Wal-Mart Proves They Are Not a Business, They're a Conservative Plantation

Wal-Mart Proves They Are Not a Business, They're a Conservative Plantation

There's a power struggle going on between the D.C. city council and the world's largest retailer, one that Wal-Mart is likely to win.

There's a power struggle going on in Washington right now, not between Republicans and Democrats but between Wal-Mart—which is supposed to open six stores in the District—and the city council, which has a bill pending to require big-box retailers to pay a living wage. As you surely know, Wal-Mart was built on keeping costs as low as possible, particularly labor costs. The model Wal-Mart recruit is someone who has no other employment options and will take whatever they can get. The retail colossus isn't going to let some uppity city council tell it how much it can pay its employees:

    The world's largest retailer delivered an ultimatum to District lawmakers Tuesday, telling them less than 24 hours before a decisive vote that at least three planned Wal-Marts will not open in the city if a super-minimum-wage proposal becomes law.

    A team of Wal-Mart officials and lobbyists, including a high-level executive from the mega-retailer's Arkansas headquarters, walked the halls of the John A. Wilson Building on Tuesday afternoon, delivering the news to D.C. Council members.

    The company's hardball tactics come out of a well-worn playbook that involves successfully using Wal-Mart's leverage in the form of jobs and low-priced goods to fend off legislation and regulation that could cut into its profits and set precedent in other potential markets. In the Wilson Building, elected officials have found their reliable liberal, pro-union political sentiments in conflict with their desire to bring amenities to underserved neighborhoods.

For Wal-Mart, this isn't just about these particular stores. They can make money even if they pay a higher wage at these stores, and with over 10,000 stores around the world, the D.C. locations are a drop in their enormous bucket anyway. It's about their relationship both to the people they employ and to the communities they locate in. It's about power, and as far as they're concerned, power has to reside with Wal-Mart. Their employees do what they're told and get paid what they're told, and if they don't like it they can go find another job. By the same token, the city council gives Wal-Mart what it wants, and if it doesn't they can try to find somebody else to open a store there.
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My guess is that in the end, either the city council will cave or Mayor Vincent Gray will veto the bill (he says he's considering it). Why? Because Wal-Mart can walk away from the D.C. stores without a second thought, while the council desperately wants both the jobs the stores will bring and the ability for their constituents to have a convenient place to shop. One side has virtually nothing to lose, while the other side has a great deal to lose.

Would Wal-Mart make less money if they paid their employees a little more? Not necessarily. There are other models out there, most notably Costco and Trader Joe's, which believe that by giving their employees higher wages and good benefits, they can reduce turnover and provide better service, which lowers costs and increases sales. And it works: they've achieved steady growth and excellent profits by making their employees happy.

The owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton family have a set in cement attitude about who deserves what. They are worth more than 40% of the population that earns at or below median income, that means they are worth about $89 billion dollars. They could easily pay every employee a living wage, but they believe it is their God given right to run a wage slave plantation. The Waltons and their conservative supporters do not care about American values, they care only about wealth and the power that goes with it..

Conservative Culture: America's Wage Slaves Are Getting Crushed Making Corporate Plutocrats Rich

America's Wage Slaves Are Getting Crushed Making Corporate Plutocrats Rich

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

In June, the Labor Department reported [3] that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association [4], the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.

The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole – a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to [5] the staffing association.

The overwhelming majority of that growth has come in blue-collar work in factories and warehouses, as the temp industry sheds the Kelly Girl image of the past. Last year, more than one in every 20 blue-collar workers was a temp.

Several temp agencies, such as Adecco and Manpower, are now among the largest employers in the United States. One list [6] put Kelly Services as second only to Walmart.

“We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, it’s rapidly escalating. In the last 10 to 15 years, there’s just a big shift to this for a lot more workers – which makes them a lot more vulnerable.”

The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.

The rise of the blue-collar permatemp helps explain one of the most troubling aspects of the phlegmatic recovery. Despite a soaring stock market and steady economic growth, many workers are returning to temporary or part-time jobs. This trend is intensifying America’s decades-long rise in income inequality, in which low- and middle-income workers have seen their real wages stagnate or decline [7]. On average, temps earn 25 percent less than permanent workers.

The CEO of Manpower is like a bandit without the risks. He made $5.5 million over 6 years for supplying wage slaves to other plutocrats. He, like the Walmart family take more out of the economy and suppress more economic activity than they create.

