With over 2 million workers, Walmart is the largest employer in the U.S.?Although the company claims that the average hourly wage of its “associates” is $12.81, industry analysts put it closer to?a paltry $8.81. This means that hundreds of thousands of the discount retailer’s workers live below the poverty line and must therefore rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.
Such assistance costs American taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store. Of the $76 billion the U.S. spends on food stamps every year, Walmart collects close to a staggering $13 billion, much of it coming from its own poorly-paid employees.
Many people argue that if Walmart were to pay its workers a living wage — enough to disqualify them for government assistance — the giant retailer would need to significantly raise its prices, which consequently would hurt the poor in other ways.
A new video released by Slate, however, shows this belief to be categorically untrue.
Take a typical box of Great Value Macaroni & Cheese, priced at 68 cents. How much do you think Walmart would need to hike the price of this particular item to cover the cost of paying its workers, say, $13 an hour? Would they need to raise it a dollar? Two dollars?
Watch the video below to see much little the hike would actually be:
Today,?one in seven Americans?must rely on SNAP benefits to get by. If multibillion-dollar companies such as Walmart paid its workers a living wage, that number would dramatically drop, saving taxpayers billions of dollars every year.
[N]o business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living.
~Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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Joseph Guyer?lives in Texas. An ad man by trade, he firmly agrees?with Bill Clinton that there is nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what is right with America. You can read more of his work at?Liberals Unite,?DemoNews, and?SenaReider. You can also follow him on Twitter?@joerobguy.
