where you are, that may or may not be even remotely realistic. We will assume you either take public transportation or own a used vehicle of some sort, so you do not have a car payment. $1256.67-418.89 = $837.78. Divide that by four (most min wage jobs pay weekly). $209.45.

Now, we have a weekly income of a little over $200. You're going to need some of that towards electricity and communication. You will need to find a way to live off of $100/week, let's say, for food. No, that is not impossible. In fact, I feel I'm being a bit generous with that. This is not an impossible task, depending on where you live. It is a matter of figuring things out.

Oh and there are two big huge massive hold-up-wait-a-minute things wrong with CT4Liberty's math and logic. First off, the estimate is based on one minimum wage worker working one job to support a family of four. Is mom in a coma? Is there family that can help out, or neighbors? The second issue is the taking away of taxes from the estimated income. Do you really think that someone making $15k and supporting a family of four pays out a whole lot in taxes?

[Zippyjuan]

I think its the corporate greed that bothers people.. You have so many making millions of dollars. Companies cut benefits then pay out huge bonuses to their round table. Then they swap deals w/govt to create regulations making it harder for small businesses to compete. When companies get loopholes and such, is when I think its just too much, and not capitalism.

WalMart is the big target since they have the reputation of having the lowest paid workers and offer the least benefits combined with being owned by the richest people in America with four of them making the Top Ten Richest People in the US. http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/ while at the same time extorting subsidies from local governments ("we will open a store in your area if you give us X, Y, Z"). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-nor..._b_443649.html

Wal-Mart Billionaire Wants $8 Million Subsidy

Missouri is the "show me the money" state -- where using public funds to bail out billionaires is considered good business.

An entrepreneur who married into Sam Walton's extended family, and is listed high up on the Forbes Wealthiest Americans list, is asking Missouri taxpayers to help him build a bigger Wal-Mart.

Enos Stanley Kroenke married into a fortune when he wed Ann Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton's brother "Bud." But Kroenke, already a successful businessman before his marriage, now apparently needs millions in public welfare to carry out his latest development plans.

Owner of the Denver Nuggets basketball team, and hockey's Colorado Avalanche, Kroene is part owner of the St. Louis Rams and the English soccer team Arsenal. His development firm, THF Realty (the acronym stands for "To Have Fun") has asked for a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) deal to build a Wal-Mart supercenter in the tiny community of Bridgeton, Missouri.

Costco is able to compete will with WalMart and they pay their employees up to three times as much as WalMart plus offering them benefits (personally know people who work there).

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money...nts/55450634/1

The 52-year-old makes $11.60 an hour as a front-of-the-store manager at a Louisiana Walmart and says she struggles to pay for basic necessities, let alone her $600-a-month rent.

"I'm giving it all I got, I like what I do, and yet I'm struggling so bad. This is not what it was when I started," says Sparks, who began working for America's No. 1 employer and discount store seven years ago.

Higher bar for benefits

Fluctuating hours also make it difficult to qualify — and pay — for health care coverage, workers complain.

Full-time employees are eligible for benefits six months after being hired, while part-time employees must wait a year and average 30 hours weekly, Walmart says. That's up from an average 24 hours a week for part-time employees hired before Feb. 1, 2012. There's no minimum for part-timers hired before Jan. 15, 2011.

Walmart says it changed its health care plan to more closely conform to the new federal health care law.

Greg Fletcher, an electronics sales associate at the Duarte, Calif., store, works 24 to 32 hours a week and says he's getting the "high end" of available hours. His wife also works at Walmart but lacks enough hours to earn benefits. Together they made $25,000 last year. Fletcher says Walmart's benefits would cost up to a third of his paycheck to cover his family.

"For a lot of people, it's just an unaffordable option," the 29-year-old says.

Instead, the Fletchers are on Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, to help cover themselves and their two sons, ages 6 and 9 months.

However, Walmart subsidizes a greater percentage of the cost of health care coverage than most retailers, says Will Sneden, senior vice president in Aon Hewitt's health and benefits practice. Sneden, who counts Walmart as a client, says the discounter's health benefits consistently rank in the top 25% of retailers "due to favorable eligibility and a wider choice of plan options with relatively low employee premiums."

[Zippyjuan]

More numbers:
http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-employees-pay

Walmart employs an astounding 2.1 million people. In the United States alone, the company employs 1.4 million people. This is a staggering 1% of the U.S.'s 140 million working population.

Walmart, in other words, matters. Its payrolls, and its pay, move the needle.

