Without any fidgeting by the employer, your time would be an average of 40.39 hours per week (assuming that 40-45 averaged to 42.5). With the cheating you describe, with 12.5 hour workdays being reported as 9 hour workdays, I assume you were working 3 12.5 hour days and one 2.5 - 7.5 hour day (to come up to 40-45). This assumption maximizes the impact of the cheating you describe. With the figures you’ve provided, the employer cheated you down to 30.5 hours per week - still within the range for benefits. What information are we missing here?”

A lot admittedly, but not enough space on this entire blog for the whole story. But your math skills are pretty good.

I worked 42.5 hour weeks, either opening and closing and often put in overtime including shifts at other restaurants in the chain, on occasion during emergencies. I wasn’t the first on that list to be called b/c of my already excessive hours(thus my needing to be paid time and a half) but no one else wanted to do the shifts ahead of me on the list.

I did quit this job after overhearing the shift supervisor tell another shift supervisor that money would be taken out of my drawer(making me short) to make up for a shortage in the safe. When I confronted them, they swore I wouldn’t be held accountable. After a year in this restaurant, I had little reason to believe them.

The manager at the time already thought I was the she-devil, because after a month in the dump, watching them violate every labor law and health code in the book, I reported the store to the CEO. Fortuntely, the day my letter came in to his office, his secretary wasn’t there to screen it, and it went directly to him. He read it, and started screaming for his brother to come to his office.

He wrote me back, said sorry and gave me free burger coupons. I figure as far as payoffs go, it wasn’t much but I thought that meant nothing would happen.

I was wrong about that. Three weeks later, I went to work and a lot of suits were there, walking around. My manager waved a letter in my face, and said “interesting story” and my file was sitting wide open in the manager’s office. Every employee was interviewed by phone, in the manager’s office with the manager present of course. I was interviewed all afternoon by the personnel and review panel, which basically consisted of the district manager, the regional director, some CEO guy and my representative, who either was humoring me or flirting with me, I wouldn’t tell. She certainly was no help at all.

Anyway, some people got fired, demoted, transferred including some shift supervisors who weren’t really breaking labor laws, but they were sexually harassing the female employees. Which came out after the replacement manager was having a meeting with the employees and he said, “well at least we don’t have to worry about sexual harassment”…silence and pointed looks…”Oh we do?”

There was also criminal activity going on, which came out in the investigation but was news to most of us. Part of it involved stealing commisary shipment items and selling them.

It wasn’t all bad. The replacement manager tried really hard on the place to make things better. The heart attack at age 33 cut him in his tracks. By the time he was better, the District Manager was dead, and his wife was unable to manage her store so the replacement manager took over.

We got two after that. Ms Nice, and Ms Grumpy. As happens often in life, Ms Grumpy, the asst., turned out to be the good one, and Ms Nice was the nice one. And she complained on the phone about me a lot from the beginning, not knowing there was a hole in the wall of her office that led to the break room. Her cousin was pulling $6.50 an hour, when minimum wage was $4.25 and bottom level employees maxed out at $5.50/hr. Someone actually confronted her on that, and she said her cousin was a crew leader, even though he only knew how to cook, not do drivethru, cashier duties, fryer, open, close, etc.

I heard the restaurant did turn itself around eventually, and won an award given annually to the top 10% of them in the company. I wasn’t there at the time.

Think of how successful they’d be if they stopped bleeding out through their high turnover rate.

“Substantially greater than zero” is pretty meaningless for reaching any conclusions. It’s a nice declarative statement that leads to nothing. That said:

But mostly turnover is created by the decisions of the literally millions of people involved. “Screw this job, I’m going back to college.”?

I was examining the question “where can people who are not that bright or motivated”? find honest work. The answer is, among other places, at Wal Mart.

Well, make up your mind. Are Wal-Mart employees slackers who stick around briefly and then go back to college, or are they folks who are not terribly bright and motivated and so are able to fit in well at a Wal-Mart job?

Turnover is an HR problem, not a force of nature like an earthquake or a snowstorm. Any company that says “gee, we’re just going to lose people because they’ll decide to quit” is, as you say, run by morons. I’m assuming Wal-Mart is not run by morons and therefore is aware that it can do things to slow turnover. (This is one reason companies offer benefits; you might not care about a 10-cent raise, but losing your health care is a big negative.) Therefore, since it chooses not to, Wal-Mart has obviously made a business decision that it is more profitable to have high turnover than to spend money on whatever it is that would take to keep those people from leaving. Such as higher wages and benefits.

Your approach seems to take it as a given that the size and economic magnitude of Wal-Mart imbue it with unnaturally great powers of agency.

There’s nothing “unnatural” about it. Size and economic magnitude mean a lot of economic leverage. And since we don’t know the exact costs of doing business in a ‘multistate environment’ (like…most large corporations?), it’s fruitless to speculate that state legislatures’ impact on the insurance industry have a thing to do with Wal-Mart policies regarding benefits.

No, Wal-Mart isn’t required to offer benefits. The problem is when their business model (should we offer benefits?) depends in part on shifting costs to the taxpayers (no, because our workers qualify for welfare–let the government pay that).

