Comments on: WORKING AT WAL-MART

By: Jay Solo

Jay Solo — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Heh. Wal-Mart healthcare is a hot topic for my wife to expound upon, but in favorable terms. Must make sure she sees this...

This is a good post to enter in CotC, in case you hadn't thought of it or already entered another. In effect, you are saying labor is a part of the market too, and subject to things like supply, demand, and type being offered by the seller. The type may be dependent on when and where in their lives people are. Hooray for capitalism!

By: RicK DeMent

RicK DeMent — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Indeed, hooray for capitalism. It is good that we abandon the naive promise of the social contract in favor of the much more efficient and impartial judgment of the free market. After all the metrics of growth and profit are have a seductive appeal as they are objective and quantifiable, whereas âquality of lifeâ is soft, imprecise and prone to subjective evaluations.

It is only muddled thinking that would suggest that our systems and institutions be designed to serve people. It is only the rigorous mind that understands we exist only to serve these systems and institutions with a slavish devotion to the metrics of profit and growth for if we do not, then what is their function?

By: sym

sym — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Walmart still shouldn't be making ads featuring people saying "It's nice to know that I work for a company that would take care of everything we went through," if it's not really true. The ads aren't saying "we provide low-paying entry jobs for students and immigrants! we have a huge turnonver rate! shop at Walmart's!" Walmart themselves see the need to advertise their allegiance to the Social Contract. They don't have the balls to justify their treatment of workers through arguments about the overall standard of living or the free market.

By: Dean Esmay

Dean Esmay — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

I believe that if Kevin Drum did some research, he would find that more people--both in total and as a percentage of the population--have health insurance today through their employers than they did 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 years ago. That being the case, he is mistaken; the "social contract" he speaks of applied only to workers in very large corporations in decades past. Due to changes in the law and tax structure, and the demands that workers made on employers, more and more employers have found ways to offer health insurance, so that now a majority of workers do in fact get it. We now consider it a "crisis" that "an entire third" of America is without health insurance. I believe that if he checked the figures for 1950 or 1960, he'd find that less than half of them were so covered. This is, of course, no reason not to advocate for reforms that make it easier to arrange coverage for even more people. Although I am an advocate for a voucherized system that allows everyone at any income level to choose among a list of private insurers, I must admit that the latest Bush proposal is excellent. Small employers and organizations, and the self-employed, right now are forbidden to pool together collectively to offer joint insurance packages, and Bush wants to change that. It's really not a bad idea at all, and would move us incrementally further to the goal of getting all Americans covered. The real issue is what happens to you if you lose your job, or switch jobs, and either become injured or have some long-term medical care need. That still hasn't been sufficiently addressed.

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Dean,

Well, Wal-Mart is a pretty big company. :)

But I agree that the solution is some sort of pooled system. I'd like to give something like the Bush plan a try. If that doesn't work, it may be that a government-sponsored pool is the logical alternative.

By: Meryl Yourish

Meryl Yourish — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Dean, your beliefs aside, I believe the burden of proof is on you for those statements, not Kevin. On what source are you basing your assertion that fewer people had health care coverage in the 1950s and 60s, or even in the 80s? Gut feelings don't count. Evidence does.

"I believe that if he checked the figures for 1950 or 1960, he'd find that less than half of them were so covered."

Feel free to make as many suppositions as you like. But don't expect us to accept them as factual citations.

Got a cite for that statement?

By: Mithras

Mithras — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

We have 44 million people in this country who have no health insurance. When they get really ill, they get uncompensated care from hospital ERs. As a result, we pay more for treating them after they're sick than if they got preventative care, they're suffering, and the hospitals are teetering on financial collapse. We do worse on health care metrics like lifespan and infant mortality than other industrialized countries. At the same time, we spend more per capita on health care than countries with socialized medicine.

Our market-based system is clearly broken. Making it more market-driven will make it worse.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

From here (a quick overview of the history of health insurance): "During the 1950s, health insurance protection expanded rapidly and by the middle of the decade 77 million people had hospital expense insurance in either the indemnity form or under a major medical plan." Since there wasn't a census in the mid-50s, I checked the population figures for 1950 and 1960. Respectively, the were: 149895183 and 178554916. Even taking the lower of the two numbers, That makes only about 51% of the population covered (taking the midpoint between the two, it's about 47%). Since the quote also says that protection rose rapidly in the 50's, I suspect the figures in 1950 were way below half. You will also please note that they were talking about hospitalization insurance, not what we call 'health insurance' today. I can't find anything definitive on when that became popular but I suspect it was probably after medicare was instituted (mid-60's if I recall).

