Via Paul Constant, Josh Eidelson reports in Salon:
A slide from Wal-Mart’s U.S. CEO’s presentation to Goldman Sachs’ retail conference boasts that “Over 475K” U.S. employees earned more than $25,000 last year. Activist workers and members of Congress seized on that statistic at a Wednesday press event, arguing it amounts to an admission that annual pay for the majority of Walmart’s 1.3 million-member U.S. workforce falls below $25,000.
“Low-income people, poor people, have been demonized for being the ‘takers,’” Rep. Jan Schakowsky told reporters at a D.C. press conference. But because “taxpayers are the ones that are subsidizing Wal-Mart right now,” she contended, Wal-Mart elites are the true “welfare kings in this country.”…
Schakowsky’s critique was echoed by two other House Democrats. Rep. George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education & the Workforce Committee, argued that when Congress passed welfare reform, the goal was to help poor people “end their dependency on public assistance – but that’s not the business plan that Wal-Mart and others have fashioned out.” California Rep. Grace Napolitano urged that “we need to start looking” at what portion of public assistances dollars are “subsidizing the Wal-Mart employees, and actually in turn subsidizing Wal-Mart itself.”…
The congressional Democrats were joined by members of OUR Walmart, the non-union workers group closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union, who described their experiences making less than $25,000 a year. After “student loan payments, transportation, rent to my grandmother, I have barely nothing,” said Illinois employee Richard Wilson. “I shouldn’t have to decide between feed my kids or pay my rent,” said Maryland employee Gail Todd. “I’ve got to get another payday loan to be able to pay another payday loan,” said California employee Anthony Goytia. He told reporters he had scars “like a junkie,” because he repeatedly donated blood plasma for money…
As I’ve reported, OUR Walmart has mounted a series of strikes against the retail giant as part of a campaign demanding better pay, workplace respect, and an end to alleged retaliation. Dozens of workers at a Hialeah, Fla., Wal-Mart also walked off the job Friday, the first work stoppage by U.S. Wal-Mart store employees since the firings of 20 workers who’d joined a June strike. Rep. Schakowsky, the House Democrats’ chief deputy whip, called the workers’ call for Wal-Mart to pay at least $25,000 a year, “not a luxury wage,” and said that “for many people and families it’s not even really a living wage, or certainly not an extravagant wage. But just asking for that has elicited retaliation.”…
“I don’t want to rely on food stamps, you know,” OUR Walmart’s Goytia told reporters Wednesday. “I pay taxes too … I want to be able to provide for my own family.” Workers plan to mount another major “Black Friday” strike the day after Thanksgiving. Goytia said he wanted the chance to look Wal-Mart management in the face and tell them, “I’m not afraid of you, Wal-Mart. You guys come and look for me.”
More information at the link. OUR Walmart’s website here.
trollhattan
Oh, I just give up. Seriously, y’all are just going to have to fix this mess your ownselves.
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/23/5846956/uc-davis-pays-claim-to-pepper.html#storylink=cpy
somethingblue
No, no no! This would be soooooooo divisive! And shrill! Some Republicans somewhere might call it “class warfare” and then Democrats would have a big sadz! Fred Hiatt would be VERY MUCH UNHAPPY. Emoprog retards do not understand how the real world works! Shouldn’t get here!
The prophet Nostradumbass
@trollhattan: You get Workers’ Compensation when you’re fired for cause? How does that work?
JordanRules
@trollhattan: Ugggh. Palm meet face.
I’m just going to re-read the post about Walmart again and try to erase that bullshit. Good on the Dems for some pushback. We need more. Goliath barely felt that, but we’ve got to pile on.
NotMax
Cheaper labor. Every day.
Judging from the very few Wal-Marts have ever been in, the entire company spends about $25 per location per annum on cleaning supplies.
kc
@trollhattan:
Please tell me that’s a hoax.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@kc: No, unfortunately, it’s real.
kc
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I wonder if those kids he assaulted got any compensation.
mclaren
In Shithole America 2013, the thug cops must get worker’s comp for the emotional damage they suffer beating down and pepper-spraying the hordes of impoverished peons demonstrating for a living wage.
The Walton family needs to have their entire net wealth confiscated and they should be put on trial as enemies of the state, then sentenced to work for the rest of their lives hand-laundering baby diapers for inhabitants of the favela slums in some third world country like Brazil.
Wal-Mart is far from the biggest welfare freak in America, though. The Pentagon is a much more lavish abuser of white collar welfare. As are Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks who survived only because taxpayers like us bailed them out, only to watch these financial crime lords lavish themselves with gigantic bonuses out of the taxpayer billions we shoveled into their pockets.
Up against the wall, all of ’em. No mercy. The Mussolini treatment for every last one.
Violet
I thnk it’s excellent news that “Wal-Mart is a moocher” is making it into the mainstream. Hopefully Colbert or Letterman or someone like that will pick up on it. Maybe SNL will do a skit. Get it out in the mainstream. Mock them.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
They may pay $25/yr on supplies but I’ll bet they refuse to pay anyone to use them. That must be one of the most foul places to work. And the filth is one of the least foul reasons.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren:
You realize, of course, that starting you comment that way pretty much ensures that nothing you say subsequently gets noticed, right?
mclaren
@kc:
The students got 1 million in compensation split between all of them and their lawyers, which works out to not as much as you’d think after taxes. The lawyers get 30%, taxes take around 50% between state and federal income taxes. That means each student got roughly 20% of the total split.