Except for the administrative costs of interviewing and hiring, the costs of inefficiencies incurred by the on-the-job training, the costs of angry, alienated, or permanently lost customers due to employee ineptness, and the costs incurred by untrained workers doing a bad job and having to replace the spoiled product.

I used to manage a fast food restaurant. A restaurant managed in the way you describe is being managed by morons. (Which does not mean that it didn’t happen. )

when they first became eligible for limited medical benefits IF they pulled a 30 hour/week average over the year. Sounds easy? I took two weeks off, worked 1 18 hour week and ranged from 40-45 hours every other week…

Your numbers don’t add up.

Without any fidgeting by the employer, your time would be an average of 40.39 hours per week (assuming that 40-45 averaged to 42.5). With the cheating you describe, with 12.5 hour workdays being reported as 9 hour workdays, I assume you were working 3 12.5 hour days and one 2.5 - 7.5 hour day (to come up to 40-45). This assumption maximizes the impact of the cheating you describe. With the figures you’ve provided, the employer cheated you down to 30.5 hours per week - still within the range for benefits. What information are we missing here?

Businesses that promote a policy of high turnover are committing suicide on the installment plan (with one exception - an acquired business whose new owners discover that the employee base is rotten might do a turnover purge to clean the stables). Again, not to say that it isn’t possible that some idiot restaurant chain is doing it that way - but Wal-Mart didn’t become the most successful retailer on Earth by practicing retarded management policies.

Oooh, I feel sexually harassed here! Men, please keep your pants zipped, and your minds out of the gutter!

Promotion of High turnover was and still is a popular policy of fastfood restaurants. Why? Because since it was by-the-seat-of-your-pants-job-training(never went to hamburger school, sorry), there wasn’t any costs associated with such training besides the paycheck. People often burned out at six months, right before their first chances at a raise. Certainly, by a year, when they first became eligible for limited medical benefits IF they pulled a 30 hour/week average over the year. Sounds easy? I took two weeks off, worked 1 18 hour week and ranged from 40-45 hours every other week and only averaged 27.5 hours a week, ergo no chance to get medical benefits. I did some research and discovered they doctored the clock. I would work 2 until closing(2:30am) and the record would show I had clocked out at 11pm, but I was actually paid for the work, but not OT, which is what I was owed.

The high point of my career was when I thought I was going to start crew leader classes, only the manager had a heart attack the next day and the district manager was crushed to death by his trailer about the same time. We waited a long time for that third bad thing.

Anyway, high turnover was the key, it seemed. Don’t know about Walmart. Wouldn’t surprise me if they did it too. They and Fast food restaurants had the same love of unions and organizing, after all.

They just hired and paid a lot of people minimum wage. Then burned them out and started the cycle over again.

I fail to see the conflict. We are speaking of statistical and actuarial phenomena.

I do not know the actual cost of running Oracle’s customer service helpline. I do know that it must be substantially greater than zero.

I do not know the actual number of page views that this blog receives on a daily basis. I do know that it must be substantially greater than zero.

And so on.

If you dunno, all you’re really saying is that possibly Wal-Mart would be happy to provide health benefits out of its own pocket, rather than shifting those costs to the government, if only those darn state legislatures would let them.

The language used is economics, but the thinking is not.

Wal Mart cannot shift costs because Wal Mart does not control or own costs. The “costs” of someone’s health care are what it costs to provide that health care (plus, possibly, some externalities). It is not, primarily, Wal-Mart’s concern that a particular worker have health insurance. The worker may have other rational choices. The worker may be covered elsewhere. The worker may be a Jehovah’s Witness. And so on.

I notice a similar imputation of great power in your earlier assertion that Wal-Mart pursued a policy of high turnover. Ignoring for the moment that idea that Wal-Mart would intentionally throw away its continuing investment in training, including the losses and inefficiencies caused by constant streams of new employees, Wal-Mart does not control its turnover rate. It can certainly affect it, if it wishes, by instituting hiring freezes or arbitrarily firing large chunks of people solely to prevent them from entering the benefits system, but those actions make little or no economic sense. But mostly turnover is created by the decisions of the literally millions of people involved. “Screw this job, I’m going back to college.” We’re not talking about being a QA tester for a Columbian drug cartel; these are fairly crappy jobs.

Your approach seems to take it as a given that the size and economic magnitude of Wal-Mart imbue it with unnaturally great powers of agency. And it is true that, in very narrow ways, there is something too that. In areas where the company possesses great talent, they have the ability to magnify the effects of that talent. But overall, size is a detriment to the ability of an entity to specifically and intentionally affect its environment, because size impedes communication and makes the transaction costs of widespread agency prohibitive. On the other hand, big entities can create “waves” in the economic sphere - general influences. Whales can’t pick pockets, but they can knock over your boat. Wal-Mart can predict when the sun will rise, but they can’t hasten the process.

Regarding the state legislatures, you have again misunderstood me. The state legislatures do not prohibit Wal-Mart from insuring its employees. The state legislatures have made the insurance industry a complicated mess by imposing requirements on companies that make doing business in a multistate environment somewhat challenging. This means that Wal-Mart faces significant - if unknown to me in terms of exact magnitude - costs in attempting to negotiate health contracts for its often transient, international and multijurisdictional work force.

