
Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers - TheLegace
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-returning-to-full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-job-killer-after-all/1/
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michaelwww
I was surprised to see this in Forbes but the author says _" I write from the
left on politics and policy."_ and _" I am a Senior Political Contributor at
Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests.
However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing
for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset
conservative thinkers."_

I applaud Forbes for having opposing viewpoints and also applaud the author
for defending himself vigorously in the comment section from the more
conservative readers. A good time was had by all as far as I can tell.

~~~
revelation
It's Forbes, they have thousands of "contributors" and their site is nothing
but a shell of blogspam now.

Make no mistake, there is no editing going on.

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eropple
This isn't completely true. Rick Ungar is an actual published writer with a
nontrivial history (most of it outside of politics--he was head of Marvel
Productions for a while). He appears on Fox News--such as that is--programs as
the token liberal.

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jobu
My favorite bit in the whole article:

"[Walmart] now hires people to work with its employees to help them sign up
for Medicaid ..."

So Walmart cares about the health of it's employees, just not enough to
provide them with a reasonable health care option.

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maratd
> So Walmart cares about the health of it's employees, just not enough to
> provide them with a reasonable health care option.

Walmart is not a person. It does not care one way or another. Not because it's
evil, but because it's not a person. It can't care. About anything.

This entire "don't be evil" crap has really got to stop.

Corporations respond to incentives, not moral arguments.

If we, as a society, have decided that we want employers to completely provide
for the health of their employees, that's fine. We should make laws requiring
them to do so, with penalties in tow for non-compliance.

But please stop the entire "they just don't care!" crap. They're not supposed
to. They're corporations, not people.

And yes, I know people run those corporations. Those people have fiduciary
responsibilities to their stockholders, not to your moral compass. This is
something resolved on a societal level, not on the corporate level.

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shiftpgdn
Then shouldn't Costco cut all of its employees salaries by half? They are a
publicly traded company as well you know...

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npc
I think the whole point is that "should" and "shouldn't" simply aren't very
useful concepts when dealing with corporations, like talking about what a
slime mold should or shouldn't do. Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like
getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to. Individuals
will respond to moral accusations, but corporations are really only
effectively controlled via legislation.

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nikatwork
> _Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about
> what plantar fasciitis is up to._

Except plantar fasciitis doesn't have a CEO, board or steering committee. Or a
public reputation.

> _but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation._

That's true, but it doesn't mean we can't publicly shame corporations when
they act in bad faith. Incorporation is not some magical get-out-of-ethics-
jail-free card.

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tzs
NOTE! The submitter linked to the second page of a two page story. For those
who want to start at page 1, try this:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-
re...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-returning-to-
full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-job-killer-after-all/1/)

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TheLegace
Oh my gosh, I could have sworn I was on the first page.

Sorry about that.

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bane
Oh, you mean when I can't buy things because they aren't on the shelves
because there's nobody available to move them from the loading dock to the
shelf, and I don't want to shop there anyway because the entire store is in
disarray because there aren't enough employees to clean up the products that
sales might drop?

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derleth
On the other side of the coin, there also aren't enough employees to stop
shoplifters and it's policy that they can't really challenge them anyway.

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gwright
The author claims that shelves weren't being stocked because the employee mix
had been shifted towards part-time workers.

OK, accurate or not, it says nothing at all about the total number of
available 'worker-hours' just that the full/part-time mix had changed. It
simply doesn't follow logically that there would be a shortage of labor just
because the mix changed.

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nathos
Is it possible that full-time workers would be more experienced and/or better
motivated, resulting in increased productivity per worker?

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runamok
They treat employees like crap and pay them as little as possible. Thus they
get exactly what they pay for; sullen workers who do the bare minimum not to
get fired.

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TheLegace
>Wal-Mart’s competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent
increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40 percent more on
average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per hour) than what a Wal-Mart
worker can earn. In that same quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company
is going nowhere fast given its current state of operations.

>the availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job of moving
the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a customer can actually
purchase it. But when there are insufficient numbers of store clerks
available—due to Wal-Mart’s commitment to using temporary workers or busting
its full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker benefit—the
products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and unavailable for customers to
purchase.

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adventured
Some parts of this article may be correct, however this:

"For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been
sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring
mostly temporary workers"

... is simply wrong. Sales (from the '13 annual report):

FY09: $401b | FY10: $405b | FY11: $419b | FY12: $444b | FY13: $466b

Sales are sinking dramatically at the retailer? At best that's ignorance, at
worst a sensational lie.

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michaelwww
Sales are up around the world. He is referring to U.S. stores that are
affected by domestic health care law changes.

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732354920...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323549204578317782804145490)

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FredDollen
"In fact, Wal-Mart’s unwillingness to pay most of their workers a livable
wage"

Wal-Mart is paying their workers what the market will bear. In fact, it can be
argued they are paying MORE than the market can bear, since they have 25
applicants for every opening.

