Food stamps subsidize Wal-Mart

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For Republicans who want to cut the number of food stamp recipients, here's a helpful suggestion: Support the ordinance passed last week by the Washington, D.C., city council, which required big-box stores like Wal-Mart to pay employees at least $12.50 an hour.


How many such workers go on the public rolls? Some states occasionally survey where those employees work, and Wal-Mart almost invariably tops their lists. An Ohio tally in 2009 found that 15,246 Wal-Mart workers were Medicaid recipients and 12,731 were on food stamps.

Wal-Mart has encountered fierce resistance as it has sought to move into New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and now the nation's capital. Elected officials in those cities fear that America's largest low-wage employer would compel long-established local retailers -- particularly unionized supermarkets -- to lower their wages.

A study by the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California Berkeley found that the opening of just one Wal-Mart store in a county where there previously had been none lowered the wages of general merchandise employees in that county by 1 percent and grocery employees by 1.5 percent. Just the possibility that Wal-Mart might receive the go-ahead to open stores in Los Angeles in 2004 compelled that city's supermarket employee union to accept a management demand to establish a markedly lower pay scale for new hires. When subsequent public opposition to Wal-Mart's entry kept the chain largely out of L.A., the lower pay scale was eliminated the next time the union contract was negotiated.


Twelve bucks an hour goes a lot further in Bentonville than it does in Brooklyn. The executives at Costco, Wal-Mart's closest competitor, know how to run a profitable discount chain that pays workers well: Its average hourly wage is more than $19. That's why there are Costco outlets in the cities where Wal-Mart is still on the outside looking in.




That's why last week's vote by the D.C. council has more than just local importance. Requiring the District of Columbia's big-box stores to pay a living wage ensures that incomes in this high-cost city won't be dragged down to the level of those in the low-cost rural South.

The council's vote isn't the final word: D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray still could veto the measure. But with working-class incomes everywhere spiraling downward, he might conclude that the Wal-Mart-ization of work -- and income -- must be stopped at the District of Columbia line.


Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post.


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