Over Thanksgiving I wrote a post about a food drive Walmart was holding for its own employees. This is attested to Walmart's low wages for its workers in order to get low prices for their customers. The question I asked was would America sacrifice the low prices of Walmart for better worker treatment. Recently I decided to check executive compensation for Walmart and some competitors. One of Walmart's biggest rivals is Costco and comparing the executive spending was somewhat telling. Turns out rather than sacrifice the lower ranked employees, the executives seem to be making much less.
Walmart's executive compensation is 77 million dollars while as Costco's is 21 million. The 56 million dollar difference is one factor in the differences between working conditions lower on the totem pole. Costco offers health insurance for its employees while Walmart is notorious for avoiding the extra cost of health benefits by restricting employees hours. I'll revise what I said before, Walmart doesn't need to raise it's prices to improve treatment of workers, the company just needs to shift priorities from the white collar executives to the blue collar workers that keep the company alive.
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