Avoid Retail Chain Stores On Black Friday

(The above drawing was done by the great comic artist Lalo Alcarez.)

I will not be going to WalMart tomorrow (or any of the other chain retail stores -- Target, K-Mart, etc.). Part of the reason why is because I hate crowds and value my safety and sanity -- but I will also be doing it to protest the low wages and few benefits these stores offer their employees. While the owners and executives of these giant chain stores receive enormous amounts of money each year, their employees earn so small a paycheck that most of them qualify for help from the government (food stamps, housing assistance, etc.). That means the American taxpayers are subsidizing the enormous profits of the retail chain store owners.

Now I know that these owners constantly whine they they can't afford to pay their employees a decent salary. They say raising their employee salaries would mean they would have to raise their prices drastically or lose money, or both. They are lying! A new report from the non-partisan organization called Demos, shows that these retailers could easily raise worker salaries to $25,000 a year and still make a very healthy profit -- and even if they raised prices to cover the salary raises, it would only amount to about $0.15 on the average household's shopping cart cost (or about $17.73 a year). Here's some of what they had to say:

The cost of increasing the living standards of more than 5 million Americans, adding $11.8 to $15.2 billion to GDP, and creating no less than 100,000 jobs amounts to just a small portion of total earnings among the biggest firms. The retail sector takes in more than $4 trillion annually and firms with 1000 or more employees account for more than half of that. At the same time labor compensation in the sector contributes only 12 percent of the total value of production, making payroll just a fraction of total costs. Large retailers could pay full-time, year-round workers $25,000 per year and still make a profit – satisfying shareholders while rewarding their workers for the value they bring to the firm. A raise at large retailers adds $20.8 billion to payroll for the year, or less than 1 percent of total sales in the sector. At the same time it is very likely the firm will experience benefits that offset the cost of the wage increase — in the form of productivity gains and higher sales per employee — making the net cost of the new wage even lower.

If you'd like to read their whole report you can go here. It's a real eye-opener. These retailers don't keep worker salaries so low because they have to do that to make a profit. They do it to turn exorbitant profits into obscene profits.  personally, I consider it to be theft -- the theft of employee labor (the only thing of value most people have to sell).

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has sided with the corporations and Wall Street. They still want Americans to believe that this country would be best served by allowing the greed-mongers to abuse American workers even more. They would like to abolish the minimum wage and give the rich massive tax cuts. They don't care that by 2020 at least one-quarter of all American workers will be in low wage jobs (and 36% of that one-quarter are working for chain retailers). They also don't care that their policies have already created the largest gap in wealth and income between the rich and the rest of America since before the Great Depression. In fact, many third-world countries don't have as much income inequality as the United States does.

Retailers need to pay a decent wage to workers, and Congress needs to raise the minimum wage to a decent level (it would take raising it to a little more than $10 an hour to equal the buying power the minimum wage had forty years ago). This can and should be done -- and it is NOT a "gift" (as Romney and his GOP cohorts would label it). It is just common sense and common decency.