Ravenwood - 05/20/05 06:00 AM
Last month the Maryland legislature voted to extort money from Wal-Mart. They drafted a bill that would require Wal-Mart to either spend 8% of their payroll on health insurance for workers, or pay it directly to the state of Maryland.
Maryland Governor Robert Erlich, a Republican, vetoed the legislation this week.
Terry Lierman, chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party, said the legislature's passage of the bill had been "the right thing to do," given that some Wal-Mart employees now must rely on Medicaid, the state-run insurance program for the poor, for health care.Apparently buying their own health insurance never occured to these people."Taxpayers are footing an even larger bill with Wal-Mart dumping their employees into Medicaid rather than insuring them," Lierman said in a letter to Democrats this week in which he urged them to turn out for a rally here at the same time Ehrlich vetoed the bill.
Category: Left-wing Conspiracy
Comments (3) top link me
Gov. Erlich would be my best pick for cloning in this case, Right on.
How Regressive can you get.
8% of a smaller payroll is a smaller 8%.
I didn't even have to open any Risk Management books to make that statement.
How about just making Employer Paid Healthcare illegal.
I mean, hell, after all they are 'French benefits' aren't they?
I do agree with your libertarian/conservative/free market views on working. But I can state I do see why the dems come at this angle.
I used to work for Wal Mart and although slightly illegal, they work you at 37 hours a week, just low enough you don't get benefits. Even if you work 40 hours a week you have to work for them about a year or throw a fit to management before they'll give you benefit options. (Usually they have a certain amount of slots of bennies they can give to employees every year.) Insurance being around 300 for two persons a month and that being half of my monthly pay it would be impossible to get insurance without the company paying for it. I don't feel the gov. should be able to hustle a company out of their money but when the people give the government social compensation powers (SSA and Medicaid/Care) it is the next evolutionary step in the cogs of bureaucracy. It will eventually reach a point when government stiflers corporations and end up ruining the economy.
In short, if Wal Mart gave their employees more than crumbs, they wouldn't have to worry about the gov, who operates such programs, from robbing the corporate till to the majority voters. The government thinks they have an interest when tobacco kills people, now they think they have an interest when a corporation doesn't give insurance.
And another minor rant, how can some fuckers at a SuperCenter make 2 or three dollars more than me when I and my store as a whole give far superior customer service. Whereas these people act like smiling and being nice will kill them.
Sorry, just had to play devils advocate here. The solution is not government control. The solution would be the corporation increasing pay role and ridding themselves of useless non-productive workers. Of course all the stragglers who are "downsized" will likely go to crime. But that's what firearms ownership is for.
Posted by: Rhett at May 21, 2005 2:55 PMAs a Target stockholder I won't defend Wal-Mart too much. But no matter how bad they are, they don't force anyone to work there.
If it's that bad, sell your labor to someone else.
Posted by: Ravenwood at May 21, 2005 3:47 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
