[Vision2020] low wages?

Fri Feb 9 22:33:17 PST 2007

G,

  Don't forget Wal-Mart shuts down Mom and Pop shops, sucks up all the water, generates traffic, increases child abuse in third world countries, drives down wages, wipes out the rain forests, kills all the tuna, puts more people on the welfare rolls, promotes world hunger, inflicts stigmata on little babies, and causes global warming.   

  Donovan

"g. crabtree" <jampot at adelphia.net> wrote:
    BLOCKQUOTE {   PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px  }  DL {   PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px  }  UL {   PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px  }  OL {   PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px  }  LI {   PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px  }        And there we have it, the standardized mantra of the left. Wal-Mart is bad 'cause corporations are bad 'cause conservatives are bad cause Republicans are bad 'cause capitalism is bad etc. etc. etc.

  As long as the name of the game is dueling newspaper articles...

      Wal-Mart posse: Why the unions are on the attackMonday, October 23, 2006
  The Wall Street Journal   Wal-Mart may be expanding in the People's Republic of China, but here in capitalist America the low-price retailer has become the Democratic Party's favorite pinata. The media like to portray this as a populist uprising against heartless big business. But what they don't bother to disclose is that this entire get-Wal-Mart campaign is a political operation led and funded by organized labor.   We've done a little digging into the two most prominent anti-Wal-Mart groups, and they might as well operate out of AFL-CIO headquarters. An outfit called Wal-Mart Watch was created by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), probably the most powerful union in America after the National Education Association. Wal-Mart Watch is backed by Five Stones, a 501(c)3 organization that received $2,775,000 in 2005 from the SEIU, or 56 percent of its $5 million budget. According to financial records, SEIU also gave Five Stones $1 million in 2004 to launch the
 anti-Wal-Mart group, and SEIU president Andy Stern is the Wal-Mart Watch chairman.   A second group, Wake Up Wal-Mart, is more or less a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Wake Up Wal-Mart refuses to divulge its funding sources, but here is what we do know: The group was founded by the UFCW, is housed at UFCW headquarters, and its campaign director's $135,000 salary is paid by the UFCW.   Wake Up Wal-Mart also has close ties to the Democratic Party. Its union-funded campaign director is Paul Blank, who was political director of Howard Dean's failed Presidential campaign. The group sponsored a 19 state, 35-day bus tour across the U.S. earlier this year, staging anti-Wal-Mart rallies. Nearly every major Democratic Presidential hopeful has joined in the Wal-Mart-bashing, including Sens. Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, and trial lawyer-turned-man-of-the-people John Edwards. They all seem to believe they have to take
 this line to pass union muster for 2008.   Even Hillary Rodham Clinton has joined in the political fun. Never mind that she served six years on the Wal-Mart board during her time in Beltway exile as an Arkansas lawyer and, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was paid $18,000 per year plus $1,500 for every meeting near the end of her tenure. Most recently, Mrs. Clinton returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from Wal-Mart to protest its allegedly inadequate health care benefits. Maybe someone should ask her if she's returned her director's pay, with interest.     
---------------------------------
    Most of the local protests against Wal-Mart are organized through the left-wing activist group ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is the group that put the squeeze on the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance this summer to require Wal-Mart, Target and other big-box stores to pay a minimum $10 an hour wage and $3 an hour in benefits by 2010. (Democratic Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the bill.) ACORN also pretends it is a locally organized and funded voice of the downtrodden masses. But guess where ACORN gets much of its money? Last year the SEIU chipped in $2,125,229 and the UFCW $165,692.   Then there are the anti-Wal-Mart "think tanks," if that's the right word for these political shops - notably, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center. The job of these two outfits is to publish papers backing the economic claims of Wal-Mart critics. The UC Berkeley group
 recently asserted that Wal-Mart "reduces total take-home pay for retail workers." The UC Berkeley Labor Center has received at least $43,550 from SEIU. The Economic Policy Institute received $100,000 from the SEIU and $40,000 from the UFCW in 2005 and has published several anti-Wal-Mart studies, particularly on the benefits of the Chicago ordinance. By the way, Andy Stern also sits on the EPI board. He's a busy guy.   Now, we're not predisposed to be pro- or anti-Wal-Mart. We've criticized Wal-Mart lobbying on policy grounds -- for example, when the company supported a minimum wage increase to court some nice publicity while also knowing this would harm any lower-priced competitors. However, it is simply fallacious to argue that Wal-Mart has harmed low-income families.   More than one study has shown that the real "Wal-Mart effect" has been to increase the purchasing power of working families by lowering prices for groceries, prescription drugs, electronic equipment and
 many other products that have become modern household necessities. One study, by the economic consulting firm Global Insight, calculates that Wal-Mart saves American households an average of $2,300 a year through lower prices, or a $263 billion reduction in the cost of living. That compares with $33 billion savings for low-income families from the federal food stamp program.     
---------------------------------
    Alas, what's good for working families isn't always good news for unions and their bosses. They hate Wal-Mart because its blue-coated workforce is strictly non-union -- a policy that dates back to the day founder Sam Walton opened his first store. Today the company employs 1.3 million American workers, and its recent push into groceries has made life miserable for Safeway and other grocery chains organized by the service workers or the UFCW.   Wal-Mart pays an average of $10 an hour, which is more than many of its unionized competitors offer. And typically when a new Wal-Mart store opens in a poor area, it receives thousands of job applications for a few hundred openings. So Wal-Mart's retail jobs of $7 to $12 an hour, which the unions deride as "poverty wages," are actually in high demand.   But as we say, this campaign isn't about "working families," or any of the other rhapsody-for-the-common-man union slogans. If Wal-Mart were suddenly unionized, Big Labor's
 membership would double overnight and union leaders would collect an estimated $300 million in additional dues each year to sway more politicians. Short of that, their goal is to keep Wal-Mart out of cities so their union shops have less competition. That's what the war against Wal-Mart is truly about.

