When Workers Come Together

[_Jersey Girl]

Kevin,

Are you singling out Walmart as using sweat shops? If so, why?

ETA: Would you like to recommend another similar retailer that doesn't use sweat shop workers?

[_canpakes]

And what about all the smaller local businesses that went under because of the mall? Their employees simply moved over there. They weren't "created," the jobs were already there because of demand. All the mall did was shuffle them around. The only real jobs Walmart is responsible for creating are the jobs in Indonesia where they pay peasants 31 cents to knit a Liz Claibourne sweater which they turn around and sell for $60.

Exactly. The service that Walmart provides has always existed. It's not as if folks never bought food or cheap crap before Walmart existed (although it could be argued that more of the latter is purchased these days due to the influence of Walmart).

Another consideration is the economies of scale employed by Walmart. Their size brings certain efficiencies that could not exist if the same amount of food and simple products were sold via a larger number of smaller vendors. But that means that a smaller total number of people could end up moving the same amount of product because of those efficiencies. Could the result be that Walmart could have actually removed a certain number of jobs from the market as opposed to creating any new ones at all?

A final consideration is that if the average rate of pay for Walmart employees is less than the inflation-adjusted average of people in the same field prior to Walmart's emergence as the dominant player, then Walmart is siphoning more dollars out of lower- and middle-class pockets and redirecting them to a much smaller cohort of substantially wealthier individuals. This decreases the total amount of dollars feeding back into the local economy for goods and services (which directly support job creation) in favor of those same dollars being funneled into investment vehicles that may end up doing nothing other than sequestering high levels of wealth for those few.