Costco employees are happy employees

Retail Company Are Really Happy With Their Pay


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By Bryce Covert May 25, 2014 at 11:57 am Updated: May 25, 2014 at 12:06 pm

In an analysis of employee feedback shared on Glassdoor over the past year, just one retailer comes in the top 25 for top marks on pay and benefits: Costco.

In fact, the company is ranked at number two on the list, although has the same rating — 4.4 — as the top rated company, Google. It also beats out some big tech companies, which are often thought of as paying well and giving workers good perks, like Facebook, Adobe, and Microsoft.

Costco has become known for paying its workers more than is typical in the retail sector, where median pay is $10.29 an hour. Its starting pay is $11.50 an hour and even the lowest paid positions report on Glassdoor that they make $11.80 on average. Across all positions, its average pay is nearly $22. It also offers benefits, with 88 percent of employees enrolled in company-sponsored health insurance.

On top of that, it offers significant room for advancement: 70 percent of its warehouse managers, who can expect to make about $22 an hour on average, started in the company’s lower ranked positions. This engenders high levels of worker loyalty, as its turnover rate is just 5 percent for those who have been there for more than a year.

All of this is significant given the working conditions at one of its competitors, Walmart’s Sam’s Club. Walmart is instead known for low pay, where workers make just $8.81 per hour on average, according to IBIS World. (Glassdoor says the average for a sales associate is $8.86.) Only about half of its employees get company-sponsored health care. In fact, Walmart workers make so little and get so few benefits that at just one store they have to rely on about $1 million in public assistance each year to get by.

Rather than reporting low turnover and high satisfaction, Walmart employees have held a series of strikes, beginning with a massive walk out on Black Friday in 2012 that saw 400 striking workers and continuing with nine strikes in November of last year from California to Florida. Workers have been demanding that it pay them at lest $25,000 a year, give full-time positions to those who want them, and end retaliation against those who speak up.

The differences in pay and benefits don’t just impact workers’ views of the companies. It may have an impact on the businesses themselves. Walmart was recently downgraded by a financial analyst for understaffing, among other things, a problem the company itself has previously recognized as consumers shunned its empty shelves and sales took a hit. Costco’s sales, meanwhile, beat expectations two months in a row and were up 6 percent over last year in January. The company gets much more revenue and profit per employee.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/25/3441468/costco-employee-pay/

10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Costco:

This is an oldie from 2005 but a goodie from the New York Times:
How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart

The US gov't is not legitimate

See: http://www.popularresistance.org/the-illegitimacy-of-the-u-s-government/

Not a democracy, not a republic

A joint study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University have confirmed what many of us already know: that the United States is not a democracy nor a republic but an oligarchy. Yes, the United States is a representative democracy but what the study found is that most of the time moneyed interests are represented —not the majority's interests.

From Popular Resistance: Popular Resistance Newsletter - Democracy Rises In A Time Of Oligarchy:

It’s official. The first ever scientific study of democracy in the US finds that we are an oligarchy (ruled by the few). We think it’s more accurate to say plutocracy (ruled by the wealthy). Some correctly say that the US is a representative democracy, but this study shows that the ones being represented are not the people (demos). It brings the legitimacy of our entire government into question.

Maybe plutocracy or corporatocracy is more descriptive but they all apply —see the header of this site.

Gilens and Page took almost 1,800 policies by the Federal government from 1981 to 2002 and found that moneyed interests prevailed over the majority opinion most of the time.

From Popular Resistance: Fighting For A Legitimate Democracy, By And For The People:

Before the occupy movement began we published an article, We Stand With the Majority, that showed super majorities of the American people consistently support the following agenda:

-       Tax the rich and corporations
-       End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending
-       Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and provide  improved Medicare to everyone in the United States
-       End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests
-       Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation
-       Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages
-       Get money out of politics

 No surprise here: the Senate is especially beholden to moneyed interests. But what was interesting was:

And, this was not the only study to reach this conclusion this week. Another study published in the Political Research Quarterly found that only the rich get represented in the US senate. The researchers studied the voting records of senators in five Congresses and found the Senators were consistently aligned with their wealthiest constituents and lower-class constituents never appeared to influence the Senators’ voting behavior. This oligarchic tendency was even truer when the senate was controlled by Democrats. —Fighting For A Legitimate Democracy, By And For The People

Check it all out:

• Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups , and Average Citizens
• Study: US Is Not A Democracy
• Popular Resistance Newsletter - Democracy Rises In A Time Of Oligarchy
•  The Rhetoric of Violence
• Fighting For A Legitimate Democracy, By And For The People
• Five Ways The 1% Are Killing Us
• ‘Oligarchic tendencies’: Study finds only the wealthy get represented in the Senate
• America is an oligarchy, not a democracy or republic, university study finds

Guaranteed national income

This is an issue that I feel very strongly about. Along with universal healthcare, a GNI (Guaranteed National Income) would be all the social safety net we would ever need. Let the plutocrats have their capitalism! The website www.popularresistance.org The video below makes the best argument for a GNI yet:

Check these out:

• VIDEO: Clearly Demonstrates That Most Welfare Goes To Rich
• 5 Reasons To Support A Guaranteed Income For All
• Is Minimum Wage Another Distraction? Let’s talk Basic Income, Shall We?
• VIDEO: Class, Race, and War - Resistance Report One-Hour Pilot
• Remembering The Officially Deleted Dr. King 
• The 99%’s Deficit Proposal 
• Time for an Economy, Of, By and For the People 
• There Will Never Be Enough Jobs