Like a big city pimp waiting to pick you up off the ground when times get tough, Walmart was able to establish its first stores in Chicago through guile, perseverance, and a few meaningless reassurances. Smaller stores! $0.50 pay raise! Union-built! These are the meager concessions that led Chicago to sell-out their local retailers. [More]
wages
How To Make Sure You Get Paid What You're Worth
By 1.25.10
Wired has put together a Wiki called a
At Least Someone's Getting A Raise: Minimum Wage Rises To $7.25
By 7.25.09
Great news, laid-off Wall Streeters, minimum wage work just a got bit more lucrative! As of yesterday, the new minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
Estimated Hourly Wages For The Lowest Paying Jobs In The U.S.
By 3.5.08
The blog Political Calculations took data from the Congressional Budget Office, “which published a study of the lowest-wage workers in the U.S. from 1979 through 2005,” and looked at the occupations of the bottom 20% of earners in the U.S. Then it took a chart of the 10 full-time jobs with the lowest annual earnings as compiled by BizJournals.com and estimated the hourly wage based on 40-hour weeks. Conclusion: don’t plan on operating a Tilt-a-Whirl and retiring comfortably.
Walmart Uses 4,300 Unpaid Teenagers As Baggers In Its Mexican Stores
By 8.1.07
Walmart is Mexico’s largest private employer, according to Newsweek, and that doesn’t include the 4,300 unpaid teenagers that it lets “volunteer” to bag groceries at its Mexican stores.
Minimum Wage Bumps Up To $5.85 This Week
By 7.21.07
The federal minimum wage is rising to $5.85 this week, up from $5.15. The change is part of a plan to give minimum-wage workers an additional 70 cent boost each summer until 2009, when the minimum wage will be $7.50, or about $15,000 a year before taxes and without taking time off.
Make More Money By Adjusting Your Witholdings
By 6.23.07
Why give the IRS an interest-free loan throughout the year? Instead, boost your monthly earnings by changing the amount of withholdings you claim. Kiplinger offers an easy 3-question calculator to help you figure out the right number.
Life at $7.25 An Hour
By 1.11.07
- Shannon Wilk, 33, who makes $6.25 an hour, said that of course she would like to earn more money. It would help her. It would help her 18-month-old daughter. “It would be good,” she said, “but also, for me, I live in income-based housing, and if I get a raise, my rent would go up, and I would lose my assistance.” Even the tiniest raise would affect her, she said, and with nowhere to go, the last thing she can afford is a raise to $7.25.
Interesting stuff. —MEGHANN MARCO
HOWTO: Negotiate Fair Pay
By 11.6.06
Let’s face it, women don’t get paid as much as men. Why is this? Aside from obvious reasons like “Men are sexist douchebags” there’s also the fact that fewer women negotiate when it comes to things like salary offers or their yearly raise. Why? Who knows. The point is, it’s appropriate to negotiate. If the men in your office are getting paid more than you are, put a stop to it with a few negotiating tips from Bankrate.com:
Confessions Of A Former Walmart Manager
By 10.12.06
The recent wage caps on veteran employees are supposed to encourage employees to advance through the ranks rather than staying in the same job, year after year.
The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Work Harder
By 8.28.06
In Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle,” it eventually emerges that some of the Chicago meatpacking workers lose body parts in the factory gears. If memory serves, at one point even one of the workers falls in. The implication being that the owners are literally making mincemeat of their workforce. Similarly, in the NYT this morning, “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity“
