MSNBC Guest: If Walmart paid workers more, taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize Walmart’s growth…

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry has been pounding on Walmart all morning, suggesting they Walmart employees aren’t paid enough and emphasizing these ‘grass roots’ protests at Walmarts on Black Friday. Problem is these protests are made up mostly of activists who simply want to unionize Walmart.

But what caught my attention was when former CNBC host Carmen Wong Ulrich argued that taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s growth because so many of their employees are on public assistance. In other words, if Walmart would stop being selfish with their bounty and simply pay their employees a living wage, taxpayers would save money:

One of the biggest ideas I hope that people can understand is that we are all subsidizing Walmart’s growth and income and money and we are supporting it because so many Walmart employees are on public assistance. How does America feel about the fact that we are paying or co-paying Walmart employees? I think we would like to not do that.

Look I’m going to bottom line this for you. When you accept a job at Walmart (or anywhere else for that matter), you agree to the salary that goes along with that job. If you don’t like the salary then don’t take the job. Find something else that pays better. It’s that simple.

As to the ridiculous claim by Ulrich that we are subsidizing Walmart (don’t you love how liberals think?), I’ll just say that if Walmart were forced to start paying this $25k/year ‘living wage’ to all their entry-level employees, there would be less entry-level employees and probably less Walmarts. Thus taxpayers would be paying more for people to live on public assistance.

Seriously, can’t we learn anything from Detroit?

Via: The Right Scoop
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AT THANKSGIVING, BIG GROCERY & BIG LABOR ATTACK COMPETITOR WAL-MART

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who will visit a Wal-Mart on the biggest shopping weekend of the year, don’t be surprised if you encounter protestors agitating for “workers’ rights.”

But you may be surprised how those protestors got there. They are not union organizers, per se, although many represent unions and other community organizing groups. They are associated with calls for wage increases and improved working conditions – even though 23,000 people just turned up for 600 positions at a Wal-Mart under construction in Washington, D.C. As Business Insider notes, it’s harder to get a job at this one Wal-Mart – only 2.6 percent of applicants are accepted – than it is to get into Harvard, where 6.1 percent get in.

The protestors are the Baptists in a Baptists-and-Bootleggers arrangement assembled by an outfit, Saint Consulting, where the goal, according to one company executive, “is always to kill Wal-Mart.”

And the reason the goal remains the same is because the bootlegger is not the labor movement but Wal-Mart’s competitors, who are spending millions of dollars to use these activists to throw sand into Wal-Mart’s corporate gears.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman reported, “Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway, and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart.”

Via: Human Events

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Black Friday 2013: Walmart Becomes #Brawlmart

It’s that time of year again: Black Friday. Millions of people gather at various retail stores to push and shove their way to a $98 TV set or a 50%-off iPad.

As usual, things got ugly in some places. So ugly that hashtags #Walmartfights and #Brawlmart had thousands of tags overnight.

One video went viral showing an unidentified Walmart full of shoppers swarming a discount item and fighting, shouting, and shoving to get out of the crowd. Police even swoop in to take down a shopper who got physical:

Another #Brawlmart tagged item showed a video of a Walmart in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. As the “This was a nice try at crowd control… but then,” one twitter user said, teasing a video showing a stampede-like crowd storming the doors:

#Brawlmart also spread to Fort Worth, Texas, where this video shows shoppers getting frighteningly rough reportedly over a DVD player, a Garmin GPS, and a variety of other items:

And in Rialto, Calif., a fight broke out over line-cutting in the parking lot of a Walmart before the store opened:

Via: Mediaite.com

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Critics: Walmart Protests Lack Actual Walmart Employees

Union front groups are planning more than 1,500 protests at Walmarts nationwide on Black Friday despite lacking significant support from actual employees, critics say.

The Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), a self-proclaimed subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers retail union (UFCW), says it will picket 1,500 stores the day after Thanksgiving, one of the largest shopping days of the year.

“Associates do stick together and look out for each other. We have to because Walmart and the Waltons seem to be fine with the financial struggles that we’re all facing,” Colorado Walmart employee Barbara Gertz said in an OUR Walmart release. “We’re are all in the same situation, one that Walmart creates by paying us poverty wages.”

Gertz appears to represent a small minority of Walmart’s 1.3 million employees. OUR Walmart’s 2012 Black Friday protest featured thousands of demonstrators, but less than 50 actual associates, according to the company. Labor watchdogs expect more of the same this year, especially because the worker center keeps focusing on the number of protests, rather than the number of employee dissidents.

“They’re not the type of grassroots worker-driven efforts that media portrays them to be,” Ryan Williams of Worker Center Watch said. “They’re protests held by professional protesters—oftentimes paid and given training—to cause a scene for publicity.”

Black Friday union strikes against Walmart likely to fizzle

The “widespread, massive strikes and protests” targeting Walmart on Black Friday will almost certainly fall flat, says one union watchdog closely monitoring the labor group planning the pickets.

OUR Walmart, a close affiliate of the massive United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), is threatening the big-box chain with crippling strikes and angry crowds during next week’s crucial Black Friday sale unless the company raises worker wages.

The planned strike, along with a series of smaller pickets preceding it, have been heavily hyped in the left-wing media. “We do expect [the protests] to be larger than last year because we have so many more members and so much more community support,” the head of a labor advocacy group told the Huffington Post on Thursday.

The Daily Caller

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After last month’s shopping frenzy, Louisiana governor looks to strip food stamps from abusers

The Louisiana governor's office said Wednesday night that it would strip food stamp benefits from anyone who took advantage of an EBT card malfunction that in some cases caused an all-out shopping frenzy in some stores across the state, The Advocate reported.