  g (with a heartfelt thanks to T)

    ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Solomon 
  To: g. crabtree ; Paul Rumelhart 
  Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 9:40 AM
  Subject: Re: [Vision2020] low wages?

  From the NYTimes: Walmart/Walton family funding of American Enterprise Institute. m.

  The New York Times

September 8, 2006
Wal-Mart Finds an Ally in Conservatives
  By MICHAEL BARBARO and STEPHANIE STROM

As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute.

Top policy analysts at these groups have written newspaper opinion pieces around the country supporting Wal-Mart, defended the company in interviews with reporters and testified on its behalf before government committees in Washington.

But the groups - and their employees - have consistently failed to disclose a tie to the giant discount retailer: financing from the Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's three children, who have a controlling stake in the company.

The groups said the donations from the foundation have no influence over their research, which is deliberately kept separate from their fund-raising activities. What's more, the pro-business philosophies of these groups often dovetail with the interests of Wal-Mart.

But the financing, which totaled more than $2.5 million over the last six years, according to data compiled by GuideStar, a research organization, raises questions about what the research groups should disclose to newspaper editors, reporters or government officials. The Walton Family Foundation must disclose its annual donations in forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service, but research groups are under no such obligation.

Companies and such groups have long courted one another - one seeking influence, the other donations - and liberal policy groups receive significant financing from unions and left-leaning organizations without disclosing their financing.

But the Walton donations could prove risky for Wal-Mart, given its escalating public relations campaign. The company's quiet outreach to bloggers, beginning last year, touched off a debate about what online writers should disclose to readers, and its financing to policy groups could do the same.

Asked about the donations yesterday, Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said, "The fact is that editorial pages and prominent columnists of all stripes write favorably about our company because they recognize the value we provide to working families, the job opportunities we create and the contributions we make to the community we serve."

At least five research and advocacy groups that have received Walton Family Foundation donations are vocal advocates of the company.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, for example, has received more than $100,000 from the foundation in the last three years, a fraction of the more than $24 million it raised in 2004 alone.

Richard Vedder, a visiting scholar at the institute, wrote an opinion article for The Washington Times last month, extolling Wal-Mart's benefits to the American economy. "There is enormous economic evidence that Wal-Mart has helped poor and middle-class consumers, in fact more than anyone else," Mr. Vedder wrote in the article, which prominently identified his ties to institute.

But neither Mr. Vedder nor the newspaper mentioned American Enterprise Institute's financial links to the Waltons. Mr. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University, said he might have disclosed the relationship had the American Enterprise Institute told him of it. "I always assumed that A.E.I. had no relationship or a modest, distant relationship with the company," said Mr. Vedder, who has written a forthcoming book about the company. The book, he said in an interview yesterday, would eventually contain a disclosure about the Walton donations to the institute.

A spokesman for the Walton Family Foundation, Jay Allen, said there was no organized campaign to build support for Wal-Mart among research groups. All of the foundation's giving, he said, is directed toward a handful of philanthropic issues, including school reform, the environment and the economy in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based. "That is the spirit and purpose of their giving," Mr. Allen said.

Mr. Allen said the foundation, which had assets of $608.7 million in 2004, the last year for which data is available, has never asked the research groups to disclose the donations because "the family leaves it up to the individual organization to decide."

Those groups, for the most part, say they have decided not to share the information with their analysts or the public.

For example, Sally C. Pipes, the president of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market policy advocate, has written several opinion articles defending Wal-Mart in The Miami Herald and The San Francisco Examiner.

A month after a federal judge in California certified a sex discrimination lawsuit against the company as a class action in 2004, Ms. Pipes wrote an article in The Examiner criticizing the lawyers and the women behind the suit. "The case against Wal-Mart," she wrote, "follows the standard feminist stereotype of women as victims, men as villains and large corporations as inherently evil."