The average Walmart "associate," Wake Up Walmart reports, makes $11.75 an hour. That's $20,744 per year. Those wages are slightly below the national average for retail employees, which is $12.04 an hour. They also produce annual earnings that, in a one-earner household, are below the $22,000 poverty line.

On the other hand, these wages are far above minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. They also aren't THAT FAR below the national retail average (only 2.5% below). In a two-earner household, moreover, these wages would produce a household income of $40,000+, which, in some areas of the country, is comfortably middle-class. Walmart offers benefits to some of its employees, as well as store discounts and profit-sharing plans.

(the $20,000 a year figure assumes that they are full time and many WalMart employees are not full time). I have seen figures which suggest about one third are part time (not that unusual for retail though).

[Mr. Perfidy]

haha some of you are some cold motherfuckers

have ye forgotten?!



angelatc

Oh well. It's apparently a job that a monkey could do.

There are a few exceptions- some real brightness and insight is necessary for some professions, but for the most part computers think and plan and record for us, so a monkey can do anything. The smugness of the outer party functionary privileged-connection bureaucrcy class in its mystical faith in the mysterious and specialist secret language professions makes me want to strap on a red arm band and burn down gated communities. Just about anyone of average intellect upward can be trained to do just about anything rather quickly. In environments of scarcity and times of war though, it as as orwell says, and people in their depression-economics besieged cities cling ever-more-ferociously to their precious pound of horse flesh. And what carrion-feeders and hoarders are hungrier and more hateful than mothers?!

Either get two jobs, or go back to school and make yourself more valuable to your employer.

do you imagine that people just assume for themselves the role of subordinated to the capricious and dehumanizing valuations of another individual who, typically by consequence of caste-entrenched birth, controls an exponential share of resources? Do you imagine that to crow and to hiss thus is good for a person, or for the people around them?

You get paid exactly what you're worth in the current market and position, and nobody owes you a single penny more.

lol

And guess what - after 30 years in the workforce, my husband and I are both unemployed, and have been for over a year. He's gone from making 6 figures to making nothing. We've gone through a lot more of our retirement than you've gone through savings, and we have a lot less time to replace it, since we're in our 50's. I'd love to have a job at WalMart, partly because I know if I got my foot in the door I'd work my way up in no time. I've done it before, and I can do it again.

We aren't exactly thrilled with the situation, but neither of us are hanging around blaming some random corporation for our problems, and pretending the world or the government owes us a living.

isn't that the same thing as saying, "I do not owe myself a living," since the corporations and government are in fact initiating aggression against you and extorting you for funds and labor in order to secure access to things on your own living space, like water and being outside?

Minimum wage isn't supposed to provide a comfortable living for a family of 4. If you can't live on it, get a roommate, or 3.

do you like to make "my vagina doesn't work" faces? Like are you going out of your way to sound like a soulless and cold anti-human monster? 20th century counter-revolutionary lame. It hurts the cause of Liberty when people who are hurting from attacks in every direction, and when seeking to understand the nature of this assault, they hear such derision. Also it sounds show-off pretender petty-nobility peasant upstart bourgeioussie'ish and this offends the sensibilities of the intellectually-aligned.


MelissaWV

family of four, including school lunches?

That's not out of line, though it's certainly not what people who are really trying to stretch a dollar spend.

Incidentally, I'm wondering about the math as well. $1256.67/mo is purely minimum wage, though most jobs do not pay min wage anymore

actually most do or hover just around it, at least where we live. I think what you meant to say was, "most jobs don't offer full-time anymore," because that is where the math is wrong; it's actually very hard to find an employer who is offering even 36+ hours a week, and harder to find an employer when you tell them that you have another job.

so this whole argument is kind of funny. Let's estimate that you pay 1/3 of your income to rent. Your rent would come to $418.89/month.

lol

that's like a mexican rental special (as in, 2 wage-earners sharing an average low-income area one-bedroom unit).

Couples too, but that necessarily subordinates the notion of couplehood to the economic demands of an ownership-class, and degrades the properties of human relationships. The couplehood structure-lease-agreement-economic-dependence emergence among the working poor is an interesting trend to observe in its infancy, now that marriage has collapsed and out-of-wedlock chidbirth is actually an advantage in terms of earning potential.

Depending on where you are, that may or may not be even remotely realistic. We will assume you either take public transportation or own a used vehicle of some sort, so you do not have a car payment. $1256.67-418.89 = $837.78. Divide that by four (most min wage jobs pay weekly). $209.45.

