I was surprised to see this in Forbes but the author says <i>"I write from the left on politics and policy."</i> and <i>"I am a Senior Political Contributor at Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests. However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset conservative thinkers."</i><p>I applaud Forbes for having opposing viewpoints and also applaud the author for defending himself vigorously in the comment section from the more conservative readers. A good time was had by all as far as I can tell.
My favorite bit in the whole article:<p>"[Walmart] now hires people to work with its employees to help them sign up for Medicaid ..."<p>So Walmart cares about the health of it's employees, just not enough to provide them with a reasonable health care option.
NOTE! The submitter linked to the second page of a two page story. For those who want to start at page 1, try this:<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-returning-to-full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-job-killer-after-all/1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-re...</a>
Oh, you mean when I can't buy things because they aren't on the shelves because there's nobody available to move them from the loading dock to the shelf, and I don't want to shop there anyway because the entire store is in disarray because there aren't enough employees to clean up the products that sales might drop?
The author claims that shelves weren't being stocked because the employee mix had been shifted towards part-time workers.<p>OK, accurate or not, it says nothing at all about the total number of available 'worker-hours' just that the full/part-time mix had changed. It simply doesn't follow logically that there would be a shortage of labor just because the mix changed.
>Wal-Mart’s competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40 percent more on average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per hour) than what a Wal-Mart worker can earn. In that same quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company is going nowhere fast given its current state of operations.<p>>the availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job of moving the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a customer can actually purchase it. But when there are insufficient numbers of store clerks available—due to Wal-Mart’s commitment to using temporary workers or busting its full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker benefit—the products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and unavailable for customers to purchase.
Some parts of this article may be correct, however this:<p>"For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers"<p>... is simply wrong. Sales (from the '13 annual report):<p>FY09: $401b | FY10: $405b | FY11: $419b | FY12: $444b | FY13: $466b<p>Sales are sinking dramatically at the retailer? At best that's ignorance, at worst a sensational lie.
"In fact, Wal-Mart’s unwillingness to pay most of their workers a livable wage"<p>Wal-Mart is paying their workers what the market will bear. In fact, it can be argued they are paying MORE than the market can bear, since they have 25 applicants for every opening.