Wal-Mart, WTO, Casinos

    No, there's no real connection between all those three headliners--just a confluence of stories in today's newspapers.

    Steven Greenhouse has been a busy boy. He has two pieces in the New York Times today. His front-page Business section story looks at the debate over wages at Wal-Mart. I think the best nugget of information from this article that everyone should tuck away is this: "If Wal-Mart spent $3.50 an hour more for wages and benefits of its full-time employees, that would cost the company about $6.5 billion a year," which is less than 3 percent of its sales. Having watched some focus groups last Fall on the subject of Wal-Mart, I'm pretty confident that consumers would be happy to pay the slightly higher prices if they knew those higher prices were a result of Wal-Mart's workers getting slightly better pay and benefits. And, hold your breathe, maybe Wal-Mart would accept a slightly lower profit, too.

   A quick little plug: this Saturday May 7th at 8 p.m. (for all of you with either no date, no babysitter or a VCR), C-SPAN will broadcast the taped debate sponsored by the The Nation and The Economist on the question of whether Wal-Mart is good for America. Yours truly, along with Liza Featherstone (see to the left here in the book list for her wonderful book), held down the side of goodness and light.

    A bit more depressing is Greenhouse's piece inside the main section reporting on a lawsuit filed by UNITE-HERE against the Communications Workers Union because of a dispute over who should organize workers at tribal casinos in California. It's one of the never-ending jurisdiction fights between unions over who has the right to organize a particular group of workers. I've always thought these jurisdiction fights are a real waste of time and money. I've never understood why adults can't just get in a room and work these things out. Normally, the AFL-CIO tries to work these things out via the jurisdictional dispute mechanisms. But, UNITE-HERE has actually sued CWA in federal court alleging breach of contract, arguing that UNITE-HERE was granted exclusive jurisdiction to organize California's casino industry and that CWA agreed to that.

    Seems to me a federal lawsuit is a bit extreme. Having said that, I wonder: what the heck is CWA doing mucking around in the gaming industry? As the union that bills itself as the union for the information age, CWA is getting killed in the burgeoning non-union telecommunications industry and it has virtually no hold in the computer industry. And the quote by CWA spokesperson Jeff Miller reminds me of someone trained in the art of Washington political spin: "We represent workers in many sectors and we're always eager to help workers organize wherever." How about your industry, Jeff?

    Lastly, The Financial Times has a front-page story quoting the two finalists for the job to head the World Trade Organization warning the U.S. and Europe "against applying emergency curbs on Chinese textile exports warning that such a move would smack of hypocrisy." Well, this whole so-called "free trade" regime was built on a foundation of hypocrisy so I say, why stop now? But, let's find the silver lining (hey, I'm a Yankees fan...this season you have to really look for that) in this dispute: it's finally shining the light on the bankruptcy of a world view that is based on an ideology (so-called "free trade") that does not exist in the real world and is creating terrible imbalances between rich and poor. Maybe the whole textile quota mess is the start of the unraveling of this faulty world economic system.

Comments

[Mindful]

"Maybe the whole textile quota mess is the start of the unraveling of this faulty world economic system."

Be careful what you ask for. The imbalance between rich and poor includes rich and poor workers.

The annual wage of a Wal-Mart cashier would give a recently arrived immagrant a live style they could hardly imagine in their third world country of origin.

Is not the off shoring of jobs addressing the imbalance between rich and poor?

[NathanHJ]

This is to the recent comment re: Wal-Mar wages and immigrants.

The annual wage of a Wal-Mart worker would give an immigrant a lifestyle they could hardly imagine, IF THEY WERE TO LIVE IN THEIR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN.

In the US, however, this newly arrived immigrant has the same problem affording the cost of living as the Wal-Mart cashier. And probably more since they are learning a new language and culture.

Offshoring of jobs may have an ancillary impact on the global gap between rich and poor, but the only thing it is "addressing" is the profits of the corporations doing the outsourcing.

[mindful]

Manufacturing jobs in this country prior to their being unionized paid Wal-Mart wages.

Despite what some may think it wasn't Henry Ford's enlightened self interest that made working an auto assembly line with a UAW contract the backbone of our consumer society for better than 40 years after the end of WWII.

It was the UAW contract.

And yes, a recently arrived immigrant from a third world country making Wal-Mart wages in the US would find the life style they would be able to maintain with an annual income of $18K a remarkable achievement.

As to offshoring only benefiting corporate profits—the same corporate profits that benefit the pension funds of retired workers here in the US—tell that to the college graduates in India working in call centers, back-office operations and software development.

[NathanHJ]

First, what percentage of all Wal-Mart employees (including their vast number of part-timers) make $18K or more and how long did they have to work there to make this amount?

Second, I don't know where you live, but any immigrant trying to make it here in California on $18K will be living in conditions that no one would call an "achievement", unless you are refering to the achievement it takes for human beings to persevere.

Third, I didn't say "benefitting", I said "addressing". I was responding to the point you were defending: that corporate outsourcing is addressing the gap between rich and poor. Setting aside for the moment the idea that this model addresses this gap by gutting America's middle class, corporate outsourcing is NOT, IMHO, directly addressing the wage and wealth gap. Any impact it may have on that gap, positive or negative, is simply a byproduct of the practice.

What it is addressing is corporate profits. This is a corporate solution to the problem of sustaining profit growth in a capitalist system. It is not being done in some corporate good citizen impulse. It's being done to keep the owning class rich.

Because if these corporations really cared about the gap between rich and poor they would also care about that gap in the US, the largest in an industrialized country, and they wouldn't be evading their taxes and pushing legislation that subjects them to fewer and fewer of them.

[Lee Russ]

Amen to NathanHJ.

I have no doubt that outsourcing is motivated by the perpetual business goal of driving wages (world wide) as close to zero as possible. Any positive impact in countries that are currently poor is a true "side effect," and probably temporary as well. As soon as India or Pakistan sees rising wages, the corporations will look at China, Indonesia, or any other place where wages are lower. Just ask the Mexican workers whose jobs have already been outsourced to Asia.