Eric Williams's List: Labor

• The six Waltons who own Walmart are the richest family in the world. They’re worth $102.7 billion, more than America’s poorest 49 million families put together. The Waltons’ turkeys will be served with gold leaf on gold platters. By private chefs. On very, very private estates. There won’t be any Walmart greeters or cashiers or stock boys sitting side by side with Waltons at their opulent celebration of bounty. Meantime, the Waltons pay such poverty wages that Walmart workers can’t afford their own Thanksgiving meals. The Walton heirs’ gluttonous, aristocratic attitude betrays the promise of the New World.

• McDonald’s, like Walmart, is so immersed in this patrician philosophy that it offers its 700,000 U.S. workers clueless advice instead of decent wages. Earlier this year, McDonald’s provided workers with a budget to help them make ends meet on pittance pay. McDonald’s told them to take a second job, work 80 hours a week! Even then, the budget didn’t account for heating bills.

   

  A raise would work much better for most workers. That’s exactly what McDonald’s gave its CEOs last year. It tripled the pay of its new and retiring CEOs. The new guy, Jim Skinner, now gets $27.7 million. That’ll buy a lot of turkeys.

• Now, on the eve of Thanksgiving, McDonald’s has offered its workers some more advice – including breaking their food into small pieces so they’ll feel full after eating less. Good advice for workers who can’t afford a Happy Meal, let alone a turkey and trimmings.

   

  Also, McDonald’s McResource site tells workers not to whine about their low wages and empty stomachs. Don’t worry, be happy, it warns: “Stress hormone levels rise by 15% after ten minutes of complaining.”
• A report issued last month by researchers at Berkeley and other universities, titled “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry” calculates that the cost to taxpayers in welfare payments, food stamps and other public assistance to the families of fast food workers is more than $10 billion a year.
• It’s a similar story at Walmart, where 1.4 million Americans work.  A study earlier this year by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that one Walmart Supercenter can cost taxpayers as much as $1.7 million a year in public benefits for low-paid workers. That study is aptly titled, “The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy: Wal-Mart’s Low Wages and Their Effect on Taxpayers and Economic Growth.”
• The Waltons aren’t depositing turkeys and yams in those bins. Those bins are there because the Waltons don’t rally around their associates; the Waltons don’t care that their workers face extreme hardships ­– hardships that would be avoided if the Waltons paid a living wage.

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