Charity Begins In The Checkout Line
Who pays for those deep discounts you get at Wal-Mart? You do! In keeping costs down by hiring janitorial companies that hire illegals, Wal-Mart passes on the schooling and emergency health care costs of those illegals to the public. Steven Greenhouse writes in The New York Times:
One night...a co-worker sliced his hand open on a floor-scraping blade and was rushed to a hospital in Red Bank. He had problems paying the $800 bill because his job did not provide health insurance and his employer shunned the workers' compensation system. The hospital swallowed the cost.
And thereís more:
"When you don't pay taxes, don't pay Social Security and don't pay workers' comp, you have a 40 percent cost advantage," said Lilia Garcia, executive director of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a group financed by California cleaning contractors to police fly-by-night competitors. "It makes it hard for companies that follow the rules."Robert, a Czech who runs a Web site to attract Eastern Europeans to janitorial work, said using foreign cleaners was good for Wal-Mart and for American consumers. "No American wants to do this job," he said. "If they hired Americans, it would take 10 of them to do the work done by five Czechs. This helps Wal-Mart keep its prices low."
Right. Buy now...pay later!
What to do? People like low prices.
The one that pisses me off is Bank of America. They hire nothing but part-timers to work the front lines in the banks, and are trying to force us to do everything online anyway... Where data on our financial habits flows DIRECTLY into their databases, and (by law) becomes their property.
Big Sentence, huh?
Crid at November 5, 2003 10:26 AM
Hmm, maybe you might reconsider your push for the world to vote Republican, considering that they're the ones kissing the ass of the banking lobby, trying to overturn Jackie Spiers' efforts to keep the people the owners of their own privacy.
Amy Alkon at November 5, 2003 11:13 AM
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61035,00.html?tw=wn_polihead_2
Here's a link about that.
Amy Alkon at November 5, 2003 11:14 AM
I have done my grocery shopping at one of the Super Wal-marts in town for quite some time. In Texas that's where you shop. And its where a few of my friends work as they put themselves through school. I had no idea until recently that they were hiring illegal immigrants. And it seems that my friends who work there didn't know either. I want to believe that they're telling the truth, not lying to cover someone's tracks. I am seriously rethinking my shopping strategy. And just as I knew where every item in the store was so I could make my grocery list by row and save time!
Sarah at November 5, 2003 12:19 PM
Of course the question is whether the other grocery stores also hire illegal immigrants? Is it only Wal-mart? Or only Wal-mart that got caught?
Sarah at November 5, 2003 12:23 PM
I'm sure many businesses do. I think it's wrong, so I personally pay more to hire cleaning people who aren't illegals, because it's the right thing to do.
Amy Alkon at November 5, 2003 1:42 PM
Gee, so maybe the rest of the country is finally catching on to what all the fighting is about here in California? Beside the silly programs the socialists keeping foisting on us from Sacramento we've also got a huge bill from the medical care of illegal aliens and the education of their children.
In the most recent year with detailed data the cost in just Los Angeles County for ER care of illegals was in the neighborhood of $375 million. A huge amount of the County emergency room capacity has been shut down as a result of these parasites overwhelming the budget.
There is a similar problem in the cost of operating the public school system. Due to a remarkably bad Supreme Court decision the children born here of illegals (in a county hospital gratis, no less) are full citizens and their parents cannot be deported since they are responsible for the little dependents. In all too many cases these people have spent their entire time working under the table and never contributing to the tax base except in sales taxes and if they play the lottery.
THere is all kinds of rhetoric claiming that the illegal populace is critical to the state economy due to their contribution as low cost labor. (To me it appears to be a dodge around the outlawing of slavery. If you aren't paying for room and board keeping a bunch of laborers at well below minimum wage could be much cheaper than outright slaves.) Others have produced figures indicating that the costs mentioned above as well as many others substantially outrank any great savings to the state's bottom line from use of pseudoslaves.
I'm all for putting the claims of those who thinks the illegals are needed to the test. Lets deport a few million obvious illegals while making it harder for them to return and see what happens. The worst outcome couldn't be any worse than the disaster we already have.
Eric Pobirs at November 8, 2003 7:26 AM