It is unclear how many recipients stand in line to lose benefits for a year, but more than 12,000 received an insufficient funds notice when the EBT card system was corrected on Oct.12, the report said.

"We must protect the program for those who receive and use their benefits appropriately according to the law. We are looking at each case individually, addressing those recipients who are suspected of misrepresenting their eligibility for benefits or defrauding the system," Suzy Sonnier, the secretary of state at the Department of Children and Family Services, said in a statement.

The frenzy at some stores was likened to the busiest shopping day of the year. "It was worse than any Black Friday,” Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd told local station KSLA-TV.

Shelves were picked clean in a mob scene that left employees rattled. Walmart spokeswoman Kayla Whaling told the station the company made a conscious decision to keep ringing up goods rather than to cut people off.

Via: Fox News

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Covering Wal-Mart in DC, Media Don’t Question Claims of ‘Worker Advocates’ Who Will Kill Jobs

For the past several weeks, Washington D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray has been playing defense in the news media against “advocates for workers” who favor a “living wage bill.” That’s partly the result of shrewd marketing on the part of lawmakers who favor the legislation – who doesn’t favor a “living wage?” But it’s also because reporters do not typically question self-described “worker advocates” about the economic realities attached to a higher minimum wage.

When the government mandates a higher wage beyond what employers can afford to pay for unskilled labor, the result is higher unemployment. In other words, if the self-proclaimed “advocates” of the working class had there way, the number of people with jobs would be smaller.

After Mayor Gray vetoed a so-called “living wage” bill in September, the Washington Post ran a series of reports that call out for additional investigation.  The proposed legislation -- officially titled the “Large Retailer Accountability Act” -- would have directed retailers with sales of at least $1 billion to pay employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour in combined wages and benefits up from the current minimum wage of $8.25 an hour. Union officials have a vested interest in the bill since it includes an exception for employers who collectively bargain with their workers. To its credit, the Washington Post makes it clear in a Sept. 12 report that the bill would put Wal-Mart at a disadvantage.

“The union exemption and square-footage requirement rankled Wal-Mart officials, who said those provisions created an uneven playing field — particularly with the unionized grocery chains they plan to compete with in the city,” the report says. But that’s not the full story. Contrary to what D.C. council members have been telling members of the press, the proposed “living wage” would result in fewer opportunities for the newest and most needy members of the workforce. Yet, the Washington Post claims the “bill would raise the annual earnings of a full-time employee making the lowest legal wage from about $17,000 to $26,000.”  That’s assuming they are hired in the first place and that’s assuming employers are willing to pay that wage.

If readers were better acquainted with what recent studies said about laws that raise the minimum wage, the political class would have a lot more to answer for in the press. Just last year, the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity published a reporton teenage unemployment that deserves more attention.

By increasing the minimum wage from $6.75 to $7.40 in 2005, Rhode Island policymakers cost the state’s teens 397 jobs in 2011, the study concluded. Out of that total, the study also said 306 were lost to those without high school diplomas.

Via: Newsbusters

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EBT America

Walmart’s food-stamp shoppers and Washington’s big spenders have so much in common.

“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously pointed out in his Olmstead dissent. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

When the government acts like a banana republic, the people will behave as though they live in one. Juxtaposing the chaotic footage of EBT cardholders conducting a legal looting at a Louisiana Walmart this past weekend with the constant cable-news loop of lawmakers conducting a legal looting of future generations affirms this. Both demonstrate the perils of letting one set of people spend another set of people’s money. 

“I saw people drag out eight to ten grocery carts,” Springhill police chief Will Lynd told ABC News. “It was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town.” The catalyst for the food riot was an EBT computer shutdown in 17 states. Rather than shut off EBT purchases, the Walmart allowed EBT purchases without reference to account limits. The store, rather than the government or the EBT cardholders, will now make up the difference between the amounts on the cards and the amounts at the cash register.

The police chief observed one customer leave with $700 in groceries and most others simply abandon overflowing carts once informed that the government’s computer system had come back online. The devastation left in the food frenzy’s wake evoked the visual of Mad Max set in a Stop & Shop. “There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no more meat,” Chief Lynd explained. “The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated.”

The Louisiana Heist - Food-stamp fraudsters should be punished to the full extent of the law.

On Saturday, Louisiana’s “EBT” system malfunctioned, causing spending limits on users’ food-stamp cards temporarily to be lifted. In two counties at least, recipients noticed the error, spread the word, and set about trying to check out as much as they could fit into shopping carts. At Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield, employees called corporate headquarters to ask what they should do. They were instructed to “keep the registers ringing.” This they did — and with a vengeance.

By the time that proper limits on the cards had been restored a couple of hours later, the shelves had been all but stripped bare. “Just about everything is gone, I’ve never seen it in that condition,” Anthony Fuller, a customer in Mansfield, told the press. Will Lyn, the chief of police in nearby Springhill, agreed, telling the Daily Mail that “it was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town. There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated.” One man even managed to spend $700.

“I saw people drag out eight to ten grocery carts,” Lynd reported. Those who did not manage to take advantage in time simply abandoned their hauls in the middle of the aisles.

“Contrary to rumors,” CBS proclaimed, “nobody was unruly or arrested and [the police] were mainly there to help prevent shoplifting and theft.” Given the circumstances, “preventing theft” is a rather peculiar way of describing the behavior of officers who stood and watched the incident. Whether or not local authorities had legal cause to arrest the shoppers on the spot, there really should be no doubt that widespread theft took place — or, perhaps, that widespread fraud took place. Neither that the beneficiaries evidently believe that they could get away with it, nor that the victim was the unsympathetically anonymous mass of Louisianan and federal taxpayers alters the plain fact. This was a crime.

Via: NRO

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