An Unkinder, Ungentler Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart, that swelling corporate behemoth, has lately been having some trouble moving into markets in New York and Los Angeles because of the fact that it pays its workers shit and gives them shit benefits, thereby effectively foisting their needs on the surrounding civil infrastructure.
Our government should be the one taking care of those needs, of course, but it’s just not set up to do so. “We” made a decision as a country to lay that burden at the feet of the corporations that employ us, despite the fact that a corporation is a pitiless amoral entity whose sole purpose in life is to make money. So it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that it will gladly screw its employees over if they stand in the way of that goal.
Wal-Mart’s employees have it worse than most, though. They’re disproportionately dependent on the services of Medicare. They make an average of $17,500 dollars a year, and many of them are intentionally given a couple of hours less than a full workweek so that they can be classified as part-time, and thus ineligible for the full suite of shitty benefits that Wal-Mart provides. Only 45% of their employees actually get healthcare.
These practices have garnered Wal-Mart enough bad press recently that they’ve decided to splurge on a makeover:
Answering its critics, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has unveiled a plan to institute environmentally friendly policies, offer employees lower-priced health care and lobby for a higher minimum wage in the U.S.
Wow! That’s sounds awesome! Maybe this soulless corporate leviathan has actually turned over a new leaf! Maybe it’s discovered a conscience under its thick layers of vileness and sociopathy! Maybe the paradoxical dream of a socially-conscious evil profit-whore isn’t so crazy after all!
Except for this. A secret internal Wal-Mart memo that made it out into the wild tells us that the company’s black hole of a heart is still firmly in the wrong place:
An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer’s reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.
How do they discourage the unhealthy without seeming to discourage the unhealthy? By taking advantage of their disabilities, of course!
To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”
Nice. I can see it now: some oily Wal-Mart exec sauntering up to some sickly ailing customer service representative and asking him to please gather up all the shopping carts in the parking lot. Oh, you can’t do that? Well, I completely understand. Maybe you can do this, then. You see the front door over there? Yeah, that one. Can you go over to that door, and open it, and go outside, and close it, and never come back? Think you can handle that? You can? Good. Great. Thanks. Have a nice day.
The memo goes on to say that old people are liabilities:
[Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits] wrote that “the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.”
As part of their old-person elimination plan, I fully expect Wal-Mart to implement a policy wherein, as soon as an employee reaches his seventh year, he or she is captured in an anti-gravity device and pulled up toward the ceiling of the store, where a matter incinerator will reduce him or her into subatomic particles, which will then be placed in an urn and given career counseling before being deposited in back next to the dumpsters.
Really, though, I shouldn’t be so hard on Wal-Mart. It is what it is, what it was designed to be. Might as well blame a vulture for eating carrion. No: the blame lies squarely at the feet of our government, which, unlike a corporation, is supposed to be looking after the health and well-being of its people. That is the point of being a government, isn’t it?
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