Last night I was watching a documentary on Wal*Mart called Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Basically the documentary was about all the evils of Wal*Mart. One section in particular in this video kind of struck a chord with me; Wal*Mart actively discourages labor unions.
If you have ever worked in a big corporate environment you have probably received some form of brainwashing against labor unions. I know from experience both JC Penney's and K-Mart practice this. The reason is simple: labor unions give employees the power to demand better wages and working conditions, and both of those things cost money.
To make up for the benefits being more expensive than the average worker can afford ($75 out of each paycheck) Wal*Mart encourages it's workers to use state-funded programs to make up for anything they are lacking. Wal*Mart is costing tax payers money because they don't want to pay their employees a living wage. A living wage is on average $13/hr. Wal*mart has a profit of over $4 billion per year. That's PROFIT meaning that's what the company has left over after all other expenses. They could increase all their employees wages by $2k a year and still make $3 billion in profit.
So why is it that employees are opposed to labor unions? Wal*Mart, and many other retail giants, employ illegal coercive tactics to make employees worried they will lose their job if they join a union. The Cold War's fears of communism helped to fuel retail companies attacks on labor unions. Labor unions which emphasized the worker looked like communism.
In general, unions are not a bad thing. There have been a few over the years that have been scams, but anywhere money exists scams have been tried. Most people who work in a corporate environment can benefit from unions. Do you want better wages and better working conditions? Try a union.
Also as a side note a fun little graph:
As you can see in the graph only 5% of Americans earn more than $165,000. Less than 5% closer to 1-3% of the population have an income that is 95% of the total income in the US. When 95% of your resources go to less than 5% of the peopel, something is wrong.
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Unions can be good, and can be necessary, but it just depends on where you work and the union itself. In a way, unions are like little tiny corporations themselves and can be either good or bad based on what they do for their coworkers.
ReplyDeleteYears ago I used to work for AT&T at probably the lowest point in the corporate structure possible(Maybe even lower than the retail store people). The union there kept trying to get me to join but I didn't see the point because they weren't doing fucking shit for me or my coworkers. For a call center job the pay was absolutely terrible(barely above Walmart level), mandatory overtime every day requiring us to work 12 hour days 6 days a week that never ended, lie after lie with promises that never happened, etc. It was a terrible job basically, certainly not something I would have expected from AT&T...but where was the union? The unions in AT&T and other telecoms have a huge presence there but for us it was a pretty useless and pointless one. They never helped us and all they did was take peoples money for an empty promise, and they were perfectly contempt with that.
I'm not saying all unions are worthless based on just one experience, but just like with corporations, people should keep a close eye on their unions. Anywhere money is involved, greed and corruption is generally not that far or hard to find.
Yeah I definitely agree unions must watched. I know terrible ones exist, but the main thing I was trying to look at is the active coercion retail giants use to scare people away from even forming unions.
ReplyDeleteThat is really miserable that large corporation like that would give you such a horrible job. Were you at least given over time pay there?
Yeah i got overtime and it was really the only thing that bumped my pay above Walmart-grade. Of course, I had to work a disgusting amount of hours every single day and week to even it out...
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