Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Wal-Mart Memo: eat the poor!

Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs - New York Times

there are so many things wrong with wal mart in this article, it's boggling.

while acknowledging that a significant part of their workforce makes so little money they're still on public assistance, wal-mart still wants to find ways to squeeze their benefits; acknowledging that their workforce is probably among the unhealthiest (diabetes, obesity, poor nutrition), they still want to cut benefits; acknowledging productivity is flat they figure the solution is to find a way to push out senior workers, though there's no indication that younger or newer workers would be any more productive. acknowledging their internal culture is fucked up, do they or their consultants recommend changing that culture?

no, they just want to find ways to make poor and unhealthy people work harder for less.

what a truly fucked up company wal-mart is.

4 comments:

Delia Christina said...

also true. but my anger floats up, toward the power that exploits people's ignorance.

Anonymous said...

um..OK, but in the above article, where's the people's ignorance in play?

guy reader

Delia Christina said...

it's not in play - in the article. the article is wholly about wal-mart and their fucked up internal culture.

but people are ignorant about the ways big box stores like wal-mart (not to mention wal-mart itself) drive down wages and impact whole communities as a whole; no hears about how their insane drive to give everyone low prices actually can destroy businesses (see what happened to vlasic) and can force competitors to race to the lowest common denominator, making it harder for low wage workers to earn an actual living wage - all for the sake of profit margin.

if the working class knew about this and was educated around it (and it is starting to happen) wal-mart would have a harder time crashing into communities.

Orange said...

I don't think Wal-Mart's concerned about employee productivity. Everyone can be mediocre so long as they're underpaid.