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Bigger Salaries for Big Box Workers?

Will Chicago Pass a Big Box Ordinance to raise worker wages?

By Adam Doster

Like many people, Pecola Doggett, 56, spent her early working years adjusting to the burgeoning service-sector economy. Whether fielding calls about magazine subscriptions, completing administrative work at local churches or monitoring elections at Chicago City Hall, Doggett earned poverty-level wages and struggled to combat the rising cost of urban living. That’s why when Costco, the nation’s fifth largest retailer, opened up… return to article

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    Page 1 of 1 pages

    This is NOT going to happen.
    The business plan of Big Box stores is based on exploitation of employees — illegal unless caught and the desperate until burned out. (suggested reading:  Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich)

    “Supporters believe that the ordinance makes economic sense…”
    Surveys in support of a view? Professors writing based on textbook theories? Retail is just beginning to feel the consumer crunch — if anything they will be dumping anyone who has risen above (their) entry level pay scale.

    My son has been working part time for the past three years at a local printer. He has over twenty years experience in the field and earns half of what he did ten years ago.

    His supervisor recently left for another job in a different state. Last week a new employee (earning even less than my son) was asked if he would like to be supervisor of the department. Since it offered no pay increase — only increased responsibility he turned it down. All they see is a vast supply of ever cheaper labor out there.

    If this passes, look for Wal-Mart to locate just over the line in a suburb looking for the jobs and tax revenue. So what if the customer is inconvenienced? Don’t you realize by now the “Service Economy” means — less service, self-service and lousy service?

    My local phone company’s Customer Service is in India!  Where is yours? I pump my own gas, check my oil wash my windshield. My US Post Office takes five days for a first class letter and the drop boxes are overflowing when I go there. As a kid we got a morning and afternoon mail delivery.My congressman has no idea or concern for job quality or pay (except his own).

    Product quality has followed service and job quality in a nose dive.  I have replaced an electrical switch three times in less than a year (Hecho En Mexico). The Philip heads drill drive screws I used last week became dimples which meant using pliers to remove and try again. this was a step up from the ones I took back — those heads popped off on the first five. (Made in Asia). All this is touted as savings to the consumer by way of big box stores by my NAFTA-loving representatives.

    We are in a national reverse auction mode due to corporate greed using globalization to enrich the already too rich who don’t give a damn about the country.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Jul 24, 2006 at 3:15 PM

    I work for a local Orchard Supply Hardware, which I think would qualify for a big box store. The pay is meager and the treatment of employees by managment is worse. The posters in the breakroom are all about how to reduce “shrink”; basically lost profits through stolen merchandise and various other avenues. The management/ Sears claim is that it is important to reduce “shrink” because it will go back to the employees, increasing benefits and pay. This however is an outlandish lie. The numbers for my store in lost profits were cut in half (hundreds of thousdands of dollars) from 2004 to 2005 due to employee response. And did we get raises NO. And then on top of this some of our benefits have been cut back. However we were given a celebratory barb b que. Mmmm cheap hamburgers and hotdogs, and grocery brand soda (not even coke or pepsi). Totally ridiculous.

    United States Posted by MediaFriend on Jul 24, 2006 at 7:45 PM

    Hey…I think they need bigger salaries simply because they’re paying more for the gallon of gas it costs to drive across the Big Box parking lots…..

    United States Posted by minerva on Aug 5, 2006 at 5:48 PM

    The low pay is no sweat for Mayor Daley.  He gets the increased tax base from the Big Box retailer whether or not the employees get a raise in pay. So if he thinks a proposed minimum floor for wages and benefits would drive the Big Box retailer away he’s against the pay hike. It’s the Federal and State governments, not the city, that get to subsidize low Big Box wages and benefits through public aid, food stamps, medicare, and section eight housing for single parents with dependants. 

    I resent the fact that these multi-billion dollar industries that are impoverishing the world with their low road business model, that is now a template model for the US economy the way Fordism and the Automobile used to be from 1945 to the late1970s, are asked to put a little back into the communities that they get rich in and they refuse!  Big Box businesses like Walmart, which has averaged close to a quarter trillion dollars in revenues every year for the past six years as well as rates of profit in excess of 10%, can’t afford to bring the working families that consistently toil long hours for them just a little further up in hourly earnings.  Even a wage of $9.25/hour for a family of four in Chicago after taxes is still below the poverty line yet, Walmart claims they will go elsewhere if this is demanded of them!  Here is a business that has impoverished the new working poor with low wages, put mom and pop stores out of business, shut down highly profitable US manufacturers like Rubbermaid at a great cost to good jobs and incomes over pennies on the dollar in supplier competition, and caused one of the worst balance of trade deficits in US history and when asked to put some extra money into the hands of their workers who also buy from their stores they militantly refuse! Decades ago Henry Ford realized this was bad business and instituted the $5.00/day wage increase. Walmart has no such inclination mostly because globalization and nation-building are two different things! 

    Perhaps it is time for a real boycott against the big box retailer.  Then they will realize that in order to make money they have to pay something back to the same communities that support them with their labor and their dollars! It’s all about respect. It’s also about solidarity amoung the growing number of working poor which is the only way to fight the incredible power of these big box bullies who are greedy and ready to exploit high unemployment rates in US cities in order to keep wages and benefits down for those working hard for them.

    United States Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Aug 6, 2006 at 6:39 AM
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