The Corporate Daddy
Walmart, Starbucks, and the Fight
Against Inequality
JUNE 19, 2014
For
some time now, Republicans in Congress have given up the pretense of
doing anything to improve the lot of most Americans. Raising the
minimum wage? They won’t even allow a vote to happen. Cleaner air
for all? They may partially shut down the government in a coming
fight on behalf of major polluters. Add to that the continuing
obstruction of student loan relief efforts, and numerous attempts to
defund health care, and you have a party actively working to make
life miserable for millions.
So, our nation turns to Starbucks. And
Walmart. In the present moment, both of those global corporate
monoliths are poised to do more to affect the huge chasm between the
rich and everybody else than anything that’s likely to come out of
John Boehner’s House of Representatives.
As long
as the Supreme Court says that corporations are citizens, they may as
well act like them. Starbucks is trying to be dutiful — in its own
prickly, often self-righteous, spin-heavy way — while Walmart is a
net drain on taxpayers, forcing employees into public assistance with
its poverty-wage structure.
“In
the last few years, we have seen the fracturing of the American
dream,” said the Starbucks chief executive, Howard Schultz, in
announcing a company plan to reimburse the cost of college tuition
for employees. “The question for all of us is, should we accept
that, or should we try to do something about it?”
It’s a sad day when we have to look
to corporations for education, health care and basic ways to boost
the middle class. Most advanced nations do those things for their
people. We used to — witness the G.I. Bill, which helped millions
of returning soldiers get a lift to a better life. But you go to war
against the income gap with the system you have, and ours is
currently broken. By default, we have no choice but to lean on our
corporate overlords.
Walmart, the nation’s top private
employer and the world’s largest public corporation, is a big part
of the problem — and could be a big part of the solution. Their
humiliating wages force thousands of employees to look to food
stamps, Medicaid and other forms of welfare. A sign appearing at a
Walmart in Ohio last year, asking people to donate food so that the
company’s employees “could enjoy Thanksgiving,” was a perfect
symbol of what’s wrong with the nation’s most despised retailer.
Working at Walmart may not make you poor, but it certainly keeps you
poor — at the expense of the rest of us.
By one measure, done by House Democrats
last year in looking at data from Wisconsin, the average Walmart
superstore cost taxpayers $904,000 a year in various subsidies, or
more than $5,000 per employee.
Walmart disputes these figures,
claiming the average full-time store worker makes at least $12 an
hour, or enough to be just above the poverty level for a family of
four. But these numbers are skewed by higher pay for management. The
average “associate” at Walmart makes $8.81 an hour — poverty
wage — according to the market-research firm IBISWorld, as of 2011.
Another independent source, Payscale, says the average is under $11
an hour. No matter the exact figure, there’s no dispute that
Walmart’s business model forces thousands of hard-working people to
look for outside help just to get by.