It Is Time For Patriots To Stop Subsidizing Walmart Billionaires

It Is Time For Patriots To Stop Subsidizing Walmart Billionaires

Due to low wages and few benefits, Walmart workers at a single 300-person Supercenter store rely on anywhere from $904,542 to $1,744,590 in public benefits per year, costing taxpayers, according to a new report from the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The report focused its analysis on Wisconsin, because the state’s data is the most comprehensive and up to date. It looked at how many workers enroll in the state’s Medicaid program and extrapolated how many services they rely on from programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Earned Income Tax Credit, school lunch program, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and Section 8 housing vouchers, among others.

Looking at just those currently enrolled in Medicaid, the report estimates that each employee takes in $3,015 in public benefits a year. But that may be a low estimate, as other workers may enroll in other programs. Assuming a higher number, each employee could use more like $5,815 in benefits a year.

Walmart’s wages are some of the lowest in the industry, despite the fact that it is the country’s largest private employer and one out of every ten retail workers is employed there. Workers make $8.81 per hour on average, according to IBIS World, 28 percent less than those who work for other large retailers.

Its employees also get few benefits through their employment. Only about half of Walmart workers are covered by its health care plans, in part because the costs may be to high. While the company decided to expand health care coverage to part-time workers in 2006, it has since reversed course.

Walmart’s model isn’t the only way in the discount retail space, however. Rival Costco, which competes with Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores, pays employees about 40 percent more. The average Costco worker makes $21.96 an hour. Nearly all of the workers who are eligible for the company’s benefits are enrolled.

Costco has come under analyst pressure to lower wages and boost profit, but the company’s CFO has thus far refused to do so. Its bottom line, however, seems strong: Profits rose by 19 percent to $459 million last quarter.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s sales have been struggling. Its sales suffered during the first quarter of the year and the company has come under criticism for failing to keep shelves stocked thanks to too few employees working at a time. That has led to long lines and customer dissatisfaction, which helped it rank at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index in February.

While Costco has a lower profit margin than Walmart, it gets much more revenue and profit per employee and generates a higher return for investors.

Walmart has embraced the conservative Republican semi-plantation model of business; screw over employees to squeeze every last penny of profit out of powerless workers. They do all of this and stock 50% or more of their products from factories in Asia. Walmart loves America the way a dog beater loves dogs.

The screen capture graphics are from the Twitter feed of this site, Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'.

How America's Sleazy Fast Food Industry Screws Over Workers and Capitalism

How America's Fast Food Industry Screws Over Workers and Capitalism

The gulf between CEO pay and staff McWages is shockingly wide: a strike serves this system of super-exploitation right.

Last week, approximately 400 workers in the fast food industry went on a one-day strike protesting the "McWages" that keep them them living at or even below the poverty line. Despite their modest demands – the workers want to be able to exercise their right to form a union without intimidation or harassment and they want to be paid a living wage of $15 per hour – they face an uphill battle to achieve them.Fast food workers take part in a protest at a McDonald's restaurant in Harlem, New York for better wages, 4 April 2013. (Photograph: VIEWpress Corp/Corbis)

One of the catch phrases used by striking workers was "we cannot survive on seven twenty-five," a reference to the insulting $7.25 average hourly wage most fast food workers in New York get paid. This paltry sum, which adds up to less than $300 pre tax for a 40-hour week, would not amount to a living wage anywhere in the country, and doesn't even come close in New York, one of the most expensive of cities in the US to live in. That is the federal minimum wage, however – and it's not hard to imagine that employees would be paid even less than $7.25 an hour if their bosses could get away with it.

One striking worker, Joseph Barrera, who works for TacoBell, told MSNBC's Chris Hayes that when he started working at the chain, at the age of 15, he was paid $7.15 an hour. Six years later, as a supervisor, his pay has increased to $7.25 an hour, a ten cents raise. If you're finding it hard to imagine how Barrera makes it through the month on such meager wages, that's because he can't. He says he often has to skip meals or walk to work because he can't afford the subway fare and he hasn't bought clothes in years. He'd like to be able to get married and start a family, but doing so on his full-time supervisor's salary is impossible.

Treating an employee this badly might be excusable if the company that hired him was struggling for survival, but this is far from the case. Yum Brands Inc, which owns Taco Bell, as well as KFC and Pizza Hut, proudly boasts on its website an EPS growth of 13% in 2012, an increased dividend for shareholders of 18%, and a net income of $1.6bn. Rival fast food companies like McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's are all doing similarly well: according to Business Wire, fast food is one of the fastest growing industries, thanks to a competitive cost advantage.

