Special Alert: You're Not Saving Money At Walmart!

Walmart prices, overall, are no better than most other shopping options. Just as 'Dollar' Stores Aren't Actually The Cheapest Stores. It sounds good (hey, I'm going to save money) and we hear it so often, it's taken for granted. Though, most of the time, it is not true.

Undoubtedly some items may have better prices at Walmart, but even though they left your pocket with a few more pennies when you left their store, Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance, so you're paying for Walmart even when you're not shopping at the store.

As Forbes reported:

“The study estimated the cost to Wisconsin’s taxpayers of Walmart’s low wages and benefits, which often force workers to rely on various public assistance programs,” reads the report, available in full here. 

“It found that a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers.”

In a study by Jon Hotchkiss, he found, "On the grocery items I compared, Walmart was cheaper some of the time. However, they were more expensive other times. Moreover, several times when they were cheaper, it was just by a penny or two."

Walmart is the worst grocer according to Consumer Reports.

Costco pay its workers much better and actually provides them with health insurance.

So Walmart's low-price mantra is more pomp than circumstance. They also cost communities money in the form of health care, food stamps and numerous other subsidies. And, if you must shop at a mega-mart, you'd be better off - for yourself and your community - to shop at Costco.

For Further Reading:
Wal-Mart Low Prices Myths

How Taxpayers Subsidize Walmart

There Is No Skills Shortage. Scott Walker Has Been Terrible For Wisconsin.

Two more memes debunked (again):

Existence of skills gap debated

Walker jobs promise appears out of reach

Sunday Reading

Too Big To Fail. Not Too Strong
The Koch Attack On Solar Energy
Recovery Has Created More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones
Coburn Says Let Free Market Decide Race To The Bottom On Wages
Scalia Makes Huge Factual Error In Supreme Court Opinion
Do Fewer Unions Make Countries More Competitive?
There's No Evidence Privatization Works, But it Marches On
How Global Warming Is Scorching The United States
Charter Schools Fail: Report Calls Their Magic Into Question

Wisconsin Roundup

Corporate Welfare Is Good:

• City May Provide $1.2 Million To Keep Downtown Boston Store Open
• Wisconsin ranks ahead of 33 other states, and the District of Columbia, in corporate welfare payments to business...roughly 10 percent of Wisconsin's budget, or $1.53 billion, is spent on incentives for businesses, or roughly $270 per capita.
• Warren Buffett, Waltons Get Welfare From Wisconsin Taxpayers
• Wisconsin spends at least $1.53 billion per year on incentive programs
• Wisconsin Farm Subsidies
• Corporate welfare in wisconsin
• Wisconsin's Walker and GOP: reward rich friends, punish everyone else

"Living" Wages Are Bad; Punishing The Poor Is Good:

• Wisconsin Bill Banning Local 'Living Wage' Laws Concern Barrett, Abele
• Wal-Mart Relies On Taxpayers To Subsidize Low Wages
• If Republicans Want a 2016 Nominee Who Will Punish The Poor, Scott Walker Is Their Man
• Scott Walker Finds Another Way To Punish The Working Poor
• Scott Walker’s 2016 Pitch: Who Has Punished The Working Poor More Than I Have?
• How opting out of Medicaid expansion punishes the poor
• Food stamp cuts punish people for being poor

And, Scott Walker Is A Crook:

• More Evidence That WI Gov. Scott Walker Is Under Investigation
• Scott Walker Investigated in Secret Wisconsin Probe
• Investigation targets Scott Walker recall campaign, political groups
• Evidence Mounting that Walker Campaign Is at Center of Criminal Probe
• Special Prosecutor Named In Investigation Of Possible Criminal Activity Surrounding Scott Walker Recall Election
• There's a New Secret Investigation Roiling Wisconsin's Turbulent Politics

The American Dream: The 7 Day Work Week

Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin GOP Senator, Fights For A Seven-Day Workweek

Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R) is attempting to roll back one of the state's progressive labor laws, arguing that workers should be allowed to work without a day off if they so choose. 

"Right now in Wisconsin, you're not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week," he told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Is it that people actually want to work 7 days a week? Or, is it, because so many of America's jobs are low-wage jobs, people now have to work 7 days a week to afford a manageable debt-level coinciding with Keeping Up With The Joneses. Maybe people are now forced to work 7 days a week just to try to maintain some semblance of an evermore elusive American Dream.

For Further Reading:

Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds

Half Of All Jobs Created In The Past 3 Years Were Low-Paying: Study

The Economy is "Recovering" By Creating More Low-Wage Jobs... Increasingly Filled By Graduates

How America created a low-wage work swamp
Bloated corporate profits are costing American workers thousands
Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs

Weekend Reading

Myth & Reality: The Low-Wage Job Machine
How Corporate Giveaways Suck The Lifeblood From Your Community
How A Secretive Panel Used Data That Distort Doctors' Pay
Reagan's Million-Jobs Month Revisited
The Great American Do-It-Yourself Retirement Fraud
8 Ways Privatization Has Brought Pain & Misery To American Life
Manufacturing Tax Break Gone Wild
Many New Jobs Are Part-Time & Low-Paying
In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters
Tax Incentives: Costly For States, Drag On The Nation
15 Things Americans Would Know If There Were A Liberal Media

Open For Low-Wage Business

More Jobs, Less Pay

Wisconsin sees the largest month-to-month gain in a decade but most are low-wage jobs.