The article did not disclose that the Walton Family Foundation gave Pacific Research $175,000 from 1999 to 2004. Ms. Pipes was aware of the contributions, but said the money was earmarked for an education reform project and did not influence her thinking about the lawsuit. Asked why she typically did not disclose the donations to newspapers, she said: "It never occurs to me to put that out front unless I am asked. If newspapers ask, I am completely open about it."

The lack of disclosure highlights the absence of a consistent policy at the nation's newspapers about whether contributors must tell editors of potential conflicts of interest.

Juan M. Vasquez, the deputy editorial page editor of The Miami Herald, which ran an opinion article praising Wal-Mart by Ms. Pipes of Pacific Research, said his staff researches organizations that write opinion articles, including their financing. But that does not always require asking if the organization has received money from the subject of an article, he said.

The New York Times has a policy of asking outside contributors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, including the financing for research groups.

Several of the research groups noted that their mission is to be an advocate for free market policies and less government intrusion in business. "Those aims are pro-business, so it's not surprising that companies would be supporters of our work," said Khristine Brookes, a spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation.

Last year, for instance, The Baltimore Sun published an op-ed article by Tim Kane, a research fellow at Heritage, in which he criticized Maryland's efforts to require Wal-Mart to spend more on health care. He objected to the move on the grounds that it was undue government interference in the free market, a traditional concern of Heritage.

"The existence of Wal-Mart dented the rise in overall inflation so much that Jerry Hausman, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is calling on the federal government to change the way it measures prices," Mr. Kane wrote. "Translation: Wal-Mart is fighting poverty faster than government accountants can keep track."

Ms. Brookes pointed out that the $20,000 Heritage has received from the Walton Family Foundation since 2000 amounts to less than 1 percent of its $40 million budget.

Ms. Brookes said it was unlikely that researchers and analysts at Heritage were even aware of the foundation's contributions. "Nobody here would know that unless they walked upstairs and asked someone in development," she said. "It's just never discussed."

She said Heritage did not accept money for specific research. "The money from the Walton Family Foundation has always been earmarked for our general operations," she said. "They've never given us any funds saying do this paper or that paper."

A spokeswoman for the American Enterprise Institute said the group did not comment on its donors. The group's focus on Wal-Mart has been notable. In June, the editor in chief then of the group's magazine, The American Enterprise, wrote a long essay defending Wal-Mart against critics. The editor, Karl Zinsmeister, now the chief domestic policy adviser at the White House, said the campaign against the company was "run by a clutch of political hacks."

Conservative groups are not the only ones weighing in on the Wal-Mart debate. Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart noted labor unions have financed organizations that have been critical of Wal-Mart, like the Economic Policy Institute, which received $2.5 million from unions in 2005.

In response, Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalmart.com, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that gives money to liberal research groups, said: "While we openly support the mission of economic justice, Wal-Mart and the Waltons put on a smiley face, hide the truth, all while supporting right-wing causes who are paid to defend Wal-Mart's exploitative practices."

The lack of a clear quid pro quo between research groups and corporations like Wal-Mart makes the issue murky, said Diana Aviv, chief executive of the Independent Sector, a trade organization representing nonprofits and foundations. "I don't know how one proves what's the chicken and what's the egg," she said.

Last year, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a research and watchdog group, published a report, "The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy," that warned of the potential influence their vast wealth gives them.

But Rick Cohen, executive director of the group, said he was more concerned about the role the Walton foundation's money might play in shaping public policy in areas like public education, where it has supported charter schools and voucher systems.

"These are certainly not organizations created and controlled by the corporation or the family and promoted as somehow authentic when they aren't," Mr. Cohen said. "More important, I think, is the disclosure of the funding in whatever's written, a sort of disclaimer."

  At 8:02 AM -0800 2/9/07, g. crabtree wrote:
  With thanks to Tom Forbes @ Palousitics...     (CNSNews.com) - Despite frequent and vocal complaints from critics of the world's largest retail chain, Wal-Mart "has arguably done more to help ordinary Americans, especially the poor and disadvantaged, than any other institution in our society," according to the authors of a new book being released nationally on Monday.

"Wal-Mart does far more for America's working class than any labor union, bloated federal bureaucracy or pandering politician," Richard Vedder, co-author of "The Wal-Mart Revolution" and a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Cybercast News Service in a telephone interview.

Because of this and other factors, "Wal-Mart is saving America," added Vedder, who also serves as a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University.

"I know that sounds like an exaggeration," he said, but "the economic transformation in U.S. retailing, which is personified by Wal-Mart, has been good for both America and its economy."

