David Atkins asserts that someday it will be a crime for Wal-mart to pay its employees so little that most of them end up getting food stamps or some other form of government aid. I’m not sure about that, but it occurs to me that a sufficiently creative state legislature could do something about this.
Wal-Mart’s Achilles Heel is the fact that it has to have a physical presence in order to make money. It can’t pull an Apple and shift its operations to a tax haven or put all its stores in Alabama. You’d have to put some thought into how you do it, but what’s to stop the Connecticut legislature, for example, from imposing a tax on any business that employs more than 500 (or more, pick your number) people nationally, that has a given percentage of employees that collect government benefits. Wal-mart can’t fire people getting the benefits, for they’d have no one left to exploit, and you could make that illegal too if you felt it was a threat. (In fact, in Connecticut, it’s already illegal to discriminate in housing against a person based on their source of income. A four or five word change to the employment discrimination statute is all you would need to prevent Wal-Mart from further impoverishing its employees by threatening to fire anyone getting food stamps.) A bill like that might provide some incentive to Wal-Mart to pay a living wage or give employees full time work, in place of the part time marginal existence so many of them have to endure. Alternatively, it would provide some much needed funds to the state while making a teeny, but nonetheless satisfying, dent in Wal-Mart’s obscene profits. Worst case, Wal-Mart leaves Connecticut, but that’s really a best case scenario.
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