Now, we have a weekly income of a little over $200. You're going to need some of that towards electricity and communication.

If I were to track and plot the annual average expenditures as a result of arbitrarily imposed-state fines, it might end up being $40 a month, but the truth is that they come in little spurts through the year, and rupture your budget with one extortion-demand.

Also you are assuming that you don't get sick, have any family doing anything important ever, never have car-trouble, get arrested, or maybe-want to rest, so that is by itself ludicrous and dehumanizing anne-coulter harpy squawking, because there are days where you are unable to earn a wage. And what if you care about a person? There is no room for an ice cream cone in that budget.

also people who are not poor do not seem to understand that what is a minor inconvenience for even the middle-class is like a eviction-threatening prison system to poor folk. Every company and business, from the tiniest shitty family operation to the international oligolopolies knows that they can just harass and threaten and extort you for free, with an X% return. You have no resources to resist and there are a lot of people that take advantage of that.

You will need to find a way to live off of $100/week, let's say, for food. No, that is not impossible

haha milk's like $8 if you want to drink it like a human being.

.

In fact, I feel I'm being a bit generous with that.

I would bet my left nut that no one has called you generous ever lol

This is not an impossible task, depending on where you live. It is a matter of figuring things out.

that's true. That's why I think the poor are winning; we grow up stealing and learning how to rapidly trade and maximize values, whereas the outer party collaborator classes tether success to obedience and subordination technocratically-structured conformity.

Real math about minimum wage:

36 hours x 7.25 = $261

on my paychecks, which are in the same tax-bracket as minimum-wage earners, I pay about 1/6th of it to imposed taxes, and that is with an Exemption claim to federal income, so, the most sizable chunk of the taxes are missing from my deductions. So that leaves about

$217 x 4 = $ 868 / month

You can't rent a place in this county for less than $700 a month- there are a few condemned-looking little-haiti kinda shanty-micro villages where you might luck out at $650, but of the 20 or so villages around the one where I live, the average is around $800 for a one bedroom.

So 868-800 a month = $68 / month

/ 4 = $17 a week for food, gas, car-insurance, communications.

[angelatc]

Economics doesn't have a heart. It's math.

do you imagine that people just assume for themselves the role of subordinated to the capricious and dehumanizing valuations of another individual who, typically by consequence of caste-entrenched birth, controls an exponential share of resources? Do you imagine that to crow and to hiss thus is good for a person, or for the people around them?

Uh, yeah, ok. That made me laugh, so I wanted to make sure everybody else saw it. No need for me to address it again.

[kylejack]

Are the workers being FORCED to work at Walmart?

I certainly understand the frustration of those working in the retail industry with the whole nonsense known as Black Friday. However, nobody is forcing anyone to work in that kind of an enviornment.

As a consumer, any store that uses 4AM openings for "Door Buster Specials" goes further down on my list of places to shop.

What's the problem? The workers are exercising their right in the market.

[Paul Or Nothing II]

Here's what jumped out at me.

Blocking the way isn't "peaceful" at all, you can't block someone's way unless the owner of the property wants it done.

I heard Walmart micro chips every one of their items.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lEGDyw7ydA

I've seen some of his other videos & he seems like a good person but too much of a conspiracy-theorist

They are just tags, you can get rid of'em if you want, plus, you are free to not buy from them if that's how much you dislike it, they aren't using coercion against anyone.

[Paul Or Nothing II]

Those workers' obligations are to themselves and their families, not the American public.

And similarly, Walmart's obligations are to its owners/investors! Because without them, may be Walmart wouldn't be there......... not to mention, all those people employed by them wouldn't have a job or have one paying even lower than that (lowered demand & increased supply of labor), not to mention all those who buy there & enhance their lives would have a somewhat lower living-standard!

When your pay your employees so little that full time workers qualify for state assistance, then I say you need to pay your workers more.
You are breaking my back with these taxes I have to pay to give all your employees food stamps and medical insurance.
I lose far more in state taxes than I will ever save shopping at walmart.

Walmart isn't a charity, & as I've said, if it isn't kept profitable & benefit its owners/investors then it wouldn't even exist & its workers would be unemployed or working for even less & all its customers would have a lower living-standard.

Walmart aren't obligated to ensure low taxes to you, if you don't like taxes then blame the government, not Walmart; it's the government that's committing coercion against you by stealing your money, not Walmart.