Good morning. I’m away on my annual Wildacres Writer’s Retreat atop Pompeii’s Point in North Carolina. I’ve been reading Fred Goldstein’s Low-Wage Capitalism and thought his “Why the bosses need Walmart” is instructive. Enjoy Part 3:

Wages at Walmart have been variously estimated at anywhere from $8 to $10 per hour It considers a full-time job to be thirty-four hours a week. But even at $10 per hour with a forty-hour week, a Walmart worker would take home $1,280 after taxes. No one can support a family on Walmart page; even a single worker can barely survive on these wages. By 2005 the company faced forty different lawsuits filed by workers all across the country for making them work off the clock, work through scheduled breaks, or punch out and continue to work for pay. Walmart has been sued for sex discrimination (two-thirds of its workers are women). It has abused undocumented workers. In fact, Walmart workers are so poor that many of them have to use Medicaid, food stamps and other forms of government assistance just to survive.

Previously…

Yes, I realize that Goldstein as leader and member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party has a point of view anathema to the majority of people in the United States, but he consistently raises points that I think important and worthy of deep discussion concerning our present economic hierarchy in general and Walmart in particular.

I sincerely hope that when I return from my retreat I’ll find the beginning of discussion that brings a thoughtful, large and varied voice to The Writing On The Wal.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 0705 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Capitalism, Communism, Economics, Socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.