Yet, the fast food companies are not only unembarrassed about how they exploit their workers, but they actually seem to think they are doing employees like Barrera a favor in providing him with a job that is a step above indentured servitude. This attitude is evident in the various statements made by the companies to the media following the strike. Burger King issued a communique saying that the company has provided "an entry point into the workforce for millions of Americans" and that they "offer compensation and benefits that are consistent with the QSR [quick service restaurant] industry".

McDonald's also waxed lyrical about their commitment to their workers, and said that "employees are paid competitive wages and have access to flexible schedules and quality, affordable benefits." The National Restaurant Association went a step further and seemed to be almost looking for sympathy with their statement that "the industry provides more than 13m jobs, that could be jeopardized if the minimum wage goes up." My personal favorite was this nugget, also from the National Restaurant Association:

    "The industry is one of the best paths to achieving the American Dream."

If the American Dream circa 2013 has morphed into a nightmare of inescapable poverty and struggle, then I guess they have a point. I think, however, most hardworking Americans – and surely, anyone who puts in a grueling 40-plus-hour week at a fast food restaurant counts as a hardworking American? – have higher expectations of the American Dream than the fast food industry has in mind for them. But perhaps the National Restaurant Association was referring to senior executives and those lucky few who end up as CEOs, because for them, the fast food industry is dreamy indeed.

In general, CEOs in the US earn 380 times what their average employee earns. That rather shocking disparity starts to look almost modest, however, when compared with the fast food world. In 2011, the CEO of McDonalds earned over $20m, which means he was paid nearly 1,333 times more than the average crew member or cashier, who earns around $8 an hour or less. Even if those employees were to get their wish of earning $15 an hour, the CEO would still be earning 640 times more than them.

But don't expect McDonald's CEO, or any of the fast food restaurant CEOs, to accept this outrageous pay disparity as a reason to raise their employees wages. The only way workers will ever change their situation is to mobilize and strike. But going on strike when you are not in a union, and are easy to fire and replace, is incredibly risky. Last week, 400 workers took that risk regardless – and as long as the media and the public keep paying attention, it will be difficult for their companies to make them suffer for it.

So far, it's one-nil for the brave 400. Imagine what could happen if all 13 million of their colleagues followed their lead.

Sadhbh Walshe is a film-maker and former staff writer for the CBS drama series The District.

 One can also imagine that Social Security and Medicare funding would be in better shape if more workers earned a living wage. Is this the America we want to live, are these the ideals we want to live up to- creating millions of wage slaves.

How Long Will Voters Let Conservative Republicans Put the Rich Before Everyone Else

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How Long Will Voters Let Conservative Republicans Put the Rich Before Everyone Else

We are nearly a week into the dreaded sequester and already there is reason to believe that the spending cuts that were designed to be so draconian and unpalatable that even the Republican party could not stomach them are here to stay.

Despite there being widespread consensus that these cuts will be extremely damaging to the economy and that they may ultimately even increase our debt load rather than lower it, the party that pushed us over this particular fiscal cliff is refusing to budge an inch. The only question that now remains is why, and for how long more, ordinary Americans will let them get away with it.

Balancing the budget and reducing the deficit are noble goals, but when a party who claims to be all about balanced budgets, shifts the entire burden of achieving one onto the poorest and neediest in our society, while doing everything in their power to protect the pocket books of the wealthy, I would be inclined to distrust their motives. All the evidence points to the fact that our most vulnerable citizens are the ones who will be hit the hardest by the sequester cuts (more on that in a moment). Yet the GOP are already making moves to reduce the impact of the cuts on the military, while they look for even more ways to cut welfare spending that will hurt the poor.

On Monday, congressional Republicans put forth a bill ostensibly designed to prevent a government shut down at the end of the month. This is welcome news in so far as I don't think any of us could stomach another round of the kind of school yard bullying that now passes for governance in the house of representatives.

But the Republican bill, which was authored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, has come under criticism for incorporating several measures that would ease the pain of the sequester cuts on military spending, while doing nothing whatsoever to counteract the damage the cuts will inflict on domestic programs that our poorest citizens rely on. Meanwhile, both senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and house majority leader John Boehner have made it clear that any talk of revenue increases, even closing tax loopholes that only benefit the super rich, are out of the question.

