This week it was announced that WalMart would cut back on
the number of employees that would be covered for health insurance. The number people affected is in the
neighborhood of 30,000 people. That is
thirty thousand lives worsened by the owners of Walmart.
The largest shareholders are the Waltons… arguably some of
the richest people in the country, if not the world. The money “saved” by this change will mostly
go to the bottom line, which is then the income line for the Walton's.
Without the ability to organize, that is, to strike against
their employer the employees are essentially cheated by the rules out of what
they had up until now. It is noted that
part of the decision to discontinue coverage was that WalMart is now going into
the healthcare business. They cater to
the least financially sophisticated populous in the U.S. and have shown an ability to
exploit that population repeatedly.
Concentrating on having the cheapest price they sell substandard
products manufactured in substandard conditions abroad. They cheat the drivers that transport those
goods and they hammer the producers on price.
The WalMart model is to exploit the tax payer as well. It is said that each store costs the tax
payer in excess of $900,000 per STORE in the state and local benefits needed by
employees to live at a near subsistence level due to the starvation wages paid
by the company. The company has further
violated laws in Mexico
(for instance) by bribing local officials in order to by-pass local laws and
build stores where none were wanted.
There is a long and growing list of reasons that WalMart is not a good
citizen wherever it exists.
We might want to ponder system that allows this. We might want to consider the possible ways
to change the course of this slide toward feudalism. It is not just WalMart but it is useful to
see and understand their model.
On one level there is problem involving the employees
themselves. They need the job, even as
low paying and inferior as it is, they cannot do without it and therefore
cannot strike or create a UNION to better
their situation. WalMart's history of
union busting and illegal actions to pressure employees against forming any
union are extensive but let’s just focus on part that is within what the employees
can do for themselves first. You cannot
join a picket line if you are going to be fired. It is necessary to have the job,
remember. You would others, by proxy, to
stand in create the protest for you. You
need some way to keep them on the line.
Since there is no union you do not have the ability to have dues paid
into create a fund. But, in this day and
age, it is possible to create on-line funding for a group that could fulfill
the function of striking the employer. I
won’t go into the history of unions or the laws that now are currently used
against the unions. I would mention that
protection of the middle class is the business of unions. Our legislators have been co-opted, bought
out, by businesses or organizations representing businesses. The pendulum has swung so far to the Right
that unions represent fewer than 7% of non-public employees today. This, in wake of 30 years of Reaganomics
(undisputedly bad for the middle class), has devastated the legal standing of
most of the country’s working people.
The New Feudal Order (NFO) has positioned the employee without recourse,
without a voice in the workplace. The
worker tends to feel that he/she should be doing the “right” thing and working
ever harder. Increases in productivity
have been absorbed by the company and redistributed to the shareholders rather
than the employees who made it possible.
Wages have decreased in real terms over the last thirty years. The wealth of the nation has not been spread
across the spectrum of people who have made it possible.
So, a first step in recharging the middle class could be
creating a way for the worker to strike without leaving the workplace. Creating a mechanism, a fund, targeting the
worst abusers of workers for actions to get the public to understand the menace
of, “Low prices always,” being the start of a downhill slide that needs
correction.
