A Black Mark For Fridays, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #206 | @MDWorld
November 20, 2012 Arthur Tebbel 2 Comments
Dear Art,
I’m quite scared. This Friday is Black Friday, the biggest single day in American retailing and the start of the lucrative Christmas shopping season. It also might be the day a bunch of my employees go on strike. There are picket actions planned around the country to protest my stores treatment of workers including practices like wage theft, discrimination, abuse, and retaliation. I’m concerned that this activity could hurt sales at a very important time for my company. What should I do?
-Mike Duke, President & CEO, Walmart
Mike,
My first suggestion, and this is going to sound cynical, is to do nothing. Let them picket and watch as hundreds if not thousands of customers at every store happily cross those picket lines for a $350 computer or a $25 video game. That’s just an unfortunate casualty of American callousness and the poor economy. If you called people on the phone and asked them if they supported Walmart workers you’d probably get a pretty decent percentage of people saying they did. None of them would probably be willing to pay more for Christmas gifts.Also, maybe come up with a retail strategy that isn’t some disgusting race to the bottom for one day a year. It used to be Black Friday sales, then Black Friday sales with midnight openings, now what seems to be a massive majority of your stores are open Thanksgiving night with sales. Most other big box stores are open Thanksgiving now too. What a horrible thing to do to your staff but also to your customers. Customers have to choose between spending time with their family and saving money on gifts. I would go off on a rant about how hopefully this would be a chance for us all to realize that it’s the thought that counts and not the gift itself but for fuck’s sake we’re Americans and we’re horrible materialists. I’m even writing a column about the evils of materialism while updating my Amazon wish list.
You could also, and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get to this, stop abusing your employees so badly that they feel the need to start picketing your stores. I don’t think any of these employees are getting up in the morning and thinking “You know what’s probably a lot of fun? Standing outside in the cold for hours for no pay.” But that’s what picketing your stores on Black Friday entails. Working for you has become so bad that doing something worse for free has become an enticing option. You’re making money hand over fist. You decided to pay dividends earlier than usual this year so your shareholders would miss any potential tax increases that might come from the dreaded “fiscal cliff” and you still can’t pay your workers a decent wage or, at the very least, not then feel compelled to not pay them all the shitty wages they’re owed? Get your house in order and stop being so profoundly shitty and then get back to making a fortune selling crappy computers to people at slightly lower prices.
Vinnie Bartilucci
November 20, 2012 - 6:09 pm
WalMart is certainly treating these people poorly. And don’t forget, they also open a life-insurance policy on each employee, with the company as the beneficiary, that they continue to pay pennies on long after the employee quits. And years later, when that person died, Walmart collects on the policy.
But there’s a larget issue here one that needs a different solution. These crap jobs, the can-stackers, cart collectors and door greeters, are NOT supposed to be good jobs. Traditionally they have been held by teenagers and college students as first jobs, paying just enough money to put money in their pocket to go to the movies and buy malteds, rohypnol and condoms (usually in that order, and order of importance). But the job situation in the country has gotten so bad that adults, married adults with families, are trying to raise a family on them. Grown adults are FIGHTING for these jobs, and once they get them, keep their head down, and hope they don’t lose them, and only speak up when things get so unbearable that joblessness is a viable option. These jobs are not SUPPOSED to be enough to raise a family on; we’ve got people fighting for burger-flipper jobs, and then begging to be paid more for work that teenagersshould be doing, or possibly a well-trained circus animal.
The reason for this job exodus is also Walmart’s fault, along with many other companies. It’s cheaper to make things Elsewhere, and so they do. There’s no thinking that if we stop making things in America, those jobs go away, and that’s thousands of people out of work, and pushing the teenagers out of the way for the honor of doing clean-up on aisle 3.
People are not SUPPOSED to be raising a family as a blue-vested servant of the Walton clan. They’re supposed to be working at proper middle-class jobs, manufacturing things, designing things, testing things on their bodies by eating five gallons of butter brickle ice cream and seeing if they react strangely. But those jobs are now being done by small brown and yellow people who think eight cents an hours isa princely sum, and the companies aren’t going to tell them otherwise.
What companies need to do is start biting the proverial bullet and buy those products in America again, or at the very least, announce that they’d be WILLING to if anyone DID make them in America, cause in most cases, they’re not even anymore. Yes, they will be more expensive to make. And if the companies spin the marketing properly, play on that whole “buy American” thing that people like to spout, they might well be able to get people to pay more, so profits won’t get eaten into. And if more jobs are available as a result, people would theoretically be able to AFFORD to do so. And the crap jobs can go back to the teenagers who don’t want medical benefits, and everybody’s happy.
Now it’d be nice if BOTH issues could be addressed, but I’d bet that ain’t gonna happen.
Martha Thomses
November 21, 2012 - 5:51 am
Vinnie, I agree with most everything you say EXCEPT (and there is always an except)…. These were not always jobs for kids. When I was a kid, I worked at a Hills Discount Department Store. For me, it was a semester before college, but there were lots of adults with families. Some got promoted to managers. Most got regular raises. And all had predictable work schedules, and were otherwise treated with respect.
Which is how Hills was different from Wal Mart. And part of the reason Wal Mart ran them out of business. Well, that and, once the founder died, his son got greedy and leveraged the company into bankruptcy.