The good news: Wisconsin had a June jobs surge, a boost from May of 13,800 private sector jobs. State officials rightfully called it the largest month-to-month gain in nearly a decade. 

The bad news: Most of the growth—7,200 jobs—was in the “leisure and hospitality” sector, where average weekly pay was only $284 last year. That’s barely one-third the overall average wage in Wisconsin of $803.

Training, Skills, & Other Fairy Tales

Time for Wisconsin to get a new playbook. I haven't heard a single innovative idea for economic development from any of the supposed experts being quoted in the media, nor from our development agencies. Just more regurgitation of development hucksterism. And, if what we hear from the Walker administration is any indication of our current state of development, we're still stuck in the '80s.

Research parks, stadiums, venture capital, etc. Why are we continuing with proposals that have already either run their course or been proven ineffective?

Here we go again.

Gov. Walker May Be Poised To Reorganize Job Training

As I wrote back in May 2009: 

Gordon Lafer, associate professor at the University of Oregon, in his expansive and definitive work on job training, The Job Training Charade, states, “Job training has served primarily as a form of political diversion. At both the federal and local levels of government, the rhetoric of job training has encouraged a discourse about poverty and unemployment which minimizes the public’s expectations of government. If poverty were viewed largely as the result of a shortage of jobs, and the government were held responsible as employer of last resort, scores of mayors and governors would have been thrown out of office in response to the dislocations of the past two decades. By instead promoting a view of poverty as largely rooted in the educational, cultural, and moral failings of poor communities, the assumptions underlying training policy suggest that the government could not be expected to provide more than marginal assistance toward solving this problem.

As noted in this review of Gordon Lafer’s work, “The commonsense idea that there are plenty of jobs to go around if only the unemployed and the poor had the motivation and the skills to fill them…The number of decently-paid jobs that were available over the last twenty years has never been more than a fraction of the number needed to raise the poor beyond the poverty level…Except for certain professional positions that require specialized and highly controlled education and that compromise a very small portion of the labor market, variables such as gender, age, race, and whether or not workers are unionized, are more important determinants of the levels of employment and wages than are the levels of education.”

David Howell, professor at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy, observes, “In short, employers in the 1980s responded to increased competitive pressures by taking a low-road human resource strategy, one aimed above all at reducing current labor costs…In a great many industries, workers learned new skills to work with more advanced production technologies – but their higher productivity was not reflected in higher wages…In the 1980s, higher skills have simply not led to higher wages. In industry after industry, average educational attainment rose while wages fell.”

The article (Gov. Walker May Be Poised To Reorganize Job Training) also declares "the state's skills mismatch" as one of the reasons to reorganize job training. Two disproven ideas in one article, now that's efficiency. Job training is pointless unless there are actual jobs available (that pay a commensurate wage for the skills). And, skills mismatch is a clever rebranding for what is actually just low wages.

Sinking The Boat, Lifting The Yacht

Christian Schneider, the Journal Sentinel's latest incarnation of conservative parrot Pat McIlheran, opined about how terrible it would be to increase wages for workers - specifically, the minimum wage.

Although, as I found in November 2010, "Others point to the minimum wage as a disincentive to hire and an excessive burden on business. Yet Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich, "Closely analyzed employment trends for several categories of low-wage workers over a 16-year period in all counties sharing a common border with a county in another state where minimum wage increases followed a different trajectory. They report that increases in minimum wages had no negative effects on low-wage employment." Nancy Folbre adds, "Once adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage in the United States is lower than it was in 1967. Wage earners seem increasingly unable to capture any of the gains from technological change and productivity growth." Here is yet another conservative talking-point which the empirical evidence thoroughly discredits." 

And, as I discovered in January 2012, "The Fiscal Policy Institute has found, States with minimum wages above the Federal level have had faster small business and retail job growth." Raise the Minimum Wage has a primer on the topic.

Conservatives have been trying to diminish the pay of low-wage workers since the minimum wage was enacted. Strangely, they never make the same calls for limiting CEO compensation. Schneider even implies, as many conservatives do, that low-wage workers possibly earning more would sink the American economic boat.

As I previously wrote, "Executives are now averaging pay that is over 300 times as large as their average worker (in the late 1960s, CEOs earned about 25 times as much). CEOs have seen double digit pay increases, year-in and year-out. Average workers have been lucky to see their pay keep up with inflation. If the minimum wage had seen the same increase as CEO pay since 1990, the minimum wage would be $23.03."

As John Schmitt reported, "the U.S. leads developed countries in the share of workers earning low wages."

I don't think the U.S should be worried about $10-an-hour workers "sinking the boat." In fact, most would rather we lead the world in middle-class, living-wage jobs. But, as long as the uber wealthy (whom it seems are the ones Schneider is really concerned about) are reaping the majority of our society's rewards, they are the ones threatening to sink the American dream.

The Results Of The Reagan Revolution

The US Has the Highest Share of Employees in Low Wage Work