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“For example, a firm has 35 full-time employees (30+ hours). In addition, the firm has 20 part-time employees who all work 24 hours per week (96 hours per month). These part-time employees’ hours would be treated as equivalent to 16 full-time employees, based on the following calculation: 20 employees x 96 hours / 120 = 1920 / 120 = 16″
Got that? In the example above, this firm would be considered to have more than 50 full-time employees because of the way that part-time employees are counted."
"Wal-Mart Stores Inc has in recent months been only hiring temporary workers at many of its U.S. stores, the first time the world's largest retailer has done so outside of the holiday shopping season."
4.) Temp workers do not count towards a companies size
"That is the company’s count of full- and part-time employees as of June 30 — more than three times the 28,300 employees reported by Amazon at this point in 2010. The stat doesn’t include temporary workers or contractors"
“For example, a firm has 35 full-time employees (30+ hours). In addition, the firm has 20 part-time employees who all work 24 hours per week (96 hours per month). These part-time employees’ hours would be treated as equivalent to 16 full-time employees, based on the following calculation: 20 employees x 96 hours / 120 = 1920 / 120 = 16″
Got that? In the example above, this firm would be considered to have more than 50 full-time employees because of the way that part-time employees are counted."
"Wal-Mart Stores Inc has in recent months been only hiring temporary workers at many of its U.S. stores, the first time the world's largest retailer has done so outside of the holiday shopping season."
4.) Temp workers do not count towards a companies size
"That is the company’s count of full- and part-time employees as of June 30 — more than three times the 28,300 employees reported by Amazon at this point in 2010. The stat doesn’t include temporary workers or contractors"
It's the same way "interns" don't count.
SO INDEED THERE ARE 525K FULL TIME WORKERS.
I asked 5 other people how they would interpret it and all interpreted differently than you. I know for a fact Walmart has more than 100k part-time employees. If you want to choose to interpret it differently fine by me. I work with Walmart as an external consultant involved in the development of their hiring process. The 1 million is in relation to their hourly workforce not just full time.
Temps make up about 4-5% of their hourly workforce.
Not understanding the concern over how many full or part time workers at Walmart there is.
There isn't really. Candy seems to think that as a result 75% of fulltime workers that earn min wage are Walmart employees. She is all over the place. Good point. I wish I could give you reputation again. I'm out.
How is Walmart of Mc Donalds going to build new stores or maintain those they have when capital goes over seas as profits are not sufficient to attract new capital. Capital is not free and can go over seas like jobs do when America signals it does not like capital or business. Don't whine about the jobs leaving the US when you take actions like this... its a law of physics for every action there is a reaction. Deny it all you wish but that wont change reality
There isn't really. Candy seems to think that as a result 75% of fulltime workers that earn min wage are Walmart employees. She is all over the place. Good point. I wish I could give you reputation again. I'm out.
Why do you blame me for changing the direction of the conversation, when you ask me a question?
My current full time job as a shelf stacker in a department store earns me a "livable" wage if I were to rent some houses about 5-10 mins drive further out from where I live at my parents place (which is an expensive suburb). The next major center out, while an extra 5-10 mins drive to work is much cheaper and I could rent an actual house and still live a fairly comfortable life. If I rented a unit I'd save up to $100 a week.
Because rewards add value at the marginal level, not absolute. A healthy economy dictates that it does in fact take more in terms of absolute dollars to attract a top talent than it does lower level. The curve of wages/employable person is not linear, and in reality never has been. They are paid for the value they bring. If a CEO makes $11 million, but increases share price by $3, more often than not (depending on the company, obviously) he has more than earned his keep. If he/she didn't deserve that much money, someone else who was making less would step up, go after the job for less money and get it.
I could ask you the same question: why do you deserve the money you make?
You also never addressed my other point. Are you comfortable permanently taking $503k/hour out of the economy for your plan to go into effect?
My life WAS terrible for the years I followed that budget. It also allowed me to make something of myself. I sacrificed three years of my life so that I could buy a house in my 20's and build the skills to prove I deserved a great job. Is it arrogant to tell someone to suck it up for a few years and make something of themselves? Apparently you think so.
Yes. It is arrogant. Just as it is arrogant to tell people to "eat in smaller bites". That's your choice to "suck it up".
I disagree completely.
I am personally glad that I never needed to "suck it up". Perhaps that's part of why I am less judgmental and magnanimous.
There is a major issue that gets ignored in debates and discussions like this: the impact of mechanization, automation and technology on everyone's jobs.
We are at the front-end of this process, with computers and automated machinery as well as global production making many workers redundant since the 1970s/80s. And that's seen in a number of statistics: the gross domestic product has soared but "middle class" wages are stable. Productivity (economic output per worker) has soared but workers feel less secure in their jobs than they have since the 1970s. Companies can globally source workers; or use contract workers without benefits; or hire freelancers to complete tiny slices of work; and increasingly, entrepreneurs are marveling at the idea that underemployed people will provide car-for-hire, work-for-hire, errands-for-hire effort at the drop of an iPhone app.
The debate over wages at fast food and retail ties directly to this. Surplus labor, thanks to the trends above, that used to be able to make middle-class wages now are all competing for low-wage jobs no matter what their skill level. Companies have no pressure to raise their wages when they have so many workers beating down the doors for a job. As a result, wages shrink as a share of expenses and the extra profits go to management and shareholders.
