Getting Ahead By Staying Behind

Walmart stores in 21 states are taking money away from salaries normally paid to higher skilled workers – including those who work their way up from minimum-wage – to pay for minimum wage hikes:

The new laws have prompted Wal-Mart to adjust the minimum premium paid to its higher-skilled employees and combine its lowest three pay grades, Reuters reported Wednesday

Sapping initiative to pay for feel good social canoodling?

All is proceeding according to plan.

15 thoughts on “Getting Ahead By Staying Behind

  1. This is wonderful news. The pay gap between workers is being narrowed, a leveler’s dream and a step toward the day when glass ceilings are gone, doctors make what janitors earn and Americans experience the bounty and productivity of other fairly structured societies such as Cuba and North Korea.

  2. If Walmart was commanded (by executive order) to double the salaries of its lowest paid workers, what do the libs think would happen? The imagined wealthy, white capitalists who live off of Walmart’s profits would take a haircut?
    Nonsense. Walmart would simply become a different store. Less profitable stores would be closed, marginal employees would be laid off, automation would increase and inventory would change. This would be considered ‘welcome progress’ only by liberals, not by Walmart customers, or by the workers who are fired.

  3. Joe, doctors make twice what janitors make in Cuba. Now, that’s $20/month instead of $10, but who’s quibbling? There’s rampant inequality in wages in Cuba, too! And now the US is trying to attack our inequality using those same methods.

  4. Emery, I once read an article by hard-core leftist Michael Parenti (Parenti denounced Chomsky for repudiating Stalin). Parenti is very popular on the college speaking circuit, more so in Europe than the United States. Anyway, the Parenti article told the story of his father, who ran a bakery back in the 50s. He couldn’t compete with the producers of mass produced bread and went OOB. Parenti thought that this was terrible because mass produced bread is less wholesome. It contains a lot of additives, and more sugar and salt, to give it longer shelf life.
    The bread might have been lacking in flavor, but it was cheap. Poor people presumably could eat more bread because it was cheaper. Parenti never addressed the question “isn’t cheap bread good for the poor?”

  5. Emery, we’ve had a Faustian bargain in this country for quite a while. We open our borders to cheap goods, but in return we ship our jobs overseas. This battles inflation and keeps wages and prices low, but I’d argue that overall this isn’t healthy for the country as it creates generations of low skilled workers without jobs who are dependent on handouts. There’s a balance to be struck between free trade and protectionism, but it seems to me we’ve gone too far in attacking the lower and lower-middle class by opening our borders.

  6. The fact of the matter is that we are going through an economic upheaval as half the world industrializes while technology displaces traditional middle income work. Will there be jobs in the future? There always have been, so probably yes, but the generation that loses their good jobs is not the same generation that gets the new ones.

  7. Nerdbert, what you and Emery are writing is usually a public policy decision described in a nation’s industrial policy.
    Most western nations (even Canada!) have industrial policies. The US does not.

  8. Walmart hires the elderly, the mentally and physically handicapped, along with youngsters lacking high school diplomas. In other words, people that want to work, but are unemployable.

    The left would rather they go on welfare.

  9. Are you suggesting the wages the “elderly, the mentally and physically handicapped, along with youngsters lacking high school diplomas” receive at Walmart will not allow them qualify for (welfare) Snap and Medicare and other hand–outs?

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  11. Economically speaking, if the government ended transfer payments to Walmart employees and ordered Walmart to pay its employees the difference, it would amount to the same thing. Even if Walmart voluntarily raised wages to replace lost transfer payments it would amount to the same thing. Youl’get rid of bureaucrats is all, and people wouldn’t have to buy cases of soda with their EBT cards and sell them for cash.

  12. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting Emery.

    The elderly and handicapped usually aren’t out there having kids they can’t afford to support, and most young high school dropouts with kids working at Walmart are no doubt there because their own parents forced them to start paying child support or be put out of the basement.

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