By: Jerry Kindall

Jerry Kindall — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Retail stores have always employed their hourly workers at part-time to avoid providing benefits, and just as importantly, to avoid paying overtime. When I worked at Sears in high school and college, not a single person in my department (paint and hardware) was full-time. In fact, they hated to schedule people more than 30 hours a week, because there was always a chance you'd have to switch shifts with someone due to an emergency and end up working more than 40 hours a week, thus costing the company overtime. They also consistently underscheduled busy days like the 4th of July Paint Sale, leaving customers standing around for hours. Sometimes we'd have so many customers we'd have to go on helping them after the store closed, which most of us were actually glad to do until maintenance turned the power off and we had to stop. My point is, Wal-Mart is doing nothing new to keep labor costs down, nothing that no other retailer hasn't done for time immemorial. And you would do exactly the same if you ran a retail store, because if you didn't you wouldn't stay in business long. Wal-Mart's real innovation was and continues to be squeezing their supply chain for cheaper and cheaper goods. This has its own effects on labor rates and product quality at these companies, although it has also improved efficiency in many cases, so it's not unadulterated evil either.

By: Dean Esmay

Dean Esmay — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Hmm. Interesting position. Meryl, who treats me like dirt and not really a human being who simply disagrees with her now and then, now wants me to take her questions seriously. I find that fascinating. At least she's not mocking and distorting me anymore. That said, the above person who mentioned some health-insurance statistics above has posted data matching what I've seen. I have several sources on what health insurance looked like in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. When Meryl decides that I'm not a less-than-dirt scumbag, I'll choose to answer her. Otherwise, I'll leave it to others who've already posted data that matches what I have already seen. There are more people covered by health insurance today than ever before in our history, and now we act as if this is a new "crisis" rather than a progressive improvement in the human condition. Meanwhile, Mithras, who obviously knows nothing about the historical figures, cannot be taken seriously. Neither can Kevin Drum, until he can demonstrate that he actually knows what the actual historical data suggests. My only observation there being that you can prove anything you want if you simply make up your data. That and the fact than when I grew up in the 1970s, most people didn't have health insurance, and having it was considered a luxury rather than a birthright. Cheers.

By: Dean Esmay

Dean Esmay — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

By the way, anyone want a list of weblogs written by females who have been known to use both the terms "feminazi" and "c***" that Meryl is known to frequent, and to be highly friendly with?

Just shoot me a note and I'll give you proof of same. I've already done the research, and can provide multiple hyperlink examples of same.

Just for the curious. ;-)

By: McGehee

McGehee — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

There are more people covered by health insurance today than ever before in our history, and now we act as if this is a new "crisis" rather than a progressive improvement in the human condition. This is SOP among the agenda-driven. The closer the underlying problem gets to being solved, the harder it is for the activists to get traction for new demands for more and still more "progress" as they define it. So the rhetoric becomes more strident and the forecasts more apocalyptic if the rest of their agenda isn't adopted. Perspective is not only lacking, those who have it are denounced as reactionaries.

By: Chris Lawrence

Chris Lawrence — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

FWIW, when I worked at Wal-Mart back in 1996, the more critical thing was avoiding paying overtime (and managers would get in trouble if they did). But, the cutoff for "full time" benefits was 30 hrs/week, and almost everyone in my department worked at least that much--so I don't think they were trying to avoid giving out benefits. It's not like the benefits were costing Wal-Mart much of anything anyway, once you figure that they're taking a tax deduction on whatever employer match they do on the insurance. (The only benefits I took advantage of were the 10% employee discount and the 15% ESOP match on WMT shares, since I was still entitled to my dad's CHAMPUS military retiree health coverage at the time.) My suspicion is that most WMT workers wouldn't benefit from a union, anyway--they'd see whatever marginal benefit eaten up by dues. The bottom line is that nobody's going to pay completely unskilled labor a living wage, because the economics make no sense--they'll have robots in stocking the shelves before that happens.

By: C.J.

C.J. — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

One thing raging liberals forget when they blast Walmart is that many people work there for the healthcare benefits. I have no statistics, but of the three people I know who work at a Walmart, two do so for the healthcare.

Not everyone in our society can be highly educated pundits. Other members of the low-skilled workforce have been locked out of their jobs for several months for stating their desire to maintain their healthcare benefits. I'm talking about the grocery workers on strike here in California. The impasse is caused by owners' fear of competition from Walmart.

It seems to me that healthcare is a concern of a lot of people in this country. I know I'm not the best capitalist in the room, but why do people make money on whether a person lives or dies?

By: Peg K

Peg K — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

I think that people are comparing apples with pineapples.

Half a century ago, people might have had health insurance. But it wasn't the same animal that it is today. It was catastrophic health care. If you needed surgery, or care for cancer; you were insured.

But if your child needed polio shots, or you were due for your annual check-up, you called the doctor, made an appointment - and paid him (they were usually "hims" back then) what you owed him.

A large part of what has created the health care monster we know today is that people do not have the same responsibility that they had then for their own health care.

Somehow, if we could return to the days when insurance meant insurance for unusual, unexpected needs - and people had to manage their normal care - I think that overall, we'd be vastly better off.