The chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores beseeched U.S. governors yesterday to help him make healthcare more affordable for his 1.3 million U.S. employees.
“We know our benefits at Wal-Mart Stores are not perfect,” Scott told the National Governors Association.
A survey by Ohio’s Department of Jobs and Family Services recently found that Wal-Mart workers represented one of the state’s biggest groups of employed Medicaid recipients–around 8% of the retail giant’s employees are enrolled, costing the state a reported $11 million, according to The Associated Press.
Wal-Mart has been criticized by labor unions for setting high premiums that keep more than half of its workers from participating in the company health plan.
Why shouldn’t Wal-Mart get the same assistance every other large employer gets? If the end result is better health care for employees, what’s the complaint? If you assist *any* businesses, you have to assist any who ask. You can’t cherry-pick because you don’t like their profit/loss statement.
Take your hippie propaganda somewhere else. Why don’t you attack something that’s actually bad instead of a company that helps make America great?
“Take your hippie propaganda somewhere else. Why don’t you attack something that’s actually bad instead of a company that helps make
AmericaChina great?”Fixed that for you.
Twenty years ago the average worker had a union job and made $17/hr with full benefits. Today, the average worker works in a Wal-mart, makes $7/hr and gets little, if no benefits. You call that progress? It is something that I, as an American, am ashamed of.
I agree with Steve. Why should a business that’s by no measure in trouble be getting any government aid? Bailing out the airlines after 9/11 was one thing (regardless of how they actually spent it, which is another issue altogether.) Wal-Mart is quite another.
I mentioned in some other post how Wal-Mart having its workers on Medicaid amounted to a government subsidy, thus their prices are artificially low because they couldn’t get away with them otherwise. The government should not be subsidizing the world’s largest corporation, especially one held up as a success story by conservatives.
“…they want the government out of the way when they’re screwing us over, but they want the goverment’s money (i.e., OUR money) when they actually have to spend some.” –Steve
Touché, and amen.
Union workers made a lot because they were looting the then present wealth of the companies they worked for at the expense of the future; just look at those places now.
I guess it would be a better deal for the state if Wal-Mart didn’t employ anyone at all?
Anyway it’s not like they have to round people up at gun point to work there; everyone who works there does so voluntarily.
Medicaid has issues, but most of those are caused by the state (and specific to Ohio, lawyers), Wal-mart has nothing to do with it.
Wal-Mart is one of the most despicable companies in the world. They have single handedly destroyed companies like Rubbermaid and sent good paying jobs to China. They should be forced to to pay their employees a fair wage and decent benefits. When companies like Wa-Mart are allowed to abuse the system, all of us end up paying for it. The employees without insurance end up in emergency rooms unable to pay the huge bills and we end up paying higher healthcare costs. I don’t want my hard earned tax money going to subsidize a predatory company like Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart can’t afford to pay its employees and offer them benefits thay should pay their management less money or raise their prices.
Always a thrill to hear from the parochial.
BMW, Porsche, Toyota, etc. are all union shops. As is Samsung and the Korean giants. Just because the corporate giants of Ohio [?] are failing has little or nothing to do with how their labor force had to organize to have even a fraction of the power of their employers.
Or do you think that US trade unions somehow own as much of Congress or the White House as, say, GM, the Oil Patch Boys, Pfrizer — or Wal-Mart?
Or the Ohio state house? It is to laugh.
“I guess it would be a better deal for the state if Wal-Mart didn’t employ anyone at all?”
False dichotomy. I’d rather they pay reasonable wages and provide reasonable benefits and maybe raise their prices a little to cover it if need be.
Unions are by no means perfect. When they’re too powerful their demands get unreasonable and they’re harmful. I know, I just went through the NYC transit strike. However, when they don’t exist and the company’s too powerful, they abuse the workers. As always, you have to hit the ever elusive balance.
Evil Sandmich, you bring up a good point about union worker [mob] mentality, but still, I wouldn’t be successful today if it weren’t for liberals that helped me rise from poverty and ignorance. The odds were against me 1,000,000 to 1. Liberals helped me. NOT conservatives.
Unions are why there are “weekends”.
Right now, there is a huge fight locally to keep a Wal Mart out of Fairhope, Alabama. It is a small, artsy little town with no sales tax and a bunch of little over priced shops. There are hundreds of people up in arms because Wal Mart is going to build just outside of their city limits. I see people on the news marching and protesting the new store and, while I am not the world’s biggest Wal Mart fan the truth is, if people would not shop there, they would go out of business. Wal Mart still has plenty of competitors. Obviously, they are doing something right. I know, we can complain that they compete unfairly and are able to buy goods cheaper but, as far as I know, they do so legally.
Remember that most of the profit from goods manufractured in China are from two things:
1) Convict labor.
2) Their curency has been kept artifically low on purpose. If it were valued on the “free” market. The prices for a lot of stuff would go way up.
ANyone that thinks Wal-Mart is a good thing needs to get off the crack. I curse Wal-Mart shoppers to never have anyone care any more about them, than Wal-Mart corporate cares about its employees.
I would not urinate from range to put out a burning Wal-Mart fan.
And Bolsheviks ate their babies and the Protocols of Zion should be enshrined in Congress. You left those out, STA.
National health care will happen when the major Corporations in our country demand it.The politicians aren’t doing anything about because they have great health care.If we can take back the Health Care industry from the Insurance and Drug companies”doubtful”we may have a chance to help people live longer and completely bankrupt our country.Do your country a great service commit suicide at 60.Oh Oh I’m 54.
Unions gave us the 8 hr day and the 40 hr week. They also gave us health benefits. Unions made America the most powerful nation on earth. They also gave the US a standard of living unsurpassed in the world.
