Wal-Mart’s Newest Scheme To Ruin The Middle Class
Salon - Just as bad as the original '80s campaign, "Buy America" 2.0 continues Wal-Mart's planned takeover of urban markets
Almost 30 years ago, as the U.S. was bleeding jobs, Walmart launched a “Buy America” program and started hanging “Made in America” signs in its 750 stores. It was a marketing success, cementing the retailer’s popularity in the country’s struggling, blue-collar heartland. A few years later, NBC’s Dateline revealed the program to be a sham. Sure, Walmart was willing to buy U.S.-made goods — so long as they were as cheap as imports, which, of course, they weren’t. Dateline found that Walmart’s sourcing was in fact rapidly shifting to Asia.
This year, Walmart is back with a new “Buy America” program. In January, the company announced that it would purchase an additional $50 billion worth of domestic goods over the next decade. This week, Walmart is convening several hundred suppliers, along with a handful of governors, for a summit on U.S. manufacturing.
This sounds pretty substantial, but in fact it’s just a more sophisticated and media savvy version of Walmart’s hollow 1980s Buy America campaign. For starters, $50 billion over a decade may sound huge at first, but measured against Walmart’s galactic size, it’s not. An additional $5 billion a year amounts to only 1.5 percent of what Walmart currently spends on inventory.
How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying
Bad news out of Bentonville. On Thursday, Walmart, the American retail behemoth, announced that it had slumped through another quarter. Sales were sluggish, and a Walmart executive said the company was downgrading expectations for the rest of 2013. The reason? "The customer doesn't quite have the discretionary income, or they're hesitant to spend what they do have," said Charles Holley, Walmart's chief financial officer.
There is a cutting irony at play here. Yes, one effect of the great recession was to put many people out of work, or to relegate them to part-time status. And yes, the expiration of the payroll tax cut earlier this year took money out of the pockets of millions of Americans. Yet wages for working Americans flatlined long before the financial crisis, and Walmart is one reason for that. Because of its size and buying power, Walmart sets the standard for much of the big-box retail industry and the retailer is infamous for paying low wages. The company says the average wage for a full-time Walmart worker in the U.S. is $12.78 an hour, but the business research firm IBISWorld pegs it at closer to $9. In addition, it generally allots its "associates" less than 40 hours of work a week. In Washington, D.C., Walmart has threatened to cancel plans to build three new stores and possibly close three more stores due to open if the city passes an ordinance mandating that the retailer pay a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour.
In other words, the type of person who shops at Walmart today has less money to shop at Walmart -- because of, among other things, Walmart.
How Corporate America Used the Great Recession to Turn Good Jobs Into Bad Ones
By Barbara Garson
Watch closely: I’m about to demystify the sleight-of-hand by which good jobs were transformed into bad jobs, full-time workers with benefits into freelancers with nothing, during the dark days of the Great Recession.
First, be aware of what a weird economic downturn and recovery this has been. From the end of an “average” American recession, it ordinarily takes slightly less than a year to reach or surpass the previous employment peak. But in June 2013 -- four full years after the official end of the Great Recession -- we had recovered only 6.6 million jobs, or just three-quarters of the 8.7 million jobs we lost.
Here’s the truly mysterious aspect of this “recovery”: 21% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were low wage, meaning they paid $13.83 an hour or less. But 58% of the jobs regained fall into that category. A common explanation for that startling statistic is that the bad jobs are coming back first and the good jobs will follow.
