Wal-Mart: The Media Elite's favorite scapegoat

From KIRO in Seattle...

With a simple cup of coffee, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) finds itself back in the charged debate over how it treats workers. The world's largest retailer is introducing three house-brand coffees that are certified as fair trade. And that, of course, renews the prolonged discussion about just what sort of treatment the world's largest retailer offers its own workers. After all, fair trade, in essence, is about paying a fair wage -- and much of the criticism heaped upon Wal-Mart in recent years concerns whether the Arkansas-based company pays employees fairly....

Fair trade, however, is all about social and workers' rights -- and labor groups are crying foul. "Wal-Mart cannot claim the mantle of sustainability and neglect its own employees," says Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director at American Rights at Work, a nonprofit workers' rights group based in Washington. "Consumers who want to respect workers' rights around the world have helped create a demand for fair-trade products, but Wal-Mart should know that the same consumers also care about how companies treat their workers in the U.S. as well."

Wal-Mart workers earn an average of $20,000 annually. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the threshold of poverty in 2006 for a family of four was $21,200.

About the only smart thing the author of this piece did, was leave his name off of it. The vast bulk of Wal-Mart's employees are unskilled, because the vast bulk of positions available within the corporation are unskilled. No one with any brains at all get an entry level job at Wal-Mart with the intention of being able to support a family, with that job. Those jobs are held by the retired, married women trying to earn some extra money, high school and college students. Each and every one of those demographics have one thing in common--they depend on income from elsewhere and work at Wal-Mart simply to get some additional income.

That this story ignores the fact that few of Wal-Mart's employee expect to support a family with that income, shows the bias of the article.

So, what would happen if, overnight, Wal-Mart doubled the pay of all it's "associates"? They'd have to raise prices to cover the added expense, which means a heck of a whole lot of other, low-income, people would find themselves on the losing end of a price/wage spiral.

Why do so many wealthy media people so willing to screw over the poor in order to create the pretense that they are concerned about the poor?

Posted by Danny Carlton at April 7, 2008 6:14 AM