Since the Reagan union busting, America no longer holds the standard of living title. Each year workers purchasing power declines just a little more. Every year we pay more for the double digit increases in health care while seeing little or no increase in pay. Every year Americans are asked to work just a little more “off the clock”. Every year more Americans give up just a little more earned vacation time to “help out” the company.
Wal-Mart is the champion when it comes to taking advantage of its employees. In the early 1970s a term was coined for companies like Wal-Mart. Corporate Welfare Bums !!!
Bankrupt our country? If anything we’re at a competitive disadvantage because we don’t have national health care. We pay more for health care than the other countries that have it.
Plenty of statistics here. (Yeah, it’s a blog post, but it links to its sources.)
We pay the highest percentage of our GDP towards health care costs. In dollar terms, we pay twice as much as other countries. GM has talked about how the Canadian system works out so well for them.
You can fight about the details of how it should be implemented, but national health care would be a boon for the people AND the economy.
I am sick of hearing how bad wal-mart treates the associates. I am a associate and i have worked for the best company for 6 year snow and have been able to single handely raise my daughter and have health care benifites the whole time i have been employed. With out wal-mart’s support for there associates i would probly be working at a gas station with out ever being able to give my daughter a future…So please think of those unfortinate associates or at least talk to then before you decide to go off about how bad they are being treated.
Thanks to Jami we have now heard from a corporate shrill! I bet she is unaware that being female has hurt her chances of promotion, or that other companies offer medical benifits that do not require some form of assistance.
The fact is Wal-Mart costs Taxpayers $1,557,000,000,00 to Support its Employees. That 1.5 billion could be better spent retraining workers in rust belt towns.
Walmart is a model of efficiency. They computerized their inventory systems well beyond what Kmart and other retailers did and bled the waste out of the system.
Walmart’s crappy wages are no worse than the crappy wages their competitors have. My brother saw a employee who had long worked at another crappy employer working at Walmart the other day.
Don’t get tricked into thinking that the low wages Walmart offers is any different than their competitors, it isn’t.
Walmart merely employs all the computerized tracking/stocking that was supposed to be a benefit of computers while their computers oafed and fumbled around doing things the old way and went out of business in the process.
Bear in mind that Walmart is a “liberal” based corp. A classic representation of what happens when liberals run a business. Not the expected welfare for all/share the wealth example you expected. Instead, they are accused of
* preditory capitalism
* white slavery
* price gouging
* price fixing
* town killing
* funneling jobs offshore
On another note, all the liberal assistance provided through unions is done based on revenue provided by conservatives…it truely IS a balancing act!
Steve, you blew RIGHT by my point. I said *IF* you help any.
Businesses get health care subsidized every day in this country. Until you abolish it for *ALL* businesses, it’s disingenuous to single out WalMart for criticism on the issue.
Mike
I went through your comment several times trying to figure out if your were being sarcastic or sincere. I’m still not sure. If you had something like “contribute to bird flu” then I would be sure of your sincerity.
In your list, I think there is adequate evidence for all of them except I don’t know about the “white slavery” issue. I thought they went for the “brown slavery” type.
Obviously you people missed the Playboy SE of Women of Walmart. That is a good thing from Walmart. If Wally World didn’t exist, these beautiful women would have never been discovered. There is always a bright side. *shrug*
What do you have against Walmart? Do you really think the businesses it supposedly replaced in small towns provided more benefits?
I love how these *articles* are put up here. The rest of the story is quite revealing. Wal-Mart didn’t ask for subsidies, it asked for help with ideas of how to set up employee health care systens that would provide health care and not bankrupt the company. Or for that matter, ANY company. The point they tried to make was….health care costs are continually going up at a staggering rate, is there something that employers can do to stem this tide and help their employees.
The other part of the original story was that Wal-mart is always accused of underpaying it’s employees, but all studies done by every economic group in the country show that not only is Wal_Mart inline with other retail employers, it actually pays a percentage higher than they all do. And, this is the part Wal_Mart bashers love to ignore, they pay better benifits than almost all of it’s retail compitors. Wal_Mart admitted that they had a problem with females employees and promotion but they have been addressing that for the past several years.
Some of you bashers might like to go to south central Los Angeles sometime, you’ll find that all of the enlightened, unionized grocery chains pulled out that area many years ago, leaving the residents with no where to shop, but Wal-Mart has gone into that area and been very successful, providing an average of 300 jobs per store, increasing local tax revenues, and providing much needed local community projects help.
Some of you may not like it, but the store chain does something very right, it’s the largest employer in this country and the largest retail chain in the world, and it provides much needed finacial help to the poor and the working poor with it’s pricing.
Oh, and the Ohio Medicaid satistics…..when you look at the actual figures, you see something not mentioned in this article, that Wal-Mart hires a very much larger percentage of over 55’s than anyother retailer in the nation, and the reason so many Wal Mart employees are on Medicare is because they already quailified for it due to being retired or disabled. How many 65 y/o’s have you seen working at Sears lately?
Sure is some interesting ideology you have going there, Joshua. “they had a problem with females employees and promotion but they have been addressing that, blah, blah”!
Folks sued their butts off for everything from sexual harrassment to discrimination. Then, and only then, did WalMart begin to respond to court-ordered compensation and adjustment in policies. I haven’t paid much attention to suits in other states; but, two of those suits were here in New Mexico in the past ten years.
God shops at Wal-mart. He drives his SUV there to buy meat, beer and guns.
Actually, He drinks beer and talks on His cell phone while driving to Wal-Mart to buy meat and guns.