Taking on a topic I've been meaning to get to all week, my boss Harold Meyerson writes:
Wal-Mart...will shift to more environmentally responsible practices -- demanding greater mileage of its truck fleet and better packaging of its products. It will offer more affordable health insurance to its employees, cutting the monthly premium in some cases to just $11. It will monitor the environmental and health and safety practices of its foreign suppliers. And it will lobby for a higher federal minimum wage.
There's an interesting argument here as to whether these policy shifts are wholly positive advances or mediocre markers of progress that'll weaken the case for organizing Wal-Mart. The answer, probably, is both: Wal-mart's proposed insurance plans are sound and include both preventive and basic care that's sheltered from the deductible. Monitoring its foreign suppliers while decreasing its domestic environmental footprint is good news all around. And pressuring for a minimum wage hike is disingenuous, but positive: Wal-Mart pays slightly above the absurdly low minimum wage, and since many who shop at their stores are lower income, raising the bottom's paychecks by a buck or two will give them more money to spend at Wal-Mart stores while not forcing Wal-mart to offer out an extra cent.
The problem, however, is one of incentives. Wal-Mart does not want a wealthy, economically secure society. Back in the day, the auto companies had to pay their workers enough to buy their cars, which meant raising their living standards up to the middle class. All Wal-Mart has to do is lobby against poverty so abject that the working class can't shop at dirt cheap big box retailers selling Chinese goods. But they don't want their workers or low income Americans to move up income quintiles. Give them much more money and current Wal-Mart begin going to Target, Coscto, supermarkets, Amazon. For Wal-Mart, the incentive is a moderately poor society, always teetering on the edge of solvency and terrified of what news the bills will bring. In that context, Always Low Prices is the preeminent concern, and where Wal-Mart makes its goods, how they cut costs, and what they do to the economy is ignored.
