On Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, shoppers will be greeted by demonstrations in support of striking Walmart employees at hundreds of Walmart stores across the country.
The intent of the demonstrations is not to discourage shoppers from shopping at Walmart but to bring to their attention that those low prices they enjoy have a cost and that cost is the horrendous working conditions of Walmart employees.
Walmart’s unfair treatment of its employees is legendary: poverty wages; insufficient hours, most employees are not full-time even though many stores are understaffed; no overtime pay; inadequate or no health insurance; and no holiday pay despite the fact that stores are forcing their employees to work from 7:00pm on Thanksgiving to 4:00am on Friday and then return to work at 7:00am.
Walmart has been sued in the past for forcing employees to work off the clock and other wage-theft activities and their virulent anti-unionism has resulted in law suits for unfair labor practices.
Walmart has been brilliant in the art of socializing their costs and privatizing their profits. By paying their employees poverty level wages Walmart gets the public to subsidize a major part of their business expenses. The average salary for a Wal-Mart employee is less than $9.00 an hour. Even at $9.00 and a forty-hour work week - and almost no one gets forty hours - that would come to an annual salary of $18,700 which is $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of four. Whenever a Walmart employee uses food-stamps to feed his or her family, or puts their children on Medicaid or uses the emergency room for lack of health insurance the American public pays the bill in higher taxes. With 1.4 million workers the Walmart tax bill is in the billions of dollars.
Walmart‘s success as a standard setter for low-wage employers feeds one of our country’s long term economic structural problem: the growing inequality of income and wealth and the resulting increase in poverty. And a new study shows that Illinois now ranks fourth among states in the growth of income inequality. This should be of particular concern to residents of Will County where the fastest growing work-force is warehouse workers whose working conditions, as the recent strike against the Walmart warehouse in Elwood exposed, are even worse than those of Walmart retail employees. Communities in and around Will County cannot prosper if its fastest growing work force makes less than a subsistence wage. This is an intolerable situation and cannot continue.
Walmart‘s business plan has made Walmart one of the most successful businesses in the world and made the Walton family fabulously rich. But their business and financial success has come at an appalling cost to their employees and to society in general.
This coming Friday, Warehouse Workers for Justice and their supporters will gather at Sacred Heart Church, 329 S. Ottawa St., Joliet at 8:00am and then caravan to a Walmart somewhere in Will County to show support for all striking and non-striking Walmart workers across the country.
Ron Kurowski
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t want those crappy Walmart jobs are scumbags is just plainareAw
Well said.
Your comment shows the false equivalency people use to try and equate similar items, but in any case, if your job is so bad, why don't you quit and take a job at awl-Mart and feed your family, if you are married, on $19,000 a year without benefits ?
Apparently you have no idea of the job situation that most people face today, and I would guess that you are married and either work a second job or no job at all. Picture this, if you are married and have children and say your husband loses his job and insurance coverage, and has to take a job at Wal-Mart because there are no other higher paying jobs available, would you still have the same disdain for honest working people at Wal-Mart, many through no fault of their own and have to work at a low paying job such as they do, to bring in some sort of money to feed their families ? I think not. Until you become one of those people, thank whatever God you believe in that it is not you.
As former Military myself, you are 100 percent correct. Not only did I have all you mentioned, but also, the GI Bill that let me go to college, and enabled me to buy my first house as well. We are Wal-Marting of America, which is where companies want to go, make sure there are no unions, make sure everyone is payed like Wal-Mart employees, and also have enough of a supply of low payed, low educated people to fight our wars.
Make daily decisions consistent with career goals and earning potential.
And for the ignorant and uninformed...there are PLENTY of line of duty deaths all across America every single day. Sorry there are not enough policedying locally to appease you. You sound just like someone who has had plenty on contact with the police. Everyone hates the police until they have to call 911 and ask for help.
With the loss of our manufacturing base - 50,000 factories have closed since 2000- we no longer have an industrial base that can produce middle class jobs. Low wage retail and service jobs are now the fastest growing job categorizes. Median income for the average worker, adjusted for inflation, has actually declined since the late seventies. This will only get worse as long as companies like Walmark keep exploiting their work force. Ron Kurowski
you hit the nail right on the head. If you work hard in school and put yourself through college you'll get a better paying job. Or as Zig Ziegler always says " do more than what you are paid to do, and one day you'll get paid more for what you do".
2) Walmart jobs, aren't they suppose to be entry level job? 3) Walmart is keeping them on Welfare? How is Walmart doing that? Not paying enough money per hour for unskilled labor, or offering benefits to part time employees. If you're not making enough at your part-time job, go back to school. 4) If Walmart pays their unskilled workers too much, they'll have to raise prices and then I'll have to shop somewhere else. How many people here shop at Walmart, Aldi, Food for Less, Ross for less, and various low cost stores? Yeah, we need the government to raise taxes on corporations, not on us. Oh yeah, that's right corporations don't pay taxes......they just pass the cost of higher taxes on to us. So do small business owners, the ones that make over $ 250,000 a year. So who really pays corporate taxes? Congratulations to all of you who voted the guy back into office that is dying to raise taxes on everyone.
Very well said. Unfortunately this country has become one of individualism and not collectivism, and until we change that, it will only get worse.