Because it’s a such a slow news day, and because the DC big box living wage bill is still in the news, I thought I’d write about the Walmart piece I published in Salon.com earlier this week. First, an update on that living wage fight, which I’ve written about before on this site. The bill, which would require Walmart and other big box retailers to pay a minimum wage of $12.50 an hour, was passed by the DC City Council. It needs the signature of DC Mayor Vincent Gray to become law, but Gray hasn’t received it yet. There have been suggestions that he’s leaning toward a veto and that Council Chairman Phil Mendelson has delayed sending the bill to Gray’s desk because he’s working to shore up support for a veto-proof majority. Walmart has threatened to cancel plans to open new stores in DC if the bill is enacted.
One of the most compelling-seeming arguments that the pro-Walmart forces have been making is that DC should reject the bill and welcome Walmart into the community, because Walmart would create much-needed jobs. So I decided to look at what the research says about Walmart’s impact on employment. Guess what? Contrary to the happy talk, Walmart does not create jobs. Actually, it kills them.
Here’s why: first, at the local level, all Walmart does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business. The overwhelming body of evidence, including the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies, suggests that when Walmart enters a community, the most likely result is a net loss of jobs; at best, it’s a wash. In fact, the biggest, best scholarly study about the impact of Walmart on local employment was done by an economist at University of California at Irvine named David Neumark, who is not exactly a wild-eyed liberal. He’s the kind of economist, actually, who writes anti-minimum wage op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.
The devastating impact Walmart has had on jobs becomes most clear when you go macro, and look at its impact not just locally, but on the national economy. In its relentless quest for low prices, Walmart strong-arms its suppliers to cut labor costs to the bone. What this has meant in practice is that many suppliers have been forced to lay off workers and ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas. Because of Walmart, countless jobs in the U.S. have been lost, mostly in manufacturing.
I’ve been thrilled by the response to my Salon piece — over 5,000 Facebook “likes,” and counting! Thus far, none of the prominent pro-Walmart voices have taken issue with it, because the facts I present are hard to dispute.
Back to the DC controversy: neoliberal pundits and politicians hate the DC living wage bill, because they don’t want to drive Walmart away. The politicians want the photo ops at Walmart openings, where they can boast about bringing “good jobs” — um, well, okay, “jobs,” anyway — into the community.
But when Walmart comes to town, significantly more local retail jobs are destroyed than created. And to the extent Walmart grows and is empowered, even more manufacturing jobs will be lost. If Walmart’s fans understood its anti-worker business model, they would get this. Walmart’s philosophy requires cutting labor costs to a bare minimum, so it makes sense that the company would not only pay workers miserable wages, but also shred as many jobs as possible. Other retailers invest in their workers by compensating them well (and offering low prices to boot); Walmart, not so much.
Some of the pro-free market ideologues do grasp this. Here’s Forbes contributor Tim Worstall, for example, with a blog post helpfully entitled: “Of Course Walmart Destroys Retail Jobs: That’s the Darn Point of it All.”
I appreciate the honesty of Worstall and others of his ilk; they celebrate Walmart for its innovation and productivity-enhancing “creative destruction.” Fine. What I don’t appreciate is those pundits who then turn around and claim that Walmart is also going to magically create jobs out of thin air, as so many are doing in the current DC debate (see, for example such gold star hacks as Mona Charen, Star Parker and, inevitably, Fox News).
Let’s be clear: the brave new economic world so many conservatives and neoliberals celebrate necessitates massive job loss. In theory, the gains from productivity brought about by Walmart’s ability to produce more output with fewer labor inputs are supposed to benefit everyone. But in practice, they’re going almost entirely to the the top, and the economic hit is being taken by those at the middle and the bottom. To paraphrase the old country song, they got the goldmine, we got the shaft. Progressives need to do all they can to change this dynamic. Supporting living wage bills like the one in DC would be a great place to start.
