Re: OT ~ Stampede Death at Walmart

KC wrote:
On Tue, 2 Dec 2008 15:42:05 -0500, "D.M. Stillwood"
<dmstill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Karen" <karensXXXXX@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:0001HW.C55ACE460231067AB01AD9AF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
True, we all have to take into consideration what we think is a business we
simply cannot, in any shape or form, give our money to. To many people,
there are companies that are intellectually and morally impossible for them
to do business with. I can understand that.

On the other hand, I just heard on the radio (that's always on in the
background of my everyday) that we are officially in a recession. The
government powers-that-be have finally admitted that. Many people shop at
the discount stores they do because it is 1) easier for them and 2) cheaper
for them. The mother with four kids with no car and an urgent need for
Pampers will probably shop at Wal*Mart without much thought as to how it
treats it's employees. The folks who work there need their jobs and are
probably there for the same reasons as the young mother in need of diapers.

Karen

Again, I refer back to Barbara Ehrenreich's _Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America_. The reason that the mother with four kids has only one place to buy those diapers is that Wal-Mart bulldozes its way through communities, plowing over all other stores until they are the only game in town in many areas. This is not true where I live, but I was shocked to realize that in MANY areas in this country, Wal-Mart is not just the only place to shop, it has become the only place to work. Pretty frightening. Wal-Mart quite consciously has created this situation, and then when the shit hits the fan, they wring their collective hands and act as though it's some kind of aberration.

I used to have a boss that would rage on about Walmart and I didn't
really get it, because we didn't have a Walmart nearby. Now I'm in FL
and our neighborhood just spent 2 years fighting with them. A shopping
plaza had been approved that was to be quaint shops and upscale
boutiques, then we find out that Walmart was to be the centerpiece of
the design! There was such an outcry about being lied to that this was
to be upscale; the "town-hall" meetings that the developer held were
unabashedly hostile. Eventually, Walmart announced that they had
decided against new stores in several locations, including this one.
The developer pulled out and the land sits vacant, just the way we
like it. There is entirely too much development in Central Florida.

In one Wal-Mart, the meat department voted to unionize. Wal-Mart's response: they closed all the fresh meat departments--firing the employees--and switched to pre-packaged meats. There are many more such stories of their union-busting.

As the saying goes, Wal-Mart is not your father's retail store.

D.

My father worked for 40 years (my brother for 30 now) at the Gunlocke
Co., makers of fine furniture, including the chair the POTUS has sat
in since Kennedy. When I was a kid and the business was still owned by
the late Howard Gunlocke, a union tried to get in. My father loves to
tell the story about how the union leaders explained all the benefits
they would get by being in the union, but one worker stood up and
said, "Excuse me, sir, but we already get all that." The union leader
asked, "What if you wanted something that you *don't* already have?"
"Well," the old worker replied, "we'd go to Howard and ask him and if
he thought it was fair, he'd give it to us."

Today, 106 years after the company was founded, they are still the
town's primary employer, employing close to a thousand people, and are
still happily union-free. The moral of this story isn't that unions
are bad, but that if you don't want to deal with a union in your
business, try treating your workers with fairness and respect and they
might not feel like they need one.


When my mother was working on her library science degree she was required to take a management course. She was surprised to discover that the company the professor presented as the one that was "getting it right" was Lincoln Arc Welding, which had been founded by a friend of her father's. The management motto was "If your employees even think about unionizing, you've messed up."

Every new hire was on three year probation. If they passed that period, they were made permanent, and could not be laid off, only fired for cause. All permanent employees got a vote in management decisions. At the end of the year, net profits were divided in three; one third went to the owners, one third to capital improvement, and one third was divided between the permanent employees.

They never hired temporary labor; they felt it was harmful to employee morale. They let the workers vote on whether they wanted to work more hours, or divide the profit more ways.

They had no problem with goldbricking, pilfering, anything like that -- because *everyone* had a stake in how well the company did, and probationers knew that their being voted in as permanent employees depended on them pulling their weight.

When my mother took the course -- in the '80s -- the company had within the past few years voted on whether they should install central air conditioning. The employees voted it down as too expensive both to install and run; everyone takes August off, instead.

It's a heckuva business model.

For that matter, there was a company in Skokie, Illinois that was written up in the Chicago Trib years ago -- Fel Pro Inc, which made gaskets. They were remarkable for their benefits -- health, dental, life insurance, sick time, day care, after school care, summer camp, sick bay for sick kids, parenting leave, elder care leave. The president of the company said he was a conservative Republican, he simply thought of this as good business. Fel Pro had almost no turnover, and therefore very few training expenses. They could pay slightly less than other similar companies, because the benefits were so great. They had almost no cost for temporary employees, because workers didn't need to stay home to take care of sick kids.

They also encouraged workers to date and marry, and hired married couples as much as possible. Which, you'll notice, lowers the child care costs.

Dana
.

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