Is Walmart Really the Problem?

Last week, WakeupWalmart.com promoted a "Boycott Walmart on Black Friday" campaign. Not shopping at the retail giant on the biggest shopping day of the year does nothing to address the real issues behind the rise of retail giants.

-Low paying jobs in general. Can you name a low paying job that is above the quality of the actual wage itself? If your making a crap wage, most likely it's not a dream job or an easy occupation to work in. If you are working in a profession where a gallon of pickles cost $3 how can you expect to make a decent livable wage? It can't happen. The lower the wage, the more work you do.

Walmart is a company that makes money on volume and takes advantage of any way it can to do so. So again, why would you expect a good wage in this kind of business?

Do you ever see doctors saying they are exploited? Or lawyers? Or any other high wage earner? No, because they have money and if they feel they are being taken advantage of can do something about it. The guy making $9 an hour has no recourse.

-Education. The more you have the more you earn. The US made a disastrous move with their education system by not preparing for the present we are now in. We all saw the day coming where you needed more and more degrees and things were getting more technical. Our low paying jobs began moving overseas decades ago, so the only chance we had was educate people so they could work in other fields. We failed on making people smarter in regards to the industries that produce high salaries.

If you have a high school diploma, you can expect to average around $40,000 on average. The boomers, who lived in an age when all you needed was high school, skew those figures, I think. These days, the same level of education probably earns you about $20-30,000. A bachelor's degree in arts, by the way, bumps you all the way up to $53,000, and that's the next lowest among all types of degrees.

There's another problem in education, cheating. It used to be people would do it so they wouldn't have to study. Today, in business schools, cheating is a tool. If you don't cheat you will not succeed because many of your peers are already doing so.

And it's not like they are getting strong moral leadership to look up to in the business world. The last few years have bore that out. Enron anyone?

But yet it's Walmart's fault the US has a poorly educated workforce not prepared to face the current state of the world. They are doing nothing more then any company who moved jobs overseas; they are looking for the cheapest labor.

-Money talks. It's the world we live in. Once you have more of it, you have more control over your life and your community. Protesting or boycotting Walmart does nothing, grass roots has little power these days until someone with a lot of money gets involved. In order to change something, you need the power of the wealthy in your community. Get them on your side and things start to happen.

-Corporations in general. Our productivity increased dramatically in the last decade, so where's the money made from that efficiency? Workers' wages did not keep pace with the increased productivity, yet CEO's of companies are among the highest compensated. Why are we not protesting outside these people's homes, or circulating petitions to give us our share of the productivity they didn't earn?

Companies are getting bigger and bigger, and it's not just Walmart that swallows the smaller competition. Look how Borders and Barnes and Noble have ravaged the book retailers' market. Notice how many hundreds of mom and pop bookstores are now gone. Nobody is protesting them. It is a bad trend, and it hurts the business community of towns and small cities who depend on the leadership of people who own small companies.

-Job Growth. Times are tough and jobs have to be created but retail stores are not basic employers. They do not provide jobs that spur economic growth in a community. They are a place where you spend the money you earned from your job. The retail industry has the highest percentage of workers at the minimum wage or lower yet politicians still love to bring in a Walgreens to show they are doing something to help grow the town.

Is it Walmart's fault they have thousands of applications at every store opening? Granted, they may build locations where there is a high low wage workforce, and I do not doubt they don't, I don't see it any different then all the steel manufacturers or automakers who left the US for cheaper labor in the 70's, the retail giant looks for the lowest wages. Yet people never boycotted automakers or products made with steel.

-Sweatshops. There's no Wakeuptarget or wakeupjcpenny but they use sweatshops too. Nearly every clothing retailer sells clothing made by sweatshops yet the director of the National Labor Committee only mentions Walmart in a congressional hearing on human trafficking and exploitation of labor overseas a couple of years ago. Isn't his goal to push for fair labor practices for everyone?

Here's another fun tidbit. Many towns and cities in the US, thanks to politicians, have incorporated a school uniform policy. They cite safety and non-distruptive classroom settings. But did you know this is a multi billion dollar industry and the leading seller in this market in the US contracts with sweatshops in El Salvador for their clothing? Yup, little Jimmy and Suzy go to school wearing clothing made by kids their own age for pocket change.

Notice nothing is really being done about this problem. Sure, there is legislation in Congress but what can we really do about it when our own politicians create polices that cater to them? Talk about a mixed message.

By no means does this take Walmart off the hook. The company is owned by a couple of the richest guys on the planet, I know their motives are about money and getting more of it. I would probably do the same thing if I was rich. I'd like to think I wouldn't but that is because I draw from my blue collar background, I give a crap about people who make $9 an hour. Judging from how people with money act and behave, I'm not so sure if they can look at it objectively unless they weren't always rich. Money taints you.

Beat up Walmart if you like, but it is unfair if you don't also attack the very reasons they exist. We do nothing about sweatshops and trafficking of labor. We do nothing about our political leaders who do not understand or care little about basic job creation, yet talk about bandaids like minimum wage increases. We sit idly by while other countries educate their children to better prepare for a global society and jobs that require a high level of math and science.

Walmart isn't the problem, it's the symptom of weak leadership in this country. Walmart is an easy target. No Pun intended