Wal-Mart

Complaints are again being made that Wal-Mart doesn't pay their employees enough:

With most of Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.

A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

Guess what, these workers are being paid what they're worth. If they were worth more they'd go take another job.

..."Wal-Mart should pay people at a minimum enough to go above the U.S. poverty line," said Andrew Grossman, executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, the coalition of community, environmental and labor groups running the series of ads criticizing Wal-Mart. "A company this big and this wealthy has the ability to pay higher wages."

So the argument used by Wal-Mart critics more or less amounts to Marx's dictum of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." They've got it, we want it. Color me unimpressed.

Wal-Mart says its full-time workers average $9.68 an hour, and with many of them working 35 hours a week, their annual pay comes to around $17,600. That is below the $19,157 poverty line for a family of four, but above the $15,219 line for a family of three.

Here's a thought: If you can't afford kids, don't have them! Why on earth would anyone start a family of four without the proper financing? Why is Wal-Mart obligated to compensate for someone's lack of family planning?