So it seems that the poor are on track to take the hit for the Republican party's apparent zeal to reign in government spending, at least on programs they don't care for. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities outlined what this will mean for low income families and children. They estimated that up to 775,000 mothers and children will be turned away from the WIC Nutrition program by the end of the fiscal year; over 100,000 low income families will lose their housing assistance; 3.8 million long term unemployed people will see an 11% reduction in their weekly benefits and over 70,000 poor children will no longer benefit from the vital preschool program known as Head Start. War veterans, children with disabilities and elderly people living alone will also be made to feel the pain.

In addition to the various cuts in services, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 750,000 jobs will be lost by the end of the year and the GDP will slow down by 0.6%. But, hey, Wall Street had a bumper day on Tuesday, so who really cares about a few hundred thousand job losses or if the poor get poorer?

Actually, we should all be deeply concerned about the long-term implications of the trickle down poverty policies that the Republican party has grown so fond of. It's no secret that inequality has been steadily rising in America for the past few decades, but I don't think most Americans are aware of the full extent of it. Mother Jones has put together a very illuminating video, based on income inequality charts that is worth a look to understand just how big the wealth gap has grown. The top 1% in this country now own 40% of the wealth while the bottom 80% only own 7% between us.

In the past 30 years the wealth of the top 1% has more than tripled, meanwhile 15% of the country are now living in abject poverty, up from 13.8% in 2008 and real median household incomes declined 1.5% in 2011, the second consecutive annual drop.

So the old cliche about the rich getting richer while the poor (and middle class) get poorer is alive and kicking. If anyone fails to see the link between this reality and the policies promoted by the Republican party that protect the rich and punish the poor, then I guess you should just keep voting republican and you will keep getting more of the same.

 Time to start thinking about the 2014 med-term elections. Do voters want an America for and by the people or for wealthy plutocrats who are leaching off the labor of the average American worker.

Conservative James O’Keefe To Pay $100,000 for journalistic malpractice.

Republican Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet

Republican Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet

When is a secret not at all secret? Consider the fact that one in three Americans are poor, if we define it as struggling to cover the basic necessities of life. That's according to a Census Bureau analysis, and it was reported in the New York Times, but I have yet to hear a politician or pundit make reference to this eye-opening reality of our vaunted “new economy.”

In 2011, the Census Bureau took a new look at the “near-poor” – Americans with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line. They found that this group, most of whom earn paychecks and pay taxes, represented a whopping one in six U.S. households – a figure that was almost twice as high as had previously been thought.

When those under the poverty line are added, Census found that a stunning 33 percent of the population was struggling to make ends meet in 2010. Analyzing the Census data, the Working Poor Project suggested [3] that the number of near-poor, which they define as those making between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line, continued to inch up in 2011 as many returning to work in this sluggish recovery have been forced to settle for lower-paying service jobs.

Nearly four years after economists tell us the “recovery” began, almost half of all American households [4] lack enough savings to stay above the poverty line for three months or more if they should find themselves out of work. Another third are living paycheck to paycheck, teetering on the brink with no savings at all.

It would require a lengthy sociological treatise to fully explain why this isn't considered a huge national crisis. But one part of the equation is the existence of a long-standing and ideologically informed project by the right to portray the burden of living in or near poverty as a liberal delusion. In these narratives, which come in a variety of forms, the poor have it pretty darn good – good enough that we really shouldn't spend much time thinking about them.

For these conservative think-tankers, pundits and politicians, obscuring America's grinding poverty and spiraling inequality is an exercise in service of a status quo that works pretty well for them, but not for most families.

1. But the poor have color TVs.

Consider the boilerplate conservative column [5] about how many wondrous household appliances the average low-income household owns. Back in the 1930s, this argument goes, poor people didn't have running water, but now they have color TVs, so life is good.

As I write this, my local Craigslist [6] offers multiple televisions, a dining set, several treadmills, a mountain bike, an oven (with hood), a blender, a coffeemaker, a slew of couches and beds, a piano, a hot-tub (needs repair) and a complete stereo system, all free to anyone who will pick them up. We live in a consumer economy that creates an abundance of surplus and rapidly obsolete goods, and people who struggle to put food on the table can nonetheless get their hands on all manner of electronics for nothing.

2. The poor have lots of room to enjoy poverty.

A similar argument holds that in the United States, poor people have more living space, on average, than low-income households in other developed nations. As the Wall Street Journal was eager to point out [7], “The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.”

