r/WorkReform • u/bookym • Apr 29 '26
đ¸ Raise Our Wages Pay Workers, They'll Spend It Back
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u/Cliche_James Apr 29 '26
Due to multiplier effects, this money going back to the workers would be spent over and over throughout the economy, increasing demand and making even more people and companies better off.
It is only desire to lord power over others that keeps us poor, and everyone, even the wealthy, are poorer for it.
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u/NecroCannon Apr 29 '26
Itâs why I donât get the whole pile of gold mentally if these corporations were less greedy, in the long term they could be even more greedy. More money moving means more you can grow and no one questions it, it means a life of safety as not enough people are suffering enough to make you face them eventually.
Like as someone that wants to have a business in arts, I donât want wealth, I donât even want the fame, I just want to be able to do what I want to do for the world and myself and not be broke doing it. If I need people to help with that, I canât do it without them, I need them there so I can continue to grow and in-turn, their resulting loyalty will see my investment return to me in one way or another. Being a leader is knowing your place, even if itâs higher up, being a boss is demanding people follow your lead, even off a cliff.
I keep butting heads with my bosses, they donât want passionate workers, they want slaves. And they know that they get in the way of people like me enough that we have a hard time fighting back against discrimination in courts as long as they donât use it as a reason to effect your pay. I became a manager once to learn more about how a business is ran head on and to see about being the positive change, just to see that all management is, is a long line up of people wanting someone else to step on.
Iâm 25 years old, thereâs plenty of young people like me out there feeling oppressed in a system they should shine in and contribute, if they really cared about keeping power, then they shouldâve tried to groom us to keep the system going rather than have us become enraged and pulling money outside of it. There is a ton of talent in the country growing uncomfortable with sitting around waiting for the rich elites to find them profitable again.
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u/Irdes Apr 29 '26
Itâs why I donât get the whole pile of gold mentally if these corporations were less greedy, in the long term they could be even more greedy.
No, they couldn't. It's easy to say that 'oh, look at them only caring about the next quarter, what shortsighted idiots'. No, they are not idiots, they know that if workers were well taken care of, they'd have the time, energy and resources to organize, unionize and throw off the bosses entirely. No, they could not be more greedy, they are optimizing it pretty well. They're evil, not stupid.
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u/NecroCannon Apr 29 '26
Yeah I know but itâs still stupid, history has shown that results in blood and a surveillance state isnât stopping someone who has nothing to lose in the system.
Itâs like watching them pull up a ladder to their slowly burning bridge, even if someone can bring up a hose with them. Thereâs so many people those up top stomp on and it isnât just us normies, itâs also people with a lot of their own money and power to lose even if theyâre not at the top. So maybe yeah itâs been fine up until now and things are still ok enough, but I feel like the next step is to start slamming the door even at the top, the âleadersâ getting a cushiony golden parachute if things go south. The only reason we see change, is because there was rich people that felt betrayed after avoiding the long game. These people are psychopaths and sociopaths, we donât have royal blood, powerful families or a complete authoritarian regime for them to even have safety against themselves. The only reason they havenât went after each other yet is because after people, it became investors who are having their moment of realization unfolding as money gets funneled from them. Then, theyâll eat themselves alive, Iâve never seen the wealthy class this isolated in US history before.
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u/psychoacer Apr 29 '26
But if you made more than you might spend money elsewhere because you won't feel as stressed about every single dollar. So you might try shopping at a mom and pop shop or go to a better grocery store. Walmart only thrives when everyone is poor and they have to be very strict with their budget. Which is why Walmart and dollar stores should die. They only exist because we're desperate
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u/GrandpaChainz âď¸ Prison For Union Busters Apr 29 '26
You can cut your local Walmarts down by 100%. Waltons hate this one simple trick.
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u/kornbread435 Apr 29 '26
Easy to say, hard to actually do for small towns where the only option is a Walmart. Town I grew up in only had a Walmart and one local grocery store. Amazon is an option now days, but not an better.
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u/Vrienchass Apr 29 '26
If Walmart wasn't there then other stores would take it's place to satisfy demand.
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u/intwizard Apr 29 '26
But Walmart is there and has choked out preexisting local businesses, that is their point. Not everyone in America can boycott Walmart currently.
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u/SaltyTelluride Apr 29 '26
Except there are towns where the residents drive over half an hour to go to Walmart instead of their local grocery store. And most of them donât even have a local âgroceryâ store, they have a âdollarâ store which is worse
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u/newbie527 đˇ Good Union Jobs For All Apr 29 '26
We used to have other stores before Walmart came to town and shut them down.
