logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

A Wage Justice Strategy: Will Sanders Bill Lead Walmart to Raise Its Base Pay?

Steve Dubb
November 20, 2018
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
“Reverend Billy in Vallejo, CA.”

November 17, 2018; Washington Post and Inc.

Last Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) introduced a bill that, as Jeff Stein details in the Washington Post, encourages large employers to raise worker wages to $15 an hour. The legislation, Stein writes, “would bar big corporations from buying their own stock—a move that rewards shareholders—unless they pay all employees $15 an hour, provide them seven days of sick leave, and prevent CEO compensation from rising more than 150 times above median employee pay.” The full text of the proposed legislation is available here, and the senator’s office also offers a one-page summary.

In case it wasn’t clear who was being targeted, the bill’s “Stop Walmart Act” name kind of gives it away. For those interested in such things—there’s an art in coming up with these acronyms, after all—the bill’s official name is the Stop Welfare for Any Large Monopoly Amassing Revenue from Taxpayers Act. (The earlier Bezos bill similarly had a long-form name of the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act.)

In a statement, Sanders points out that the Walton family is the richest in America, with an estimated net worth of about $180 billion. The Walton family still owns roughly half the company’s stock. Meanwhile, the starting wage for a Walmart employee is $11 an hour. Sanders in his statement introducing the bill also mentions that, “Since 1982, the wealth of the Walton family has increased about 10,000 percent, and the family now owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. Meanwhile, 55 percent of Walmart’s associates are food insecure.”

Raising Walmart wages to pay all workers at least $15 an hour would cost the company $3.8 billion, according to Ken Jacobs, chair of the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center. The $3.8 billion, notes Stein, is considerably less than the $10 billion a year Walmart has dedicated to buying back its own stock from shareholders.

“Overall, the cost to Walmart of doing this would be a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenues, while its impact on workers’ lives would be huge,” says Jacobs.

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Roosevelt Institute economist Lenore Palladino makes some additional observations. If $10 billion were distributed to workers in wages, pay could be $5.66 an hour higher per employee. Or, if $10 billion were given to workers in stock, each employee would get 113 shares. Over the past 12 months, Walmart’s stock price has fluctuated between $82 and $110 a share. Even at $90 a share, 113 shares would work out to over $10,000 per employee.

As we have noted at NPQ, worker income today “is more than $700 billion less—i.e., more than $5,000 per worker—than it would be had labor’s share stayed the same as it was a decade ago.” According to Palladino, stock buybacks “driven by relentless pressure from wealthy shareholders to move more and more corporate profits up and out of the firm for themselves” are one mechanism that has enabled this shift to occur:

This extractive behavior is exacerbated by the fact that corporate executives are largely compensated in stock themselves…shareholder primacy has, among other things, resulted in workers being understood by corporate executives as a cost to be cut, rather than being considered as an essential part of the value-creation process and as stakeholders who should be able to bargain for a living wage that is commensurate with the value they create.

For their part, Walmart workers are not blind to the fact that Amazon recently raised wages for its workers. Kristi Branstetter, 54, a Walmart employee for seven years in Kansas City, Missouri, earns $11 an hour. As Branstetter tells Stein, “Hey, if Amazon can do it, Walmart can do it.”

In Inc., contributing editor Bill Murphy suggests that Walmart employees have reason to be optimistic that Walmart may in fact follow Amazon’s lead. Murphy notes that Amazon raised its wages not only due to pressure from Congress, but because Amazon management concluded that higher wages would help Amazon with employee recruitment and retention and force competitors to follow suit. Murphy writes, “If Walmart were to conclude for example that paying its lowest wage workers more would let more of them afford to buy more Walmart products—and similar to Amazon, squeeze some of their competitors on the labor market—maybe they’d decide now to increase wages, too.”—Steve Dubb

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
About the author
Steve Dubb

Steve Dubb is senior editor of economic justice at NPQ, where he writes articles (including NPQ’s Economy Remix column), moderates Remaking the Economy webinars, and works to cultivate voices from the field and help them reach a broader audience. Prior to coming to NPQ in 2017, Steve worked with cooperatives and nonprofits for over two decades, including twelve years at The Democracy Collaborative and three years as executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation). In his work, Steve has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous reports; participated in and facilitated learning cohorts; designed community building strategies; and helped build the field of community wealth building. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005) and coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads, published by MSU Press in 2012. In 2016, Steve curated and authored Conversations on Community Wealth Building, a collection of interviews of community builders that Steve had conducted over the previous decade.

More about: minimum wageLegislationNonprofit NewsPolicy

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

NPQ_Winter_2022Subscribe Today
You might also like
Nonprofits as Battlegrounds for Democracy
Cyndi Suarez
Cancelling Student Debt Is Necessary for Racial Justice
Kitana Ananda
To Save Legal Aid, Expand Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Zoë Polk
No Justice, No Peace of Mind and Body: The Health Impacts of Housing Insecurity for Black Women
Jhumpa Bhattacharya, Maile Chand and Andrea Flynn
The Human Impact of the Global Refugee Crisis Must Be Understood—And Acted Upon
Anmol Irfan
Black Americans Need Reparations: The Fight for the CTC Highlights the Roadblocks
Jhumpa Bhattacharya and Trevor Smith

NPQ Webinars

April 27th, 2 pm ET

Liberatory Decision-Making

How to Facilitate and Engage in Healthy Decision-making Processes

Register Now
You might also like
Nonprofits as Battlegrounds for Democracy
Cyndi Suarez
Cancelling Student Debt Is Necessary for Racial Justice
Kitana Ananda
To Save Legal Aid, Expand Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Zoë Polk

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.