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Viliam_Bur comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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Instead of complaining, could this system be hacked to help the poor people? If you created a company for hiring currently unemployed unskilled people and providing them as good working conditions as possible, could you get the same subsidies Walmart does? Then those people would prefer working for you.
I imagine something similar to Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa, but focused on low-income people.
No need to hack anything, anyone who wants to can step in and create such a company.
I predict rapid learning about reasons why these people are unskilled and unemployed :-/
Not sure if it's my idea that is wrong, or just my way of presenting it. So here is a longer version:
We observe that some people are employed by a company that effectively pays them less than most people consider an acceptable wage. Some say it's less than living wage, but that's probably an exaggeration. Let's just say that the wage is considered so low that this fact offends many people, and for the purpose of this comment let's just call it "unacceptable" without providing an exact definition of what precisely that means. (The basic intuition is that we object against a specific amount of money being paid to a person living in a specific location, regardless of which specific company would pay the money, if the work is equivalent.)
Some people conclude that the company is "evil". Which I would translate as a moral obligation to stop doing such things, and either pay the employees an acceptable wage, or fire them. Other people conclude that the company is doing morally okay, because some people simply don't create enough value that would translate to an acceptable wage without a state subsidy. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to make both of these people agree on one specific answer; not merely about whether Walmart should but even about whether it could pay those people acceptable wages.
Instead of just expressing my allegiance to one of these tribes, I propose solving the problem experimentally.
If it is possible to employ the same people and give them higher wages than Walmart does, then do it. Actually, Walmart succeeds to do it while creating profit and big salaries for its management -- so if you would run the company without the explicit goal of creating a profit and big salaries for the management, you could use that extra money to improve the situation of your employees compared with the employees of Walmart. If you succeed to execute this project well, it could lead to Walmart going out of market, which (if you consider Walmart evil) would be a good thing to do. (I am not trying to solve all the society's problems here, neither from socialist nor libertarian viewpoint, just to improve one specific situation.)
On the other hand, if it is not possible to employ those people without using the same methods Walmart does (if your project predictably fails), then your only possible conclusions about Walmart's behaviour is either that it is okay, or that Walmart should fire those employees; because they don't have other choices.
I would prefer to see this resolved experimentally, instead of writing clever arguments on the internet. I can imagine both results, for example depending on which subset of the current Walmart's employees one would employ. I consider one of the results more likely, but I would prefer to have experimental data instead of a smart and mostly uninformed opinion.
Confusingly, "living wage" in US parlance doesn't mean "the minimum you can live on", but rather the minimum needed to meet some set of quality-of-life criteria for the region after factoring in dependents. Exact definitions differ, but it usually hashes out to quite a bit higher than subsistence wages: when California was debating one a while back, I believe the number being tossed around was $13/hour in late-1990s dollars.
I don't know exactly what Walmart pays its employees but it probably doesn't qualify.
That's a rather interesting criterion.
By the way of comparison, let me point out that not baptizing your children also offends many people (because from their point of view you have just pushed your child into the pits of hell). Or, for another example, polyamory offends many people, too. So?
Um, and who's going to do it? And how would that work-- you'll set up a company which functions much like Wal-Mart? That will be pretty expensive and I am not sure you can do this -- arguably Wal-Mart competitors have tried and failed.
If you want to just employ these people doing whatever, well, there is the whole market economy out there which offers choices of employment. If someone is willing to pay these people more (in money and benefits) they would switch jobs, wouldn't they? Yes, of course there are frictions but at Wal-Mart scale the effect should be pretty obvious.
Your idea sounds great in its short and long forms, and I think Lumifer's agreeing with you and telling you his prediction about how it will go, so you can falsify it.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're suggesting. As I understand it, the argument isn't that Walmart is literally getting subsidies. It's just that Walmart employees are getting welfare, so Walmart doesn't have to pay to support them, reducing Walmart's costs hypothetically compared to an equivalent company which paid their workers a better wage.
So if you created a company which provided as good of working conditions as possible, your employees wouldn't need welfare, so you wouldn't be benefiting from the "subsidies". Also, your costs would go up, so you'd be more likely to go out of business than Walmart.