If you don’t know the actual cost, how can you confidentially say it must be “substantially greater than zero”? If you dunno, all you’re really saying is that possibly Wal-Mart would be happy to provide health benefits out of its own pocket, rather than shifting those costs to the government, if only those darn state legislatures would let them.

Sometimes. In the case of insurance, where state legislators have erected all sorts of barriers to insurance in the form of mandatory coverage of certain treatments or levels of care, thus raising both the quality and the price of insurance coverage by fiat, there is a state-by-state differential in the ability of a given insurance company to provide coverage in the state. Since Wal Mart is emphatically a multi-state operation, this adds friction to their dealings and in at least some states puts them in pretty much the same boat, size- and influence-wise, as their regional or local peerlets.

I don’t know what the actual cost of this friction is, but it’s substantially greater than zero. Is it greater than the leverage benefit derived from Wal Mart’s size? I dunno.

One big reason Wal-Mart is getting picked on more than other retailers is that part of its business model is using its enormous economic leverage to pressure suppliers. It’s Wal-Mart’s way or the highway. Why can’t it do the same with a health-insurance company?

I believe your reading of Robert on which you based the question in post #15 was a misreading.

Robert’s claim was not that lefty organizations underpay their employees and then get them to supplement their wages with food stamps, but that there are lefty organizations which help people (whose wages they have no say in) to get food stamps. His dubious claim was that WalMart does not structurally and intentionally underpay their workers, but merely helps their fairly paid workers to get food stamps (or medicaid) if they qualify. In support of this, he argued that while starting workers had a relatively high rate of use of foodstamps and medicaid, long term workers did not. That this ignored WalMart’s concious policy of high employee turn-over was pointed out to him, and as far as I’ve noticed, he has not responded to that point.

But the question in post #15 is (I believe) moot.

I asked if you had responded to my question in #15 in case I had overlooked it, rather than start by assuming you were just handwaving. My bad.

Being mean to unions is usually just good sense.

Or a one-way ticket to having the NLRB install a union whether you like it or not. There are anti-union actions an employer can take that are generally legal (such as paying your employees over union wages, telling your workers that a union will mess up their cozy relationship with you). Other anti-union actions are not so legal, and if an employer is egregious enough, the NLRB may simply decide there’s no possibility your employees could have fairly said no to a union, so now you have one.

No, you didn’t. Instead, you missed the part about how that isn’t what I said.

I hope you’re not planning on becoming a judge; I’d hate to have you reading my briefs.

The issue isn’t whether they have unions, but how they react to unions. Trader Joe’s doesn’t have a union. From all indications, their people just don’t want one. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has closed down entire departments shortly after those departments were unionized. As the second half of karpad’s post, which you glossed over, said: rather than firing the entire staff of a store when they try to unionize.

Did I miss Robert’s explanation of which lefty companies are “just as bad as Wal-Mart”?

Target and Kmart, ex cetera, are not torturing kittens, so you’re analogy falls flat.

It’s not a defense against the charge; it’s a defense for not caring much about the charge in the context of larger wrongs. My time and attention are finite; I try to prioritize.

Barry and Robert both kick a puppy dog on their way to work in the morning. Barry spends his working day torturing kittens with electrical shocks until they die. Robert spends his working day finding homes for orphans. On the way home from work, they both kick another puppy dog. Local journalists, who hate Robert for being handsome and brilliant, write story after story in the paper about Robert, the wicked dog kicker.

It is not right that Robert and Barry kick dogs. It is much worse that Barry kills kittens. (You bastard.) If someone brings up Robert and Barry in conversation, and someone says “yeah, they kick dogs, but that isn’t the worst thing going on”, that person is correct, and is not automatically a defender of dog-kicking.

Wal Mart’s offense against society is that it undermines the network of small businesses that make insular, tight-knit communities economically viable. This effectively alienates people from their livelihoods far more than getting screwed out of an overtime check does, and does it to far more people. I consider this to be the primary bad thing about Wal Mart, not that they are mean to unions. Being mean to unions is usually just good sense.

How much more blatantly dishonest are you going to get in this thread?

Please try to refrain from direct personal attacks like this. (I’m not saying you’re the only one, just the most recent one at this moment when I happen to be at my keyboard).

The main issue the original post talked about is the use of virtual slave labor in China. I’d be very curious to know if K-Mart and Target refrain from selling things manufactured in China, but I doubt they do. In that sense, WalMart is no worse.

On the other hand, since it’s much bigger than the others, WalMart presumably sells MORE stuff make with slave labor than the others. So in that way it’s worse.

And its labor policies here in the States are demonstratably a lot worse, in terms of pay, benefits and union rights, then someplace like Costco. (Then again, both WalMart and Costco have been sued for discrimination against women.)

Besides, “some other places are just as bad but don’t get the attention” isn’t a defense. I’m sure that there are serial killers who killed more people than Charles Manson & followers ever did; but that doesn’t mean that the punishments and criticissm Manson receives are unjust.