Wal-Mart: a Template for 21st Century Capitalism?

Working at Wal-Mart Wal-Mart defends its low wage/low benefit personnel policy by arguing that it employs workers who are marginal to the income stream required by most American families. Only seven percent of the company’s hourly “associates” try to support a family with children on a single Wal-Mart income. The company therefore seeks out school-age youth, retirees, people with two jobs, and those willing or forced to work part-time. The managerial culture at Wal-Mart, if not the formal company personnel policy, justifies its discrimination against women workers, which now compose two-thirds of the workforce, on the grounds that they are not the main family breadwinner. Not since the rise of the textile industry early in the 19th century, when women and children composed a majority of the labor force, has the leadership of an industry central to American economic development sought a workforce that it defined as marginal to the family economy.
Wal-Mart argues that the company’s downward squeeze on prices raises the standard of living of the entire U.S. population, saving consumers upwards of $100 billion each year, perhaps as much as $600 a year at the checkout counter for the average family. A McKinsey Global Institute study concluded that retail-productivity growth, as measured by real value added per hour, tripled in the dozen years after 1987, in part due to Wal-Mart’s competitive leadership of that huge economic sector. “These savings are a lifeline for millions of middle- and lower-income families who live from payday to payday,” argues Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott, “In effect, it gives them a raise every time they shop with us.”
But why this specific, management imposed trade off between productivity, wages, and prices? Henry Ford used the enormous efficiencies generated by the deployment of the first automotive assembly line to double wages, slash turnover, and sell his Model T at prices affordable even to a tenant farmer. As historian Meg Jacobs makes