What Walmart Doesn’t Want You To Know About The $10.10 Minimum Wage

They’ve been trying to convince the public that paying employees a living wage would raise their Always Low Prices astronomically. What a surprise – it turns out they’re wrong:

According to a report from ThinkProgress, a raise in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the price of a product at Walmart that costs $16 by exactly one cent. Devastating burden for the consumer, huh?

Estimates from Ken Jacobs at the Labor Center at U.C. Berkeley show that the increase would add $200 million to Walmart’s current labor costs, which amounts to just 0.8% of what the retail giant spends annually. It also represents a tiny 0.06% of the company’s sales each year.

Bloomberg has reported that Walmart is actually considering supporting a minimum wage increase, since it would result in millions of its customers having “additional income,” although no decision has yet been made. The increase could give 16.5 million workers across the country $31 billion more in earnings. “That penny per $16 an item may not turn out to be necessary,” Jacobs noted.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.