Let’s do the math: 36 protesters get $700,000 after the greedhead lawyers snarf up 30% of the damages. That works out to $19.444 per student before taxes. After taxes, figure 25% federal + 20% state, they get $10,694 per student.
Notice that the thug who pepper-sprayed them got almost four times as much in compensation as the students get for being pepper-sprayed. Standard, typical, usual and quotidian for post-democratic America.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
You realize that constantly and publicly applauding sociopaths who order the murder of American citizens without even charging them with committing a crime ensures that anyone who encounters a comment with your name on it will spit in revulsion and turn away without reading it, right?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Omnes Omnibus: As the reply shows, mclaren is a nut, and comments here mainly to scratch an ego itch.
kc
@Violet:
I suspect conservatives will just blame Wal Mart employees for not getting two or three additional jobs to supplement their crappy Wal Mary wages.
Violet
@kc: Oh, sure they will do that. But they’re preaching to the choir. The rest of us live in the real world and we can see how crappy Wal-Mart is, how beat down their employees look and how they strong arm communities to get what they want. I don’t think that crap sells as well as it did.
kc
@mclaren:
LOL, I love this place.
max
@mclaren: The Mussolini treatment for every last one.
Fabulous. You’re the Internet’s Single Liberal Fascist! There must be some kind of fucking prize for that.
max
[‘Can’t you hang out with the 88 dudes?’]
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Cheers!
mclaren
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Yes, citing the documented facts proves that I’m “a nut.”
Source: “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, 29 May 2012.
So much for the credibility of The Prophet Nostradumbass.
Pro tip: when you use a smear, try to make sure it’s credible. You need to study the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry to see how it’s done. You’re not doing it right.
Source: `Terror: The Hidden Source,’ Review of “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam” by Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books, 24 October 2013.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@mclaren: I apologize for calling you a nut. Your reply indicates that you are actually a kook.
Susan K of the tech support
Glad to see my representative quoted in this story (Grace Napolitano) Imma gonna hafta give her office a call tomorrow and put in a word of support.
(Previously, my rep was the chair of the House Rules committee; and I spent a little time during the shutdown wondering if he’d’ve done that foul House Rules thing had he still been around.)
Omnes Omnibus
@The prophet Nostradumbass: LOL
mclaren
@max:
Uh-huh. And proposing that the Walton family be treated the same way Italian peasants treated Mussolini and his mistress makes me a “fascist”…how, exactly?
Benito Mussolini robbed and brutalized his countrymen and when it came time for payback, guess what? Payback’s a bitch. Take a look at this video to see what the ordinary Italian working men and women did to Benito Mussolini when they got their hands on him.
Yes, that’s what I’m advocating for the human remoras who impoverish American working men and working men, people like Jamie Dimon and the Walton family. They need to have their corpses hung upside down from lampposts as a warning to the rich greedy parasites who are sucking the American middle class dry and trashing this country.
Take a look at this short video showing the current distribution of wealth in America and tell me there’s not going to be a mass uprising in the foreseeable future, a mass uprising in which a vast mob of impoverished starving working men and women burn down the mansions of the Walton family and their ilk, drag them out of their marble-halled palaces, beat ’em to death, and hang ’em from the streetlamps.
This situation is not sustainable.
Apologists for the grotesque and outrageous status quo like you are going to go the way of Josef Streicher at the Nuremberg Trial.
Rich greedy fucks like the board of directors and the management team who run McDonalds set up a help line that tells their starving employees to apply for food stamps so they can feed their children. Google “Video: McDonald’s tells workers to get food stamps — A new recording captures the fast food giant’s worker 1-800 number touting public assistance” from Salon.com and tell me I’m wrong about the maelstrom of fury and rage that’s building up in this country. Listen to these assholes telling their own employees that they need to file for public assistance so they can put food on the table for their kids, and tell me the rich greedy vampires running companies like McDonalds aren’t the biggest welfare queen in the fucking United Snakes of Amnesia.
mclaren
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
You don’t have anything to contribute other than name-calling, do you?
Foul-mouthed, ignorant and unable to provide logic or evidence in a debate is no way to go through life, son.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Pot, kettle.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@mclaren:
As I said, you are a Kook. You have all of the hallmarks of one. Walls of text, and an inability to understand why people don’t find your walls of text to be the TRVTH, as if presented by the gods, are generally sufficient.
ETA: Oh yes, there’s also the tendency to engage in “I know you are, but what am I?”
trollhattan
@mclaren:
Will add the douchenozzle officer Pike made $120k/year, patrolling the crime hotbed that is UC Davis. That’s a nice $10k/month, plus I’m sure, excellent bennies. You’d think that sort of compensation could attract actual talent.
ruemara
@trollhattan: Take that back. I’m sure he risked his life protecting students from mutant carrots grown in the test fields. And perhaps a random loose cow with the transparent tummy. Very dangerous, UC Davis and Davis is. Just you try to remove a street tree or put fluoride in the water.
