There’s a Lou Reed quote for you, DSL.
I finally got around to reading this earlier today, and wow. Wal-mart is now officially pushing for large companies to cover employees’ health care. You’ll never guess who’s holding hands with the Empire of Evil. The SEIU, that’s who. (The Service Workers are the largest labor union for those of you who don’t revel in reading captivating labor statistics.)
As someone who has supported unionization within the Wal-mart distribution facilities, etc., and is well-versed in what a sad mess Sam Walton’s heirs have made out of his respectable business model, I feel a little doomy and gloomy over this bizarre collaboration. On the other hand, I’m excited albeit shocked by the we-agree-with-the-union message the company is sending to its employees. For sure, there is some kind of crazy rabbit Wal-mart is about to pull out of its top hat, especially since one of the biggest problems with Wal-mart is its terrible “coverage”.
They care now? Nah.
You could watch the whole thing, but for the sake of relevance, least skip to marker 2:13.
Glenn Beck had his own take, naturally. I could be wrong, but I would wager quite a bet that Glenn is not one of the millions of uninsured Americans. Nonetheless, he classifies Wal-mart as a “naive” corporation and chastises it for getting into “bed with the devil” over this health care debate. Glenn Beck has a way of turning everything into Christmas morning, doesn’t he?
For the record, I totally agree with the field reporter’s assessment regarding Target’s less expensive health plan being a driving force behind this Wal-mart change in heart.
Here is Wal-mart’s reaction:
At Walmart, we believe in shared responsibility and support an employer mandate that is broad and fair. We believe the mandate should cover as many businesses as possible, and cover part-time as well as full-time employees. Any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers or disincentives to hiring workers with disabilities, entry level employees, or people from low income families.
I can’t wait to see what happens with this one.
Thoughts on this, health care peeps and Alexandrians? Confusion is mine!
Wal-Mart has an enormous PR problem. So far, it’s local monopolies and sheer convenience have balanced that, but I suspect they know that balance will not last forever. My anecdotal evidence of that: some years ago, when I mentioned to someone that I boycotted Wal-Mart, no exceptions, the vast majority reaction was that I was crazy. Lately, maybe 1 in 4 reply that they too have started to boycott Wal-Mart.
A couple of things that the lady brought up:
1) It is strange that Wal-Mart vision centers do not accept the employee coverage plan, but not unheard of. By itself, it is not really a criticism so much as a complaint (and some might see it as whining).
2) That a new Wal-Mart store receives road and infrastructure services from the local municipality is a strawman criticism. Find me a major mall that paid for its road improvements when it was built. I don’t think you can.
It is true that some municipalities will ask for some defrayment of infrastructure costs. It is also true that many municipalities offer bribes… um, tax discounts to bring the big boxes in. Mentioning something like #2 above is, for me, a net detriment to the argument no matter how you spin it.
Franklin wrote — and I know you meant plural you in this usage: “Mentioning something like #2 above is, for me, a net detriment to the argument no matter how you spin it.”
This is why I provided the marker referring to the “relevant” discussion regarding health care, naturally. There are five zillion reasons to hate on Wal-mart, so it’s easier to take things one at a time.
Glenn Beck’s calling the company naive is still my favorite.
“Glenn Beck’s calling the company naive is still my favorite.”
Always lower denominators. Always.
The Wal-Mart/China connection, sported, bottom vignette.
I suspect many more companies will also back health care reform. It represents a huge, unpredictable cost for them. If they could get out from under and make it someone else’s responsibility, I suspect they would be quite happy. I suspect you are right about Walmart hoping that requiring everyone to carry the same level of insurance will hurt their competitors.
I have advocated for portability quite often here. Linking health insurance to employers is a holdover that makes little sense to me. The insurance should belong to the individual and go with them.
Steve
“We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical. Why single out medical care? Food is more essential to life than medical care. Why not exempt the cost of food from taxes if provided by the employer? Why not return to the much-reviled company store when workers were in effect paid in kind rather than in cash? The revival of the company store for medicine has less to do with logic than pure chance. It is a wonderful example of how one bad government policy leads to another. During World War II, the government financed much wartime spending by printing money while, at the same time, imposing wage and price controls. The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor. Firms competing to acquire labor at government-controlled wages started to offer medical care as a fringe benefit. That benefit proved particularly attractive to workers and spread rapidly.”
–“How to Cure Health Care” (2001), Milton Friedman, Hoover Digest [tip: "Links", Harper's]
Universal health care (probably through a mandate, with subsidies, and tax penalties for the non-compliant) is a choo-choo train coming down the tracks that even mighty Wal-mart cannot derail no matter how many Little Nells it throws on the tracks. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Especially if it’s set up so that employers who don’t provide a plan with adequate benefits will pay no more into the system than they do now (although probably at least as much), and the guv will provide substantial subsidies for the many many employees who make less than 400% of poverty level. And get themselves out of the health coverage business entirely.
If Wal-Mart and the SEIU (who will be perceived as gaining political cred for making this happen, at least among Democrats) say Yes! to the general recipe, then when they start sticking fingers into the cake batter being made they will be listened to: “no, it should look like this“.
And if the health insurance battlefield is now level (eg they end up paying no more, and with equally [dis]satisfied employees as their competition, then they can fight the other resource input battles. Like screwing their suppliers, etc. If that’s what they’re doing :-).
Hmmm, I am not sure it is reasonable to blame government. If government did something stupid to a company, it does not necessarily exonerate that company when it does something stupid. They could have responded with something like paying for college costs or a company club.
“The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor”
Ok, Friedman has forgotten more economics than I will ever know, but didnt having 20% of our men in the military have something to do with labor shortages? I thought we were at full employment during WWII. Will have to look this one up later.
