Ted Rall for August 29, 2011

Your spin on the catch phrase rocks, TR, but the logo?They long ago bumped the star to the end and turned it into a big yellow sphincter.

The greed of tyrants and oligarchs sows the seeds of their own demise. When people are desperate, they fear the loss of order less than they do the potential loss of their own lives. Less stratified societies also tend to be more stable precisely for this reason.

Ted, is that supposed to be a female HR manager?At that company?

Charlie, your heartlessness says far more about you than the people who struggle to make ends meet in our current economy. You might want to think about whether you really want to broadcast that character flaw so widely on what is basically a public forum.

When Wal-Mary employees can’t afford their own cheap crap, someone’s gotta do something.

How many no benefit part time jobs does it take to grind soul and car to dust?

Ouch!

On the “Disney” thread, Epcot uses interns from overseas on 14 month work visas to run all the “attractions”- meaning stores. I wonder what their salaries are? Anyone want to discuss the “foreign workers stealing our jobs” issue? Florida weather also sucks, unless you like living in a steam room, it AIN’T a “sauna”.

What part of 40% are employed did you not understand? This is not about skills or ambition. it is about a lack of jobs that pay living wages.

Coming soon: Sam’s Club Brand Soylent Green.

“Making sure our employees can feed their families.Because we care.”

Wal-Mart is the emblem of the new American economy, in which nearly all of the better-paying manufacturing jobs are outsourced to Third World sweat shop nations, while the corporations that do so receive generous tax breaks and subsidies from their servants in Congress. Wal-Mart and other Big Box corporations pay most of their “associates” so little that many of them have to depend on food stamps and other “welfare” programs to survive. The stigma of “welfare recipient” should not be directed at the working poor, but at Wal-Mart and other corporations rolling in profits and benefitting from taxpayer subsidies.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t this shift with Clinton’s welfare to work programs….essentially subsidizing business so that they could employ more people at lower wages, while pushing people to take low income jobs to retain survival benefits. The purported goal was to get people off welfare, but it seems to only have shifted the welfare from the unemployed people who were collecting it, to the businesses who now employ them at subsidized wages. The problem of generational welfare/unemployed was not solved, and the health of our economy did not improve with a further slide to the bottom away from living wage jobs.

A fair number of military families are also in that “food stamp” employed list.

“You would rather they have NO job?”

If they have evena part-time job, they may be in danger of losing what meagre benefits they get. So yeah,

When you’re the biggest employer in town (possibly the ONLY employer), it’s very easy to underpay, and say “You’re lucky you even HAVE a job. If you don’t like working for $9 an hour, I’ll find someone who’ll do it for $7.” That’s pretty much the definition of exploitation. If you need 20 full-time people, hire 20 people and give them a living wage and benefits. Don’t hire 40 part-timers that you can jerk around.

Can any of the conservative commenters explain why any full time job should not pay a living wage? Do you really want to argue that there are jobs that need to be done but that the persons doing them don’t deserve to be paid enough to make even modest ends meet?

You don’t have an answer to my question, so you resort to insults. I’ll bet that tactic wins a lot of debates for you.

Try again.

And before you do, try reading the following:http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf

Hi all. Please note that my last two comments were in response to an abusive poster (TheOne2012) who has either deleted his/her comments or had them removed by gocomics. The link I provided is still a good source of information on how Walmart pays wages so low that many of its employees require government services to get by (thus socializing Walmart’s private decision to pay non-living wages).

Tigger, here’s some facts, those annoying things right wingers hate so much. LBJ’s War On Poverty did work. In just the first four years it made significant reductions in poverty. It remained effective until Raygun (Zap!) and a subservient Congress gutted the initiative.