Walmart can easily afford to raise pay for its low-wage workers by $5.83 an hour, to an average wage of $14.89, a new report from progressive think tank Demos concludes. All the retail giant has to do is stop its massive stock buybacks—which only serve to enrich a shrinking pool of shareholders, not to improve productivity—and put that money toward its workers.
Walmart spends $7.6 billion a year buying back shares of its own stock:
Wal-Mart could afford to hike every U.S. employee’s hourly wage to at least $14.89 an hour just by not repurchasing its own stock, according to a new report from the progressive think tank Demos.
Walmart, enmeshed in a debate over low wages highlighted by a food drive for employees at a Canton store, can significantly raise the salaries of sales clerks and other workers without having to find additional money for the pay hikes, says a research brief by a think tank.
This is supposed to be a cheery season for retailers. Not at Wal-Mart (WMT), though, where it’s been a really bad week—and this is only Wednesday.
On Monday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke the news of a holiday food drive at an Ohio Walmart store—for its own employees. The newspaper story, including a photo of the bins set out for the donations, quickly made its way pretty much everywhere. And it came from OUR Walmart, a group of union-backed employees pushing for higher wages and better working conditions.
“We are on strike today to have respect and dignity at work,” says Walter Melendez, one of approximately 40 Los Angeles port truck drivers who walked off the job at 5a.m. morning in protest of alleged unfair labor practices. The strikes featured the rolling “ambulatory pickets” that the truckers have excelled at—chasing down trucks as they leave the port and setting up picket lines in front of them.
In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demoshave made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects.
There are few better ways to uncover fraud in an industry than to incentivize insiders to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. And a little known part of Dodd-Frank did just that for the securities industry, creating a new whistleblower program run by the SEC that can bestow huge rewards on anyone who brings to light evidence of fraud that results in a settlement.
Credit card fees can be expensive and annoying, there’s no doubt about it. But many of them can be avoided if you’re careful and others may be worth paying if you get something worthwhile. For example, many of the best rewards credit cards charge annual fees, but people who use them frequently are able to earn additional rewards that outweigh the extra cost.
If asked, Americans of all political persuasions will say overwhelmingly that they prefer “tougher rules” for Wall Street. But what does that actually mean?
Black veterans weren't able to make use of the housing provisions of the GI Bill because banks generally wouldn't make loans for mortgages in Black neighborhoods, and African-Americans were excluded from the suburbs by a combination of deed covenants and informal racism.
If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Here's a question for every reader of this post who lives in a major metro area and has at least a college degree: How many people do you know who make under $40,000 a year?
Exclude that artist friend who's husband is in finance. And eliminate younger people still paying their dues. I'm talking about people who really earn under $40,000 year.
Credit reports and scores are made up entirely of information about individual consumers -- data that’s collected without our permission or even necessarily our knowledge -- but we don’t have free access to this information. Under federal law, consumers get one free credit report a year and must pay to see a credit score.
Give them jobs. That's the most important answer to the serious economic crisis gripping young America, which faces double digit unemployment rates for some groups -- levels rivaling that of the Great Depression.
Of course, creating jobs sounds very complicated -- a multi-part process of "stimulating" economic growth to boost demand so that employers add more workers. In fact, though, creating jobs is one of the easiest things for government to do: Just use public dollars to directly hire workers and, presto, government has created jobs.
The Pew Charitable Trusts blew a major opportunity to condemn the exploitative practice of payday lending when it issued a major report on this issue a few days ago -- the culmination of over two years of careful research.