We've reached a strange juncture when the top officer of Wal-Mart Stores is calling for government to take a new look at increasing the minimum wage and is fretting about American business' ability to compete globally.
Indeed, it's not entirely impossible to conclude that the discounter's chief executive, H. Lee Scott, would be amenable to public funding of health care. What gave rise to these near-radical viewpoints?
What's going on now began in April 2004. That's when voters in Inglewood, Calif., rejected by a margin of more than 60% a ballot initiative Wal-Mart generated by a petition drive. The initiative sought to overturn the city's denial of Wal-Mart's plan to build a huge retailing complex, and which would allow Wal-Mart to do so free of environmental, zoning or traffic considerations.
Wal-Mart had an epiphany: The failure of its audacious bid to create a fiefdom bared the fact that one of its central tenets was false, namely that its stores would be welcome anywhere if consumers understood that low prices and numerous jobs would result - even if those jobs paid little and featured paltry benefits. Wal-Mart saw that its critics' constant harping about such matters, coupled with its own neglect of any real effort to burnish its image, had taken its toll.
So, Wal-Mart started to change and Scott became a reluctant evangelist for the Wal-Mart way. The most recent manifestation of that came lately when Scott addressed a meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington. There, Scott asked rhetorically if American business can compete in a global economy in light of the fact that businesses elsewhere have few health care liabilities. See Page 20.
In his talk Scott was apparently alluding to the fact that in most other developed nations, health care costs are publicly funded. And, in many countries, the cost of health care is far less than it is in this nation.
This line of inquiry raises a critical issue: Should American business enterprise have to bear the cost of health care, or would it be better paid for from public coffers or by some other means? The same question should be asked of pension costs; neither is sustainable by American business in the long term.
Separately, late last year, Scott called for Congress to increase the minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour. Scott said Wal-Mart's shopping constituency was struggling to buy even basic necessities at that wage rate. (Wal-Mart pays workers more than the minimum.)
All that stipulated, let's be realistic and acknowledge there is no possibility that either benefits or pensions will become publicly funded, except and increasingly by default, for more than a generation. Other solutions are difficult to envision, too. Nor is it likely that action on the minimum wage is forthcoming soon.
Nonetheless, it's sometimes possible to foresee the future by projecting from the acknowledgement of a problem by an opinion leader to its necessary solution, even if it's years off. And, there can be no doubt that the cost of doing business and the impoverishment of large sectors of the population are problems that will eventually eat away at the foundations of the nation absent big change.