Steve
“Hmmm, I am not sure it is reasonable to blame government.”
I’m as sure as I am that I exist that when governments impose price controls, from the days of the emperor Diocletian to those of the emperors George II and I, BARACKTICVS, to the extent those prices are set below the market-clearing price – which they are, else there would be no political point to them – they will result in shortages within the controlled sectors, and a diversion of investment resources into uncontrolled sectors.
“If government did something stupid to a company, it does not necessarily exonerate that company when it does something stupid.”
But you’ve just proven my point: the companies’ responses to the misguided policies were anything but stupid – they were entirely rational: having been prevented under wage-and-price controls – state-sponsored violence, in other words – from setting market-clearing prices in the labor market, they were driven by the resulting diversion of competitive pressures into offering non-wage benefits to the workers they were desperate to bring on board, but who had, temporarily, decided the controlled wages offered – which, thanks to shortages and rationing of consumer goods, were of less value than in the prewar years – not worth their while.
“They could have responded with something like paying for college costs or a company club.”
And you’re calling the perfectly rational sweeting by the tied-handed employers’ of the workers’ packages with medical benefits stupid? For one thing, only a very small proportion of the US labor force in the World War years was college-bound – compared to the virtual 100% then and since for whom medical coverage came as virtual manna from Massa – not to mention serving as an ideal means of guaranteeing employee retention, far more than counterproductive college benefits, which, in addition to their far more restricted public among the lunchpail crowd, would increase their users’ ability to find work elsewhere…
“The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor…but didnt having 20% of our men in the military have something to do with labor shortages? I thought we were at full employment during WWII.”
You’ve just answered your own question: full employment does not mean an absence of labor shortages – it means an absence of the polar opposite of labor shortages, i.e., unemployment, or forced idleness. We might even, for clarity’s sake, call labor shortages “overfull employment”.
And the even better news regarding all of the above: sweating over your revered charts won’t be required.
The even better news? The first-week delights of Microeconomics 101 will – and will prove almost as engrossing as those of Gray’s (or Grey’s, for that matter) Anatomy…
In reading your comments, I see there is some confusion, guys.
I wrote: “Wal-mart is now officially pushing for large companies to cover employees’ health care.”
This is not a social healthcare program — or even UHC as some have called it. Please refer to the initial link. They want to put their competitors in financial woe during the recession.
The SEIU doesn’t need “political street cred,” by the way. No offense meant in saying so. There are millions of people in both the government and private sectors who support its efforts as members. Additionally, there are four other major players, including the Teamsters, who jumped to join the SEIU in its secession from the AFL-CIO into Change to Win. A labor union will ALWAYS push for healthcare to be covered within the contract between the company and its bargaining units, so there’s zero surprise or anything unusual there.
I’m not sure, though, how much of this is about the union, like it or not. I think it’s more a case of odd bedfellows and…why?
DSL, thanks for the redirect, too. It won’t be long before the Walton heirs are featured, ironically, alongside Chairman Mao. In fact, I am kinda shocked Ron English hasn’t done that one yet.
“It won’t be long before the Walton heirs are featured, ironically, alongside Chairman Mao.”
Those provinces in which the traditional bowl cut is most popular are known for their reverence for Chairman Moe.
“In fact, I am kinda shocked Ron English hasn’t done that one yet.”
He will once he changes his name to Ron Engrish.
And speaking of Engrish, I now see there’s an adult-Engrish section, with a Language Alert for those who might fail to be as charmed as is this shameless Asiaphile by the fact that even when talking, or, rather, printing, smack – for starters – our Eastern cousins are adorable…
…even – or especially – their nihilist-anarchists…
Scott- I guess my biggest quibble is with the labor shortage issue. I think price controls are bad for any number of reasons, so I can see how you want to lay the follow up decisions there. I guess I am thinking too much of our recent crisis. I think that the holding down of interest rates played a part in creating a housing bubble. Interest rates, IMHO cannot be blamed for people creating DADT loans and the overly optimistic folks who thought that real estate prices would never drop. We have had housing bubbles before and probably will again. Fed interference will probably be a cause. We can hope we wont again have people at an AIG selling CDS’s with the assumption that there is no inherent risk.
However, if I go to any first world country during normal times and take 20% of their men off to war, I bet you will have a labor shortage. One can claim that WWII was not necessary (Buchanan? or is he just anti WWI?), but it does not necessarily follow that it was the economic policy that was responsible. There were not enough retirees. Day care centers did not exist. It seems much more likely to me that wage controls were more likely to cause a maldistribution of workers rather than an absolute shortage. Where am I wrong here?
Steve
Kristan: “Wal-Mart: ‘To cure you, they must kill you’…There’s a Lou Reed quote for you, DSL.”
From “Sword of Damocles – Externally”, off Magic and Loss (1992). Had to Google…
Hmmm…Aged 10 in 1972, I bought the “45″ “rpm” “single”, as they were known, of “Walk on the Wild Side”…practically memorized my “cassette”, as we called them, of The Blue Mask from 1982, and saw Lou play the DAR Constitution Hall in DC in 1992, on his Magic and Loss tour…his output in The Velvet Underground with Cale/Morrison/Tucker, mother’s-milk proverbial…that you seem to have intuited all that means, as Paul Newman said to the barkeep round the opening of Harper, “You must be physic…”
Seem interesting niche site. I have collected fresh health article on my site too. The leading source for trustworthy and timely health and medical news and information. Providing credible health information and educational services by blending award-winning expertise in content, community services, expert commentary, and medical review.
The most sane part of this discussion is the quote by Milton Friedman.
Or should it be “sanest”?
If you’re involved with labor law, it doesn’t matter; you’re already insane. ;)
Yes, but is he sanitary?
Both usages are correct, Guy. Only an English teacher would notice it. ;-)