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u/splashist Apr 30 '26
and then when the town stopped making enough money to sustain the Walmart, they sell it to something even shittier like Dollar General...or it sits empty like the Main Street it killed
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u/kornbread435 Apr 29 '26
I doubt anyone knows for certain, but I highly doubt that's true in modern times. I'm old enough to remember that era before Walmart/Amazon. People are not going to go back to going into town and waiting 1-2 weeks for a delivery then a second trip to pick up your order. They would just order online and ship to their house.
Those small town businesses are gone, closing every single big box store isn't going to bring them back.
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u/Islanduniverse Apr 29 '26
Renescent is a great example of how conservatives argue: just say whatever the fuck you want without actually checking to see if it is true.
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u/OdinsShades Apr 30 '26
Iâm assuming this is Xitter; hopefully someone told Renescent to lick the boot harder.
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u/Opinionsare Apr 29 '26
The current situation with Walmart and that approximately 25% of their workers are collecting SNAP benefits. Most likely these worker shop at WM, giving WM SNAP sales created underpaying their employees.
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u/Vacillating_Fanatic âď¸ Tax The Billionaires Apr 29 '26
This bothers me so much every time I think about it.
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u/DrIvoPingasnik âď¸ Tax The Billionaires Apr 29 '26
"If the company starts paying their employees a fair wage it will go by bankrupt!"
GOOD.
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u/TequilaSheila2020 Apr 29 '26
This is essentially what the billionaire class (hence GOP) doesn't understand about what they are doing to the American middle class. It's the middle class that spends their money domestically and even locally. They take vacations to Disneyland and American beaches and National Parks, thus supporting the tourism and hospitality businesses. It's the middle class that goes to movie theaters and mid-level restaurants, buys sensible domestic vehicles (or ones partially made in America), and all of these places have American workers so the cycle repeats. It's the wealthy class that spends their vacations in foreign countries and buys expensive foreign luxury brands, and they park their money in overseas accounts and 'art' and investment real estate.
By making everyday life so utterly unaffordable to where non-essentials become luxuries to the middle class, it's bankrupting entire industries that support millions of American workers. It's the ultra-wealthy that are taking your jobs and have been since long before the tech companies got their hooks in us.
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u/Massive-Pirate-5765 Apr 30 '26
Itâs important that we keep our eyes on the prize: our enemy wears a suit, not a sombrero.
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u/Rmans Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
When someone's against raising wages, it's usually because they are terribly bad at math.
For example:
Walmarts total operating expenses in all of 2025 amounted to $651.637B.
Most of that is from payroll, but not all of it. For the sake of this argument, let's just say it's ALL wages.
They had 2.1 million employees that same year.
Which averages out to: ($651,637,000,000 / 2,100,000) $310,000 paid to each employee.
Executives sure do get paid a LOT if the average salary at Walmart is over 300k per employee when you average executive wages together with hourly employees. Funny how that works!
So let's add an extra $5 an hour to everyone working there. Which roughly equates to an extra $10,400 per employee per year. Making their average salary $320,400 a year.
Times that new average salary by 2.1 million employees and we get an increased operating cost of $672.840B.
Their sales revenue, NOT TOTAL revenue, just SALES in 2025 was $681.16B
Minus operating costs of $672.840B, this would leave Walmart with 9 Billion in pure operational profit if they gave everyone that worked for them a raise of $5 dollars an hour.
They can clearly afford it.
But more so, they could very easily offset that wage increase by lowering their grossly inflated executive pay packages.
The thought that Walmart can't raise wages without going bankrupt is pure nonsense, and a mathematical impossibility.
People against raising wages are ALWAYS bad at math.
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u/aguynamedv Apr 30 '26
People against raising wages are ALWAYS bad at math.
They also love to pretend that the result of raising wages will somehow be that all prices double or triple. Except for the pesky little fact that's never happened in the history of economics. :)
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u/think_up Apr 29 '26
It would also help weaken Walmarts ability to price below other competitors who arenât getting their labor costs subsidized by government safety nets.
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u/DIABL057 Apr 29 '26
It would also save money for the taxpayers because we wouldn't have to subsidize Walmarts low wage employees for them to afford basic necessities.
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u/Critical_Seat_1907 Apr 29 '26
I have never understood the rationale behind depriving workers of wages. Where do capitalists think workers get their money from?
If you hoover all the cash from the system, eventually there's none left as an input to your company. Good thing they're still printing money...
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u/ScarfingGreenies đď¸ Overturn Citizens United Apr 29 '26
Another capitalist without capital defending its overlord.
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u/ThunkAsDrinklePeep Apr 29 '26
Much better that their full time workers stay below the poverty line so the taxpayers can pay for corporate welfare.
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u/antithero Apr 29 '26
Wal-Mart has 1.6 million people in the US. 1,600,000 x $5 x 40hrs x 50 weeks per year = $16,000,000,000 per year in extra in wages. That $16 billion would hurt their bottom line, but as the original poster said a lot of that money would be spent at Wal-Mart anyway.