While admitting he was "an agnostic" regarding the retail giant when he began more than a year of research and writing for the book, the author argued that "Wal-Mart's basic business strategies have had a profoundly positive impact on America's productivity, wages, consumer prices and other key economic variables."

Vedder stressed that neither he nor co-author Wendell Cox, a public-private partnerships expert, received any kind of assistance from the retail chain, even when they contacted the company seeking information for their book.

Nevertheless, their research of financial and academic studies led Vedder and Cox to a number of conclusions, they said:

   Wal-Mart workers are paid fairly - given their level of skills and experience, and compared to other retail firms, Wal-Mart employees do well;
The chain's health-care coverage, retirement benefits and other benefits are similar to those of other retail firms, and very few Wal-Mart workers go without health insurance;   
   Big boxes mean big business, as communities with new Wal-Mart outlets typically enjoy increased employment and incomes after the store opens;   
   Wal-Mart benefits the poor, in particular, in the form of lower prices and new job opportunities; and   
   Attempts to keep Wal-Mart out of communities through zoning restrictions, mandatory health insurance or special high minimum wages hurt citizens, especially those with lower incomes

Vedder acknowledged that Wal-Mart and other big-box discount retailers such as Target or Home Depot have been vilified as selfish retailers that mistreat their workers, outsource American jobs, uproot communities and harm the poor.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

"The criticism of Wal-Mart follows a rich American tradition of attacking new retail innovations," the author noted. "More than a century ago, some people were concerned that the mail-order catalogs of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward were destroying local retailing.

"In the 1930s, angry small grocery stores attacked the new chains like A&P that brought lower prices and greater choice to communities," Vedder said. "Congress even passed laws to try to prevent stores from offering low prices to consumers, although those laws were found legally flawed or ineffective."

He added that "the anti-A&P campaign in the 1930s and the anti-Wal-Mart campaign 70 years later are remarkably similar" since in both cases, "costly service providers have lost out to more efficient companies that provide 'consumer welfare' to their customers through low prices, greater choice selection and relatively good service."

'Not an either-or proposition'

Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalMart.com, took a different view of the conclusions drawn by the authors of "The Wal-Mart Revolution."

"I challenge Vedder and Cox to walk a day in the shoes of a Wal-Mart worker who struggles without affordable health care and gets paid a poverty-level wage," Kofinis told Cybercast News Service.

"I want them to walk a day in the shoes of a manufacturing worker who had his job shipped overseas to China so they can wax poetically about Wal-Mart's positive effects," he added.

"But the truth is that Wal-Mart's negative effects far outweigh any benefits people get from its 'everyday low prices,' and that's the tragedy here," Kofinis said.

"This is not an either-or proposition. It never has been, never will be and never needs to be," he said. "Wal-Mart can provide low prices and be a responsible employer, but they don't want to. That's the unfortunate part of all this.

"As long as companies like Wal-Mart continue down this path of corporate irresponsibility, they are going to be the focus of a growing political and social movement against them," Kofinis noted. "It's really that simple."

Despite his praise for Wal-Mart, Vedder readily agreed that the company "is far from perfect," as proven last month, when the retail giant agreed to pay almost 87,000 employees over $33 million in back wages.

So, given the complaints from union-backed groups like WakeUpWalMart.com about the company, what should be done about Wal-Mart? "Nothing," Vedder said. "Putting the government in the position - for which it is ill-equipped - of picking winners and losers in a market economy would be a disastrous policy."

Besides, he added, Wal-Mart's influence may have peaked, since the company is starting to lose market share to Internet retailers such as Amazon.com and eBay.

"Change is progress," asserted Vedder.        g  
  ----- Original Message -----  From: Paul Rumelhart  To: g. crabtree  Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com  Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 7:32 AM  Subject: Re: [Vision2020] low wages?  
  g. crabtree wrote:
  From a news story thoughtfully posted by Mr. Solomon. It's unfortunate about Mr. Woods difficulties but the article did point out one shining example of the untruths that the local anti Wal-Mart wackadoo's continually spout...       "Woods had trouble finding other work that paid as well as his Wal-Mart job"     And this is in Lewiston. A town with twice the employment opportunities that Moscow currently (and for the foreseeable future should our illustrious city council have its way) has. Sort of shoots the theory that Wal- Mart comes to town and only provides crappy, low wage jobs, that nobody in their right mind would want wouldn't you say?     g

Let's see.  Racial harrassment, sexual harrassment, glass ceilings for female workers, inadequate health care benefits, and unpaid overtime.  I can see why "crappy, low wage jobs, that nobody in their right mind would want" pretty much sums it up.  And that's just the items I've heard about in the news lately.

I can't just look past all that because they happen to employ people.  I think standards are a positive thing, and that more employees should set theirs higher.

I'm sure Mr. Woods was happy at some level to have a paying job, but going through two years of that kind of harrassment is too high a price to have to pay.  I wonder if they fired the manager.

Paul  

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