WP: In Wal-Mart's America

[question everything]

(This is two years old, but still relevant)

In Wal-Mart's America

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

If you had to pick a time and a place where the 20th century (as a distinct historical epoch) began in America, you could do a lot worse than 90 years ago in Highland Park, Mich. It was there, in 1913, that Henry Ford opened his new Model-T plant and announced, a few months later, that he'd pay his workers a stunning $5 a day on the revolutionary theory that the men who built cars should make enough money to buy them.

(snip)

So in honor of yet another Labor Day, here's a depressing question: Where are the housing booms for the current generation of working-class Americans? Not around factories, that's for sure: We close factories in America today. In the past four years, the United States has lost nearly one in nine manufacturing jobs, including 20 percent in durable-goods industries such as autos.

Ford and General Motors are yesterday's news; the employer that now sets the standards for working-class America is Wal-Mart. The nation's largest employer, with 3,200 outlets in the United States and sales revenue of $245 billion last year (which, if War-Mart were a nation, would rank it between Belgium and Sweden as the world's 19th largest economy) doesn't pay its workers -- excuse me, "associates" -- enough to buy decent cars, let alone homes. According to a study by Forbes, Wal-Mart employees earn an average hourly wage of $7.50 and, annually, a princely $18,000. Just as Ford, GM and the UAW once drove up wages for workers who were nowhere near auto factories, so Wal-Mart drives down wages for workers who never set foot there. Controlling as it does so much of the low-end retail market, Wal-Mart has, with great success, pressured suppliers to cut their labor costs.

(snip)

It may just be me, but I don't recall the moment when the American people proclaimed their preference for an economy driven by Wal-Mart to the one driven by General Motors. It is, after all, one thing to live in a nation where the largest employer wants workers to make enough to afford its cars; quite another to wake up in an America where the largest employer wants workers to make so little they'll be compelled to buy low-end goods in a discount chain.

(snip)

The relation of union power to mass prosperity is, in a word, causal. Anyone who doubts that should go to the only American city today where there's a boom in housing construction for the working class: Las Vegas. The MGM-Grand, the Bellagio and Caesar's Palace are the Ford and GM there, and a quite brilliant hotel workers union, which has won the right to represent the workers in all the strip hotels, is the latter-day UAW. And the desert rings with hammering and sawing as homes go up for the only low-end service-sector workers in the Wal-Mart economy who've won the living standards to sustain the American dream.

The writer is editor at large of The American Prospect.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A50881-2003Aug26¬Found=true

[Occulus]

1. "which, if War-Mart were a nation,"

Oh, the irony.