With Downton Abbey currently on hiatus in America, labor organizers and their friends in the media let their imaginations run wild this holiday weekend at the expense of America’s largest employer, Walmart.
Despite evidence that scores of protesters were bused in to at least one Walmart location, at which only one actual Walmart employee was protesting, progressives denied Walmart’s claims that only 50 workers walked out in protest nationwide and that “roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year.”
Of the most committed to trashing Walmart was MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who spent the first half hour of her show on Sunday blowing the Walmart strikes and Walmart’s role in society way out of proportion. Harris-Perry even went so far as to compare the Walmart strikes to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which liberals apparently still view as a successful movement that left a positive image on Americans (and here I was thinking that the 2012 election proved that rape is a serious offense.)
After demonizing the Walton family for their fortunes, Harris-Perry blamed Walmart for the struggles of Americans who are underemployed or unemployed.
Arguing that Walmart pays its employees as low as $8 an hour, or $16,000 a year, Harris-Perry and her guests, including CNBC’s Carmen Wong Ulrich, made the spurious correlation that as America’s largest employer, Walmart, is therefore responsible for the level of poverty in America. Harris Perry claimed that if Walmart paid its employees at least $25,000 a year it would cost the typical Walmart shopper only $17.50 more a year.
“If that became the wage standard more than 700,000 Americans would be lifted out of poverty,” Harris Perry claimed.
What Harris Perry fails to mention is that for a family of one or two, the wages of a single Walmart worker are above the federal poverty level. Meaning, if a husband were out of work, and a wife were working at Walmart nearly full time, than that family would still be above the federal poverty level at Walmart’s current rate of pay. Furthermore, even if both the the husband and the wife were working at Walmart and had two kids, they would still be above the federal poverty level for a four person household.
However, it was Heather McGhee, Vice President of Policy and Outreach at left-wing organization DEMOS, that made the most telling statement during the discussion on Walmart.
According to McGhee, “It takes business, it takes government, it takes individuals to sort of create a social contract and a middle class in this country. Employers have simply walked away from that bargain.”
McGhee’s comments stem harken back to President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” slam on businesses earlier this year. Because the local taxpayers funded the creation of the roads and bridges over which Walmart’s goods are transported, Walmart somehow now owes something additional to locals other than low priced goods and services they might not otherwise be able to obtain.
“We know the government could do a lot more to put people back to work, but couldn’t the private sector do a lot more to put people back to work?” McGhee later asked.
McGhee’s statements were the central theme of Harris-Perry’s anti-Walmart show: why isn’t Walmart working harder to solve the U.S. recession?
Harris-Perry and her guests clearly don’t understand the purpose of business or the role of business in society.
We’re not living in Britain in the early 1900s, where the role of the rich and royalty, or in this case business owners, is to provide employment for the townspeople. Walmart is not Downton Abbey. It’s not Walmart’s responsibility to create jobs in order to solve America’s unemployment problem. Nor is it Walmart’s fault that many of its associates are underemployed. In fact, if it wasn’t for Walmart, many of its workers wouldn’t be employed at all in these tough economic times.
Furthermore, taxpayers are not subsidizing the Waltons’ billions of dollars in profits, as Harris Perry claimed. Consumers are choosing to buy products from Walmart and in turn the owners of Walmart – the Waltons – are making a profit.
Harris-Perry stated that Walmart has only been successful by one measure – making profits.Clearly, she doesn’t understand that the purpose of business is America is to make money, which Walmart has succeeded at by offering competitive prices.
At one point Harris-Perry admits that Walmart “may not be alone” in this practice of not paying its employees enough money, but, she claims that Walmart can set the standards as the nation’s largest employer. This gets to the heart of what progressives are really upset about. Basically, Harris-Perry and co. are angry that the minimum wage is too low.
Rather than attacking law-abiding businesses for paying their employees the minimum wage, Harris-Perry and her friends ought to focus their ire about the poverty level at the government, which sets minimum wage standards. While it would be unwise for the government to follow progressives’ advice on this issue for a number of reasons, a discussion about increasing the minimum wage would be far more productive than one that encourages attacks on private businesses and demonizes capitalism.
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