Those who would argue that taxing less and letting wealth 'trickle down' is a better solution than wages and regulation are on the wrong side of history. The myth of the 'job creator' in the 2000s -- that if we just lowered taxes on capital gains, income and dividends, that more jobs would be created -- is just that, a myth. Under the GWB administration, the benefits of the 1990s boomtime surplus were diverted to the "job creator" class, yet we saw continued strain on workers in many fields throughout the 2000s. Where there was job growth, it was focused on the housing bubble -- construction, remodeling, mortgage broker, and real estate jobs flourished not out of productivity of "making things," but from building housing units, shopping centers and office buildings.
But there's a bigger economic and moral debate to be had. Many of the responses on this thread seem to sneer at people who are working low wage jobs, implying that if they "worked harder," maybe got a STEM degree, they would magically be empowered by higher wages and would have a life that they somehow deserved.
My biggest fault with this argument is that the same trends that impacted manufacturing and other lower-skill jobs in the 1980s/1990s, are coming to the high-wage, high-skill jobs that I suspect many of those sneering have. If you work in information technology, for instance, look at what's changing in our field. Virtual machine technology means less data center space, less I&O staff, fewer servers -- look at what's happened to Dell and HP in the server space. Increasingly, technologies for system administration are automating the work of managing systems, and we will see less need for sysadmins, DBAs, and other high-paying jobs. BYOD trends and the rise of tablets? Less need for desktop support staff. And all those cloud apps like SalesForce, Workday, and the like? Fewer to no admins on the back-end, and fewer developers and the like, too. In my industry, everyone had on-premises ERP systems a few years back. Then, about 5% moved to cloud-based ERP. Within the past few months, 25% have moved to cloud-based ERP systems.
This is happening across the economy. I was at a major conference this fall where a leading analyst firm predicted that 1 out of every 3 knowledge worker jobs will be displaced by 2030. Professors and teachers, impacted by online learning systems like MOOCs. Physicians, impacted by automated diagnostic systems such as those that could diagnose major diseases, read imaging test results, and administer dosage for a treatment plan; we should not be surprised to see more nurse practitioners and PAs as the "human touch" and emotional connection to patients, partnered with learning-based systems analyzing big data to provide patient care. Information technology, as noted above -- decimated from a staffing perspective. Attorneys will face pressure from learning systems as well as global sourcing, as is being seen with law (and also accounting and radiology, for instance) work moving to other countries.
What will be the impact when this happens? The purpose of an economy is to ensure that everyone has a better standard of living -- specialization of labor, everyone chipping in to provide productive work, everyone doing better through trade than they could if we all just tended our plot of land, grew our crops, tended our livestock.
What happens when increasingly-large and wealthy corporations and individuals can create economic output but don't need labor? We are already seeing the cupcake shop and hipster-crafted goods phenomenon -- entrepreneurship of questionably-needed goods, a sign to me that we have underemployed labor in the economy. How will these individuals afford housing? Food? To pay taxes? To contribute to the community?
Raising wages on fast-food and retail needs to be a recognition that the purpose of corporations and business is not wealth-creation in the abstract, with no concern over how the wealth flows through the economy. Indeed, the whole nature of monetary policies assumes that money inputted to an economy flows through people, in terms of wages turned into consumption, turned again into return on capital and wages, and so forth. When you get rid of more and more jobs, when you have excess labor, you will see wages fall, and sales fall, leading to greater economic peril.
We need to raise wages on retail and other service-sector jobs not for their own sake in isolation, but because I guarantee that many of the nay-sayers on this thread will themselves be personally impacted in their lifetime by their own jobs going away. We literally cannot afford to live in an economy where there are no good jobs yet the wealthiest few have a surplus of capital. Our democracy, and basic human rights, demand it.
I am not calling for socialism. I am calling for a world in which everyone is expected to contribute their labor and effort through a job, to make a difference at something productive. Those who are the most productive, who have the rarest skills, will and should earn more than those with the least. But if it is not possible to have a basic existence with the most menial of jobs, then we are creating a monster that cannot be fed, cannot be satisfied, and will destroy our economy and way of life -- if not within that job sector, then through the broader impact that the coming wave of automation and underemployment will have if the current precedent continues.
The fact remains we are arguing about 3-4% of the hourly working population. The average wage for a full-time hourly employee at Walmart is $12.83 an hour.
Very few people are actually making minimum wage (1.2% of hourly employees).
12.83*40*52=$26,686.40
If I have a wife that earns that as well we have a median level household income.
For someone with a limited skillset to marry another person with a limited skillset and have the potential to earn as much as 50% of the households in the US working a no stress job for 40 hours a week seems like a pretty awesome deal to me.
So if they are 3 to 4 % of the working population why can't they earn a living wage?
What is the huge deal?
Limited skill set? Hard work skilled or not skilled, is hard work. I personally could never do this type of work.
Who else has a "limited skillset (sic)" according to you?
Here are some vital jobs that have a limited skill set. I would not perform any of them. How underpaid do you want these people to be?
- day care workers
- personal care assistants
- farm hands
- nurse's aids
- receptionists
- security guards
- airline cleaners
- hotel maids
- enlisted soldiers
I don't have all day, but each of these jobs are important. Perhaps you don't think so, but most folks would disagree.
Your comments are incredibly offensive to me. They are also elitist.
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