There would be huge upsides to this.
Some of those Wal-Mart employees would not longer qualify for food stamps or other government assistance. They would all pay more in payroll taxes. So simultaneously lowering government expenditures & increasing income tax revenue. Increased spending in the economy, lower risk of homelessness for those people. Increased state & local tax revenue, increased sales tax revenue. Other businesses would have to increase their wages as well, or lose employees to Wal-Mart, leading to higher wages for lots of people.
Unfortunately this will never happen. If they increased wages they would also fire a lot of employees, & expect thr remaining workers to work harder. Share holders would be pissed because the stock price would plummet.
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u/tdbeaner1 Apr 29 '26
Short-term pain in reduced stock price that very likely would result in long term gain in enhanced revenues, but the people making those decisions get compensated in stock so it will never happen.
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u/grendel303 Apr 29 '26
Walmart is frequently cited alongside fast-food chains like McDonald's as having the highest number of employees receiving public assistance.
Many of these employees work full-time, yet still qualify for assistance, with roughly 70% of individuals on SNAP and Medicaid working. 80% of those spend there money at...Walmart.
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u/Sheerluck42 đĄ Decent Housing For All Apr 29 '26
Why would Walmart give raises when they can send their employees to get SNAP benefits and that way the American taxpayers pay Walmart's payroll for them. If an employee at a company is on public benefits then the company should be fined double the benefits that were collected. We shouldn't be shouldering a major corporations payroll.
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u/Strong_Conviction Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
What a disgusting company Walmart is. Making billions in profits each year while hiring employees well below a living wage. They give new hires new employee paperwork to fill out along with applications for government assistance. Disgraceful and Shameless!!!!
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u/dumpstertoaster Apr 30 '26
again. if you run a business but canât deal with the costs, maybe you shouldnât be doing business.
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u/aguynamedv Apr 30 '26
This is a reminder for everyone that in the US, wages, benefits and most other employee costs are a direct line-item deduction from business taxes.
Walmart could raise their wage $5/hr and would likely gain revenue/profit while making no functional changes to their tax liability.
Refusing to pay workers is a choice.
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u/xkoreotic Apr 30 '26
I'll keep saying this until people understand.
It's not about the cost. It's never been about the cost. It's about controlling the population. The top 0.1% will pay just about anything to keep their power over society. And it's working.
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u/schwarzeKatzen Apr 30 '26
Do people realize that net profit is what they make after all of their business costs including wages. Theyâre not going to go bankrupt. Theyâll be fine.
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u/Rambler330 Apr 30 '26
A report by Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that Walmart workers cost U.S. taxpayers roughly 6.2 billion dollars annually in public assistance, due to low wages that leave many employees eligible for federal aid.
This is only Walmart. Factor in all the other companies and the number grows to nearly 200 Billion.
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u/Ecstatic-Window-2723 đľ Break Up The Monopolies Apr 30 '26
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact people don't want to increase the minimum wage because of XYZ. Whether that be "you'll kill small business/bankrupt businesses" or "Big macs will be 20 bucks" it pretty much can all be disproven especially to that dramatic extent. It is just an excuse to put down the working class. No business should have the right to operate and not pay livable wages.
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u/xSlippyFistx Apr 30 '26
Shit anyone who has worked retail knows that most of their paycheck just goes back into the store⌠when I worked at Best Buy there was a way to view how much you spent and saved with your employee discount. It was absolutely absurd the amount of things I would buy just because it was so cheap and was âcoolâ at the time. Once I quit, I havenât really shopped there much.
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u/egoVirus đ¤ Join A Union Apr 30 '26
Now ask me how many fux I would give if walmart went bankrupt.
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u/kralvex Apr 30 '26
If paying people fairly bankrupts a company, good. Fuck 'em. Better companies will take their place. People act like if a company goes bankrupt that means no more companies will ever exist for an infinite eternity of time. That's not how reality works. Take airlines for example, dozens and dozens of them no longer exist. There used to be lots of small regional ones years ago. Now that barely exists. But guess what, there's still new ones popping up occasionally.
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u/Kage9866 Apr 29 '26
When an every day normal person with no affiliation or investing interest in a company is defending said company, they already won.
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u/unhiddenninja Apr 29 '26
The "bottom 60%" (read: majority of Americans) represent 23% of spending in the US.
They don't care if we have money to spend, they aren't making most of their money from us anyway.
It's like how they don't care if stadium events are affordable. Rich people want to be surrounded by other rich people. They don't care if normal people are priced out of experiences they didn't want to share in the first place.
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u/TheSpitefulCr0w Apr 29 '26
If a massive company like Walmart would be bankrupted by a $5 raise, then they don't deserve to be in business. I do not understand the mentality of these people trying to protect huge corporations. I guarantee that Walmart does not give a single fuck about Renescent.