Wal-Mart a Scrooge?
By Jan Larson (12/11/06)
The Christmas Season is the time when millions of shoppers pour into their neighborhood Wal-Mart store seeking that very special gift for a friend of loved one. It also marks the season when demagogues ramp up their anti-Wal-Mart rants.
Is Wal-Mart really a scrooge to its employees?
The anti-Wal-Mart propaganda, specifically how Wal-Mart mistreats its workers is totally unfounded. That is, the widely disseminated misinformation that Wal-Mart is somehow a sweatshop where employees are overworked, underpaid, and in other ways mistreated is simply a lie that is not borne out by the facts.
Sure, there will always be some employees of any company that aren’t happy for one reason or another. That even happens in my thirty-person firm. However, the facts certainly do not support such claims, the most prominent of which is the fact that Wal-Mart employs 1.3 million people in the United States [1].
I don’t know about your neighborhood, but in mine, I’ve yet to see any Wal-Mart “gestapo” rousting people out of their homes to take them to work slave-labor jobs at Wal-Mart. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that every Wal-Mart employee voluntarily filled out a job application to get his or her job and is similarly free to seek employment elsewhere at any time.
If Wal-Mart was truly an American corporation’s equivalent of a concentration camp, as anti-Wal-Mart zealots would like you to believe, there wouldn’t have been 25,000 applicants for 325 positions when a new Wal-Mart recently opened near Chicago.
Not only are people not forced to work at Wal-Mart, no one is force to shop there, although 127 million Americans do so every week. Why would Americans patronize a company that is so vicious and evil toward its employees? Actually, it is because Wal-Mart and their employees deliver what Americans want for prices that Americans are willing to pay.
The driving forces behind the anti-Wal-Mart effort are labor unions. The unions view Wal-Mart as a target where thousands of new, dues-paying members could be harvested.
The strategy is obvious – concentrate on hourly pay rates health care coverage. After all, who doesn’t have sympathy for workers that are low paid and don’t have health care coverage?
The real question should not be what Wal-Mart can do for such employees, but what does Wal-Mart do for people that have chosen to work for Wal-Mart over all other employment choices available to them?
A 2005 study by Global Insight [2] revealed that Wal-Mart “market wage that fairly reflects the skills, experience and education it requires of its workers.” The study also indicated that Wal-Mart saves the average household $2300 per year. Those that attack Wal-Mart on wages fail to tell this side of the story.
Another area commonly attacked with regard to Wal-Mart is that Wal-Mart destroys jobs, that is, it forces smaller retailers out of business. However, the Global Insight study showed that the opening of a typical 150-350 employee Wal-Mart results in a net increase of 97 area retail jobs in the long-term.
The bottom line is that Wal-Mart is one of the greatest success stories in American capitalism. Compare Wal-Mart’s success in the past 30 years to that of a couple of other American companies, union-dominated Ford and General Motors.
Unions would be a cancer to Wal-Mart and every American would feel the pain. Don’t be fooled that cigarettes are good for you and don’t be fooled by anti-Wal-Mart propaganda. The facts speak for themselves.
[1] http://www.walmartfacts.com/FactSheets/8292006_Economic_Benefits.pdf
[2] http://www.globalinsight.com/MultiClientStudy/MultiClientStudyDetail2438.htm
Copyright ©2006 Jan A. Larson All rights reserved.
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