Perhaps that's true, but it's also divorced from context. There is a simple matter of population density at work: in the core states of the European Union, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And the average is a bit misleading as it includes the rural poor – low-income households in tightly packed urban centers don't tend to have 1,200-square-foot apartments.

3. The poor are actually rolling in money.

A new and equally distorted argument entered the conservative discourse just recently. It holds that poor families receive $168 per day in government benefits – more than the median weekly income in this country. If that were true, low-income households in the United States would enjoy quite comfortable living standards.

But as I noted last month, that number is inflated by around eight-fold [8]. The claim originated with Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation and then underwent some revisions on its journey to Republican congressional staffers, and finally to the conservative media. It gets to that number by counting things like federal aid to rebuild communities after natural disasters as “welfare,” including programs that assist the middle class and the wealthy and then dividing the costs of all these programs by the number of households under the poverty line, despite the fact that many more families benefit from them.

4. It’s just how they are.

And then there are the ever-popular cultural explanations for poverty. This is a storyline based on confusing correlation with causation – a rookie mistake in any introductory college class.

The Heritage Foundation, for example (it's Robert Rector again), sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe [9] that “the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.”

But this gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s, more than doubling, [10] yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is like claiming the rooster causes the sun to rise.

As I've noted [11] in the past, this is an essential piece of the “culture of poverty” narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: they “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around.

In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here’s the key finding: for every dollar that a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000.

Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself “seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.” As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.”

Why People Are Really Poor

During a period of less than 20 years beginning in the early 1980s, the American economy underwent dramatic changes. It was a period of policy-driven de-unionization and the offshoring of millions of decent manufacturing jobs. The tax code underwent dramatic changes, as CEO pay sky-rocketed and the financial sector came to represent a much larger share of our economic output than it had during the four decades or so following World War II.

And our distribution of income changed dramatically as well. During the 35 years prior to Ronald Reagan's election, the top one percent of U.S. households had taken in an average of 10 percent of the nation's income. When Reagan left office in 1988, those at the top were grabbing 15.5 percent of the pie, and by the time George W. Bush took office in 2000, they were taking over 20 percent of the nation's income.

Corporate America has discovered that it can make most of it's goods in Asia and pay Americans less than a living wage, all the while making record profits. They have no incentive to change because corporate America has lost any sense of patriotic responsibility to the country.

Obama's Call to Raise the Minimum Wage Met by Republican Howls and Disinformation

Obama's Call to Raise the Minimum Wage Met by Republican Howls and Disinformation

During his State of the Union address, President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour [3], up from its current $7.25, and indexing it to inflation so that it rises as the economy grows. If the increase were to happen, it would give the minimum wage its highest purchasing power since 1981, lifting millions of families above the poverty line.

But top Republicans are already coming out against it.

Hey Mark Duke, CEO of Walmart, Have Some True American Values And Pay a Living Wage

Hey Mark Duke, CEO of Walmart, Have Some True American Values And Pay a Living Wage

Walmart has about one million workers, give or take, in the U.S. who are making less per hour, adjusted for inflation, than workers made in 1968. This is remarkable for another reason – today’s Walmart worker, due to automation and other efficiencies, does the work of two Walmart workers from 40 years ago. A federal minimum wage, inflation-adjusted from 1968, would be $10.50 today. The present federal minimum wage is $7.25 – the lowest in major Western countries. In Western Europe and Ontario, where you have operations, you must currently adhere to minimum wages of $10.50 or more.

If you were to announce that Walmart is raising the wages of your one million laborers to $10.50, you would have a decisive impact on the momentum that is building this year for Congress to lift 30 million American workers to the level of workers in 1968, inflation adjusted. Imagine 30 million workers trying to pay their bills with wages below those of 1968, inflation adjusted, when, back then, overall worker productivity was half what it is today.

Raising your workers’ wages to a $10.50 minimum would cost your company less than $2 billion (deductible) on U.S. sales of more than $313 billion. Fewer Walmart workers would have to go on varieties of government relief. Some of that $2 billion would go to social security, and Medicare with more going back into purchases at Walmart. Employee turnover would diminish. If Walmart joins with many civic, charitable groups and unions to press Congress for legislation to catch up with 1968 for 30 million American workers, good things will happen. You and your fellow executives will feel better. Your public relations will improve. So will our economy.