? Martin
@trollhattan:
California has some of the most labor-friendly laws in the nation. No policy is perfect, and it’s better that we overshoot by giving some outlier disability that they don’t deserve than the usual policy of not giving deserving workers anything.
This is the same argument for why it’s okay to allow a handful of fraudulent votes in an election to prevent anyone’s voting rights from being denied.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@? Martin: Dunno if you live in Northern or Southern California, but there’s been some guy who, during the BART strike, was able to position himself around pretty much every single TV segment about the strike with his “OUTLAW TRANSIT STRIKES” ballot measure. Did you catch him?
JordanRules
@? Martin: And reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Indeed, I’m disgusted in that one outcome but not disgusted by the lean of the Cali labor laws.
? Martin
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Socal, so no. Local ballot measure I hope. Because who the fuck else in the state would care about transit strikes? We all drive down here.
mikej
@? Martin: LA has the largest transit system measured by usage in the US.
? Martin
@mikej: Not enough to carry a ballot initiative, especially when the socal transit workers aren’t striking.
gene108
You know it’s interesting how the pendulum is starting to swing against the “center-right-nation” CW. In some of the state legislature races, here in NJ, the candidates are saying they are in favor of raising the minimum wage, for example.
I think raising the minimum wage is going to be an economic wedge issue that is going to hurt Republicans. Most people are strongly in favor of raising it. When it is on state ballot measures, it usually passes with overwhelming support.
I like how highlighting how Wal-Mart employees work and receive welfare benefits will help set the stage for the showdown to raise the minimum wage in Congress this year. It really stands the whole “job creators” talking point Republicans message tested on its head and shows it for the shallow sloganism that it is.
Also, too who hijacked Ann Lauries’s Front Pager account? There’s no link to Billmon! (/snark)
A Humble Lurker
@gene108:
I think Maddow did a thing a while back about the minimum wage and raising it: always a winner. Not a lot of people who are dumb enough to say they are against it get elected. I think it’s popular, and has been for quite a while.
So getting people on board with it might not be the issue. The issue might be pushing it enough to get it to snowball.
Mardam
I don’t shop there…ever. Haven’t for more than two years. If I can’t find it elsewhere, I’ll do without. It’s the least I can do.
gene108
@A Humble Lurker:
I think most Congressional Republicans have been on record as being against raising it for as long as I can remember, or else it’d have been indexed to inflation or something other mechanism to keep it rising automatically.
I think there are issues people agree with, but are not going to get up to vote someone out for opposing. The trick is to get people fired up enough to vote people out for opposing it.
Hopefully more human interest stories about the working poor will help.
Ramalama
Walmart seems to be doing fine in Canuckistan, where the minimum wage is $10/hour and health care is free.
Also, it makes me so angry that my hands shake whenever the status of being an American is measured by how many taxes you pay, or whether or not the taxes you do pay are the right kinds of taxes.
sparrow
@? Martin: Or letting a few criminals go free rather than jail the innocent. Or letting a few get away with “welfare fraud” so that the needy get real help. I actually think this is a good way to test liberal/conservative values. Liberals agree that it’s ok to let the first thing go in order to take care of the second, while conservatives will happily put the whole poor/black population in jail because they think that way they won’t miss any criminals. Better a hundred die than a guilty man go free. etc.
sparrow
@Ramalama: Agree. It’s part and parcel of the privileged class (i.e., primarily well-off whites, though not always) being blind to their privilege, and thinking THEY worked so hard and contribute so much but all those icky poors must just be lazy, or inept, and undeserving. And when I say blind, it really is that. I took my mother (one of the above types) through East Baltimore as a learning experience. Aside from being scared stupid, she wanted to lay the whole of the blame on the people that lived there… meanwhile I was just thinking, how do people ever have faith enough in a better life they have never seen, to get out of this hell? And unfortunately these people like my mother lack empathy and imagination. They don’t understand hardship until it happens to them, and sometimes not even then.
A Humble Lurker
@gene108:
Ah, I should of clarified. Not a lot of candidates who are dumb enough to say it out loud or are against pending related legislation get elected. When there isn’t an election on the horizon, it’s easier for that to fall down the memory hole.
StringOnAStick
@A Humble Lurker: Candidates appear to be great at supporting an increase in the minimum wage while campaigning, and not so great at actually pushing any legislation about it after elected. It must have something to do with campaign financing sources, no?
My BIL used to work at Target; pretty much also a dystopian hellhole for employees though not as bad as Walmart by a long shot. Having to write up 5 unique performance goals every 2 weeks about drove him insane, but eventually he got their crappy health insurance. For comparison, he loves his current job as a prison guard, especially when compared to working at Target…..
GRANDPA john
@kc: except for the fact that you d n’t work the same hourly schedule. each week. Walmart puts you on rotating hours worked and you only get the schedule weekly . therefore you cannot commit to a second job , they even shift you between day and night hours