Members of Congress, economists, workers and reporters know you can do this. After all, Walmart has to meet numerous safety nets in countries of Western Europe beyond a higher minimum wage, such as weeks of paid vacation and paid sick leave. Also, your top executives in Europe are paid far less than your $11,000 an hour plus benefits and perks.

One of the reasons Mark makes so much money is that his cost of labor is subsidized by other American workers. This is the kind of income redistribution that conservatives love. They do not believe in a genuine working model for business, they believe in the screw over workers, local communities and tax payers model.

Alabama’s Clinic Escorts Protect Women From Anti-Abortion American Taliban Conservatives Singing ‘Happy Birthday Dead Baby’

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Interstate 5 runs down the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley for hundreds of miles. On either side are dusty rows of almond, peach and orange trees. In the summer, the ground is tan and dry. Telephone poles measure out the time for passing cars, their sagging power lines scalloping out to a vanishing point on the horizon. Somewhere almost halfway from San Francisco to Los Angeles is a town called Huron.

This is where Carla (not her real name) used to work, shaking almonds from the trees at harvest time for $8 an hour. This is also where she was raped by her foreman. But as a Mexican immigrant with no papers, she was afraid to tell anyone.

It’s a common tale. Some 630,000 of the 3 million migrant farm laborers in the United States are women, and at least 60 percent are undocumented. Most are subject to sexual abuse but fear deportation if they speak up. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which expired almost a year and a half ago, would have helped change that. But after being held hostage by House Republicans who wanted fewer protections for women, it died in the 112th Congress. The next class of legislators will have to start from scratch on a new bill. Meanwhile, women are waiting.

A 2010 survey by Irma Morales Waugh of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported that 80 percent of female farmworkers interviewed had been subject to sexual assault or harassment. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that sexual abuse of female farmworkers is so common that many see it as “an unavoidable condition of agricultural work.” And a mid-1990s study by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission concluded that among California crop workers, “hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex.” The female laborers, or campesinas, called one company’s crops the “field of panties,” since so many women had been raped there by their overseers.

The women are stuck, because even though the same labor laws that forbid workplace harassment for legal residents also technically cover undocumented workers, enforcement is spotty and laborers seldom know their rights. Female crop workers make an average of $11,250 a year. “They don’t want to lose their job,” said Amparo Yebra, a senior caseworker at Westside Family Preservation Services Network, a community group in Huron that provides social services to migrant laborers.

The Senate passed a version of VAWA in April that would have expanded escape routes for these women. The bill would have increased the number of special U-visas, which give temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants who are victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, and who are willing to cooperate with an investigation.

* * *

When the foreman drove Carla home for the first time, it was raining. She piled into his truck with other workers. He stopped at a gas station to drop everyone else off, but told Carla he’d give her a lift all the way back to her place. Instead, he took her out into a field and raped her.

There’s so much space out there in the flat fields, sounds don’t travel much. Sometimes there’s a background noise: an unseen bird chirping, or power lines buzzing, or a giant eighteen-wheeler groaning by, mud flaps beating.

Over the next couple of months, he raped her five or six more times, and she became pregnant. She was 22. When she started to show, the women working alongside her asked who the father was, and told her to go to the Westside community group. Carla went because they gave out free food. At Westside, her caseworker Yebra, who knew all about U-visas, called the police and helped Carla through the ensuing investigation, which concluded with the arrest and deportation of her assailant back to Mexico. About eight months later, in 2010, Carla got a temporary work permit.

* * *

In 2012, the number of U-visas issued by the Department of Homeland Security hit its annual 10,000 limit a month before the end of the fiscal year—for the third year in a row. The Senate version of VAWA would have made up to 5,000 rollover visas from previous years available annually to undocumented women. The bill included additional safeguards for immigrants, and new provisions for Native American women and LGBT victims of sexual abuse as well.

But in the version of the bill that passed the House in May, Republicans stripped out the new protections for these three vulnerable groups, slamming them as politically driven. They also scaled back the law’s existing protections for women—for example, removing the chance for immigrants with U-visas to become eligible for permanent residency after their temporary visas expire. The House bill would also have required a stricter standard of proof for asylum, and would have broken with current confidentiality laws to allow the government to interview the abuser about the applicant.

The conservative movement's message is that they're happy for you to be a silent wage slave, but do not expect basic human rights protection just because you pride cheap labor for greedy industrial farms.

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